Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cold Warriors Question Nukes

Posted by Soulskill on from the nukes-invoke-their-right-to-remain-silent dept.

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."

33 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. In the suicide-bombing age... by fiannaFailMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...deterrence is obsolete.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
    1. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by fiannaFailMan · · Score: 2

      As long as I get to make fun of the Xtians, I'm OK with that.

      Knock yourself out. I'm an equal opportunity make-fun-ofer.

      --
      Drill baby drill - on Mars
    2. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Religion is the enemy right now, sea lanes, industrial production, communications/control and minerals are the long term things to worry about, for all of those nuclear weapons for deterrence are still "useful".

      Religion isn't the threat, ideology is, be it pan-Islamic, Maoism, White Supremacy, etc

    3. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Driving while texting.

    4. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Suicide bombers are arguably the most dramatic example; but they are hardly the only ones who threaten the classic MAD/Deterrence model of nuke use.

      For the classic model of nuclear deterrence to work, you must have two or more rational actors, with access to good information, with interests that would be unacceptably threatened by the use of nuclear weapons against them, and with access to nuclear weapons and the ability to perform reprisals with them. That is actually a fairly tight set of requirements.

      Even during the Cold War, for instance, there were a few situations where technical and/or command & control glitches left some number of warheads in the hands of local officers with either false positives, or highly limited information. Since the ability to perform reprisals requires an emphasis on designing "fail-unsafe" systems that launch if the nation's infrastructure is damaged, you enormously magnify the potential costs of infrastructure glitches.

      Another quite plausible attack on the classic deterrence model is the use of proxies or non-state actors(whether suicidal or not: it isn't hugely pertinent whether or not the chap who carried the bomb onto the plane is also on the plane when the trivial-for-an-arduino-hobbyist-with-$100 GPS/alteometer system triggers the bomb at perfect airburst altitude over a major city...) If you don't know who provided the bomb, you don't have anybody to perform a reprisal against, and thus your threat of reprisal is hollow, and does not deter an attacker with access to covert operators. Your basic "Hey guys, let's build a limited number of big, hardened, silos, trivially visible from orbit, from which to launch extremely dramatic ICBMs" strategy makes retaliation easy; but is increasingly obsolete. Even aside from the cargo planes and panel vans school of sneaking about, the steady proliferation of the expertise to build short to medium range missiles(or just the finished missiles) which can be launched from all sorts of improv platforms is going to make aggressor ID harder as time goes on.

      There is also the "star wars" concern: Were some rational actor locked in a classic deterrence scenario to develop an anti-missile technology that actually worked, their opponent would no longer have a viable deterrent, which would upset the equilibrium(as would a rational; but misinformed actor who thinks he has an effective anti-missile system, or an irrational actor who believes
      There is also the sticky issue of the potential for proliferation and increased use of smallish, tactical nuclear devices. International opinion on the use of strategic nuclear devices, particularly against population centers, is pretty uniformly negative. It is less clear how a situation involving something on the scale of a Davy Crockett style device would be handled. It's a nuke, and it would place considerable destructive punch in the hands of quite light forces; but it is smaller than some perfectly-legal-and-above-board conventional explosives. Even in a simple "two powers, clear attribution" scenario, it isn't clear that such devices would escalate to a full-scale strategic armageddon; but they would certainly make conventional warfare extra ugly. Perhaps of greater interest to today's major powers, such devices would be a godsend to the scruffy proxy-forces of the world: All the power of a GBU-43 or some sort of particularly nasty cluster/carpet munition, in a delivery system not much larger than a simple mortar, and capable of being broken down and hand carried by a small team, whatever rickety pickup trucks are the local favorite, etc. Easy to hide in a populated area against anything but a house-by-house operation(unlike the aircraft or heavy artillery you would ordinarily need to deliver such firepower); but capable of inflicting ghastly casualties on even advanced military forces...

      So. Yeah. I can't really blame them for being concerned...

    5. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by Runaway1956 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Someone who happens to be on target. 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.

      It's "ideology" that is the real threat. Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin never went to a Christian mass, and they certainly never took an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. Ideology. Any time some sumbitch starts thinking that he knows what's good for the rest of humanity, we are in trouble, no matter his religion, or lack of.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    6. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 2

      Stalin sure went to Church, he went to seminary for 9 or 10 years.

      But that's not why he was an asshat, he was an asshat because of ideology.

    7. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      So. Because these examples you trot out never went to "Christian mass", they're atheist? Are all people who don't practice your brand of Christianity atheist?

      Everyone trots on Mao, Pol Pot and Joseph Stalin as extreme examples of "atheists" who demonstrated the cruelty of "atheism". The problem, of course, is that none of them were actually atheist....

