When you grow up in Los Alamos, NM and have been visiting replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy every year or so since you were born, your social studies classes tend to be a little different than the norm. You play peculiar games where students are assigned to ten countries and each country is given a supply of zero to ten nuclear weapons. You play the Ultimatum Game in 6th grade. And you study policy nearly as much as you study history.

The big mistake Joe Average makes about nuclear weapons is assuming they're weapons. They aren't. They're policy tools. I think it was one of Rafsanjani's lieutenants who, when asked in 2006, why Iran was developing nuclear weapons said (paraphrasing) "there were three countries mentioned in Bush's Axis of Evil speech: Iraq, North Korea and us. Iraq is gone. North Korea has nukes. Wouldn't you develop nuclear weapons?"

If North Korea wanted to blow us up they would have done it a decade ago. If Russia wanted to wipe us out with bioterror they could have done it four decades ago. Countries mostly want to do what they do without anybody else interfering and WMD is a powerful disincentive for the Big Boys on the Block from coming and fucking with your shit.

If North Korea were in Africa, and had no nukes, we would have invaded in the '70s.