William Arkin: A New Trident II is an Illusion of Defense

Read every single word. Here's a snippet:

Two former Secretaries of Defense argue in today's Washington Post that the United States should procure conventional warheads for Trident II submarine-launched missiles, a capability, they argue, that someday could be the only defense standing between us and terrorists with nuclear weapons. These two big brains would have us accept a scenario in which a terrorist organization acquires "several" nuclear weapons, that somehow in this scenario we have been so blind, so negligent or so stupid to have allowed this to happen, that we will wake up one morning facing this mortal threat hanging over our heads, and that when all of this happens, we should just be thankful that the super heroes perfect-intelligence and instant weapon will appear to zap the bad guys and make us safe. ~

So let me understand: the United States is unsuccessful in carrying out its core national security objective of countering terrorism, U.S. intelligence is incompetent or blind and misses all of these developments and can not predict their unfolding, and yet we should accept that they will detect an imminent strike an hour beforehand to allow the President to push the button and have Trident II missiles save the day.

We are talking here about confidence levels that will allow the President of the United States to decide to preemptively attack a terrorist operation in the middle of a sovereign nation within 30 minutes. Why would we believe that U.S. intelligence could detect this with any level of confidence and yet have failed to detect all of the days, months, or years of preparation to get there?

I'm no fan of preemption, I question the weapons of mass destruction obsession of the national security priesthood, and I don't even like the articulation of a "war" against terrorism, but if the United States is going to have a national security strategy of preemption, if the pre-9/11 let's-just-sit-around-waiting for the worst to happen mindset went the way of the Cold War dinosaurs, then how is it that this scenario could ever be implemented?