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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.
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.