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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.
Free of nukes only works until some other 4 foot 9 dictator decides to raise his status the only way he can to impress the world.
What then? Does he become emporer of the world or just harasser of the world as Hannibal did to Rome?
And now, Ill come forth and call to an end of mean people. And a pony. I want a pony.
Really though, nuclear technology isnt that hard. Take 2 pieces of near-critical U235 and smack them together.. Hell, we could have Soulskill clap them together.
And dont forget yeah, the US, France, UK, Russia, and China all have nukes. Those countries like India, Pakistan, and Israel also have them, and we dont have a nuclear holocaust yet, either.
Just a bunch of North Korea fearmongering. After all, if they do get scared, China WILL step in and handle the situation.
The United States has 5,914 strategic nuclear warheads, followed closely by Russia with 4,237 deployable warheads. (Source: Arms Control ). The rest of the members of the nuclear club -- UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel -- have less than 1,000 combined nuclear weapons. Clearly, if Obama wants the world to take him seriously, he needs to restart the START-II treaty and disassemble his own stockpile before he can expect others to do the same.
By the end of the projected total nuclear ban, there will be much stronger weapons than nuclear. Why stick to some outdated weapons?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Nobody is going to disarm if another country still has nukes, that would be suicide. Furthermore, countries that possess nukes would still have the knowhow to produce them after the destruction of all of the nuclear weapons. That alone would create an unbalance in the worldpower, some countries can still make nukes if the situation warrants it and they can be produced in a year or 4(probably less) so any war with these powers would mean a re-arming of the nation involved and as a reaction a re-arming of all other nuke-capable nations.
Furthermore, some countries still rely on nukes as a deterrent like Israel. I just don't see them disarming, and my believe is affirmed since Israel categorically refuses to say anything about its nuclear capabilities which leads to the last objection to these plans. You can hide your nukes and feign compliance with disarming programs.
In short, it won't work and Obama is not believing his own words if he has any intelligence.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
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).
It won't.
There are many reactor designs (CANDU in particular) that don't require any enrichment at all. What he's talking about is no longer producing highly enriched U235 and/or PU239.
Of course, that's great and all, but there are already fairly sizable stockpiles of both within the established nuclear powers.
He's either posturing or pipe-dreaming.
He is just naive. No one will give up their trump card. And even if they did, it may not be for the best. I submit that a world without nukes would be one with much larger standing armies. Look at europe during the "old" cold war. NATO relied on the nuke card to justify much smaller forces.
Conservative, mod down for violating
So we get rid of our nukes and so does other 'law abiding' countries. What about the 100's that really don't give a damn?
Then again, he thinks banning personal guns will work too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Its how you get the populace to give up their rights 'for their protection'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
End result of Reagan's plan: Collapse of the USSR, and reduction of the probability of nuclear armageddon.
Obama's solution to eliminate nuclear weapons: Curtail or eliminate defenses against nuclear weapons, sign on to a treaty that would have no effect upon those that would actually use nuclear weapons, and ensure that nuclear deterrence would eventually fail, as there would be increasing uncertainty whether the nuclear weapons of the nations that had signed the Test Ban Treaty had functioning nuclear weapons or not, especially if you're going to then go and end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
End result of Obama's plan: Defenseless US et al against those whose moral duty to act includes nuking us.
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I don't see it that way at all. It sounds like that on the surface, but I don't think it's like that at all.
Take a society without guns (zero, none whatsoever) and put 1 gun into the hands of one side of an argument and 1 gun into the hands of the other side. Both sides are smart enough that they know using the gun would mean the other guy would.
So, what's the problem here, now there are lots of guys without guns and they want them. Sounds like you should give everyone who wants them because we're responsible, so they should be too. I mean, it's too powerful and everyone respects that fact.
So lets give them to everyone, hell if everyone has them, and noone uses them, well, nothing changes....
No.. If you just hand out weapons, or just allow everyone to make them at their own will, eventually one guy will end up with one and he will want to use it. Eventually it gets into the hands of a crazy. N. Korea might not be the crazy guy, but he sure as shit isn't the sane guy.