    8. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Informative

      Just FYI... Joseph Stalin attended(but left just short of graduating) from a Georgian Orthodox Seminary. He could afford to do so because of a scholarship earned during his earlier years at a church school. His theistic activities were largely confined to his early life; but he probably went to a great many masses, after the eastern orthodox style.

      Ironically, Pol Pot attended a Catholic school, and so probably also had a few masses under his belt as well. Only Mao appears to have a reasonably clean bill of health...

    9. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Funny

      And the 72 virgins are chosen from a D&D convention.

    10. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by interkin3tic · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      I'm skeptical that we're dealing with one big population that is offended at those things and is also trying to nuke us. Rather, I think we're dealing with a large number of people who are offended by such things, who would maybe burn an American flag and throw rocks but are mostly harmless.

      Then there is a much much much smaller group who is trying to get nukes to destroy us because they're messed up in the head. Maybe Al Quaeda spouts off about the danish cartoons, but even if we were completely nice and respectful to them, and even if we were to convert to Islam, they'd still try to destroy us. It's worth keeping in mind that most Islamic terrorism is focused against other Muslims, even ones who were being respectful of their own religion.

      It really doesn't matter if they're offended by "The Satanic Verses" for example: the harmless ones don't matter (and of course it's our right to say whatever we want) and the dangerous ones are trying to destroy us anyway. Their taking offense to whatever is a separate issue from terrorism.

    11. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by MarkvW · · Score: 2

      The only person who gets to do the seventeen virgins in heaven is the foolish suicide bomber. The people that make the suicide bomb and give the bomber directions don't get to participate in the seventeen virgin fun. Such leaders are pragmatic and they seek their virgins here on Earth. They use fools as tools.

      Saying that religion is the biggest threat to the survival of our species is beyond ridiculous. The biggest threat to the survival of our species is population pressure. That much is obvious. Furthermore, no amount of telling "them to go fuck themselves" is going to lessen religious violence. Insulting people increases violence. And . . . Newsflash . . . With few exceptions, violent conflict increases, not lessens, violent conflict.

      The United States is NEVER (never, never, ever) going to nation-build a Muslim country. That's not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. Disengagement with Countries that support or tolerate terror is the only hope of getting those in power to see the tangible benefits of friendly engagement with the US..

    12. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by maxume · · Score: 2

      I don't think I follow. I think you might be saying that since there were monotheistic Abrahamic religions 2000 years ago that Islam has roots that far back, but that is quite something different than "war against the 'west'". Especially when you figure that 2000 years ago 'the west' meant Rome, a bunch of pagans that liked to persecute Christians.

      And if you are going to conflate the founding of those religions, you might as well round up to 3000, it's a bigger number, and just as accurate as 2000.

      And I suppose if you combine the above, Christianity has waged a much more successful war against the 'west' than either Judaism or Islam.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    13. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by catmistake · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In truth, the passage in question was indeed mistranslated

      Bummer, bombers.

      --
      The Admin and the Engineer
    14. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by c6gunner · · Score: 2

      Then we can pop over to europe. Those are documented fairly well, including the enclaves in france and norway where EMS will no longer go because they'll be attacked. They're not ethnic enclaves, they're religious enclaves, where they have their own rule of law, inside the rule of law.

      I don't suppose you could document these well documented claims? For some reason, in all the times I've asked that question, I've never gotten a real response.

    15. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by nedlohs · · Score: 2

      You might be surprised at just what people can be convinced to do without religion being involved. Well the "rewarded in the afterlife part" is religious specific but a non-religious people will stuff conduct suicide missions and blow themselves up, for the cause.

      Take Japanase kimikaze pilots in WW2. The Tamil Tigers basically invented the suicide belt but aren't doing things for religious reasons.

    16. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's dangerously close to the no true Scotsman fallacy. They were exposed to religion in childhood and did bad things so they're not REAL atheists! Many if not most avowed Atheists were exposed to religion in childhood by religious parents.

      A Christian could as easily claim that since mass killing is against the teaching of Christ, the crazy Christian killers weren't really Christians.

    17. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by cold+fjord · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Totally. I'm sick of atheists and their "logic" and "rationality". They're clearly worse than people blowing themselves up in the name of religion.

      You mean the likes of the secular Marxist Tamil TIgers?

      Tamil Tigers: Suicide Bombing Innovators

      Prof. PAPE: No. Actually, the Tamil Tigers are a purely secular suicide terrorist group. They're not a group that most of the listeners will have heard too much about because even though they're actually the world leader in suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, carrying out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they're not attacking us and they're not attacking our allies.

      And so, even though they've done really quite tremendously spectacular suicide attacks - for instance, in 1993, it's the Tamil Tigers who assassinated - with the suicide assassination a sitting president, Premadasa, a president of Sri Lanka. That's the only time that a suicide attack has actually assassinated a sitting president.

