In 1954, Sec­re­tary of State John Fos­ter Dulles (the man for whom the air­port is named) unveiled his pol­icy of “mas­sive retal­i­a­tion”: basi­cally, an announce­ment that if the Sovi­ets tried any funny stuff, the U.S. would do unspec­i­fied hor­ri­ble things to unspec­i­fied Soviet tar­gets at an unspec­i­fied scale that would prob­a­bly be much greater than their orig­i­nal offense. Of course, this strat­egy is only effec­tive if the U.S. can prove that they are not bluff­ing. Indeed, the Sovi­ets gen­tly tested the lim­its on sev­eral occa­sions, at times lead­ing pre­cip­i­tously close to nuclear war. This pol­icy thus evolved into the more famil­iar “assured destruction.”

So it’s a lit­tle unnerv­ing that today, the elec­tronic front page of the New York Times reads:

U.S. Is Warn­ing North Kore­ans on Nuclear Test
The Bush admin­is­tra­tion warned North Korea that if it con­ducted a nuclear test, the U.S. would take unspec­i­fied puni­tive action.

Oh well. Back to work.