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Cold Warriors Question Nukes
Martin Hellman writes "George Shultz served as President Reagan's Secretary of State, and Bill Perry as President Clinton's Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to both President Nixon and Ford. Sam Nunn was Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years. Their key roles in the Cold War has led many to call them 'Cold Warriors.' That status makes their recent, repeated calls for fundamentally re-examining our nuclear posture all the more noteworthy. Their most recent attempt to awaken society to the unacceptable risk posed by nuclear weapons is an Op-Ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation. (That link requires a subscription to the Journal. There is also a subscription-free link (PDF) at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.) Key excerpts and links to other resources are available as well."
...deterrence is obsolete. If people are so brainwashed by their religion that they think that they're going to be greeted by 17 virgins and everything will be better once this life is over, all bets are off.
Religion is the biggest threat to the survival of our species, folks. Time to wake up. Time to stand up to the "let's not offend the Muslims" crowd. Every time they claim to be offended by people in the western world exercising their western rights (whether it's to draw cartoons or write novels) we should tell them to go fuck themselves.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
We just dropped a 10 megaton Slashdot on http://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/
Have gnu, will travel.
Or so I'm told.
There is an argument to be had for having a nuclear deterrent, but the kind of madness where a country builds thousands of megaton yield thermonuclear weapons is just tragic. If nothing else it is a fantastic waste of money and resources when even a small nuclear arsenal with maybe 50-100 weapons would appear to work as an effective deterrent. Ideally it would be better if one could do without them altogether, but if one feels there is a need for it then at least keep it sensible rather than blowing away resources that could be better spent elsewhere on a stupid pissing contest.
or the radiation exposure. I can't tell which.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Robert McNamara was in a documentary a few years a back, expressing his regret over the Vietnam strategy he implemented, mainly because it led to so much destruction and slaughter.
Well, that's great, Bob. Too bad you didn't THINK OF THAT AT THE TIME.
There's something chillingly cynical about guys like Perry and Kissinger complaining now about the nuclear posture that they created, as if the closeness of their deaths has made them fear an everlasting punishment. Like Lee Atwater in the last few months of his life apologizing for the blatantly racist campaign strategies he crafted, the only human response should be "TOO FUCKING LATE, YOU ASSHOLE!"
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Although I thoroughly disagree with most of the political positions these people have espoused over the years, I have to agree with most of their conclusions in this paper. They are intelligent men, and for the most part, thoughtful.
Now if it were 42, that would be the answer to all my problems.
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
We can do pretty much anything we need to with precision guided conventional weapons. Nukes were great for threatening populations (probably a war crime) or taking out hardened targets. Now, we can take out buried facilities with a couple of bunker busters. And if nobody had nukes with which to escalate, the political acceptability of surgical strikes would be greater.
The presence of nukes in various countries creates some serious limitations on our tactical options. Take Pakistan for example. If they didn't have a nuclear capability, we probably wouldn't think twice about pursuing Taliban forces across the border from Afghanistan and bin Laden would be ours by now. But the political shitstorm that would ensue should they respond by firing a nuke or two at India makes the situation all the more complex.
Have gnu, will travel.
The thinking back then was, 50-100 might wipe out a population, but the enemy might just have a way to shoot some down, or might strike first and knock out too many to mount a counterattack. The "Star Wars" program was after all a big fake system to make the USSR believe we could destroy hundreds of their missiles, and thus the USSR made thousands of missiles to compensate.
If you only have a few dozen missiles, then suddenly it is way more lucrative to invest in space based defenses, because then you CAN stop all of them with a really fantastic space based laser system.
Maybe these Cold Warriors suddenly recognized they could sell more weapon systems without MAD being in the way. Any guesses on how many of them have major investments in the military industrial complex?
I read it as 72 - 17 year old virgins!
17 year old girls are at their peak! It's right before most of them pork out.
I'm going to my bunk now.
It's easy for some jackass to come out 20 years after he had any political relevance and state that his approach was equivocally wrong. Now, show me a politician with the COURAGE to do the right thing when there's political pressure to make the wrong, but safe, choice. Fuck you and fuck your legacy!!!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Although it does not appear in the Wikipedia definition, it is common for all US military vets that served in the deterrence of the Soviet nuclear threat to call themselves Cold Warriers. I kept Pershing tactical nukes operational during the early 70's. They were in Southern Germany and their purpose was to defend against a Red Army attack from the east. I have several friends that served in similar roles.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I believe the Koran itself doesn't actually specify how many virgins; that was mentioned in the Book of Suran instead as a fifth-hand recollection of something Mohammed said. Also, there's no mention of them being specifically available only for martyrs.
