bomb, bomb, bomb ... Iran ... sigh

Well, may that friend of a friend of a friend did say what he was said to have said (sounds like something Dr. Suess might have written.) In any case, he'd have the backing of Sen. Lieberman, whose saber shaking words over the weekend were another trial balloon for extending the war without end across the border into Iran. This balloon floated without the Beach Boys' background music that Sen. McCain gave his attack Iran thoughts. The noise level increases these days much as it did in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, but America's problems won't be solved in Iran either.
I'm reading a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, and ran across this factoid: the United States has spent $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons since the days of the Manhattan Project.
One wonders how the post-war history of the country -- and the world -- might have been different had we spent half that much on something akin to a global Marshall Plan instead of a global empire strategy whose foundation was the massive buildup of weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, it might have looked something like what Oppenheimer himself, the father of the bomb, suggested in his farewell address to the scientists at Los Alamos, when he said:
"But there is another thing: we are not only scientists; we are men, too. We cannot forget our dependence on our fellow men. I mean not only our material dependence, without which no science would be possible, and without which we could not work; I mean also our deep moral dependence, in that the value of science must lie in the world of men, that all our roots lie there. These are the strongest bonds in the world, stronger than those even that bind us to one another, these are the deepest bonds -- that bind us to our fellow men."