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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
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.
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.
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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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.
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
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.
Wikipedia breaks it down like this because of the availability of information, not the frequency of the subject. You really think there have been the same number of wars from the beginning of time to 1000ad as the last 18 months, as you imply? There have wars that took out entire civilizations that you've never heard of, that no one has heard of, Wikipedia is no time traveler. There have been no major wars, what makes a war major, you ask, my answer would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll
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.
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?