The Billiken's Bluff

Chechnyan militants seized a school in Beslan on Sept. 1. 336 hostages died, many of them children. A day earlier a suicide bombing in Moscow killed 10 people. And just over a week before that two Russian passenger planes crashed following explosions, killing all 90 people aboard. Many Russians are calling the siege inside the school- Russia's 9-11. There are reports coming out of Beslan that there were some Arabs among the terrorists who attacked the school. Understandably, Russia's president, Putin is taking a strong stance against the Chechnyan rebels and terrorists in general.


Video image of hostages sitting below explosives strung from basketball hoops in the gymnasium of a school in Beslan, Russia.

Russia is prepared to make pre-emptive strikes on "terrorist bases" anywhere in the world, the Interfax news agency cited the country's chief of staff as saying.

"With regard to preventive strikes on terrorist bases, we will take any action to eliminate terrorist bases in any region of the world. But this does not mean we will carry out nuclear strikes," General Yuri Baluyevsky said Wednesday.

[Via Yahoo]

Well thanks for the reassurance Yuri. Clearly Russia should use force to deal with the Chechnyan rebels. But why is Baluyevsky announcing that Russia won't be using nuclear strikes against these terrorists? Why would anyone assume that they would use nuclear strikes? I certainly wouldn't assume that. Was firing nuclear weapons at Chechnya ever really an option? Was the Russian public clamoring for nuclear retaliation? Were they tossing that idea around at the Kremlin? Did Putin's advisors say, "well we do have a lot of weapon-grade plutonium lying around we might as well put it to good use"? I have to hand it to the Bush Administration, as militaristic as Bush's presidency has been, to my knowledge, he has never come up with as ill-conceived a notion as using nuclear weapons to fight terrorism.