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US, Russia Reach Nuclear Arsenal Agreement
Peace Corps Library writes "The United States and Russia, seeking to move forward on one of the most significant arms control treaties since the end of the cold war, announced that they had reached a preliminary agreement on cutting each country's stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons, effectively setting the stage for a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), a cold war-era pact that expires in December. Under the framework, negotiators are to be instructed to craft a treaty that would cut strategic warheads for each side to between 1,500 and 1,675, down from the limit of 2,200 slated to take effect in 2012 under the Treaty of Moscow (PDF) signed by President George W. Bush. The limit on delivery vehicles would be cut to between 500 and 1,100 from the 1,600 currently allowed under Start. Perhaps more important than the specific limits would be a revised and extended verification system that otherwise would expire with Start in December. The United States currently has 1,198 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based missiles and bombers, which together are capable of delivering 5,576 warheads, according to its most recent Start report in January, while Russia reported that it has 816 delivery vehicles capable of delivering 3,909 warheads. 'We have a mutual interest in protecting both of our populations from the kinds of danger that weapons proliferation is presenting today,' said President Obama."
boooo, there goes my hopes of one day having a child that would roam the wastelands and be the savior of all humanity.
The indefinite combinations of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations. - Robert S. McNamara
Slightly offtopic but in high school I read a few books by Robert S McNamara who died yesterday. It's too bad he didn't get to see this agreement between old enemies. He was Secretary of Defense from 1961-1968. Although I did not agree with a lot of his views he shaped a lot of the nuclear buildup during the cold war. I believe he was responsible for abandoning Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation in the event of a nuclear war. He was first tasked by Kennedy of explaining nuclear fallout. McNamara favored non-nuclear power and one of the books I read "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" shed a lot of light on the Vietnam war for me.
If you haven't seen Erol Morris' "The Fog of War" you should.
Rest in peace Robert Strange McNamara. You revealed to me the horrors that leadership must face during war.
My work here is dung.
BBC radio is reporting this will bring the USA and Russia down to owning a mere 95% of the world's nuclear weapons. Go USA! Go Russia!
Seriously, good work both countries for making a step in the right direction. But keep going, you've got a long way to go before you can start preaching to countries with a dozen or nuclear weapons about the need for restraint.
Basically the United States gave Russia a billion or so and tactical/technical/administrative support every year to reduce their weapons stock pile.
So even when Bush and Putin had their panties bunched up, great work was being done cooperatively by both sides. The program considered pretty successful by government standards.
I know, I know, the idea of good news from government is a scary one!
I think not! These weapons are with us for good.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
But John R. Bolton, who was ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, said Mr. Obama was going too far. "The number they are proposing for delivery vehicles is shockingly low," he said.
Really? They're aiming for 500 launch vehicles. Are there even that many targets to nuke or does Bolton just want us to do it a few times over for the refried beans effect? Also, this is 500 launch vehicles and 1,500 warheads so I assume there are some MIRVs in there. I was under the impression that the whole defense aspect of nukes was to make retaliation too expensive for the other side to shoot first. If that's the case, 500 launch vehicles and 1,500 warheads would be enough to make anyone regret it. France, China, and the UK seem to be pretty secure with even less.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
START requires only that the weapons be deactivated, not destroyed. The US currently has over 4,000 "deactivated" nuclear weapons. Believe someone who used to shove them up a Buff's (B-52) belly, they can be reactivated in short order.
Also, START is 'Strategic' Arms Reduction Treaty. It says nothing about tacticals, either battlefield or ship based weapons, or EMP devices.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Both sides are developing SDI/anti-missile defenses. This makes many of these weapons obsolete, as they no longer have a guaranteed first-strike capability.
The old arms race was big missiles and bombers; the new arms race is drones and micro-cruise missiles.
But it was a nice press opportunity for both men to come out smelling like roses while they quietly plan each other's destruction.
Futurist Traditionalism
DAVID LANGE, Oxford Union debate, 1985
A member of the bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission -- headed by former secretaries of defense William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger -- warns that the preliminary agreement signed by Barack Obama guts part of the American nuclear arsenal but does not demand significant gutting of the Russian nuclear arsenal. Two points of serious note are (1) nuclear launchers and (2) tactical nuclear weapons.
Nuclear launchers are mechanisms for launching the intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Russians are demanding that we Americans reduce the number of our launchers to 500, but the Russians were already (before the signing of this agreement) planning to reduce the number of launchers to close that number because they cannot afford to replace the launchers that must be shutdown due to reaching the end of their operational life. In other words, the Russians do not make any sacrifice on this matter but demand that the Americans make all the sacrifices.
As for tactical nuclear weapons, the Russians successfully insisted that these weapons be removed from coverage in this preliminary agreement. The Russians have a 10-to-1 advantage over us Americans in tactical nuclear weapons.
The only winning move is not to play
How about a nice game of chess?
I'm blown away that this entirely inaccurate screed got modded informative.
Said President's term wasn't up until January and as much as he wanted to extend his term limit he wasn't likely to succeed. It also wasn't likely that had he succeeded in extending his term limit he would have been reelected anyhow since his approval ratings were at an all time low.
I also need to point out that an ally of Chavez he wasn't an American ally by any stretch of the imagination.
Proper democracies work by voting lame duck leaders out at the end of the term so what happened was a military coup. Obama speaking out against a military coup was, in fact, arguing in favor of the rule of law not against it.
Let's get some facts straight here...
The Honduran President's term was not up. It's not up until January. He was trying to organize a vote on a constitutional referendum to allow him to run for a second term, which would likely have failed anyway. Yes, he was doing something illegal. But so was Nixon, and I don't remember the army ousting him.
