WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush announced in a surprise press conference today that he would launch nuclear weapons against countries that the United States deemed too small.

"Small countries take up a good deal of space that could be used to better advantage by larger countries," he told the White House Press Corps today in the Rose Garden. "Large countries can do things more efficiently than small countries, and as a result, they waste fewer resources. It's called 'economy of scale.' Look it up. I have an MBA from Harvard, so I don't need to look it up. I already know. But you have to look it up. You don't know."

Later in the day on the Fox News Channel, anchor Brit Hume defended Bush's remarks. "It's high time countries like Micronesia, Fiji, and Monaco gave up their land and resources to somebody else. They're only standing in the way of progress. What is this, the seventh century? We're not nation-states anymore."

A source within the White House said that Bush came to the conclusion late on Saturday, when his computer's hard drive became full. "The president called in one of our technical experts, who showed him how to uninstall unnecessary programs and delete old files. The president was amazed by this ability to free up space on his computer, and wondered out loud to the technician if this would work to clear what he called 'the hard drive of the world.' According to the technician, he responded by replying, 'I don't know, sir. I'm just desktop support."

According to the source, Bush made an emergency phone call to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and asked her whether what he called "the hard drive strategy" would work. Dr. Rice replied that it was a very good analogy and suggested they implement the plan immediately. After securing Vice President Dick Cheney's approval, a team of speechwriters met Sunday morning while the president was at church to outline the plan for destroying the world's unnecessary countries.

A spokesman for Microsoft, manufacturer of Windows, the world's most popular computer operating system, said that the president had contacted Bill Gates, the company's chairman, to secure an endorsement. "Mr. Gates told the president that while 'the hard drive strategy' was a good strategy for computers, it probably wouldn't work in the real world," said the spokesman.

"We need to go further than just cleaning out the world's hard drive," said syndicated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh earlier today. "We need to clean out the world's RAM, which means dissolving the United Nations. We need to go back to a mainframe/terminal architecture, in which all nations get their orders from the United States. Our embassies will be like terminals. It will save the world's diplomatic and computing resources! What good is a computer when its different parts have different ideologies?"

Some world diplomatic experts questioned whether or not global policies should be formulated based on an analogy, but they were quickly dismissed by critics who said that they were just raising pointless issues because they want to see the terrorists win. "It's the same old thing you see with all these cretins," said syndicated columnist Ann Coulter. "These diplomatic eggheads in their liberal ivory towers want to make everything theoretical so that they can prevent the common man from understanding what's going on in the world. You know what's going on? Muslims are blowing up Christians and Jews, and these Commie wackos in their comfortable universities are cheering them on. They hate Christianity, they hate America, and they don't even like computers. They're against this computer analogy because they want to take us back to a time before typewriters, back when we were using pencil and paper. I think our university system has a corrupt header block, and we should re-initialize all of these professors to get rid of the corruption."

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow cautioned that the plan would take time to implement. "First, we need to scan the world to see what countries are too small. Then, we have to actually 'delete' them with nuclear weapons. It will take several months to assemble a team to scan the world, so I expect that the American people have nothing to worry about. I'm going to place this hourglass on the podium like so, and that will tell us when our scanning team is done scanning. If for some reason they encounter a problem, the hour glass will stop, and we'll have to start all over again. But I repeat that the American people have nothing to worry about in the near future."