Yes, it sounds hypocritical, but if enough people have weapons, eventually someone will use them. That is what we want to avoid.
The answer is, unfortunately, depended on installed base technologies.
The ancient, prototype nuclear plant (the ones installed all over the western world in the 1950's and 1960's) DO require the very same enrichment cycle that nuclear weapons require.
The new types of reactors. Pebble bed, light water, what have you, don't require any kind of enrichment cycle (but would, in the US and all over Europe and Russia, require replacing most, if not all, existing facilities). Dropping the enrichment cycle would also rob us of the production of medical isotopes, which would become prohibitively expensive to produce. It would also end research into new "very high atomic number" isotopes, and will rob us of any knowledge of the higher stable islands in the periodic table.
The problem with this knowledge is that is makes it VERY hard to explain what Iran is doing with enrichment facilities and light water reactors, which have other advantages such as increased efficiency and, above all, price. You see, Iran doesn't need enrichment for power, and yet they ARE enriching ... Since they're not doing it for power (and they sure as hell are not spending 40% of the country's budget on producing medical isotopes they don't know how to use) ... there can be only a single conclusion.
However I will leave it to people for whom reality is more important than fantasy to decide what exactly said conclusion is. Especially considering that Iranian engineers participated in North Korea's missile test. The missile test that occured moments before Obama announced he would kill the one defence America's got that's proven to work : the ability to retaliate in kind.
There is a positive note to make though : despite all the hype, any realistic quantity of nukes is not capable of taking out America's military. That would take something near a million nukes, and would require enveloping America, and several other nations, for weeks in nuclear blasts, something impossible to do with less than several hundred thousand nukes.
Therefore despite their reputation, any nukes Iran or North Korea might fire, in the belief that America would be prevented from retaliating, would not really prevent that. America would, obviously, be left with only one choice : have American soldiers conquer a few of their cities and commit massacres the "old fashioned" way. It would cost untold numbers of casualties, but there would be no other options.
You see, despite all the idiocy surrounding nukes, they were intended to lessen bloodshed and force enemies to use other external politics than war.
They worked. On at least three enemies (Japan, USSR and Korea). Destroying nukes will not improve the world, it will bring back the civil wars and constant open conflicts like WWI and WWII. They will bring back the need for national armies to massacre civilians, just like they did before the 1950's.
Of course, considerations like that are too much reality for anyone who's ever believed an Al Gore (or Obama) speech.
Has America invaded any nuclear power?
Deleted
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.
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.
It would also be a hell of a lot less safe too. People know this too. We might say "down with nuclear weapons" in public, but if you put it to a vote, I promise you a large majority would vote to keep every nuke we own.
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.
The USA have the most powerful conventional military in the world. So the only way to ensure the USA don't attack you is to have a nuclear bomb. And the USA have clearly shown that they want and will attack you, take Serbia or Iraq for example.
It's political posturing, with more important objectives.
In short, the "nuke-free world" is window-dressing for more real, practical objectives.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
What Obama is seeking is similar to the consolidation of material advantage when you trade pieces away on a chess board when you are already up in material. If major nuclear powers were to unite in disarming small nuclear powers first and controlling proliferation it would consolidate their strategic control of the world through these weapons. This could be done under the guise of world nuclear disarmament but of course it would take a "little" longer to disarm the major powers that would drive the effort. I think that this is less about dreaming of a day without nuclear weapons than it is about dreaming of a day when it is possible to control the rest of the world through possession of these weapons again. Admittedly the chess material analogy is a little strained: a nuke isn't a pawn advantage, hell it's not even like being a queen and 2 rooks up. It is more like being a Wookie opponent at the chess table.
Yes, I know I'm paraphrasing pro-gun rhetoric here, but I believe it applies. The only way that International Law works, is if all the countries involved agree to abide by said laws -- which we all know doesn't work often enough. One day, assuming the human race actually lives long enough to see it, we MAY evolve enough, physioligically and mentally, that our needs for things like solving problems with aggression will become obsolete; THEN things like nuclear weapons will have a chance to go the way of the dinosaurs. Until that day comes this technology will (unfortunately) have to exist. You can't put the genie back in the bottle once you've let it out, after all; knowing something is possible is half the battle towards MAKING it possible, even if we effectively buried the knowledge of how to create nuclear fission, physicists would work backwards and rediscover how to make it happen anyway. I applaud Obama's sentiments on the subject, as I applaud the realism of his thoughts when he says "not in my lifetime".
