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I want to talk about how big-time politicians are talking about dealing with the possibility that the Iranians may get a nuclear weapon, and with Iran more generally. I want to talk about people talking tough.

But let's start with something less sensational: a problem my students in a science fiction film course had understanding a scene in the pretty unsubtle film "Terminator 2: Judgment Day."

The scene has Sarah Connor, the female hero, striding into the home of computer scientist Miles Dyson to kill him and, she hopes, thereby avoid "Judgment Day," the day the supercomputer he's helping create will destroy human civilization.

Connor would have to kill Dyson in front of his wife and son, and she finally decides not to and sinks down in tears, while her son and the reprogrammed protector Terminator break in to stop her murdering Dyson, and the film moves toward a climax where "Judgment Day" is avoided.

My more assertive students thought Sarah wimped out: she should've blown away Dyson. I tried to convince them that they could argue for the wimp-out judgment but that they'd have to allow that the first Terminator film and Terminator 2 worked against it.

Several remained adamant: real heroes are tough and do what's necessary, and Sarah Connor should've blown away the scientist.

Eventually, I prepared an iMovie showing the Terminator of the first film murdering unarmed women, juxtaposed with Sarah Connor moving to kill Miles Dyson: the camera-work suggested a parallel, reinforcing the reading of the film that, in fighting the Terminators, Sarah had "Terminatorized" herself, only to save herself at the last moment by refusing to murder a helpless wounded man.

To drive home the larger point, however, I had to add clips from a movie, showing, with similar camera-work, a Nazi officer calmly blowing away two pleading women,

and some excerpts from the classic "South Park" episode, "Scott Tenorman Must Die" — where horrible little Eric Cartman gets Scott's parents killed and then serves them to him cooked in a chili, and where Scott gets teased as a wimp for crying over the death of his parents.

My students hadn't grown up on anti-Nazi films that called into question the "ruthless toughness" that allows men to murder for some glorified cause.

Most Americans wouldn't say "ruthless toughness," but we do value "requisite toughness," including the willingness to threaten killing large numbers of foreigners if the threat might work, or if the actual killing might be useful in assuring the security of Americans.

I'm less bothered than some by Sen. John McCain's sick joke of singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann"; I'm more concerned about Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's saying that Iran's nuclear program must be stopped "by all possible means" or Barack Obama's saying he would do "'everything in my power' to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capability," or Hillary Clinton's similar comments about doing "everything possible" to prevent a nuclear Iran and, more justifiably, saying that "if she were president, the United States could 'totally obliterate' Iran in retaliation for a," presumably first-use, "nuclear strike against Israel."

"All possible means" includes thermonuclear weapons that can't literally obliterate Iran but that can destroy all of their major cities and kill just about every living vertebrate in them.

And if you argue that it's inconceivable the U.S. would H-bomb cities, then just downgrade the threat from thermonuclear to nuclear, which will still get most of the job done, and for which there is precedent. It is easily conceivable that the U.S. would bomb cities into oblivion since we did just that within living memory, and not just us: the Germans blitzed Rotterdam during World War II, and the U.S. and British destroyed Hamburg and Dresden, with the U.S. by ourselves dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I'll accept threats to "totally obliterate" Iran, or wherever, if the candidates will spell out for Americans with limited background and imagination just what it is possible to do in an instant with modern weaponry.

If you have the requisite toughness.

If you are willing to kill men, women, children, and babies to achieve a political goal.

I am not a total pacifist, so I must allow for situations in which it is the least evil choice to burn, maim, and/or kill people: dropping ordnance on people does have that effect.

If Americans desire in candidates the requisite toughness to threaten or commit slaughter in our names, we should demand also the moral strength to avoid obscene euphemisms like "collateral damage" and discuss such horrors directly. (If you wouldn't accept a "collateral damage" argument from Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing, don't accept it for any other bombing.)

If preventing the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons would justify killing a few, or many, Iranian children, say that.

One other thing people can do: see Terminator 2. It has a highly accurate simulation of the effect of a hydrogen bomb on children and their mothers on a playground, and suggests that it would help in avoiding "judgment days" to learn to value human life. The first two Terminators together propose that total toughness is for killer cyborg and pure robots; real men, and real women, also know compassion.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor in English at Miami University in Oxford, who currently lives in Ventura County, Calif.

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