The Boston Globe

World War I veterans still have no national memorial. There has been no Hollywood blockbuster in recent years to bring their story to life. But they still have Frank Buckles. More than 90 years after he fudged his age to join the Army, Corporal Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last surviving American veteran of World War I, came to the Pentagon yesterday to represent the more than two million "doughboys" who braved the trench warfare and gas attacks of the "The Great War." (...)
Now, Buckles is the last flesh-and-blood reminder of the 116,000 Americans who gave their lives to save Europe at the start of the 20th century.

Wikipedia tries to document the surviving veterans from all World War I combatant nations.

The surviving veterans remind us that the era of wars between the world's major powers is not ancient history. I wonder what these veterans think when they hear how today's politicians talk about the risks of terrorism. Do they think that this is just scare-mongering to win votes and that we shall consider ourselves to be lucky to live in such peaceful times? That Al Qaeda is just a nuissance compared to the Wehrmacht or the Red Army?

The human and financial costs of WWI were huge. America's current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are also expensive: $3.5 billion per week, according to William Hartung. German Joys quotes some comparisons from his article: The "whole international community spends less than $400 million per year on the International Atomic Energy Agency, the primary institution for monitoring and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; that's less than one day's worth of war costs." And the US government's yearly budget for combating global warming is as big as two weeks of expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and combating global warming are at least as important as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Julianne Smith and Alexander Lennon of the Center for Strategic and International Studies contend that climate change will further disrupt the stability of already volatile regions, which has the potential of producing multitudes of discontented individuals prone to radicalization...

The Federal Foreign Office announced today:

Germany is stepping up its efforts to establish an international uranium-enrichment plant under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Today, at IAEA's headquarters in Vienna, Federal Government representatives informed interested States about the details of the German proposals to multilateralize the nuclear fuel cycle, receiving a highly positive response. This concept is based on an initiative by Federal Foreign Minister Steinmeier. More and more countries are thinking of starting their own enrichment activities. Any joint solution must therefore take the desire for the peaceful use of nuclear energy into account, while at the same time making sure no fuel is misused to build nuclear weapons.

Could this be a workable compromise for the conflict over Iran's nuclear program?

One of the questions Zenpundit Mark Safranski and his readers are thinking about in this holiday season is:

If the EU has genuinely changed the twenty century-long warlike character of Europeans to apathetic, bureaucratic, declinists why does the idea of Germany with nuclear weapons still give everyone pause ?

Is that really the case? How many folks are contemplating these days whether Germany would violate the non-proliferation treaty and waste billions of Euros to get nukes?

John Jay responds to the Zenpundit in the group blog Chicago Boyz. He says that he does not worry about Germany or Japan if they obtain nukes in the near term, but also states:

Certain cultures tend to fall prey to militaristic regimes. Germany, Russia and Japan are all such cultures - conformist, hierarchical, and clannish.

Sorry, I can't respond right now. Naughty Hitler [NSFW] just ordered me to get back to my clan to celebrate Christmas and plan the next world war.

Happy Holidays everyone!  Enjoy your Zen meditation about the future of the free world.  Get inspired by the Queen's Christmas Broadcast from 1957. (German politicians' Christmas messages do not change that much over the decades either.)  And if you want to get sentimental about war in "the good old days," then read about the 1914 and 1915 Christmas Truce.

Related posts in the Atlantic Review: WSJ: Russia and Jihadists Target America's "Giant Aircraft Carrier with Sausages", United States Apparently Removes Nuclear Weapons from German Base Ramstein, and A World Free of Nuclear Weapons?.

Mark Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is concerned about Germany's security. He describes Germany as the "soft underbelly of Europe," which presents a tempting target for Russia and the Jihadists.

Having been deeply humiliated in recent years, Russia is now "like Germany between the wars." Moscow is encouraged by European pacifisim and US failure in Iraq and views Germany as "the strategic gate to Western Europe," says Helprin.

And the Jihadists are interested in Germany, because it is according to Helprin the "richest target least defended," because Germany does not spend much on defense and lacks an independent expeditionary capability and nuclear weapons. Helprin assumes that nukes would deterr Jihadists... He also opines that NATO would not retaliate with nuclear weapons, if a member country was attacked by a nuclear weapon.