      And then just a few years before that, Rajiv Gandhi, when he was running for prime minister in 1991, a Tamil suicide attacker, this time a woman by the name of Dhanu assassinated him. And so, despite the fact there have been these spectacular attacks, they have been occurring not against us or against our allies, and so many folks won't really have been as familiar with them.

      But they are not religious. They're not Islamic. They're a Hindu group. They're a Marxist group. They're actually anti-religious. They are building the concept of martyrdom around a secular idea of individuals essentially altruistically sacrificing for the good of the local community.

      The militantly atheist communists were, and are, one of the most dangerous threats to humanity.

      The Black Book of Communism

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    18. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by sumdumass · · Score: 2

      Well, not really. You see, the joke is on them. The 72 virgins are perpetual virgins- they can't be screwed. Instead of them going to a paradise, they are actually living in a hell with 72 annoying as fuck little sisters.

    19. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by mjwx · · Score: 2

      The passage says whatever they want it to say.

      Christianity is the same, the white supremacists operating out of the US can quote large tracts of the bible to prove that god made white men superior.

      Show me one single organised religion that has not be politically co-opted. For crying out loud, the entire bible was re-written at least once, British kings changed entire tracts without blinking when it suited them (ye olde Henry and his six wives comes tom mind). I'm certain Rome has done the same.

      So good luck with trying to tell them it's wrong. They will just say that your version is the mistranslation.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    20. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by megalol · · Score: 2

      Well you cant really expect people to understand anything you say if you use "islam" when you really mean "judaism and/or christianity before islam was founded".

    21. Re:In the suicide-bombing age... by tehcyder · · Score: 2

      the white supremacists operating out of the US can quote large tracts of the bible to prove that god made white men superior.

      I'd love to know how they get round the whole "written by Jews" thing.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  2. 17 vs 72 by nowen2dot · · Score: 2
    Perhaps the OP meant 17 in base 65 :>

    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
  3. Re:Large arsenals is a waste of money by Nyeerrmm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From what I gather, it would be far more unstable for us to have 50-100 nukes than the huge number we have right now.

    The problem is that there are only 2 countries with very large numbers of weapons, while a lot of countries have ~100. The two-party balance is theoretically stable (or at least it appears to be given the past 60 years), while a multi-party balance leaves a lot of room for alliances and power plays that could start nukes flying. The most dangerous part of a 'Road to zero' nuclear reduction plan is the time when everyone has a few hundred.

    The other problem is that with ~100s of weapons, it is conceivable for a country to 'win' a nuclear war, since it would be conceivable to eliminate the enemies capabilities while inflicting serious damage. However, with the ridiculous number we have now, there is simply no way to attack the other country and keep from being wiped out yourself.

    Or at least thats the theory. I'm no expert on the matter though, I just learned from my roommate who is in grad school for these kind of things.

  4. Weaponization of Space by PraiseBob · · Score: 2

    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?

  5. Re:We don't need them anymore by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 2

    There are extensive bunker facilities that a conventional weapon can't take out. Like Cheyenne Mountain, Raven Rock Mountain Complex, Heng Shan Military Command Center, Mount Yamantau, and tunnels of the Moscow Subway.

    If you are going to kill the US, Russian, Chinese or Taiwanese (to list four) command and control network and make sure the continuity of government goes with it, you'll need nukes.

  6. Re:We don't need them anymore by salesgeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We can do pretty much anything* we need to with precision guided conventional weapons.
    * Except make making victory impossible for the enemy.

    FTFY.

    Until the other guy doesn't have nukes, you are pretty much stuck with having them. Nukes are largely responsible for preventing the next every 20 years or so ginormous war that was happening up until 1945. While I don't like having stuff around that hand the earth off to the cockroaches, it beats having 50 million people killed in five years every two or three decades.

    --
    -- $G
  7. Re:Like Robert McNamara by djmurdoch · · Score: 2

    I think their argument is that things are different now. The MAD strategy worked to deter a nuclear war (though it didn't deter all sorts of other bad things, from the invasion of Hungary on), but it isn't needed any more.

  8. Cold Warrier by HotNeedleOfInquiry · · Score: 2

    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...
  9. Re:Like Robert McNamara by erice · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Did you actually read the article? They aren't complaining about what they did in the cold war. They are saying that those strategies don't make any sense *now*. And they are right, although like any committee opinion, they did not state it forcefully enough.

    Why do we have *any* nukes pointed at Moscow? Russia is not our enemy. Who else then? There are no nation states with motivation to nuke the US that have the means to do so. Who are these missiles supposed to deter? The only purpose these weapons ever had was deterrence. If they aren't any good that then they actually make us less safe by making nuclear war by accident possible when it wouldn't happen deliberately.

  10. 72 white raisins... by Namarrgon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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"?
  11. Politics will block it by mr100percent · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  12. Complete Nonsense by Phoenix666 · · Score: 2

    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.