Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz

An anonymous reader writes "Famed academic Kenneth Waltz for years has argued that more nukes around the world create peace. Why? Because the more nukes are around, the more people are afraid to start a war with a nuclear-armed state. Peace seems assured with a gun to the world's head. In a recent interview, he argues that Iran gaining nuclear weapons would be a good thing. He points out that 'President Obama and a number of others have advocated the abolition of nuclear weapons and many have accepted this as both a desirable and a realistic goal. Even entertaining the goal and contemplating the end seems rather strange. On one hand the world has known war since time immemorial, right through August 1945. Since then, there have been no wars among the major states of the world. War has been relegated to peripheral states (and, of course, wars within them). Nuclear weapons are the only peacekeeping weapons that the world has ever known. It would be strange for me to advocate for their abolition, as they have made wars all but impossible.'"

Comments

Re:Inevitably...

[GameboyRMH]

Luckily that never happens and nukes are only launched after extensive consideration.

Re:Inevitably...

[Chewbacon]

Working in healthcare, I've come across some sick fucks. Some are born that way, some just wake up that way one morning. Any one person's behavior doesn't surprise me anymore. Regardless of how one ends up going ape shit, eventually one of them will have a nuclear weapon at their disposal.

Re:More data needed.

[icebike]

Actually we don't have much evidence for 50 warheads theory. Maybe 200, but not 50.
Often these predictions are based on speculation and take on the trappings of truth, but when you track them down you find a single source with very little science behind it. The gigantic explosions of the Krakatoa volcano was equivalent to about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the bomb that devasted Hiroshima, Japan, during WWII, and it lowered global temperature by 1.2 degrees C for one year.

So 50 nukes = Krakatoa? No. Try something like a thousand or 500 modern day nukes for equivalent power.
But Krakatoa blew from below and lofted the entire volcano into the atmosphere. Nukes are triggered above ground and don't lift anywhere near that much material.

We heard the same predictions for all the smoke kicked up when Saddam fired all the oil wells. There were people actually wringing their hands and talking in terms of the "end of the world". You could see the smoke from space, so clearly it meant doom.

We've found at Chernobyl that radiation can also be survivable, even in fairly high quantities.

So as long as all the Nuclear nations don't fire everything at once, a regional nuclear war is likely to be a humanitarian disaster, but not that big of a deal globally.

Note: there is also the modern day assessment that only the US, China, Great Britain, and maybe France would have enough weapons to offer reprisal. And among the smaller nations, whoever strikes first would not have to face a counter attack. This would cut the number of actual warheads detonated.

This is the scary part if you ask me. With nobody else willing to step in on either side, and the participants having no launch on warning capabilities, the situation with proliferation of Nukes is such that some nut-job will sooner or later launch a surprise attack knowing they will not have their own country destroyed in return.
MAD only works if its truly MAD and if religious nut jobs don't see it as a path to heaven.