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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
Preventing large scale conflict between Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Western Europe, United States.
Meanwhile, we've had almost non-stop wars, revolutions, invasions and a few instances of genocide since Nagasaki & Hiroshima
I don't think it's working...
Now sharks with lasers, that might do the trick...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Or quite possibly after two world wars, people simply got so fed up with annihilating each other that they made an actual effort to avoid it for once?
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.
Lisa, I want to buy your rock...
Gandhi's threats of NUCLEAR WEAPONS never kept me from going to war with him, so clearly this premise is false.
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?
Nothing new. "If that's the only thing that's stopping war then thank God for the bomb" ---Ozzy
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Let's assume for argument's sake that nukes really do give these assurances, then not only would they prevent war between nation states, they'd likewise within those nations protect the powerful few and their military from ever being truly accountable to their own populace. All hail our permanent overlords.
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.
Florida, or Texas 'stand your ground' laws with nukes.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
... and everyone got all uptight about me handing out guns indiscriminately to known & repeat violent offenders.
Why can't they see that I'm trying to keep them safe?
In May, 1945 as Germany collapsed completely, the Soviets had over six million troops in Eastern Europe. War planners in Britain and the US had already been planning for WWIII. To my mind, one of things that stopped the Red Army in its tracks and ended any possibility of trying to take advantage of the numerical superiority in that theater was the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unconditional surrender of the Japanese to the Americans after those attacks also meant that the Soviets only managed to grab the Kuril Islands, and never made it as far as the Japanese main islands (there are some who theorize one of the reasons that Truman gave the go ahead was to convince the Japanese to surrender quickly before the Soviets could start moving south from the Kurils).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The main problem is that Iran won't use nuclear weapons in their own right. They'll use them via a proxy like Hezbollah. So it doesn't quite fit into the scenario he is describing.
First, MAD assumes that nobody involved is, er, mad. If a true loony got their hands on a nuke, they might set it off to get their 72 virgins.
Second, there's the risk that Iran might think they could blow Israel first and destroy their ability to strike back.
Third, there's the danger of a miscalculation. Given how close Iran & Israel are, there's not much time to verify that that flock of geese overhead really is a flock of geese.
Maybe none of those scenarios would happen if Iran got the bomb. But having the bomb doesn't guarantee stability either, even if it has diminished war so far. It just takes one exception.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The citizens of Nagasaki second the argument.
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I think the fatal flaw in the dogma of MAD is that it is predicated on the notion that the actors act rationally and share the same root common values. I don't think that's the case with Iran or other countries with unstable, immature, leaders.
This "peripheral state" idea strikes me as naive. Was, say, the Vietnam war just between North and South Vietnam? Wasn't it a war, staged in Vietnam, between bigger (nuclear) powers?
The North Korean leaders are as close as we have today to a "Joker with the bomb."
But imagine if anyone or any organization with a few million dollars could get the materials to build a bomb big enough to kill almost everyone within a quarter-mile radius and severely injure almost everyone within a half-mile radius.
It would only be a matter of time - years or less - before some idiot who didn't care if he or even humanity lived or not used one.
Heck, he'd probably try to make it look like some other country was behind it just to start a real war.
No, a world with large numbers of countries or worse, non-governments or individuals with the bomb is NOT a safe place to be, at least not if there's any real chance someone will use one just for kicks.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
Doesn't mater how powerful a gun someone has, they will eventually find reason to use it.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
... because in your imaginary the United States will be back to a 48-star flag by the time you finish reading this sentence.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Waltz' infatuation with neo-realism does not serve him well when looking at Middle Eastern politics.
. . .
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He turns a blind eye to the India-Pakistan skirmish over Kashmir, neatly dismissing the idea that both nations have nuclear weapons.
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He assumes that Iran would act rationally, and would not destroy Israel out of religious zealotry and the conviction that their actions and own inevitable mutually assured destruction would make them martyrs. A nuclear Iran would not remain nuclear at all. It's mullahs would fulfill their religous obligations as quickly as they possibly could.
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He assumes that the Sunni nations, like Saudi Arabia would not feel threatened by a Shia nuclear superpower in their backyards and would not start up their own nuclear programs..
Nuclear weapons have eliminated wars between major powers, yes. But this does not mean they are peacekeeping weapons. Instead what they do is effectively put a ceiling on the scale and intensity of a conflict. The US doesn't want to get in a major set-piece battle with Russia, because everyone knows if that happens, there won't be a US, Russia, or probably a Europe either. Most wars these days are very low-intensity, and many of them involve proxies of some sort or another: Vietnam, Afghanistan(1980s), Iraq (2003). In all 3 of these cases you have major military powers fighting an enemy that is not as well equipped or armed, but has external backing of another major power to one extent or another. In Vietnam you had the Soviets arming, training, and in some cases fighting for the North Vietnamese; Afghanistan has mujaheddin funded and armed by US money and weapons, and in Iraq you had Syria and Iran assisting the insurgents. Here's an analogy: if you dislike a guy, but you know he carries a gun with him, you aren't going to walk up to him and punch him in the face: you're going to get shot. But you can get at him by paying a kid $20 to go slash the guy's tires while he's sitting in a bar or something. You two are not exactly "at war", but you are also not at all at peace. So what nuclear weapons do is basically force you, as a leader, to draw the line at how far you are willing to take a conflict, and who you're willing to fight against. But hostile action is, and mostly likely always will be, a major and vital part of statecraft. And this would be true even if every state had nuclear weapons.
