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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.
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.
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 don't think the USA will have any problem using conventional weapons to take out any tinpot dictators nuclear facilities - well before they have a nuke.
After all, the USA outspends the rest of the wolrd combined on their military.
Anarchists never rule
Outdated indeed. The new tactics of war are about guerrilla battles, and small nimble forces that can wear down the enemy overtime. Using a nuke on them is like trying to swat a fly with a grenade.
Roosevelt was 6 feet when the big bombs were dropped. As in 6 feet underground. It was Truman who took the decision.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's a touch harder than that. First you need that highly enriched uranium, which means you'll need a reactor, reprocessing facilities and some way to refine your U238-rich Uranium into weapons grade U235. You'll also need a few other metals while you're there, such as Beryllium. Then once you have all of that, and assuming someone hasn't bombed your facilities in the mean time, you have to "smash them together" in just the right way: too fast and they'll fly apart before they reach criticality, too slow and the mass will not be compressed enough: either will lead to a fizzle.
Which is exactly what happened to North Korea by the way. Apparently even after decades of research and development, smacking to bits of metal together is pretty hard to do right.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
So you mean the nukes don't act as a deterrent anyway!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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
Exactly. Iran is a prime example of a country which is constantly threatened by regional powers (and the US) and has built up it's defence in response.
Before you mod me down, note that I'm not saying I sympathise with Iran, just that it's a matter of public record that a major reason Israel/US hasn't invaded Iran in the last few years is due to their retaliatory capacity. This, of course is only encouraging proliferation.
Hopefully Obama can make a break from the previous administration in this regard, but I doubt it.
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.