Discouraging proliferation

The problem with invading other countries on the grounds that they've got WMDs is that afterwards, people start asking awkward questions like "if they had WMDs, why can't you find them, more than two years after you invaded?"

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Pentagon have come up with a way to answer those objections: pre-emptive nuclear strikes. How much easier it would've been to explain the failure to find WMDs in Iraq if we'd dropped a few nukes - just small ones - on the sites where our Iranian stooges Terribly Reliable Intelligence Sources told us Saddam had his WMDs? The ones ready to be used against our troops within 45 minutes, remember those?

"Of *course* Saddam had WMDs... and we destroyed them all!"

It's just as bad an idea, but for different reasons, when applied to states with a confirmed WMD capability - let's say China, since we're not *quite* up to nuking the French yet. These states tend to be run by people who aren't in a hurry to throw their lives or leadership positions away, which makes retaliation a sufficient deterrent against their initiating a nuclear exchange - "hit the enemy at the cost of your own life" isn't an appealing proposition to such people. But if they believe you *do* intend to strike first, well, they might as well make the best of a bad lot and beat you to the punch.

Mercy killings in NOLA, or just the Daily Terror?

The Daily Telegraph is running a story that claims "senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive".

However, I can't find this story anywhere else, and the 'Terror' doesn't usually get scoops on non-Australian stories; foreign reporting isn't their strength. AFAICT, most New Ltd. papers here just reheat material cribbed from their US counterparts. When one of them *does* get a 'world exclusive', it's often something like this story, which the Herald Sun swallowed hook, line, and sinker on the basis of its appearance on a website somewhere; having been published in something approximating a newspaper, it then became Unquestioned Truth to all who wanted to believe.

So, if this one begins to circulate in the US, check whether it's been confirmed by sources more reputable than the Tele. (BTW, their only named source does seem to be a real person, but whether he said the things attributed to him and whether they're true is another question. It also seems kinda odd to me that if the British media were *already* looking for him, they wouldn't have picked up on his story once he showed up.)