The question in the recent candidates debate was not the ethics of routine interrogation but the ethics of torture in an apocalyptical situation, in which one or more U.S. cities stood in imminent danger of being nuked by terrorists. The problem is that if our national security stands or falls on whether we can torture one or two people, then for all practical purposes we no longer have any national security, since there can be no 100 percent effective way to intercept all terrorists with nukes.

This is not the thread to debate the larger problem of a world in which terrorists have access to nuclear weapons. But the question debated by the candidates makes it sound as if we might be secure in such a world if we remove all restraints on interrogation. Maybe we could intercept and disarm the nuclear threat that one time, but quite apart from the ethical consequences that the two generals so properly raise in their article, I do not see how a policy of torturing captured terrorists can make us secure in the longer run even in its own terms.