That being said, I have read Waltz numerous times, and I know I've cited him him several times while in grad school. And he is right that we still need to keep nukes around, because even a bunch of low-intensity conflicts are "better" (ie, not as costly in terms of human life and money) than just one major conflict between large nations like the US and Russia (partly because any conflict of this magnitude would certainly draw in other states, while a low intensity conflict is more likely to stay isolated).
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
...Two little nagging problems with this are Hiroshima/Nagasaki, which weren't very peaceful as about 135,000 people died in two flashes of light.
I will remind you that the war in the Pacific was killing that many people per month, so if the bombings hastened the end of the war by as little as 5 weeks, they saved as many lives as they took. (Not even accounting for those who would die by starvation due to the fact that the Japanese had drafted all the farmers into the war effort.)
With or without nuclear weapons, the war was brutal.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Didn't stop Argentina invading the Falklands.
Didn't stop Al Queda hitting America.
Never stopped Hizbollah from firing rockets into Israel.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
before WW2 most people could barely read or not read at all and the only job they could get was working on a farm. serving in the military and getting some war booty was more exciting. back in those days graduating high school was a major achievement.
now in the first world the vast majority of people know how to read, have a high school education and a lot have higher education degrees. why would these people want to join the army, crawl through the mud and be shot at or blown up? for minimum wage salary?
The problem with peacekeeping weapons is that they're still weapons. The only reason nukes are effective as peacekeeping weapons is that nobody so far has been willing to take responsibility to use them between superpower countries. That doesn't mean an irresponsible a-hole won't show up at some point.
So here's a crazy idea. If you want to keep peace, look at solutions THAT ARE NOT WEAPONS to accomplish it. I reckon that if the army budget would be invested instead in education, foreign student exchange programs, international sports events etc, this would prove to be FAR more effective to promote peace than weapons.
Either that, or stop claiming to be offering "freedom from fear". You can't have both.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Yeah, that notion worked real well with Al-Qaeda flew planes into buildings in the US. They were clearly terrified of attacking a nuclear-armed state.
And don't give me the "stateless" argument, either. Just because they weren't affiliated with a state doesn't mean they couldn't be counterattacked. The US used it as an excuse to invade Afghanistan, and then Iraq as well. Al-Qadea knew there would be retaliation, and they did it anyways.
In other words, nukes don't prevent wars or violent acts.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Depending on your sample size and definition of major state, you could say that a defeated Napoleon prevents war. I get what Waltz is saying, but I don't know that his conclusion is valid. I think the major states have more modern ways of fighting than outright killing. A trade agreement or sanction can do about as much damage as a war, especially to the governing officials.
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.
down. China will at some point want to attack. If we have only 300 nukes, then in a first wave, they can take out more than 1/2. That means 150 or less nukes. Easy to block that.
OTOH, if we have 3K+, then China can not block all of them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The flaw in this argument, of course, is nuclear weapons prevent wars between great powers in the same way the IMF, World Bank, and the Fed prevent the collapse of banks. That is, they can do so for decades, but when the banking system fails everyone goes down together.
It's an academic question anyway. There isn't any way to verify a country hasn't stashed a few nukes away on the sly, which means nobody is going to get rid of their arsenal completely. There will never be a nuclear weapon free world.
you will always be able to break up a nuclear nation into regions with and without bunkers. National borders are fluid, there is no way to create this kind of peace forever.
All the above criticisms about unstable governments (and leaders) is valid, though the original article did have some interesting points about stability in international relations.
All the article's points are completely moot, however, as it doesn't discuss non-state actors at all. That is, organizations which are NOT governments tied to geographic locations. And, there is where the problem with nukes lie.
Proliferation means an increasing risk that non-state actors will get their hands on nukes. And, non-state actors are bound (and influenced by) none of the inhibiting factors that governments have, when dealing with possible use of nukes. Indeed, mere possession of a nuke by a non-state actor is something almost guarantied to start a war, instantly. Because, there is very little down side to using said nuke by that non-state actor.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Because before they got smart enough to master long distance space travel they mastered WMDs and blew themselves up.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Kenneth Waltz seems to have cherry picked information to support his hypothesis. The full article mentions that he basis his hypothesis on India-Pakistan relationship, but it is clear that he has ignored several things in it.
First of all, unlike what he mentions in TFA, India and Pakistan relationship has had a full fledged war (and not just terrorist actions launched by Pakistan) , after Pakistan conducted A-Bomb tests. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War
India has come very close to waging war on other occasions as well, especially after the terrorist attacks on the Indian Parliament.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Parakram
Waltz is right that the possibility of nuclear war raises the stakes, but what he does not acknowledge (and what the Pakistani example shows) is that the a nuclear state might indulge in risky behavior against another nuclear states, precisely because it counts on the other state to act more conservatively. And sooner or later, there is a miscalculation of the risk by the aggressive nuclear state.
