Nuke nightmare

Recent news from Iran renews old fears and shows that the threat of nuclear attack just won’t go away | Marvin Olasky

Illustration created from Goodshoot/Superstock and Corel Library photos

On Sept. 12, 2001, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote that New Yorkers still alive should be thankful to be so, thankful that "for some reason, and we don't even know what it was, the terrorists didn't use a small nuclear weapon floated into New York on a barge in the East River."

She suspected that "the next time the bad guys hit" it will be nuclear, but "for now we have been spared. And now, chastened and shaken, we are given another chance, maybe the last chance, to commit ourselves seriously and at some cost to protecting our country."

These past four and one-half years are not the first time we should be thankful to have been spared one or many nuclear bombs incinerating thousands or perhaps millions of our fellow Americans. Sixty years ago, in Fulton, Mo., on March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill spoke of how "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the [European] Continent."