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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.
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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.
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.
You're as insane as the OP. There is no 'world peace,' there's a different political atmosphere. Rather than fighting other countries, the politicians realized they can all live comfortably in power by oppressing their own people and helping each other oppress their own people. Instead of trying to rule the world, they're trying to keep knives out of their backs and grudgingly working together to make sure they're not deposed out of their own kingdom ever.
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... 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).
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
Peter Singer, in discussing his book, Wired for War , once pointed out that the difference between a nuke and a drone-launched missle is largely academic to the people at the point of impact.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
Beyond that, there are nations that would effectively use terrorist groups to act as proxies in a nuclear quasi-war.
If Iran had nuclear weapons, we know they can't use them directly, that would result in outright destruction. However, if they "carelessly" get a nuclear weapon stolen, a terrorist group could bomb a target in Israel or the US without giving the victim an excuse to invade. This has been the strategy of many nations for a while with conventional weapons, and it only becomes more effective with nuclear weapons.
Both the US and the USSR understood that if one of their nukes got used on the other, there was going to be war, and it was going to be devastating. Many of the terrorist-supporting states won't have that fear because it hasn't worked that way for them in the past.
Right now, most of the nations of the world with nuclear weapons (this includes North Korea and Israel) are nations that carry out their military operations overtly. If they decide to attack with nuclear weapons, the whole world will know they were the ones responsible. These nations know that openly attacking a nuclear power will simply result in their annihilation, so they won't do it.
That isn't true for many of the nations in the middle east. They have a strategy of letting terrorist groups do their dirty work precisely because they don't get the direct repercussions of it. There's no reason to believe that the strategy would be any different with nuclear weapons. So, how does the US respond when some terrorist group operating out of Iran "steals" a nuclear weapon and uses it to blow up DC? Do you nuke Iran? They'll simply tell the world "we didn't do it, the terrorists did." Do you kill a few individual terrorists after the fact? That won't appease the american people, who will be out for blood, I assure you. I can see Iran expecting (particularly against the US) that the world community would prevent the victim from directly attacking Iran with nuclear weapons, and thus expecting controlled use of nuclear weapons through terrorist groups to move political negotiations in their favor.
The only ways I see to avoid this are either to make terrorist-supporting countries responsible for the terrorism now, so that they won't attempt nuclear terrorism, or to prevent those kinds of countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Since the former will just make the US look like a bully in the short term and result in significant instability, I understand why the current plan is to try and prevent nuclear weapons from spreading.
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:
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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.
...
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No. If the US were nuked and we traced the fuel back to the Iranian enrichment program, no one would care about the subtleties. Iran would be leveled before the cries for blood died down enough for people to start thinking clearly again.
It wouldn't matter if Iran did it or "merely allowed their nuke to get stolen".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Conflicts have been known to escalate beyond rationality in the past; World War I is a prime example.
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?