This makes the entire premise that Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Even Known," a wrong one.
and terrorists getting their hands on them? Imagine zealots who are looking for the end of the world to occur in their lifetimes. It would be catastrophic.
Weapons on a battlefield threaten people who are fighting.
Nuclear weapons threaten millions of innocent, non-fighting men, women, and children.
Judge for yourself if it is moral to protect yourself by threatening innocents.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Wasn't that shtick from Beneath the Planet of the Apes?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Even when they are, war still finds a way.
You do not even need a war. If you have 200 nations wach with their own nuclear deterrent can be be sure that every single nuclear device is secure enough that it will never be stolen by a terrorist group? I agree that there seems to be some evidence that nuclear weapons seem to have effectively stopped large scale conflict (although I think there needs to be a longer period of peace before I'll be convinced). However I see considerable danger in trying to scale this unproven principle down to smaller, regional conflicts.
What comes after the nuke in the development of how to be nasty to each other on a massive scale?
Something that raises the ante even further, in the same way that the Sherman Tank was a big improvement over the sharpened stick?
I seem to recall someone proposing sharks in space with frickin' lasers or something...
Personally I'm hoping for a self-replicating plague of robot monsters, but I think we're a little way off achieving that one yet.
Some sort of stasis bubble would be pretty neat -- nominate a sphere and slow-down time -- you could use that to counter all sorts of nasty things...
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or the IRA from attacking the UK military. Or Chechen separatist from attacking the Russian military.
For that matter, nuclear weapons didn't stop forces from nuclear-armed superpowers from directly engaging each other in Korea, Vietnam, and a number of other places, either.
So, nuclear weapons haven't stopped:
1. State actors without nuclear weapons from engaging in armed conflict with nuclear armed states on the other side (Argentina v. UK, etc.),
2. Non-state actors without nuclear weapons from fighting engaging in armed conflict against nuclear armed states (IRA v. UK, Al-Qaeda v. US, Chechen separatists v. Russia, etc.), or
3. State actors with nuclear weapons from engaging in direct armed conflict against forces from other nuclear-armed states (U.S. v. USSR in Korea, Vietnam), or
4. State actors with nuclear weapons from engaging in armed conflict against major states without nuclear weapons (Suez 1956, USSR v. Afghanistan 1980, U.S. v. Panama 1990, U.S. v. Iraq 1991, U.S. v. Iraq 2003, etc.)
Nuclear weapons haven't really done much to stop wars. They may have channelled conflict such that mutual aggression between nuclear-armed states is mostly directed into conflict on the territory of third-party client states where, but its not clear that that translates into a reduction in conflict if third-party non-nuclear client states weren't available, or whether it just means a return to direct conflict if third-party non-nuclear proxies aren't available as venues for playing out major-power aggression.
No.
There was not a choice of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki and doing nothing.
There was a choice of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending the war or an invasion ending the war.
Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the correct and humane decision.
Ending the war before an invasion of the main islands saved millions of civilian lives.
If you were one of the millions who would have killed themselves or been killed during the invasion, you wouldn't be debating the finer points of war with me right now, would you?
So... in the past two thousand years, there has been a large amount of large wars between large states. But because there have been none in the last 60 years, a *whopping* three percent of that 2000-year period, we can congratulate ourselves on stopping war, all thanks to nukes? How about if we revisit this argument in another 2000 years? Maybe then I'll buy it.
Martin Hellman at Stanford has made a consistent, logical, and compelling counter-argument to this for many years. Purely from a statistical point of view, the longer one waits, the higher the probability of a (possibly accidental) trigger.
To my mind, the assertion that nukes are in any way useful is short-sighted and likely a result of inexperience. The author (Keck) in the OP was a student a couple of years ago, whereas Hellman has had a long and distinguished career at Stanford and elsewhere.
I know who I'm going to listen to first.
-- This
Is not about having, but about using. Is after using the nukes that the world will rest in peace.
If we have 300 nukes on the ground at the time a "first wave" is launched, its unlikely that even half will still be on the ground by the time it strikes.
No, its not.
Its rather unlikely that there will ever be more than an extended period of time where China will have a defense system that gives it near-certain protection against 150 nukes of the type the US would have deployed at the time, but not against 3,000 of them.
The conventional battlefield has become so lethal in recent years that it is nearly on par with nuclear weapons yet it has not stopped nations from waging war. In the case of the U.S. it has caused us to try to "manage" warfare better to reduce "collateral damage", but we still screw up from time to time, with horrific results. You would think that would discourage us from going to war, but it doesn't. And I think there is still a mentality in some political and military circles that nuclear war can be "managed" just like conventional warfare.
Proverbs 21:19
As technology improves the barrier to laser enrichment and plutonium implosion technology will continue to shrink dramatically over time.
M.A.D. is meaningless when you have nuke(s) and don't represent any state.
