You wrote: "It's a different age...it has been for years now, but it took most of us--certainly myself--a while to recognize that fact.

"An eye for an eye" is now "A city for a city." That's not a game I want to see us--or anyone--play. If we must take pre-emptive military action to prevent it, then we must."

Actually, the USSR had the capability to take out our cities from around the early 1950's, or at least make an attempt to do so with their nukes and Tu-4 Bulls, a direct rivet-for-rivet copy of the B-29, and it wasn't long before the VVS had even more formidable bombers, the familiar Bears, Badgers, and Bisons of the Cold War era.

First there was the "Bomber Gap" and then we had the "Missile Gap" as the Soviets were well ahead of us in the "throw weight" of their ICBM's.

Despite these ominous developments, we did not take out the Soviets, and the Soviets did not attack us.

The military threat posed by Saddam's Iraq is tiny when compared to that of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the vaunted Warsaw Pact, but somehow, we all managed to survive without pre-emptive strikes on the commies, Dr. Strangelove notwithstanding.

sp