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Obama Calls For Nuke-Free World
jamie points out news that President Obama has put out a call for a world free of nuclear weapons at a speech in Prague today. He acknowledged that it was a long-term goal, perhaps not something that can be accomplished in his lifetime, but promised to encourage the US Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty. According to the BBC, he also stated his desire to "negotiate a new treaty to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons," and to hold a global summit within the next year to work out agreements for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Obama said, "As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it." His speech came less than a day after North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket.
I'm not one that believes in using nuclear weapons, but not having them seems worse than having them.
Ya, I know, pretty easy to say when I'm in one of the countries with a crapton of them (US).
Has America invaded any nuclear power?
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To respond to a bunch of folks here:
First of all, it would be economic suicide for any country to be a nuclear aggressor. The World's economy is so integrated that it can't happen among countries that trade internationally or want to.
Now the countries that don't want to: N. Korea. International trade would undermine his regime. Yes, Jong Ill will use nukes for blackmail purposes. Launching missiles, threatening the World, mostly the US, with nuclear aggression. From what I'm seeing, he's so fucked up, he doesn't care about retaliation. He's starving his own people to keep his pathetic little country. I don't know enough about international affairs to know exactly what to do, but Nukes aren't the way to deal with that fuckwit.
Islamic fundamentalist. The Muslim community will have to deal with those themselves. For one, they're the only ones that those wakos will listen to - maybe. And two, if they don't, the entire Muslim World will be caught up in the backlash against the fundamentalist nuts. I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying what will happen.
The international money folks and traders are driving all this. Sovereign nations are also becoming a thing of the past. Yes, I am saying that the one World government is on it's way. Not in our lifetimes, but not too far either.
Too much so far for a post. Here's more from some great books: "The World is Flat" by Friedman and "The World is Curved" by Smick.
The nuke has very effectively prevented WWIII from happening as the deterrent of MAD has proven to be histories most effective peace policy. The concept of non-proliferation, to keep nukes from spreading is one that that world has turned it's back on. You want to make the world a safer place, get real about nuclear programs run by countries like Iran and North Korea.
In the event that nukes were somehow magically put back in the nuclear genie bottle, countries would simply go back to larger standing armies. Conventional armies with conventional weapons have proven their ability to kill in large quantity time and time again.
That is the question. What if one of these "rouge" countries nuke a neighbor? What if they nuke us or our allies? Do we or Russia go MAD on their ass or do we get hella pissed instead?
First of all, one nuclear weapon isn't the end of the world. It is a huge deal, yeah. But it isn't balls-to-the-wall USA vs. Russia either.
If I was president (thank god I'm not), I wouldn't nuke that country... odds are good that was the only nuclear weapon they owned and they just blew their whole load in one shot. If we nuked them to hell, it would make the situation much worse and could result in a MAD-like scenario. Worse, what if that weapon did come from "Country X" and we knew it, and retaliated with a nuclear weapon, we might risk getting into that ball-to-the-wall USA vs. Russia scenario.
In other words, I have no clue. USA vs. Russia ain't gonna happen because of MAD. Random countries with three nuclear weapons don't have enough firepower to warrant a nuclear retaliation. But the trick is to make sure all they ever have is a couple nuclear weapons--hence calls to "disarm the planet". Everybody knows we are gonna continue to have 5 bagillion nukes--the fact that we do is the only way we can even make a call to disarm the planet... it doesn't matter if dont listen, we can destroy them and the world.
After Gulf War 1 an India offical said "The lesson of this war is do not fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." I can see the path down to under 1000 nuclear weapons world wide. But i can't see the path to 0. As long as US conventional strength is strong enough to topple regimes China, Pakistan, North Korea etc are going to want to hold on to their nuclear weapons. These countries know they could never defeat the united states in a fight with or without nuclear weapons their only option is to raise the costs to the point a fight becomes unacceptable for either side.
The one thing to realize is that crazy guy isn't gonna have a mass stockpile of them either. He might get one or two of them and then use them to blow up $RANDOM_COUNTRY. It would suck a *lot* and justifiably piss people off *a lot*, but as long as everybody sane keeps their cool, the world wouldn't end. The world would end if the sane folk got into nuclear war... but but if they actually nuked each other, they wouldn't be sane would they.
What you *dont* want is to sit around and twiddle your thumbs while Crazy Guy builds a stockpile. If he gets a stockpile, all bets are off.
The real question is, if your military intelligence indicates that the nuclear weapon Crazy Guy just used was the only one he had, do you retaliate with a nuclear weapon? My answer would be no and I'd be curious to hear pro-nuke-them-to-hell arguments...
MAD still works against the pizza-box-bomb terrorists. You just have to make it clear that you will nuke something they love. In the case of Islamic terrorist, you just make it clear that if they use a nuke on us, we will nuke Mecca.