Germany, says Helprin, "sleeps and dreams unaware" of all theses threats. And the The US just views Germany as a "giant aircraft carrier with sausages." His entire post is available in the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal (HT: ROA and GM Roper). I find Helprin's comments on Russia more convincing than those on the "Jihadists."

On the eve of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Congress according to NTI: "We recognize that our first and most urgent priority is to prevent nuclear weapons from coming into this country and preventing dirty bombs from being constructed and detonated."
But: How secure are the nuclear weapons that are already in the United States?

Eric Hundman writes about "America's loose nukes" in FP Passport: "Last week, the Pentagon admitted that a B-52 had mistakenly flown nuclear-armed cruise missiles across the United States. And worse, for almost fourteen hours no one at the base of departure, on the bomber itself, or at the base of arrival had any idea something was wrong."

North Dakota News adds: "The airmen who first discovered the bombs could not believe what they were seeing and had a hard time convincing superiors that the missiles on the bomber were, in fact, carrying nuclear weapons."

More unbelievable news: According to a new biography, President Bush "is a big fan of Austin Powers and in particular, the character of Dr. Evil, imitating him often along the corridors of the White House," writes Nicole Belle in Crooks and Liars and adds: "Sometimes the jokes just write themselves..."

Personal conclusion: Neither this kind of White House humor (if the story in the biography is true) nor the air force's screw up is encouraging. In less open societies than the US, such nuclear screw ups would not become public: I wonder how many of these incidents happen in Russia, China, India, Pakistan or Israel... Will the movie Broken Arrow be reality one day?
Nukes are just too dangerous in the wrong hands. We need a world free of nuclear weapons. Since even Kissinger claims to support this goal, we should pay attention.

Related: "America, stop waving the nuclear threat at potential adversaries," says Jack Mendelsohn, who was a US State Department official and a member of the US SALT and START delegations. Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, he criticizes that "four Republican candidates Mitt Romney, Duncan Hunter, Jim Gilmore, and Rudy Giuliani have already expressed their willingness to use 'tactical' nuclear weapons against Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons." He argues:

Every time the United States threatens a potential adversary with nuclear weapons it tells the world that these weapons are acceptable instruments of modern warfare and that there are no political or moral constraints on US behavior. It is overwhelmingly in the US national interest to preserve the "taboo" on nuclear weapons use and to seek to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in US security policy.

A poll published by Der Spiegel in 2005 revealed an overwhelming support across the political spectrum for a complete withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Germany. The German government said in May 2005 that it would raise the issue of continued deployment within NATO, but officials later told Der Spiegel that the government had changed its mind. Yet the withdrawal from Ramstein indicates that the government has been more proactive than thought or that the Bush administration “got the message” and decided not to return the weapons.
The withdrawal reduces Germany from the status of a major nuclear host nation to one on par with Belgium and the Netherlands, both of which also only have one nuclear base. The German government can now safely decide to follow Greece, which in 2001 unilaterally left NATO’s nuclear club. This in turn would open the possibility that Belgium (and likely also the Netherlands) will follow suit, essentially throwing NATO’s long-held principle of nuclear burdensharing into disarray.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, trying to counter the increasingly anti-American attitude of her coalition partners, the Social Democrats, has called on the European Union to find a common position over American plans to deploy part of an anti-missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. (...) In fact, the two parties in Merkel's coalition appear more divided over the missile shield than other EU member states, which have been far less vocal or critical of the U.S. missile shield.  Kurt Beck, leader of the Social Democrats, said this week that the missile defense shield would lead to a new arms race and that it should be discussed within NATO, or even abandoned. (...)
So far, in public at least, U.S. officials have not questioned the tone of any of the criticism from the German left, as was the case after Gerhard Schröder, the former Social Democratic chancellor, narrowly won re-election in 2002 after criticizing the Bush administration's actions toward Iraq.

One of the key points I was trying to make in my Foreign Affairs article was that the Bush foreign policy of 2007 looks somewhat different from the Bush foreign policy of 2002 -- it's more multilateral in both form and substance. This has been a common theme among foreign policy wonks across the ideological divide. However, the word has yet to reach the German Social Democrats. (...) One gets the sense that domestic political calculations are behind the SPD's thinking... much as it was back in 2002.