How can the author ignore the insane costs of a nuclear programme? Surely he realizes thousands, if not orders of magnitude more, will die due to starvation, poorer health services and forced labour while a government is busy maintaining an implausible status quo, is that just signed off as "acceptable loss"?
Will also ensure that the other guy will not attack you...
Kenneth Waltz's argument is entirely specious.
Yes, MAD is probably the only reason there hasn't to this point been a world war III. But you need to zoom out and judge this on a slightly longer timescale than 65 odd years
I think it's pretty obvious that the probability of a nuclear armed state entering into a confilct with another in any given year is non zero. In fact, if you look at the cuban missiles crisis, or the able archer incident, it's pretty obvious that that probability can be fairly high.
It's also pretty obvious that any major power nuclear conflict would result in the deaths of most of the worlds population, quite concieveably all of it.
Therefore, the probability of an absolutely catostrophic nuclear incident will asymptotically approach 1 the longer we have nuclear armed states. In my view our annilihation is assured if we keep these weapons around long enough.
Being willing to contemplate the destruction of the entire human race, rather than contemplate the destruction of your particlar political power base/ideology is to my mind the purest expression of human insanity.
Difference is:
When you're afraid of your enemy, you still plan an offensive. You are just very careful about what you let them know.
When you have peace, you don't need an offensive because there is a genuine mutual trust between entities.
Nukes are a crappy form of insurance against ill-placed trust.
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Iran is not the US, Russia, China, or even India or Pakistan. It's a state on the edge, susceptible to revolution and incapable of properly securing a nuclear weapon or nuclear technology.
I even agree nuclear weapons have been a net boon, but one of these things is not like the other.
Why not reduce his argument, one could even say to the point of absurdity, and say that we'll be better off if everyone in my neighborhood has a nuclear weapon? I mean who's going to rob me if I can nuke them, am I right??
No. We can't allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. States don't have "rights", so fairness is not an issue. And it's clearly not in our or anyone's interests if they have a revolution or someone in their smallish government decides they want to allow some terrorists access to a nuclear weapon or even just the technology to make a very dirty conventional weapon.
There are so many people on here saying Waltz is a "idiot" or "moron" for an observation he has made. Talk about knee jerk and shooting the messenger. I understand about not RTFA but not RTFS which is fairly clear? Waltz is making a very clear & though provoking observation that most people (and clearly it exists here too) are "head stuck in the sand" about.
All Waltz is saying is that through out human history, nukes have been the best deterrent to big wars. Prior to nuclear proliferation, there was a MAJOR country at war with another big country every bloody decade. And it impacted a significant part of the known world population. We fought with Japan, Russia, & Germany. Once we all got nukes, we stopped fighting on the big scale cause escalation will result in mutual destruction. We nuked Japan once, do you think we will nuke them again? Do you think Japan would invade and conquer like it did before and risk getting nuked? We aren't "enlightened", we are the same as before.
Yes, nukes are not a permanent solution... BUT THERE ISN'T ONE. There is no such thing as "getting rid of nukes". That is fairly tale talk. The world doesn't have a Superman standing on a incorruptible moral highground who can detect nukes around the world and toss them into the sun. What nuclear disarmament means in reality is that a small batch of people have secret nukes and the rest don't. And this is a far more dangerous and unstable situation than nuclear proliferation.
Why? Cause when one/few nations have nukes, they have a very high value weapon: They can destroy your enemy! When your enemy has nukes... Nukes will destroy you! Before, you risked losing, but you could win too. Someone has to win! Now, BOTH parties' options are one totally wins, OR more likely both totally lose and having no winner at all. The reward of war has gotten smaller and risk has gotten higher.
Just look at our history and even today. USSR and the US never went to war. They both setup nukes right next to each other but never went to war. They hated and despised each other right down to the 2 year olds, but no war! India didn't want Pakistan to have nukes cause else the sky will fall. Didn't happen once they got it. In fact, they have defused every escalating skirmish since they both got nukes. What's the most unstable region in the world? Middle East... the only location where one superpower has the nukes and the rest don't. So the rest constantly scheme about how to take out the giant and the giant schemes how to keep the little guys down. Both live in constant fear of the other in a restless twitching mode of operation.
NO, nukes are not a permanent solution and they will cause utter destruction... if used. But, the risk of that is small and there is no realistic alternative. The best deterrent that humans have come up with against war is nukes. The best deterrent humans have come up with against nukes.... is nukes. That's all Waltz is really saying.
Yes, there are lots of "wars" happening all over the world but in relative terms per history, they are the equivalent of a few villages duking it out somewhere in the British empire. The empire itself is at peace.
Nukes prevent wars the same way that taking people hostage prevents a shootout with police.
All it does is make people back down, and makes sure the guys that have nukes get their way without resistance.
India and Pakistan had nukes and still went to war over Kargil. There is a good, big list of nuclear close calls during cold war. If you think nuke close calls are preferable to World Wars, your brain is totally and completely cooked. And the Sanest Country in History is actually the only one ever to detonate a nuke in anger. Two, actually.