Sure, Ill will continue to blackmail the World, but let's face it, he doesn't give a shit about retaliation. He is starving his own people, after all. Do you really think that he'd give a shit if we nuked them? He's tucked away in his palatial bunker with his whores.
And there's the Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists. Nuking a country won't do anything. If anything, that's exactly what they would want: great recruiting tool! The Muslim community will take care of those folks eventually. Their development requires that Islamic terrorism be stopped.
For more, please read: "The World is Flat" by Friedman and "The World is Curved" by Smick.
But seriously, what the heck are we doing with over 10,000 nuclear warheads on our planet and over half of them in the north american continent.
I mean 100 wouldn't do it? We need 6000?
"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." - Carl Sagan
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
The invasion won't be via mass armed invasion of a whole continent but rather via more subtle economic and political means and winning the battle with as little military combat as possible, but the THREAT of force if they don't cave in. Nukes in a suitcase are terror weapons and terror can be a psychological strategy. To that extent they are still strategic weapons just the deployment ands use is different. Some older tactics have changed but in some cases they still work, reference the mass invasion of Iraq. It's a case by case basis on what works, the concepts are valid just the options to apply the concepts are limited.
Yeah, but either they withdraw their troops or we nuke them. Those are the only two possible outcomes of invading us. Sure it might take a while to escalate to that point, but in the end either they withdraw or we nuke them. Period. There is literally no other outcome of such an event--it will always end in one of those two ways.
In otherwords, you cannot just invade half of Europe Hilter-style unless you want to be nuked. Period.
He isn't naive. Nobody is gonna get rid of their nukes, especially the USA, and he knows it. It puts international pressure on countries who really have no business with them. It is just good politics.
In terms of countries that don't need nukes, I'd submit that any country with less than 10 million citizens (more or less) should never really consider having nuclear weapons. The main reason is one of cost and maintenance.
Nuclear weapons are costly... from the viewpoint of monitoring the weapons and using them. Not only does it require technically brilliant people to create them in the first place, but you have to have extremely skilled folks to even deploy them once you have an objective. Also, no sane (or even slightly insane) national leader would want nukes to be used except if and only if that leader really wants them used and has given explicit order for their use. That implies a security detail guarding these bombs from accidental use and from being stolen, concerns about the health of those who are handling the bombs, medical staff to monitor those health concerns, communications devices and procedures to relay the wishes of the national leaders, and bureaucratic oversight of the whole process.
Nuclear bombs can also be traced very well in terms of finding the origin of the fissile material that was used to make the bomb. Again this goes back to the security issues, where a nuke that is used can be traced back to a country of origin... that will also be a target of attack if found.
IMHO North Korea, to give an example, is too small to effectively operate nuclear weapons. They are making it a priority for various reasons and destroying what little of an economy they have to do it... but it is an unsustainable proposition for them. Given the issues involved, I don't see North Korea maintaining its weapons for too long, and I certainly don't see smaller countries trying either.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/183673
by Henry Kissinger
The real story is about the fact that nuclear prolifiration and nuclear disarmament should have gotten a lot more attention from previous presidents (both Clinton and Bush completely failed on this one) and Obama's pledge came much too late. Now trying to go as far as possible (nuke free world) is the least he can do.
I cannot say I share your unbridled optimism with regard to the H-bomb. I would be surprised not to see a global conflict in my lifetime. It is going to be terrible, just unbelievably awful, but that alone will not stop it from happening. It does not matter if anyone can truly benefit from the conflict. The only big net winner in WWII was USA, and that only because the war did not go anywhere near it. Germany and Russia wanted war and lost. Allies were against the war, and they also lost, even though they won on paper.
Just give us a few decades to cram a few more billion people onto the planet and outline a few ideological differences on the subject of a bearded man in the sky. Then take your lawn chair onto the roof and enjoy the show.
P.S. It does not have to a nuclear war, by the way, could as well be biological, especially because it is cheaper, I suppose. My point is, the history shows that after weapons are stockpiled for a while there always comes a time when they are used to capacity.
You are mistaken. If your opponent's intention is to conquer you, the VERY last thing he wants is for you to nuke his invading army, and his homeland. In that situation, possession of nuclear weapons DOES prevent an attack by conventional troops, by allowing you to maintain a far lower conventional troop strength.
By the same token, if he wants to conquer and rule you, the last thing he wants to do is attempt to nuke you into submission, since that wrecks all the nice farmland and factories and French farm girls he wants to conquer.
Read up on the troop strength of the old Soviet Union, and on the number of tanks they could field. If the Soviets had wanted to, they could have lined up, North-South, along the old Iron Curtain, across ALL of Europe, and headed West. There was never any doubt in anyone's mind, on either side of the Iron Curtain, that they wanted to do it. The West did not (and does not, even today) have anything even remotely resembling the conventional troop strength necessary to stop such an assault.
