No More Nukes

U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei accepted the Nobel Peace Prize this week and made some stirring comments on the nuclear crisis:

"We are in a race against time," the 63-year-old Egyptian said about efforts to keep nuclear weapons away from terrorists. "In four years, we have completed perhaps 50 percent of the work. But this is not fast enough."

To escape self-destruction, the world must make atomic weapons as much of a taboo as slavery or genocide, ElBaradei said in his acceptance speech. It has been 60 years since the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, yet the world is still deeply concerned over nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.

The Bush administration has bristled at ElBaradei's positions on the nuclear threat posed by Iran and Iraq and unsuccessfully lobbied to block his appointment to a third and final four-year term this year.

It is not enough to simply sanction rogue nations, and viciously torture insurgent forces who might be hell-bent on nuclear armaments. The best, and only, successful path toward ending the nuclear threat is by disparaging them beyond cultural acceptance.

In the gun-crazy nation of America, where even Congressmen can suggest nuclear attacks on enemy capital cities and holy sites like Tom Tancredo has, it's hard to see this happening here. One of the primary reasons America hates ElBaradei- his vision of a world without nuclear threat includes America as a nuclear threat.

And he's right.