I've been meaning to bring this up for a while, obviously, because it's about something that Senator Clinton said in her last debate with Senator Obama, the one right before the Pennsylvania primaries. I see that she's still taking occasional flak from various members of the commentariat over this one answer, so this gives me a good opportunity to do something you will almost never see me do: defend Hillary Clinton. Because this one time, she's being criticized for what may, in fact, be the only completely honest and halfway intelligent thing she's said during the whole campaign.

In particular, it was one of those hypothetical future questions that debate moderators think make them look so smart and issues-oriented. (As far as I'm concerned, they're wrong. The correct answer to any future hypothetical is, "I don't know, because I can't know all the facts that I'll know then. So all I can promise is that I'll do the best I can with the information I'll have then." But no, instead, politics requires that the candidates play along with these goofy role-playing scenarios. I find it annoying.) The question was, let's assume that all our efforts to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons fail, and some time during your presidential term, Iran gets The Bomb. What should we do? Unsurprisingly, both candidates said, "let's be sure it never gets to that point." But Clinton went further, saying that we should also make it clear to Iran that if they use weapons of mass destruction against Israel, then even if they managed to take out Israel's (she didn't say nuclear, but we all know it) deterrent in the strike, we'd respond with all available force, up to and including nukes. Note, by the way, that this is not the same thing as McCain's glib and flippant answer to the same question, where he simply joked or hinted or whatever that he'd be in favor of nuking Iran preemptively as soon as they got the bomb; that, now that? That answer is completely irresponsible, but that's not even in the same ballpark as saying that we'd nuke Iran in response to Iran using its nuke(s).

Her answer went on to them point out that if there were a Shiite nuclear bomb in the middle east, that would increase pressure on all the Sunni states in the region, including US "allies" like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to resume their nuclear programs. So she went on to say that we should offer all of the states within range of Iran's hypothetical future nukes this deal: we will include you in our nuclear deterrent "umbrella," we will promise to nuke all of Iran into a sheet of green glowing glass if they nuke you first, in exchange for a promise from you to not develop your own nukes.

This is not a stupid answer, let alone a crazy one. Nor, and here's the part that makes me want to thwap not a few network news reporters upside the head, is it even all that new or controversial an idea. No, on the contrary, we've known ever since Herman "Dr. Strangelove" Kahn made this point 50 years ago that once one of two potential enemies has an atomic bomb, the other side has to have their own bomb, in order to be able to credibly threaten to nuke someone back if they get nuked. The need for mutually assured destruction has always been the critical flaw in the idea of nuclear non-proliferation. But nuclear non-proliferation wasn't stupid, itself; it rested on the idea (however plausible you think it is; I think "not very") that increasing proliferation of nuclear arsenals increases the chances of accidental or terrorist-triggered global thermonuclear holocaust. This was a substantial part of the logic of the Cold War: to sign up every potential combatant in any war in the world into one of the two nuclear-armed factions, so that they could rest assured that there was somebody with nukes who'd nuke their enemies back if they got nuked themselves.

And, in fact, over the course of the last half of the Cold War, there was a growing diplomatic consensus that if any nation used its nuclear weapons without itself being nuked, this would trigger a nuclear response from other nuclear powers, up to and including maybe even its own nuclear-armed allies, that America only got away with nuking Japan in 1945 because there was no one to threaten to nuke us back for it yet. There was even a determined diplomatic effort, world-wide, to codify this into law, in a No First Use global treaty. It never got anywhere, because the doctrine of "no first use" pinched every US president in a tight place; we were committed to defend western Europe from a possible Soviet conventional-forces invasion, and there was no way for us to win such a war without using nukes. So the US, alone, clung to the right to First Use of nukes, even though this made us something of a pariah state (even as far back as the 1970s), even though every president who contemplated the possible future need to nuke the Fulda Pass to stop Russian infantry and armor had to know we'd get nuked by Russia if we did, even though it came close to costing us the whole Cold War when the West German people elected a government that threatened to leave NATO if the US didn't abandon its First Use threat and withdraw the short-range nuclear weapons we were planning to use in the event of a Russian invasion of West Germany. And every President since back when Dr. Strangelove made his points about nuclear strategy has clung to this ambiguity over whether we would, or wouldn't, use nukes preemptively. Heck, it's part of why Reagan cultivated the image, during his first terms, of a deranged and belligerent cowboy; he wanted his Soviet counterpart to be a little bit afraid that Reagan was just crazy enough to start World War III if pushed hard enough.

But back to the potential Iran problem. Hillary's suggestion amounts to something very close to No First Use, without the US political baggage that would come from trying to push a No First Use treaty through the US Senate: a unilateral commitment to only use our nuclear arsenal in our own defense or our allies' defense (while leaving it unanswered whether or not we'd respond in a nuclear fashion to any non-nuclear attack, letting the history of all the times we haven't yet to speak for itself) or for a nuclear counter-attack on any non-proliferating nation. I think it's actually an elegant, nuanced, and plausible solution. If I thought she were always this smart, and if I trusted her with my country's wallet, I'd vote for her myself. So it kind of annoys me to see her attacked for this one thing. If you want to attack her for her disastrous record during her husband's administration, for the abysmal quality of the cabinet members she recommended to him, for her long history of financial scandals, for her almost equally long history of sticking up for giant corporations over actual voters, for her sad and scary history of sucking up to some of the scariest people in the religious right, for her newfound admiration for Fox News and Richard Mellon Scaife, for the mean-spirited and deeply dishonest (and flagrantly incompetent) campaign she's run for the presidential nomination, and for her mind bogglingly stupid vote for, and early defense of, George Bush's war in Iraq, knock yourselves out. But leave her alone on the issue of Iran and a possible expansion of US policy of nuclear deterrence, because she's almost certainly the only one running who's right on this one.