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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 problem is there's a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Thats why nukes are such a security risks with terrorists about, and a lot of attempts to acquire missiles by al queda. They will succeed as long as nukes are in the hands of a small few. The solution is to make nuclear weapons open source, so we can better secure them. Open source = better security.
If nukes are available to the common man for free, then anybody from part-time nuclear engineers, to hobbyist reactor specialists in their spare time, at home, can better analyze the security around them, test them in their backyard, etc. Put the specs on the internet for everybody to download and install in their home uranium enrichment centres. Most security holes are found by accident, so home-made nukes will help reveal more holes than any other method available.
Open Source Nukes, FTW!
Like any technology, once the ability to produce nukes is available it will not go away. Trying to make this happen will succeed about as well as prohibition did or banning firearms would. It is obviously a larger project than a still or a machine shop but not beyond the realm of possibility for any nation to try.
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...
That is what happens when you get your news from a very narrow band of sources.
Yeah, Bush did a great job boosting our leadership status. Cough.
At least we tried. If they dont cave, fuck them.. at least we'll have our allies helping us. Bush didn't try and just said "fuck em... we'll go at it alone and if you dont help, you are an enemy to". Now we are broke footing the bill for a war we never should have got in.
- Theodore Roosevelt.
The fact is large scale deliberate civilian killing is not acceptable by any democratic country, in the cold war era it was barely acceptable when the US could have been destroyed. MAD doesn't work when your fighting an enemy that are smaller than you and surrounded by innocent people.
The enemy know the US won't use a nuclear weapon on them so it doesn't act as a deterent:
*9/11
*Taliban handing over Osama
*Both Gulf wars
*etc
Nobody takes the threat of the US launching a nuclear attack seriously. The only things that the huge stockpile does:
*Cost a fair bit of money
*Remove any high ground the US may have, you can't expect other to give up their weapons if you keep yours
*Increase the risk of one going missing (minor in the US, but in Israel/Russia/china this is a risk)
*Increase the risk of semi-produced materials being stolen (Again lower in the US, but non-trivial elsewhere)
So by starting to reduce the pointless arsenal in America (see above), Obama can try and convince other to follow. Negotiations are just that, and you never get anything by just shouting louder. Even if Obama only convinces the 'good' guys (US/china/russia/uk/france) to disarm, that is still a significant reduction in the risk of one of them inadvertently helping the bad guys (hell in the uk we seam to be losing everything, I wouldn't trust us with a nuke), while simultaneously putting you in a better position to convince the 'bad' countries (Iran) that they should disarm.
The total loss for the US is NOTHING, you can't use the nuclear weapons anyway!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I really think he does believe that the world is like Star Trek, where you can have a meeting with someone that totally hates you, and suddenly love breaks out
It worked for Jimmy Carter. Sort of.
The Internet is generally stupid
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.
The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 13 to 18 kilotons and the Nagasaki bomb 21 kilotons.
The 10 to 15 megaton weapons in the US arsenal are close to a thousand times greater yield, with all the trappings that go with it.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
This will work just like the UK banning hand guns, now the only people with hand guns are bad guys AND they all know the law abiding citizens aren't armed. Also once we get rid of all our nukes, then the bad guys get to turn the tables on us and say okay if we see you guys trying to build any nuke we're gonna nuke you.
Yeah, and we all now how big the UK's gun problems are:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/britain-records-18-fall-in-gun-deaths-1232069.html
And although I am in favour of banning guns and a reduction of nuclear weapons I don't think it's a comparable analogy.
Seeing as how the US essentially IS NATO, no matter what, we'd be stuck supplying most of the troops and most of the money.
And before people start foaming at the mouth about how I'm want war, I think the current war is idiotic and that the only justified war that the US has fought in a century is fighting against Japan during WWII. Outside of that, the US has never fought anyone who harmed them / posed a threat. That's why I laugh when I hear people talk of soldiers in Iraq / Afghanistan "defending our freedom" -- our freedom was never threatened by them.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Fuzzy kittens and bunnies. XOXOXOXO!