No major states went to war since WW2? I'd say, let the Superpower clowns screw each other until their rear ends bleed, but leave the poor developing countries to develop in peace. We don't want Cuba or Vietnam or Cambodia or Chile or Nicaragua or Palestine squeezed because big and benevolent America can't wave her(?) dong at Russia which had Peacekeeping nukes.
If you can make the case that nukes led to global peace, I can make the case that Nazism rid the world of Colonialism. Please stop glorifying these academic nuts with coverage.
It works for civilians and pistols.
Even with psychopaths and criminal gangs preying on innocent victims, the crime, injury, and death rates are substantially lower where the gun-toting is higher and potential victims are often armed. And when laws are changed to encourage or discourage victim self-armament the crime, injury, and death rates change accordingly. So it seems to be a real effect and driven from laws to carry to crime, not some artifact. (See _More Guns, Less Crime_ by John Lott for research supporting this side of the interminable argument.)
This is what you expect if you think about it more than superficially. When it comes to behavior, especially with something known to be dangerous, people tend to be mostly rational actors and only occasionally random number generators. Predators avoid victims that are likely to injure or kill them. The few that don't are likely to have a much shorter career when victims are armed than when they can continue unchecked (or until caught by police).
In international level, treating governments as if they were people, you have a small neighborhood. And you have no police at that level (despite the posturing of international organizations), just competing gangs. The same real-world effects can be expected to rule at this scale that rule when a few people are interacting.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But if we don't abolish nukes, then we won't get a proper world war going again, and what will FPS developers do?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
CONSERVATIVELY 250 million people were killed in 'wars' in the 20th Century alone, far outstripping the casualties in any other century. Large scale wars have raged around the world continuously both before and after the introduction of nuclear weapons. In fact the casualty rate INCREASED somewhat after WWII.
I see not the slightest evidence that even the basic premise of Waltz's hypothesis is valid. He's proposing a causal link between nuclear weapons and some non-existent 'peace'. The whole proposition is insane and his hypothesis is idiotic on the face of it.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Suuuure, it's all about nukes and nothing about how interconnected modern economies are. It used to be beneficial to start a war with your neighbour, it's no longer the case because he's now your customer and manufacturer.
The presence of nuclear weapons may have stopped major conflicts but it had an interesting effect of allowing minor conflicts to continue. As long as a conflict did not involve the US and Russian interests significantly it was allowed to go on. Take a look at this link, this link and this link and see if you agree that nuclear weapons have stopped all wars.
Think for a second.
Three anonymous tactical nukes, one each, Mecca, Vatican, Jerusalem.
What would happen? Can you not think clearly about this?
Then maybe you're not ready for Prime Time Politics.
I mean at least muslim have the balls to explode THEMSELVES, rather than blackmail people into doing it the cowards : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_bomb
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I don't think it's at all certain that quick and devastating nuclear strikes would amount to more dead than the conventional wars which nuclear weapons have made impossible.
This is, of course, as-yet unknown, since there has never been a war that has started with both sides already in possession of nuclear weapons.
Approximately 60 million people were killed in World war II, or about 2.5% of the world population. "Only" approximately 150,000-246,000 of those dead were killed by atomic weapons.
Well, true, but the second world war was actually two separate wars, one in Europe and one in the Pacific. The war in Europe was over before nuclear weapons were introduced. Even counting them both together, since world war II lasted about 2170 days and three of those days were fought with one of the two combatants armed with nuclear weapons, you're saying that 0.13% of the duration of the war accounted for 0.4% of the deaths.
If WWII is any indication, if a war were to break out with a nuclear-armed state, it would end abruptly.
This is not clear. WWII was a war in which one of the two combatants had nuclear arms.
...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"someday they will all be nuclear powers, and the art will become as formal and minor as flower arranging."
from "Black Easter", 1968
I am horrified that the smart people of slashdot are simply accepting the premise that nukes have exclusively created peace in the world. Misunderstanding this point can cause that it is trying to avoid. Mr Waltz's thesis is that since the end of WWII there hasn't been a major war between Nuclear powers. He asserts that the major change has been the existence of nukes, therefore nukes are what are keeping the peace. That logic is flawed horribly. This is confusing correlation with causation. Other things have changed also. For example:
I can assert that since 1945 the United Nations has existed. Therefor the UN has prevented a major war;
World War II is the most heavily documented event in human history. Since we cannot ignore the mountains of history we are able to avoid repeating it. Santayana is proved, not Waltz;
After WWII education and communications have boomed. Since smart people anywhere on Earth who can commentate in written English can exchange ideas freely on Slashdot the conditions for war are ameliorated. Therefor Slashdot and the internet and mass communication have prevented war.
As a corollary: To be correct Waltz would have to rephrase his comments to: Nukes can't keep the peace, they are objects. It is knowledge of what will happen if the Nukes are used that keeps the peace. The confounding of Nukes and knowledge is troubling.
This also ignores two facts: First, that except for a tiny part all of the damage of WWII was done with conventional weapons. When we look at image after image of different blasted cities, only two were nuked. If we hid the few important landmarks could anyone here tell the difference. Horror and death are horror and death -- how they are achieved may not be important. Second, India and Pakistan are still well within the average, 17.3 years, between wars. We have no proof that Nukes have done anything to maintain peace between them.