There's also some doubt about the virgin part. Some scholars believe that the word "hur" is better translated as "white raisin".
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If you're interested in this stuff, check out www.armscontrolwonk.com for detailed discussions on the geekery of how to control the spread and use of nukes
Political power has been responsible for 1000 times the amount of death and destruction throughout history than religion. You can't even begin to compare the two.
At some point in the not too distant future China is going to resume testing warheads. It will violate the CTBT (which it has never ratified) and then engage in whatever rationalization it must at the UN who, while engaging in the obligatory public histrionics, will be only too happy to accept China's renewed nuclear credentials as a bi-polar counter to the US.
On that day this nuclear navel-gazing will be quietly returned to the dusty silhouette on the shelf from which it fell. So don't spend a lot of time on it.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Deterrence is not dead, but some countries may be harder to deter (I have read and disagree with Shultz). Iran may be one of those. Soviet Union was certainly deterred. Russia is still deterred. China is deterred. North Korea may be difficult to deter. If Iran gets a bomb, you should expect Saudi Arabia and other middle east countries to get one, and they won't care of the US still has them or has given them up.
The 60's called, they want their right-wing rhetoric back.
(and they think your hair is too long, hippy)
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I am all for a world without nuclear weapons just like I'm all for a world without terrorists. The problem is, how do you ever PROVE that you have eradicated all the terrorists or prove you have eradicated all the nuclear weapons? The harsh reality is that nuclear weapons are orders of magnitude more powerful than our strongest conventional weapons.
So would it be stabilizing if the United States just decided to drop to a unilaterally low number of nuclear weapons, say 50? Countries wtih existing nuclear arsenals would likely be encouraged to build up their arsenals under this scenario to achieve parity or even surpass the U.S. warfighting capability. Additionally, the current U.S. nuclear umbrella extends to approximately 30 allied countries, many of whom posess the knowledge to posess nuclear weapons but have agreed not to develop their own weapons due to our protection. Would they still feel protected if we only had a small number of weapons or would they develop their own nuclear weapons? As additional countries obtain nuclear weapons the whole equation of keeping them safe and secure becomes much more complex.
I would love there to be a magic solution where we could just blink our eyes and nuclear weapons could be un-invented, but I just don't see how it will ever realistically happen. Each of the past 5 U.S. presidents have talked about a goal of eventually getting rid of all of the nuclear weapons in the world and it would be awesome if we could get all dozen or so countries with nuclear weapons to 1) Truly disclose all of their nuclear weapons 2) Cooperatively agree to a disarmament plan that would rid them from all countries and 3) Ensure they would not be re-developed in secret.
Unless that can somehow be achieved, I believe we are more safe by keeping our nuclear weapons around.
Ronald Reagan called for a world without nukes, and took concrete steps to slash the arsenals of both the US and USSR.
Obama calls for a future where there will be zero nukes, and his administration's policy is to have both US and Russia reduce the number of nukes by several thousand. And for this, he's rewarded with screeches from the left that Obama hates America, wants to let the terrorists win, doesn't understand war, etc. This is all coming from the Right, a group that is trying to portray Reagan as a saint. How odd that Obama copying Reagan gets jeers.
Userfriendly.
this the marketing speech for?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmN2cVOr5W4
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
One sure thing is the level of dedication an average follower of Mohammed has far exceeds that of his Western Christian counterpart. My best guess is that you'd be hard pressed to fill empty employment slots for suicide bombers anywhere in the U.S. It will not be long before one of these zealous anti-great Satan outfits come into possession of an emancipated Soviet-era nuclear device. And if they acquire dos, they'll hit us right after Israel.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If we would of listened to John von Neumann he would of preemptively nuked the Soviet Union to prevent the damn communists from getting a nuclear bomb; later, but since we didn't, he then invented the mutually assured destruction doctrine. When you combine the previous two sentences, it is not hard to guess that he would recommend we nuke the IPCC, Al Gore, and similar dangerous crap today, too.
One of his hobbies was to forecast weather. As a result, he has also designed a sophisticated project that could have efficiently raised global temperatures and make the world a better place: it was an ambitious project of a man-made global warming. He wanted to spread colorants on the polar ice caps in order to reduce the albedo and increase the absorption. ;-)
1940's
It seems that game theory especially evolutionary game theory is spot on when predicting global events beyond most peoples comprehension or theologies control.