To single out President Obama for his condemning of the coup is pretty disingenuous, considering pretty much every country in the region, and the UN, said the same thing.
It isn't governments job to "pull them out of their bad position" its their own individual job.
No, but it is the government's job to stop the majority from actively keeping them in a bad position. Jim Crowe was only a few years ago.
but this is 2009 not 1950
Try the late 60s, which weren't so long ago. Many people who still hold a lot of sway were either part of the problem or are directly descended from those people. I'm white and I hear what other whites aren't afraid to say about blacks when there aren't any blacks around. To imply that racism is dead among whites is very disingenuous.
Asians make more on average than whites, shouldn't whites get special treatment now?
No. Asians tend to make more in the US because they tend to come here as well-educated people who bear well-educated children. This is not an injustice, just a statistical anomaly, and a direct result of our immigration policy. Visit Asia sometime if you think that Asians can't be poor and ignorant. Blacks come from a history of being ACTIVELY held down, and it's going to be a while before this nation recovers from that. Having blacks in powerful positions helps their cause, and they know that and vote accordingly.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I can recommend the book Epicenter of Peace by Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Kazakhstan. While Nazarbayev is not very well liked in certain circles for other reasons, the book is an interesting story of why he decided to lead Kazakhstan to denuclearization.
One of the many things I learned from this book was the difference between nonproliferation and denuclearization. Kazakhstan didn't simply agree to store away the warheads like the U.S. and Russia have agreed to do, they dismantled them and shipped them entirely out of the country (basically to Russia and the U.S.). Then they dismantled the accompanying infrastructure, reseach facilities, education facilities, etc so that hopefully, nuclear arms would never again be deployed in Kazakhstan.
It's an interesting story.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Would they be able to use up the dismantled nuclear materials to make another reactor with without having to pay for mining of the stuff...(plutonium, uranium, etc..), or is the materials wasted in the making of the warhead to begin with?
Is there a white equivalent of the NAACP? Is there a Caucasian College Fund?
At a certain point, the effects of ancient history have dwindled to nothing. I'd say that point is already past.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is there a white equivalent of the NAACP?
No, why would there be? Was there a white equivalent of slavery in the US?
Our histories are parallel and intertwined, but not equal. Without injustice, the NAACP would not be necessary. The NAACP was started in the early 1900s, when blacks often couldn't vote or stay in the same hotel or use the same drinking fountain. The NAACP is a demonstration of exactly what I'm talking about - we still haven't healed.
Face it - in the US it is still a tremendous advantage to be a white man.
At a certain point, the effects of ancient history have dwindled to nothing. I'd say that point is already past.
The numbers disagree with you. Blacks are still disadvantaged. If you, as a white guy, don't see racism on a day-to-day basis then I'd say you aren't paying much attention, or you are very lucky and live in a place which I would love to move to.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It depends on what kind of 'solution' you are interested in. The U.S. already has an anti-ballistic missile system designed to stop small-scale launches (a single missile from North Korea, an accidental launch of a Russian or Chinese missile). However, there is no technology that would work in a larger-scale conflict. Nuclear weapons and delivery methods are simply too effective. As has been said many times, hitting a missile out of the air is like hitting a bullet with a bullet, only harder. Technology isn't a quick or easy fix, you have to stop it at the source - it's easier to prevent someone firing a gun than stopping the bullet once it's launched.
A modern ICBM is very hard to track; it only burns fuel for about 5 minutes, then continues to ascend for 20 minutes, reaching a height of over 1000 kilometers. A MIRVed missile will then break apart into (up to) eight separate warheads, as well as releasing chaff, reflective balloons, and decoy warheads. These warheads then fall to Earth at 4 km/s in less than two minutes, in a variable pattern (something like this ). That is a little under 30 minutes to see the launch, determine the ballistic course, and launch enough missiles from hundreds of miles away to attempt to intercept hundreds of real warheads amongst the greater amount of decoys and penetration aids. Oh, and some warheads can be set to detonate in the atmosphere to create an EMP effect, throwing off radar and other tracking systems. Radar and ABM sites will also be among the first targets. We have a hard enough time shooting down slow-moving single targets (the military has effective tactical anti-missile technology such as the Patriot and AEGIS, but there are orders of magnitude of difference between tactical missiles and ICBMs), but the very idea of a strategic nuclear defense is laughable. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a system that we hope can take out a rogue missile or two.
Actually, most of the slavery was carried out by the Africans. In fact, Africa is the only continent that still has legal slavery to this day. And the so called Anglo Saxons consisted or Portuguese ans Spanish who purchased the slaves from African tribes and sold them to settlements under the British crown.
As for reparations, they have already been paid in both the loss of life in gaining the freedoms of the slaves and in the welfare and housing benefits given to minorities and the special treatment they got starting with the civil rights legislation of 1964. Every descendant of a slave has had the opportunity to be more then anything that the slavery took away. Even if you attach the Jim crow laws that were around as late as the early 1960, this means that almost every distressed minority is at least 1 generation out if not 2 or more. There is no need for a cash payment or anything because the people who were harmed and their families directly effected are no longer alive.
That USED to be the case, but not anymore. Today, the actively hold each other down as they accept government hand-outs and cling on to a state of "victimization". Simply put, it's a culture thing. Not race.
It's the truth. Just look at the numbers. Per 2007 data, Whites make up 80% of the population while blacks make up 12.8%. However, American Indians only make up 1% while Hispanic make up 15%. This is important to point out for the simple fact that three of the four races I mentioned do *not* bitch about their situation even the slightest when put in comparison.
While I really do feel bad how blacks were treated in America's history, they no longer have any excuse to be clinging on to victimhood in this day and age.
Life is not for the lazy.