re: #151 Achilles Tang

More than that; Saddam also deliberately created the impression that he had WMDs, presumably for what he thought would be a deterrent.

We can however be pretty sure that had Saddam still been in power he would now be in a full scale arms race with Iran, if not everyone else.

So what? We coexisted with the Soviets when they had thousands of nukes aimed at us. State actors with nukes are not the problem: they are accountable for their use and they know it. (As in “if I fire off a nuke at the US or Israel they will turn my nation into a parking lot”) That balance kept the world stable for 50 years. And Saddam, being among the most paranoid leaders on the planet, we never going to let any WMD he had get into anyone else’s hands: he’d be too worried that whomever he gave it to would use it on him.

To turn a state actor with WMDs into an existential threat to us, you need to show that it can get the weapon to our territory or that it is willing to give the weapon to a proxy that can do so, and that it’s leadership is insane. Maybe N Korea will qualify soon. Iraq never did.