It is most important to realize that none of these are exclusive. It can easily be argued that it is some combination of the factors I have laid out that keeps the peace.
Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport.
And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes. And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
p.s. Silver Surfer was a suicide bomber. Shocked that a Hollywood movie would glorify such acts?
There are countries in the world that simply don't care if they get nuked, as long as they take the enemy down first. Give a country like Somalia a few nukes and see how long they can sit around "enjoying the peace" before trying to figure out a way to make money from it. It wouldn't take long before they start threatening to detonate a nuke they've claimed to smuggled into another country unless that country gives into a demand (money, prisoner release, seat on the U.N. security council, etc). What country could simply ignore that kind of threat, regardless of how unlikely it might be true? And then you have any nation governed by religious zealots. Someone makes a joke about Muhammad in a bear suit and they might just piss off the right nation at the right time. Today, that nation would simply threaten to send a suicide bomber or something, but if they had nukes? Simply put, if your idea of world peace means everyone is walking on egg shells for fear of accidentally offending someone who has a nuke, then I guess this guy makes sense.
If the POTUS went nuts what do you think would happen??
1 Sure start World War Three Point One
or
2 "Im sorry Sir But I can't Do That Until you Calm Down First"
Don't forget that serving the Office Of The President does not always include serving the guy wearing The Hat
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Yes, and what if they are about to removed from power, e.g. uprising? What's to stop them from having the
mentality of "if I can't have, no one will".
Yes, this! Over 9000 times this!
This is precisely the reason that 98% of the world's population died from 1991–2001, after Gorbachev let the missiles fly during the Yeltsin coup in the USSR that attempted to oust the Communists.
No one over here really knows whether the coup succeeded, because Russian transmission systems were knocked out by US EMP strikes. We *think* we got all their bunkers in Moscow (after all, our Minuteman III's had a 120 meter CEP). Best guess is that the remains of the Red Army brass have established various fuedal warlord "states", each claiming to be the true successor of the Soviet government.
Aside from the direct casualties of nuclear holocaust, billions more died of starvation in the subsequent decade.
Every year, on the anniversary of the Great Death, a robotic rover is sent to drop a floral wreath on the beach where the highly radioactive remains of the Statue of Liberty rise above the sands...
Not a Jew.
Not even remotely a zionism supporter.
What does that have to do anything?
ALL of this shit would stop if the world was cured of faith and religion.
Have you thought about that?
He knows it's stupid, but he wants some attention. Or he wants to sell a book. Or maybe just get a squib on Slashdot (Okay, maybe not that). It is pretty impossible to get any public attention by taking an established sensible position on anything. As far as media outlets and the public are concerned consensus it is a big fat yawn. "Well-known scientist agrees with other well-known scientists that Einstein was right." One gets respect, of course, from one's peers in this way. But that and two bucks will get you a cup of coffee.
But if you want a turn on The Today Show, and you crave some book sales, then you have to be bold, to swim against the turgid current of normalcy. You have to GET CRAZY -- in a measured academic sort of way. But I have to give Waltz credit for flying high and wild. He must have a new mistress he needs to house. Nonproliferation? Fugedaboudid! Bring it bitches! W00T! Let's have some Plute! Uranium? I want it rich, Bitch. Where's Teller when you need him? Let's give Nicaragua a Super H so they can dig a canal. Why can't we all just get along?
I'm A Dinner Jacket (Ahmadinajad) is an apocalyptic nut case holocaust denier who says Israel should be erased -- but I guess Waltz thinks he is just posturing. If Waltz actually believes in his theory let's see if he moves to Tel Aviv when Iran gets its weapon. Which they will.
Okay, If we were talking real politik globally, as we were during the cold war, then Waltz might have a leg to stand on. Might. But this is a Cosmic war. The problem with Jerusalem is not political. It is religious. Or better put, the politics of this contentious boil poisoning the bloodstream of the planet is religious at root. Whether you are a Taliban or a Talibaptist or an Israeli Zealot we are not talking rational nuclear game theory here. Apocalyptic weapons in the hands of hyper-religious spun up Apocalyptics? I should say not. And Mr Waltz knows better, too. Shame on him!
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
...because a fair amount of the world is already in one war or another. Holding a proverbial gun to the world's head has had no positive effect.
It is what it is.
Dr Gatling thought his weapon would be so devastating that people would never want to fight wars again. I'm sure this idea has been attached to many other weapons throughout history and nobody has been right yet.
Eventually someone will be crazy enough to use nukes in warfare. Their enemies will use this to justify using nukes in retaliation and we will quickly forget how absurd nuke-free war seemed as lobbing nukes at civilian populations becomes standard practice.
This man is an idiot. They said the same thing about the Gatling gun, and look where that got us collectively as a race. Fail to learn from history, doomed, repeat, etc.
C|N>K
tens of millions of unicorns farting rainbows, you mean
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I was in college on the day of the Cuban missile crisis. I and everyone else in the dormitory that day thought that the world was going to end in 30 minutes. After that, we spent the next 30 years fatalistically believing that is was not a question if the world would be blown up but when. We all believed the "On The Beach" scenario as the only credible outcome.
