Slashdot Mirror
The Marshall Islands, Nuclear Testing, and the NPT
Lasrick writes: Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former senior policy adviser to the Energy Department's secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment, details the horrific consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands and explains the lawsuits the Marshallese have filed against the nuclear weapons states. The lawsuits hope to close the huge loophole those states carved for themselves with the vague wording of Article VI of the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty), wording that allows those states to delay, seemingly indefinitely, implementing the disarmament they agreed to when they signed the treaty.
Note that they're required to negotiate in good faith on "effective measures" - when they figure out some "effective measures", then you can complain about them not negotiating "in good faith".
And just curious, what "effective measures" can you think of? Especially in light of the fact that North Korea is NOT a signatory to the NPT....
As to that, no, they're not actually building more powerful nukes. The delivery mechanisms are getting more accurate, so smaller nukes are as effective as big nukes were back in the day. Note that there are no multi-megaton nukes left - they've been replaced with fractional-megaton weapons with a CEP small enough that it makes no difference.
Note, by the by, that CEP is a function of the rocket (or bomber), not the nuke. And improved versions of rockets/bombers aren't limited by the NPT in any case.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'd actually argue that it was considered more than that. MacArthur wanted to nuke China over the Korean War. I'm sure someone suggested nuking the Russians over their development of an atomic bomb, and I know that the Russians considered doing it to China when China was developing one. Each time, cooler heads prevailed, in no small part because of just how awful we realized nuclear weapons are.
And that's in part what you need to ask - how many times did we avert something worse than the historical outcome due to the fact that Russia/China/USA/etc had nukes now? Even the Great War (World War I), a war so bloody that both sides pretty much bled themselves dry fighting it, still wasn't enough to turn people off from another one twenty years later? And yes, I realize there's a lot more to it than that, but I would argue that nuclear weapons are the single sole reason that the Cold War never turned hot.
The bottom line is that Nuclear Weapons make it impossible for one nation to unilaterally impose its will by force on another without triggering mutual suicide. This turns out to make people a heck of a lot more willing to talk things out, or at least to not fight each other head on.
Now that said, I don't think it's a good idea to thereby let everyone have them. The more countries that have them, the more the risk increases that something goes wrong with that calculation, because someone decides to gamble, either from desperation or greed or whatever, and it goes nuclear.
Nuclear weapons are horrible, awful, and terrible things - but their existence also has some very important effects that shouldn't be ignored.