If you believe they didn't want to do it, review the history of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, during the period between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. For that matter, review the history of the Berlin Wall.
There was just this one little problem. The Soviets knew that such an attack would trigger BOTH strategic nuclear counterattack against Moscow and Russia, *AND* tactical nuclear response against their skirmish line. The tactical nuclear response would have broken the attack, and the strategic response would have hurt them even worse than they got hurt in World War II. (While you're doing your troop strength homework, look up how many casualties the Soviets took during World War II, expressed as a fraction of their population. The number is, by Western standards, astonishingly high. Russia KNEW, during the 1960s, what kind of casualties they could take, survive, and recover from.)
This is why the West refused to sign up for the "No First Use" policy that the Soviets pushed. Without the option to escalate to nuclear weapons, the West had NO chance of stopping a conventional Soviet attack.
The Soviets also understood this. It is why they attempted to install ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons on Cuba, in the early days of the Kennedy Administration. It is what brought the world within a gnat's eyelash of World War III.
None of the above is fiction, none of it is speculation. I had the privilege several years ago of talking, over lunch at The Men's Club of Dallas, with a guy who turned out to be the only B-52 aircraft commander in the United States Air Force who didn't fly his airplane out to his Fail/Safe point that day. He and his crew had just landed from a training flight when the orders were given. As he and his crew were walking in, he met everyone else going out to their airplanes. He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
You overestimate the effectiveness of nuclear weapons. In Hiroshima there were survivors in reasonably sturdy buildings 100 meters from the center of the blast. Even a fairly severe use of them would not evaporate enough people to significantly impair guerilla recruitment; to engage in bombings in the amount necessary to achieve any kind of extermination would cause significant fallout elsewhere on intolerable levels.
In fact, the result would probably be to provide them with a whole host of recruits locally as radiation poisoned individuals may not have significant compunctions about going down fighting. And it would most likely result in significant blow back from the nuclear aggressors own population, as well as from non-involved parties.
Nuclear weapons may be useful against conventional armies with conventional leaders in countries with conventional population. They destroy enough infrastructure and kill enough people in the longer term to change the political game, and may make any state concept of 'winning' irrelevant, but the use of any non-tactical nuclear weapon against guerilla forces would be largely ineffective (compared to conventional weapons) and most likely seriously counterproductive.
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral
Hardly. Political and practical would come highest on the list, using nuclear weapons would remove any chance of reaching any possible current goals, ie, make any 'winning' essentially impossible.
Further, a nuclear first strike would make the rest of the nuclear powers so jittery we'd rename the Cold War the Slightly Chilly War. Friendlier, more interdependent world or not, the ability of the rest of them to tolerate a first-strike nuclear power would be limited.
Also, much of this "aid" comes in the form of loans with strings attached saying "get rid of any governmental function that helps poor people" and "sell your natural resources to corporations based in our country for a pittance".
Mmm, freedom. Can you taste it?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The only reason nuclear weapons are outdated is because they still exist....Basically, the existence of nuclear weapons make the old tactics obsolete. Remove the nuclear weapons and the old ways are no longer obsolete.
Ah, I strongly doubt it. If anything nuclear weapons have created alternative ways to wage war, because after they became the doomsday device they still are today, NO ONE in their right mind would ever use them. We simply tiptoed quietly back from that dark road the superpowers went down, but kept our finger on the infamous button.
It's a last-resort device, capable of damn near wiping out the planet if ever used in any large scale, which there is NO other scale, really.
That being said, taking away the nukes if anything would likely target those countries who still have a "button" to push, because there would no longer be that dark cloud threat to worry about.
None of the above is fiction, none of it is speculation. I had the privilege several years ago of talking, over lunch at The Men's Club of Dallas, with a guy who turned out to be the only B-52 aircraft commander in the United States Air Force who didn't fly his airplane out to his Fail/Safe point that day. He and his crew had just landed from a training flight when the orders were given. As he and his crew were walking in, he met everyone else going out to their airplanes. He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
The Cuban Missile Crises is something that I believe is significantly downplayed by most high school and even university professors when covering modern American history. It is everything you claim and more.
Those who participated in the military at the time were of my father's generation, and to a man every single one of them knew the proverbial shit was hitting the fan at the time. Weapons lockers that were never, ever touched were opened and a massive mobilization of forces happened that was simply incredible. One guy I know was sitting in a Marine landing craft fully armed and provisioned for a month's operations about 20 miles from Havana when Khrushchev finally backed down. I don't know how much of that was saber rattling, but a full-out aggressive war was at least a very real possibility.
The world would have been very different if those plans had been put into motion, and it wasn't due to a lack of nukes or a President without balls. Similar incidents happened during the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations BTW, both of which get even less coverage than the Cuban Missile Crises. How World War III was avoided in 1973 is one of those facts of history that you have got to read about and investigate to believe, and just as remarkable.