Thomas Sowell: two nuclear detonations = American surrender?

In a recent column at National Review Online, the economist Thomas Sowell argues that President Obama has done nothing to stop Iran from developing atomic weaponry. That's not a unique argument, but Sowell goes further. Granted, he says, Iran may only acquire a handful of nukes. But that may be all it needs:

Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender -- especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

I don't cherish the idea of my (hypothetical) granddaughters living under sharia, but, that said, I didn't gain much by pausing to ponder that scenario. But Sowell's column did make me think of a few questions that might inspire a lively discussion in, say, an eighth-grade history class:

Militarily speaking, what resources does the United States have, in 2009, that Japan did not have in 1945?

How might those options affect 1) Iran's decision to strike the U.S. with atomic weapons? Or 2) possible American responses to such an attack?

If Japan had possessed several thousand nuclear-tipped ICBMs in 1945, might that have affected the course of World War II? How?

Not long ago, Dinesh D'Souza, author of "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11," was nudged out of the Hoover Institution for making arguments that were long on Democrat-bashing and short on scholarship. It was decided that he was an embarrassment to Stanford University, where the think tank is based. Sowell is a far more credible figure, but this column, anyway, is D'Souza-level stuff.