RUSH: Here’s Lucas in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hi, Lucas. Thank you for waiting. Great to have you here, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. A lot of food for thought today. I was just thinking about what you were saying about a world with one or two superpowers and which world is safer. I think it’s an open question, political scientists have debated it for some time, and of course we in the world get to experience it. Are we safer with the number of nuclear weapons we had in the 1980s or are we safer today? Does terrorism threaten us now more than it used to threaten us? These are all interesting questions. What I want to get at I think, though, is what you were talking about about Reagan. You were discussing Star Wars. It’s a system I was a huge fan of in the 1980s. It is a great idea. We could shoot down ballistic missiles and forever end the fear —

RUSH: Wait a minute, wait, hold it, hold, hold it, Lucas, let’s not get to Star Wars yet because I mentioned that as an afterthought. Let’s say focused on your really good question, are we safer — ’cause the question that you’re asking — the question —

CALLER: Were we safer in the 1980s, or are we safer today, is my question.

RUSH: Right. Let’s give the qualifiers, though. Madeleine Albright and the leftists believe that the world was safer when there were two great nuclear powers. She believed the concept that there were no good guys, that we were both the same. There was no difference and that the existence of two superpowers effectively nullified them both. In other words, the existence of the Soviet Union kept us from nuking the world or expanding and taking over the world, whatever. And she worried when the Soviet Union went kaput and the wall fell, she worried that we were the only superpower.

Why would you worry about that if you have a notion of us being the good guys? But if you think that the world is more unstable because there’s only one superpower in relation to nuclear weapons, then you must not think much of the United States. So your question’s really good: Were we safer with two competing superpowers and mutually assured destruction, or are we safer with the Soviet Union having gone kaput, albeit rebuilding, and just one superpower? How would you answer the question?

CALLER: Well, first I would say, Rush, I think you’ve asked about four separate questions in there, because we could have a world with two superpowers (unintelligible) nuclear weapons. So it doesn’t have to be a question of whether we have a world with two superpowers armed to the teeth with 50,000 nuclear weapons each or not because we experienced a world with two superpowers (unintelligible) a few years in the late 1980s with the declining number of nuclear weapons, and that is one of (unintelligible) or (unintelligible) safer time.

RUSH: All right, Lucas, I’m having trouble following because your cell connection is crapping out on me. So I don’t really know what you’re saying, so I’m gonna be forced to tell people what I think you’re saying. You said I asked four different questions when I posed the two, and then you got into the numbers of nuclear missiles and so forth. Now, he did say that he thinks we’re safer today, right, with just one superpower. But you can’t just talk about numbers. In terms of nuclear holocaust, there is no comparison to today and then. It was a far greater reality, even with MAD, because of who of the Soviets were.

I don’t think anybody wants to go back to two competing superpowers each with a giant nuclear arsenal. Doesn’t mean we get rid of ours. We are the good guys. We do not attack. We defend and liberate. This must be part of the question and it never is when discussed in the left, in classrooms, in poli sci courses, by the way. We are never the good guys. And in my mind you can’t talk about this without the concept of good guys and bad guys. And the reality was the Soviet Union was the bad guys. The Soviet Union was an expansionist state, built on spreading communism, built on oppressing people, building walls to keep people in countries.

The Soviet Union is where people were mass murdered in order for the Regime to stay in power. That’s never been the case here. There is no moral equivalence between, in a two-superpower world, where one of them is the US, one the Soviet Union, there was never any moral equivalence. The left attempted to establish one. So now we have the United States as a lone superpower, but that’s even debatable with the ChiComs. They have a nuclear arsenal. They’ve got a robust economy. We don’t know how solidly built it is, but they do have expansionist tendencies, and they’ve got a big problem. They can’t feed their population. They just can’t.

And they got another problem. They gotta keep their rural population in the rural areas. They cannot let the rural population migrate to the cities or they’re finished. They don’t have food for them. They don’t have jobs for them. You’ll notice all of the factories that are being built in China are not in the cities. These factories that are employing hundreds of thousands of people are built in rural areas. The ChiCom leader has to keep his people out there. By the same token, they can afford to lose a hell of a lot of soldiers in a war, because of their population. But we don’t really put them on a level playing field yet, even though they should be. They’re not outwardly expansionist, but they do aid and support America’s enemies. Iran, to name one.

If the Soviet Union rebuilds and is able to establish once again its superpower status with a nuclear arsenal, then we’ve got a big problem because then you’d have effectively three, with two of them being the bad guys. And the bad guys would be defined as aggressors and expansionists. And that’s not us. We liberate people who are oppressed. We do not try to oppress people. We do not try to put people in bondage for the purposes of empowering our Regime. (interruption) I know. I know. But we don’t. And we never have. But the left has never acknowledged the good guy-bad guy concept. I know they never will. They never will.

But Lucas is right, there’s no question, in terms of nuclear holocaust, it’s much safer now than it was. And we wouldn’t be in this position if it hadn’t been for Reagan. There wasn’t anybody else that was gonna do it. He was even shellacked by fellow Republicans for instability and unpredictability. And when he gave his evil empire speech, you ought to see what Obama wrote about that. The leftists were scared. They were quaking in their boots because to them that was the kind of provocation that would make Yuri Andropov launch his arsenal. They never understood that what kept Yuri Andropov or Brezhnev or any of them from launching was our own stockpile. They never understood it.

They really thought that Reagan was gonna go nuts one night and push the button in the White House, while making jokes about the evil empire. They always thought Reagan was the bad guy. And they still do. That’s the point of Obama. He still thinks that the US is the problem when it comes to foreign affairs around the world. I don’t care where you go, it’s patently obvious. Now, the ChiComs are developing a blue water Navy. (interruption) Blue water means ocean. Blue water Navy. A brown water Navy would be little skiffs on their rivers. Don’t bother me with this stupid question.