Rick Santorum has an active imagination:

Imagine if Honduras has been making noise about trying to destroy the United States and that they were developing a nuclear weapon, and we had a report saying they were in a few months of developing a nuclear weapon. Would we just sit there knowing that they had made comments that they would destroy our country and they were about to get a nuclear weapon? Would we sit there and allow them do that? I don’t think any Americans would let that happen. In fact, the president would be impeached for letting that happen.

Alarmist rhetoric about foreign threats is nothing new for Santorum, but it is unusual when Santorum’s rhetoric has the effect of making the threat he’s describing (i.e., the Iranian threat to Israel) seem smaller than it really is. I suppose he picked Honduras because it is not that far away from the United States, but otherwise the comparison is baffling. Honduras is an extremely poor country, and it wouldn’t have the resources to develop such a weapon even if it wanted one. If the Honduran government inexplicably started threatening the U.S. with annihilation, our government would have to assume that they were engaging in meaningless bluster.

Someone will object that Santorum isn’t really talking about Honduras, but wants to make a point that a nuclear threat from a regional neighbor is so intolerable that it would demand preventive war. Even so, Santorum isn’t making any sense. If there were a Honduran nuclear threat, the U.S. nuclear arsenal would be more than enough to deter Honduras (or indeed any nuclear-armed state in existence). The idea that a country so much weaker and more vulnerable to attack would make such direct threats is hard to take seriously, and it’s even more ridiculous that Santorum would think that any presidential response short of preventive war would be deserving of impeachment. The standard argument for preventive war against Iran is that the current Iranian regime is fundamentally irrational, and because of this it cannot be deterred. All of that hinges on an extremely tendentious, unfounded mythology of the Iranian regime as a “martyr state,” and it’s complete nonsense, but at least it tries to account for why traditional deterrence is not possible with Iran. As Santorum tells it here, he seems to think traditional deterrence is completely useless, and he evidently believes that preventive war is the only appropriate way to respond to a nuclear threat. Why anyone would take policy recommendations from someone with such a dangerously militaristic view is beyond me.