99% of the time, not watching the news is awesome. Most of it is noise that obscures what's actually happening - you do much better by studying history than wat

99% of the time, not watching the news is awesome. Most of it is noise that obscures what's actually happening - you do much better by studying history than watching the news. For instance, you'd do well to study the history of financial crises during one, instead of watching the news. The news say that armageddon is coming, whereas history says buy stocks after the crash. Though occasionally, you do get bushwhacked - the thought process goes like this: "WTF? My country is bombing Libya? google... google... Huh, my country is bombing Libya." Analysis - I think the article makes some good points, but the conclusion is overly simplistic. In terms of securing their current government, a regime hostile to the USA needs to look at a few factors, such as: 1. Are they on the US leadership's radar already? 2. Does US leadership believe the USA has enough resources to to make war on them without excessively compromising the economy or military capability elsewhere? 3. Could further arming provide a casus belli for an administration that already wants to make war? 4. What's the US leadership's current geopolitical strategy for the area? North Korea is interesting because they have the fourth largest military in the world, and they've got ballistic missiles pointed at two of America's closest allies in Asia - Japan and South Korea. A coalition could absolutely defeat North Korea, but at huge potential costs, nuclear weapons aside. So in their case, yes, arming with nuclear weapons probably helps their security, especially while America is already in two deep military conflicts. (Note: I'm being descriptive here, not proscriptive. Obviously I think North Korea having nuclear weapons is a bad thing) On the flipside a lot of petty regimes like Cuba and Venezuela are mildly hostile to the USA but not on American leadership's radar as a threat and the American people would be against a war with them. In their case, arming with nuclear weapons would be a very dangerous gamble - they're basically safe from any U.S. offensive action at this point, but you'd be provoking a still very fierce tiger if you tried to get nuclear arms. Especially Cuba - I think American discovery of nuclear armament in Cuba would result in a near instant invasion. The regimes and governments with the most interesting questions to ask themselves are the ones that are loosely aligned with the USA right now, but stand a very good chance of having hostile relations later. My gut reaction is that places like Saudi Arabian and Pakistan become more domestically secure against American action with nuclear weapons, but arming is risky - if American intelligence, leadership, or media happened to discover some blatant financing or backing of terrorism or insurgency around the same time the nuclear program was discovered, they might find themselves occupied. They're already next door to regions we're at war, so it doesn't even open another front and the key supply chains are already in place... U.S. leadership might decide they'd prefer to install more explicitly friendly leadership in those places if they tried to arm up. In regards to Iran, I think it's point #4 - "What's the US leadership's current geopolitical strategy for the area?" My take is that the American leadership really wants the Iranian leadership out, but they think it's going to happen organically pretty soon and don't want to give the regime an external enemy to fight for unity's sake. Though, I think some of the more public war-dogging Iran was doing during Bush's administration was crazy - that administration seemed to really want to attack Iran, especially if operations had gone more smoothly in Iraq and Afghanistan.