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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.'"
...someone screws up.
His assumption requires that all the wielders of nuclear weapons are sane.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Kings, emperors, priests, dictators and all other types of power-seeking politicians, who drag a country to war seemingly over little more than a bad case of butthurt, maybe then we could have some sort of peace without the MAD.
The main problem is that the first time there is an exception to this trend of peace, it could conceivably be the last exception for everyone, period.
The 2.25 million people that died in the Korean War, and the ~ 2 million people that died in the Vietnam War would beg to differ.
sudo make me a sandwich
If nuclear weapons have made war so unlikely, then why does the USA spend so much time and money fighting wars?
Sorry to be blunt but anyone who thinks this is a moron.
The lack of wars involving countries possessing nuclear weapons does not demonstrate that it is a good peacekeeping measure. It demonstrates that it's a good _TEMPORARY_ peacekeeping measure. The problem is, eventually, at some point, someone will push the button. And the button has drastic results that will instantly eradicate any concept of "peace" in an instant as well as plunging the planet into the stone age. Just because a weapon _temporarily_ prevents violence does not mean it will _permanently_ prevent it. We are, in the end, human. We will, eventually, fight. Someone will sling insults and then, eventually, someone will throw a punch. The problem is the punch will wipe out an entire city and be followed by hundreds of other punches.
Anyone who thinks nuclear weapons are a peacekeeping tool is an idiot. They are the ultimate ticking time bomb. They are a temporary solution to a permanent problem.
To be blunt.
Right. There is a plausible argument that nuclear weapons may have decreased the frequency of large-scale war. (That argument could be challenged [the data set is only 67 years, which may not be statistically significant] but it's a defensible proposition). However, nuclear weapons increase the destructiveness of large-scale war. So it is not at all obvious that decreasing the frequency but increasing the severity of war is a good result.
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How is that a problem? The use of nuclear weapons ended the war and saved the tens of millions of lives that would have been lost in a ground invasion of the major Japanese islands.
So the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Dominican Republic wars, the Arab-Israeli and Yom Kippur wars, the Soviet and American invasions of Afghanistan, two Persian Gulf wars, the Falklands War, the Invasion of Grenada, the Serbia-Bosnia war, and too many more to list... those are just what, "police actions"? Some of them you can discard as "non-major countries", but too many of them had major, nuclear-armed powers on at least one side.
In fact, you could argue that nukes have produced *more* wars. Just look at Wikipedia. They obviously don't have a single page listing every war that ever was, but they've got it broken up by dates:
List of wars before 1000
List of wars 1000–1499
List of wars 1500–1799
List of wars 1800–1899
List of wars 1900–1944
List of wars 1945–1989
List of wars 1990–2002
List of wars 2003–2010
List of wars 2011–present
Weird how roughly 40% of all wars happen *after* 1945, when he says war basically ended. That assumes that all sub-lists have approximately the same length, which isn't precisely true, but it's close enough for our purposes (in fact, the longest seem to be the 1900-1944 and 1945-1989 lists). So you could easily argue that, while nukes may prevent major wars, they do so by converting them into numerous small wars.
And even his premise of "no major wars" is not proven. Sure, we haven't had a World War since '45. That's 65 years or so. They've had wars that *lasted* longer than that. Having a peace that lasts that long in "Western and Northern Europe and North America" isn't exactly uncommon. I can imagine people made the same argument about the rifle in pre-Napoleonic Europe, and I know people said such things about machine guns after WWI.
The Fallout games had it right - war never changes.
Love it or hate it, MAD is the most successful peace program this world has ever known. I know a lot of the anti-nuke zealots out there while immediately shout "but, they could kill whole cities, hundreds of thousands of millions could die".
History will tell you that conventional arms are leading that race by well over a hundred million just in the last century alone. Because of nukes the cold war remained cold and never became hot. Pick a body count site and look at the body count from the number of people killed before, during and after the cold war.
I'm on the pro-nuke side of this argument and my body count is many, many millions less than the other side of the argument. The bottom line is that the cold war with it's policy of MAD was the most peaceful period in human history.
It really boils down to one idea, and you have to make a simple value judgement to know which side of the argument to sit on. Is the concept of nuclear free /peace/ in the air more important than the reality of millions of dead bodies in the ground? Try as you might, the one thing you can never change is human nature.
Once we have a few global nuclear wars under our belt, we'll have a better idea of the overall destructiveness, as well as the frequency, and we'll be able to make a more meaningful comparison. This is hypothetical, of course, because it's unlikely someone would seriously consider that question after a full scale nuclear war had occurred.
Your topic was whether nuclear weapons will keep 'non-fanatical' countries out of a war. My point is that you are overconfident of the rationality of the two countries that maintain the bulk of nuclear weapons. Woodrow Wilson taked about "the war to end war". Now you say that nuclear weapons are the weapons to end all major wars. Forgive my skepticism; I base this on past behaviour, not on suppositions about whether large states will or will not join a conflict. We are still over reliant on wise and considered decision making (such as the judgement call by Stanislav Petrov); I don't think we can take that short term stability for granted. If the assassination of a single person in Bosnia can lead to a world war, what do you imagine might happen if a nuclear weapon was used to murder an entire city?