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?
She was the only person "skilled" enough to bring out the base of die-hard republicans. Without her, McCain wouldn't have been able to count on the vote of the republican base. To the die-hard republican, she *was* the person they were voting for! The problem was, by bringing in Palin, McCain wasn't able to get the vote of so-called left-leaning republicans and "Regan democrats" (aka "The Undecideds").
Basically, McCain was trying to win the vote of two completely different bases that didn't like eachother's policies. By wining one base, he'd lose the other. But that is to be expected when you've got such a polarizing figure leading your party for eight years.
But now we've drifted so I'm done with this!
The problem with disarmament asks for something impossible - positive evidence of non-activity. A state can merrily destroy its weapons in front of the whole world, but how do you prove that they aren't secretly building some weapons in another place? You can do all the inspections you want and find nothing but that does not prove that they don't have a small stockpile stashed away somewhere. A dozen ICBMs or so should not be that hard to hide, and with megaton payloads have all the destructive power one needs for retaliation.
she doesn't go back in.
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.
If there are no nukes, then what are we supposed to blow up the life ending meteors with???
Consider if someone in 1910 had suggest than in less than a century europe would probably never have another war. Moreover all of the countries would acquiesce to a single common currency without losing in a war.
People would think you were nuts. in was unforseable. Yet the League of nation set the stage for cooperative behaviour, and the generation after WW2 made it happen.
in his speech in strassbourge he challenged the youth of europe not to take peace for granted but imagine a world that extended it even further.
if you can conceive of the paradigm shift from a continent at war since recorded history to one that is peacefully unified and no one feels oppressed by a conqueror then you can conceive of a world without nuclear weapons.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I really think he does believe that the world is like Star Trek, where you can have a meeting with someone that totally hates you, and suddenly love breaks out
It worked for Jimmy Carter. Sort of.
Yeah, it worked until Iran decided to take over the U.S. Embassy and he discovered that the military was in such horrible shape that it couldn't do what he wanted them to do. The fiasco of the hostage rescue mission was so bad that the U.S. military spent years afterward trying to fix the problems.
Oh, I guess you were talking about the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks. Yeah, that seemed to work out real well.... just look at how well Gaza turned out.
>No one will give up their trump card.
South Africa and Ukraine did so in the past.
A "nuke free" world would be one in which we use no fission/fusion of atoms for the energy. Weaponizing it is one aspect of the technology.
The problem is, a power plant program can (and likely will) be used to make weapons. The horse is out of the barn. Obama is advocating that we can have the knowledge to make steel, but no one will make swords.
It's somewhat naive. We'll see how he executes his plans, or us.
--
Toro
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.
b. In that region, nuclear weapons are still a hot topic political issue.
c. Obama gives the crowds what they want to hear. He's prven that already. In essence, a good (but typical) politician.
d. Slashdot took the bait, and now we're discussing what was discussed 10yrs ago. Only difference is we think we have someone that can do something about it... Just like 10yrs ago.
For a certain version of "works". You cannot murder people into loving you, for example. You can bomb people into true submission, but that requires blazing a path of epic destruction through their homes like Hitler through Poland, only more thorough. To consider yourself one of "the good guys" when you're openly advocating that sort of thing requires the sort of masturbatory self-delusion endemic to cokeheads and Americans.
Like Hilzoy said, "Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to."
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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
Where "doing anthing to protect ourselves" means lighting a whole bunch of civilians on fire by "mistake", right? (Hey, it's not like those terrorists place the same value on life as we do!)
Of course, you might mean things like boring investigative work to monitor potential threats and bring them through the justice system in the full light of day, or not blowing up civilians as "collateral damage" and then being so darned surprised when survivors and their relatives are unhappy with us. But somehow, I doubt it.
Because the only way to relate to a world full of strange and alien people is to terrify them into submission, and crush any hint of dissent within your own ranks, lest it betray weakness to the enemy.
I think you're confusing Warhammer 40K with reality.
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.