Then in 1989, things changed abruptly. We dodged the bullet of extinction level war. I should say War. Not a nuclear war, but The War.
In the comments of this thread, I don't see that distinction coming out. Man could probably survive one or several global nuclear wars, as distinct from The War. war is a question of politics and power. War is a question of survival of the species (or should I say all species.)
Of course, War is still possible no matter how unlikely we like to believe. But I hate discussion of war as if it were War.
If you're fighting a war for resources, you are fighting for an ideology. Not every culture on the earth believes in grabbing as much as possible for itself, or trying to build empires out of the other nations of the earth.
Nuclear civil war. Now that's a novel concept. China vs China, or America vs America. Don't think it can't happen. Nations do split from within. Though there are supposed to be nuclear code safeguarded measures against such things, but I'm not entire convinced it's good enough.
Life is not for the lazy.
When there are a few stable countries with nukes, they know that firing them off is a bad idea. With the past few decades of less-stable countries (and less stable leaders) either getting them (missing USSR nukes) or working to build them, then I see much less deterrent. Especially since all the sanctions against Iraq and N. Korea do zilch. "We promise we'll stop." "OK then, have a cookie."
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
The article states: Israel is an anomaly in this way. This anomaly will be removed if Iran becomes a nuclear power.
The person writing the article didn't seem to realize, this could be taken in two ways...
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I find it ironic that an approach with a proven track record, Mutual Assured Destruction, has been lambasted as some sort of cold-war artifact, of intrinsic evil. The threat of Armageddon is the evil, MAD was the preventative. The United States of America was even founded on it. The 'armed militia model' where the empire and an armed populace, each with the power to hold the other in check -- the whole quotable 'We the People' litany -- is just a flowery and (to our ears) archaically quaint way of introducing the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction as a deterrent to tyranny. In a practical and historical sense MAD is the only device capable of holding peoples in restraint, long enough that the meme of self-restraint might creep into the culture.
It's just like guns. We've seen Sum of All Fears. There are presently enough loose nuke warheads and 'nuclear partners' to make them, to keep the world supplied with little boomers like the one that took out Baltimore Stadium -- for thousands of years of dirty little tricks and false flag pranks. Why not accept that as a 'given' rather than participating in escalating campaigns of denial? It's like turning in all the guns... and of course we were only joking last time, this time we'll get all of them, another historical circus recursus which always seems to distill into a "You first, we'll reconsider later" policy.
Then there is the business of generating energy. Nuclear Fission is the only -- only! only! -- thing on the table that could keep the grid up through some long, dark winter of inclement weather with limited or no transportation infrastructure operating. Neither solar, nor wind nor great rail-transported volume of coal passes this simple test. Nuclear plants are self contained and require only occasional delivery of fuel, which could be carried by mule train (a big slow one but hey, it's possible and I'd love to see that)
Which is why I get pissed whenever my country goes ballistic on nuclear energy programs around the world. In a country like Iran nuclear energy is the only way to ensure a peaceful future because you can guard shipments of nuclear fuel, you can harden security around plants, but no one will ever be able to protect liquid or gas pipelines. Never mind the oil in the ground. What hope do they (or anyone) have for stability? Aside from being stupid, I consider the US's policy on nuclear development tantamount to terrorism itself. Like regulating, confiscating and blocking distribution of penicillin.
Special note to the Japanese: please do not put your emergency backup generators in a basement at sea level with no watertight doors or bulkheads protecting them from complete immersion. All the haughty discussion about 'is nuclear a good idea' re: Fukushima is smoke and mirrors, Fukushima was a 19th-century 'FAIL' in terms of how simply it could have been prevented. Yes, I'm talking about steel doors and rubber seals! It really is THAT simple! Some 19th century steel door and rubber seal technology would have changed everything. Merely a mess, not a disaster.
Also good reading, http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/05/29/2242203/the-worlds-most-dangerous-password
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Conflicts have been known to escalate beyond rationality in the past; World War I is a prime example.
The greatest weight loss plan the world has ever known.
Technically, all of the components of Little Boy were ready by July 26th... so, 11 days.
Brilliant response. Thank you for that.
This is why I read slashdot: different points of view, supported by fact and logic (and occasionally experience).
And which countries had nuclear weapons in the first world war?
Try to keep up with the topic at hand.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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?
Every sort of the arms race from tanks, to machine guns, to computers has been part of a detterent somehow.
Only Nukes are so fucking destructive no one would admit wanting to use them, But people did/do.
Castro wanted to nuke NYC for the bay of pigs. Goldwater wanted to nuke china.
then we have all the brush wars nuclear powers fought against eachother in proxy. Kept peace my ass.
Ya, Nukes keep the world safe.
That is why there has been wars going on pretty much non stop since we've had nukes.
Our nukes have kept us safe, after all, the threat of us having nukes keep 9/11 from happening. Oh, wait, it didn't.
Our having nukes have keep our soldiers safe. oh, wait, they have been dying.
