Why is anyone surprised that someone would support giving nuclear weapons to a dictator?
There are imbecils who still believe that giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union was a good thing, "balancing" power between the United States and another comparable "pole." The trouble is, because the Soviet pole was trying to establish permanent police states in its totalitarian image all over the world, its possession of nuclear weapons effectively stymied, for four decades, America's 20th-Century push for global freedom and democracy.
To counter the Soviet pathology, the United States itself had to make temporary deals with autocratic dictatorships.
However, since the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States has been able to press on for democracy. Every nation in the Western Hemisphere, except Cuba, has held elections (yes, some were freer than others), with U.S. support. And even in Iraq, where the Soviet threat once suffocated democratic aspirations, liberation finally is possible.
The point is this: For freedom, the worst thiing in the world is dictatorships with nuclear weapons. Free nations have an obligation to help the oppressed, but they cannot be expected to commit suicide to liberate an imprisoned nation.
Nuclear dictatorships are especially dangerous because of their secret decision-making, their unpredictability, and the lack of accountability of dictators to the press, to opposition political parties, to courts or to voters.
Russia today has about the same number of nuclear weapons that it had before the Soviet Union died, but because Russia has established rudimentary democratic institutions, its decision-making is open just enough to remove the unpredictability that made the Soviet Union so dangerous. (Let's urge the Russians to make their democracy even stronger.)
Openness and accountability are the reasons that no two democracies went to war with each other in the entire 20th Century. Secrecy and unaccountability are the reasons that dictators killed more of their own people in those 100 years than all the world's wars combined. That record is proof that democracies must replace every dictatorship in the Middle East.
We should not be making dictators more powerful. We should be helping the people in every dictatorship to claim their human right to democratic power. When the Middle East is free, it finally will see peace.
Frank Warner