Amidst all the insufferable virtue-claiming of the last week - including the ongoing morality play of the January 6th hearings - I've been pre-occupied by one thought: The Hullabaloo sounds awfully arrogant for a country with 60 million infant deaths on its much-abused conscience. Particularly nauseating examples of the self-deception orgy include the circumlocution of "reproductive freedom" and "women's health-care" to obscure the definitive act of the new Democratic sacrament: the surgical dismemberment of a live baby snatched from its mother 's womb.

How can a country with such a track record be so complacent, especially when our adversaries have directly threatened us over the last fortnight with nuclear war? Although such concerns are seldom raised in polite company, my military career included studying under Professor William Kaufman of MIT. He was the genius who authored, for SECDEF Robert McNamara, the Single Integrated Operations Plan by which American nuclear forces would attack the Soviet Union. The applied mathematics had a seductive logic: numbers of delivery vehicles and warheads, effective mega-tonnage, targets lists arrayed by Overall Probability of Kill (requiring two warheads per target). We tried to ignore the implications of over a thousand attacks by both Blue and Red forces. "We destroyed everything on our target list but would the world survive?" Sorry, but that was well beyond the scope of our classroom problem. Even more worrying, the Soviets engaged in similar war-games but with a critical difference. While Americans typically asked, "How much is enough?" our Soviet counter-parts had an entirely different approach: "How much is demonstrably too much?"

So why would today's Russian and Chinese adversaries be deterred from attacking the US to achieve those interests they consider vital - from Ukraine to Taiwan? Is there something in Joe Biden's halting demeanor that might make them hesitate? Or in the fearsome war-fighting mien of General Mark Milley, best known for suggesting that our armed forces should be imbued with an in-depth knowledge of critical race theory? National security practitioners in both Russia and China routinely point out that the United States is so far the only world power to use nuclear weapons in combat, relatively modest demonstration shots (by modern standards) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why should old white men in their dotage be the only ones to enjoy such a useful operational monopoly?

Naturally, those are inconvenient questions to pose with the virtue-claimants still in full cry. For me, one of the most appalling was a Supreme Court demonstrator carrying a hand-lettered sign: JEWS FOR ABORTION RIGHTS. Excuse me? Perhaps those rights were granted sometime after the conflicts in which Ancient Israel was specifically warned against tolerating Canaanite worship of their baby-killing god Molech. https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/4372130/jewish/The-Tragic-History-of-Molech-Child-Sacrifice.htm. And how to reconcile abortion with King David's eloquent words in Psalm 139: "You made all the delicate parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb...You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.." (Ps 139, 15-16 NIV).

Instead of defiling the Supreme Court, those pro-abortion demonstrators might have considered our history, when Americans were forcibly confronted by the manifold evils of slavery, our long-running foundational sin. On the north wall of the Lincoln Memorial are engraved the immortal words of his Second Inaugural, delivered just 41 days prior to his assassination. "Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' "

I keep wondering if that same calculus could be applied again - this time to atone for the 60 million infants sacrificed on the unholy altar of Roe v Wade. Would it include prompt mega-deaths from a nuclear strike or the lingering effects of radiation spread downwind from the smoking remnants of America’s great cities? Should we fall to our knees to pray for grace and forgiveness or just shrug and carry on as before, hoping that Lincoln was exaggerating when he declared that the Lord's judgments are "true and righteous altogether?"

Colonel Kenneth Allard, United States Army (Ret.) is a Vietnam-era draftee who became a West Point professor and Dean of the National War College. He is also the author of Command, Control and the Common Defense, winner of the 1991 National Security Book Award. After leaving active duty, he served for nearly a decade as an on-air military analyst for the networks of NBC News.