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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?
Nuclear warheads are pretty much only good to make other people not want to attack you because they fear getting nuked. You basically only need enough nukes to kill some of the big cities in a country and that should stop any non crazy person from launching against you.
One of the better quotes in this regard is that a nuclear arms race is like 2 generals standing waist deep in gasoline, the first with 3 matches, the second with 5.
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!"
It's more complicated than that. It's much more than 2 generals, it's an entire world.
Right now, for example, Japan sits underneath the American nuclear umbrella. They easily have the capability to build their own, but do not, because they trust that America will protect them. Other countries are in a similar situation. Once the American stockpile shrinks too much, the Japanese will start to get worried and want to build their own.
If it were only between Russia and the US, then our stockpiles would have shrunk already, because neither side is afraid of the other, neither side wants to attack and both know it. It's not worth the expense of having a large arsenal. But it's not; there are many actors in the world, and imagining it's just between the US and Russia is dream thinking.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.