“Limited war is not nicer or kinder or more just than all-out war, as its proponents would have it. It kills with the same finality. The American mentality counted on superior might, but a tank cannot disperse wasps.” – Barbara Tuchman

What are we, a bunch of fraidy cats? Kim Jong-Il in North Korea seems to have tied our britches in a knot. Yet, if you propped him on an apple box, he’d still stand small.

Maybe he has half a dozen or so nuclear warheads and some Model T missiles. Does that mean he’s going to launch an all-out attack on the most powerful nation on earth? Get real.

For once it wouldn’t hurt to trust a Pyongyang press release such as the one issued after its second underground nuclear test in three years, to wit: “The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence.”

The same can be said for Iran’s tinhorn president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who doesn’t believe Israel should exist. Well, little man with the ingrown 5-o’clock shadow, the U.S. and Israel have enough armed nuclear missiles to atomize Iran.

But no one in his right mind would want to nuke Iran even though Ahmadinejad has obviously rigged the latest election. Iran’s a beautiful country with some beautiful people. See them massing daily in the streets. Shedding blood. Google Iranian people and its links. It’s Persia. It’s Omar Khyam, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou.

Of course, it has its share of religious fanatics and Rush Limbaugh wannabe’s.

Remember, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein tried for eight years to demolish Iran—with U.S. aid—and failed. Before that, the CIA overthrew an Iranian democracy and replaced it with the hated Shah. So perhaps one can understand lingering ill feelings on Iran’s part toward U.S. rhetoric about its nuclear program.

Give President Obama credit for saying he wants to eliminate all nuclear arsenals, but he’s realistic enough to admit it may not happen in his lifetime.

Ted Daley, the Writing Fellow with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, says military superiority no longer cuts the mustard. Alamogordo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed that.

“Security,” he says, “required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict ‘unacceptable damage’ in reply.”

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, with both sides armed with thousands of aimed and cocked nuclear warheads, we kept the peace through “mutually assured destruction,” a policy that became known as MAD.

“If an adversary knew,” notes Daley, “no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a first strike, the chances were good that it would receive massive damage as a consequence (even far less damage that it had inflicted as long as that damage was ‘unacceptable’) … according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking first.”

Why risk loss of a battle group or a capital city, its leaders and a million lives to gain the advantage of a preemptive nuclear strike?

“Unacceptable damage”—call it UD—could well be the policy of North Korea and Iran.

One of the early Manhattan Project scientists said 50 primitive atomic bombs could take out the Soviet Union. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project, said as early as 1953, “Our twenty thousandth bomb will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two thousandth.”

“Iran and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear arsenals to deter potential adversaries from launching an attack upon them – by threatening them with unacceptable damage in retaliation,” says Daley.

“It really is quite a remarkable development,” he adds. “North Korea today is one of the most desperate countries in the world. Most of its citizens are either languishing in gulags or chronically starving. And yet—in contrast to all the debate … about whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran—no one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.”

A little UD can equal a lot of MAD.

Meanwhile, according to the latest annual Yearbook on Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security, published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), the U.S. accounts for more than half the total increase of $1.4 trillion spent on arms.

Dolph Honicker can be reached at djhonicker@msn.com