Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Arms Cuts, Supported By 56% of Americans, Would Make the World Safer
Lasrick writes "Kingston Reif of the Nukes of Hazard blog writes about nuclear arms reductions are back in the news, thanks to President Obama's State of the Union address and now also a Gallup poll that shows 56% of Americans support U.S.-Russian reductions. From the Article: 'A recent report by the Center for Public Integrity revealed that senior Obama administration officials believe the United States can reduce its arsenal of deployed strategic warheads to between 1,000 and 1,100 without harming national security. Those numbers would put the total below levels called for by New START...' Congressional Republicans of course are against those cuts; Reif lays out why the cuts would make the U.S. and the world safer."
Do we even need a thousand nuclear warheads?
Says who? And will countries like NK or Iran follow suit or not? And does that result play into the discussions at all?
Opinions do not equate to facts, yet some people like reporting as if they do.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
With Russia embracing democracy, more or less, there is less concern about it trying to conquer the world, as seemed to be a prime Soviet ambition. Meanwhile, China's government (not so much its people) is still bellicose, and has been significantly increasing its offensive capabilities in recent years. We can't drop the MAD paradigm just yet, because of China.
The difficult part about getting defense people to commit to decreasing the stockpile is that we have no idea when, if ever, we will be able to start producing new warheads. That turns it from being a discussion about how many we strategically need, towards a discussion about how certain were are that the stockpile we have will still be functional when we need it, and "can't we keep them all just in case". It would suck to destroy an entire line of warheads because they seem least valuable today, only to find out later that the ones we kept had an aging problem we couldn't detect before which didn't effect the destroyed line.
Actually, you don't even need that. As each ICBM reaches space, it could pop out a few dozen mylar balloon decoys. The balloons will cool rapidly in space,
And because of their tiny mass will almost immediately slow to zero velocity. If your DEW radars cannot differentiate between something moving at a considerable percent of the speed of sound and a balloon floating around with the wind, you need a better DEW line. "Hey, look, Bob, those incoming missles that were targeting Memphis are now going at only 120 knots and are aimed at the North Pole!"
China has no more ambition or motive to attack the US than Russia does. Sure they are a superpower, and therefore dangerous, but if that is enough to keep MAD, then there is no "just yet" about the situation, they will always (for the foreseeable future) be a superpower, so by your logical we must always have MAD.
Right, at their current rate of expenditure their military should catch up with our current levels in only what, about 50-100 years. And I'm sure that has nothing to do with their being surrounded by a number of hostile and/or unstable countries within easy striking distance. Or as a deterrent against the one currently unopposed superpower that's apparently feeling it's oats and picking fights anywhere there's money to be made.
Frankly, I suspect the day China presents a credible military threat to the US will be the day our government has already crumbled from within.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Who gives a shit what 56% of the general populace think? They aren't qualified to have a meaningful opinion.
Did I miss the high school class on thermonuclear tactics? Pretty sure I would have gone to that.
Suppose someone in the North Korean army started a civil war. Then Kim Jung Un decided to nuke his own country. Would we retaliate and cause further damage by nuking his part of the country? Suppose he nuked China or Russia would we just leave it up to them to retaliate? Suppose the North Korean army was revolting and the last thing Kim Jung Un did was to nuke South Korea. Would we retaliate even though everyone who was responsible for the attack were already dead? Would we retaliate if the new leaders of North Korea want to unite with the south in a democracy? It would not make sense to nuke a side of any civil war. In a sense the whole Earth is just one country making any war just a civil war. The use of nuclear weapons will never make sense. If one side uses them than the other side would do nothing but spread the misery. Neither side would win as the only way to win is not to play. There is no way we can morally demand countries like North Korea and Iran not develop nuclear weapons unless we do all in our power to eliminate all nuclear weapons. I would think we already have plenty of non nuclear weapons to sufficiently retaliate against any other country in the world.
Which means you get wiped out while your missles are in space waiting for the re-entry time ...
At an altitude of 100km, you reach the Karman Line, which is generally considered the threshold of space. The air density at that altitude is 1/(2.2 million) the surface density. At ICBM trajectory has an apogee of 1,200 km. Since the density decreases exponentially, it will be far, far less at that altitude. So I don't think either the balloons or the warhead would slow down enough to matter.
There is no way we can morally demand countries like North Korea and Iran not develop nuclear weapons unless we do all in our power to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
Spare us the bullshit. NK and Iran are totalitarian pits. The US, for all its faults, is a representative democracy with the strongest free-speech protections on the planet (the one area, IMHO, in which the USA is far, far ahead of every other country on earth).