When I saw the headline, I immediately thought of:
Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me?
Bomb #20: Of course.
Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm... well... I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That's good. That's very good. But how do you know that anything else exists?
Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun.
I used to dream of world peace, but I realized that there can never be peace in this world. Only through the blood of soldiers and martyrs can world peace be achieved. We are living in an era of relative world peace because we have summoned the awesome might of nuclear weapons and unleashed it upon our enemies.
My idealism is no more. I no longer wish for a Utopian society that is free of hunger, of sadness, and of hardship. I have seen the true face of this world. Its face is not as beautiful as we were made to believe it to be. The world doesn't care us, for it is a cold and unforgiving place. Earth is insignificant; it is but a dust in the grand scheme of things. The universe won't care if all of civilization would be wiped out in an apocalypse. We are nothing.
So my wish for this world is for it to never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you; never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye, never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.
Because nuclear weapons can always be redeveloped.
Be careful what you wish for...
The result of a world without nukes would be to make massive, existential, conventional wars practical _again_.
No chance, because that world can never happen. The best we can do is eliminate deployed nuclear weapons. The knowledge of how to build them and the ability to develop them quickly isn't going away. Any of today's officially recognized recognized nuclear powers could develop and deploy new bombs very quickly even if they had previously disposed of their arsenal. And they would, if they found themselves on the losing end of a massive existential conventional war. Bank on it.
...then count me in. I agree.
We have nukes pointed at Moscow because they have nukes pointed at New York. If you can figure out a good way to stand down from this situation, I'm sure both sides would love to hear it.
I believe that both sides have "de-targeted" their missiles, but that both sides have the means to retarget them within seconds.
Play Command HQ online
And after they grew up, they turned atheist and tried to destroy religion, among other things. I'm reasonably sure they weren't taught that in school.
Or were you saying that they shouldn't have been allowed to deconvert in the first place? If everyone who deconverted was shot, I suppose you can argue that fewer would have died, but that's rather harsh.
sarcasm?
new sig
Theres also the question of mistranslation of the Koran, the virgin bit could mean angels, (which are sexless so no good for anything), grapes or raisins.. ..so welcome to heaven here are your 72 raisins..
Obligatory Subnormality comic: http://www.viruscomix.com/page462.html (just the first two panels) . . . Are these *really* the 72 virgins they have in mind?! This would seem a good way to operate Hell . . .
The mewling idiots complain about "religion" being a danger. And, within the past 100 years, we've seen that ATHEISTS rank among the cruelest, most inhuman monsters on earth
Of course it only looks like you have a pretty good argument as long as you don't look back further than the last 100 years because before that, it's almost entirely religious people killing, enslaving, indoctrinating, dehumanizing, terrorizing, and generally making life a living hell for themselves and everyone else on the planet since prehistory. One has to wonder, were the atrocities of the last 100 years the result of "ATHEISTS" and their immorality or was it the result of Humanity's historical trajectory?
Whatever the case, we can also look at what secularism and religion have bestowed on humanity. In the last 100 years Science done mostly by "ATHEISTS" has advanced humanity more than religion has in the last 200 thousand years combined. It's not even close. So, for the love of "God," give those "Mewling Idiots" a break, you might even want to say a little thanks to atheism.
....The thug with *one* nuke is king.
Regards;
The one thing the United States has to deter Cold War 2.0 with China is a massive number of ICBMs, and even more effectively, a robust fleet of nuclear submarines. Without those, China figures it can buy a bunch of shore-to-ship missiles to neutralize American carrier battle groups, a bunch of amphibious landing craft, and it can "re-patriate" Taiwan.
China is embarked upon a massive, comprehensive, and long-term strategy to counter American power and seize hegemony for itself. Read about it in Congressional whitepapers. Accumulating U.S. debt and dollar currency reserves, gaining control of key locations (eg. Panama Canal) and resources (eg. rare-earth metals), perfecting cyber-warfare, anti-satellite measures, and the like are all explicitly part of the same strategy.
The one trump card the United States still holds is our subs. Park a couple off-shore in the Yellow Sea, and game over in 15 minutes for the People's Republic of China. They know this, so why not open another front by buying off our supposed 'Cold Warriors' to say that nukes are counter-productive? How wonderful it would be to convince your adversary to disarm himself...
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.