Israel having nukes have keep them safe, right? No terrorist acts, no people dying?
Nukes haven't done shit but make the USA a big ass bully.
Be seeing you...
It's funny how you pass everything through your USA-like filter. How do you know how things work in North Korea, for example? Or China, or Israel, for that matter?
Yeah, in the USA maybe everything is under control and triple-checked. Good for you. I have strong doubts though about the same control being implemented in other, more dictatorial countries.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If you are going to make statements about the statistical significance of 67 years worth of data, please find out how many other 67 year periods of peace there have been.
I used the phrase "no large scale war," and you have modified this to "peace". There have been no large-scale wars, as I chose to define it, but certainly this has not meant "peace." There have been very few years with no wars at all, with Korea following on the heels of World War II so quickly that they almost appear phases of a single conflict.
Since there is a lot of flexibiliity in what is aggregated as "war," it's hard to say what the statistical significance is. It's dicey to make statistics when you can chose what to count in a way to adjust the result to anything you want. For example, I can claim 1815 to 1914 as a 99-year period of no large-scale wars. What? You say there were plenty of wars? Spanish American? Franco-Prussian War? Ah, but not large-scale wars.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I agree with Kenneth Waltz.
Because India and Pakistan are not using nuclear weapons inspite of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_dispute#Reasons_behind_the_dispute and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks
Casteism
The mathematics of deterrence are much more complicated than the simplistic Prisoner's Dilemma, but the Prisoner's Dilemma can inform some 30,000 foot understandings. It does not take a genius to see that when you put an infinity in one of the spaces in the PD payoff matrix, the math goes all bananas (the technical term). Religious nutjobs all seem (to me) to think in terms of infinite losses or infinite rewards. Or both. In decision sciences we would call those people irrational.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
I think the French would argue that the white flag has served them equally well.
Total War; the only moral kind of war there is.
He is echoing what they said just before WWI. Tirpitz's 'Risk theory' was that the German Navy was supposed to be big enough that the British wouldn't risk attacking it as it would do significant damage to the British Navy. Didn't happen. Instead they [Europe] had a lot of little 'preventative wars', that were supposed to stop the big one, but ultimately lead to the big one. Now we're supposed to believe that nukes will work using the same 'Risk theory', and we've been watching a lot of small 'preventative wars' that happened after WWII all over the world, and the world almost came to nuclear war between USSR and USA with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
If the US were nuked and we traced the fuel back to the Iranian enrichment program, no one would care about the subtleties.
I can see that this would be the case if nuclear material was "stolen" and they said nothing. However suppose they informed the world that the material had been stolen? Even if it had happened accidentally-on-purpose unless you had proof that they deliberately allowed it to be stolen there is no way that the US or anyone else would be able to nuke them in retaliation. They could certainly put enormous pressure to bear to shutdown their nuclear program but beyond that, without proof, it would be very hard.
You're right that the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons will never go away. That is why we need to learn to look at the issue differently:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Personally, I say that if a nuke is detonated on US soil and the material was found to have originated in Iran, we level them. Same for any other country that tried to pull something like that.
Great - so if a Russian nuke is stolen and detonated in the US we are going to have World War 3 then? What about the UK - would you nuke us too, or does this just apply to Iran because you don't believe that it really was "stolen"? The problem with this policy is that any state which can have nuclear weapons stolen from it clearly has nuclear weapons and can retaliate in-kind. A better solution would be to insist that the country gives up its nuclear stockpile - if you cannot secure the weapons then you do not get to keep them.
Good points. See also my essay: http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/e34f9013282af9d7
"The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) with strategic nuclear weapons policy is based on decision makers being rational and not wanting their own country destroyed (were they to use their nuclear weapons and receive reprisals or even just spreading radiation). This essay explores a few reasons why this MAD policy will ultimately fail due to irrationality or other reasons for bad decisions by humans or the bureaucracies they inhabit. This reasoning is also applicable to understanding why any similar policies about bioweapons or drones or nanotech and so on could also fail. Then the consequences of this are explored, and some alternatives suggested (including sharing information leading to healthier local communities and ultimately creating space habitats)."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I wouldn't say that they target the leadership per-se, but it definitely affects them.
The aforementioned narcissistic bastard may be able to ignore poor people on the street, drug use, abandoned/abused children, and whatever other ills are beneath him/her when living in some big mansion on the hill in a rich neighbourhood.
However, when he (/she) has to live in some underground bunker because the world above is radioactive, his favorite mall is glowing, that bakery he frequented on second-street is a smoking hole, and there's nothing on television... then it's a lot harder to ignore. Obviously said narcissistic bastard wants to avoid that.
The big issue I see is when there's nothing left to lose. Perhaps he's about to be pulled from power and imprisoned, sentenced to death, or whatever. To a true psychotic narcissist, perhaps he's just going to die of cancer or even age soon anyhow. Then suddenly pushing the big red button and taking everyone out with him seems a lot more appealing.
Look at parents losing custody battles that end up killing themselves and their kids. Sometimes their neighbours and relations all account them as normal, nice people. What happens when one of those people is in charge of the launch button?