Obama Calls For Nuke-Free World 705
jamie points out news that President Obama has put out a call for a world free of nuclear weapons at a speech in Prague today. He acknowledged that it was a long-term goal, perhaps not something that can be accomplished in his lifetime, but promised to encourage the US Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty. According to the BBC, he also stated his desire to "negotiate a new treaty to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons," and to hold a global summit within the next year to work out agreements for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Obama said, "As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it." His speech came less than a day after North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket.
Poor North Korea (Score:2)
Always playing at the wrong end of the bell curve
Nuke Free Only Until When (Score:5, Insightful)
Free of nukes only works until some other 4 foot 9 dictator decides to raise his status the only way he can to impress the world.
What then? Does he become emporer of the world or just harasser of the world as Hannibal did to Rome?
Re:Nuke Free Only Until When (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the USA will have any problem using conventional weapons to take out any tinpot dictators nuclear facilities - well before they have a nuke.
After all, the USA outspends the rest of the wolrd combined [globalsecurity.org] on their military.
Re:Nuke Free Only Until When (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the USA will have any problem using conventional weapons to take out any tinpot dictators nuclear facilities - well before they have a nuke.
After all, the USA outspends the rest of the wolrd combined [globalsecurity.org] on their military.
I seriously doubt we have the will to do this under this administration. At least not until it is far to late to help.
Re:Nuke Free Only Until When (Score:4, Insightful)
Please keep your "help" to yourself.
Sincerly,
Signed: The Rest of the World
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You forgot the bit about American military leadership preventing the Nazis then the Soviets from dominating Europe - a watch that lasted half a century, or preventing the tinpot dictators in Pyongyang from controlling all of Korea, the same in Vietnam... oh wait, never mind that last one.
The fuzzy headed always get it backward. The US, for all its flaws, is still the best thing going compared to the dictatorships controlling Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran or all the unelected governments in the middl
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while being so self-righteous you have forgotten a couple of things.
first of all, the taliban you yanks are hunting now are the same taliban you yanks were funding and calling heroes and freedom fighters 25 years ago.
second, thanks to your intervention in yugoslavia, albanian cutthroats have murdered lots of serbs and tried to invade macedonia.
third, not american military leadership has prevented the nazis, the russians have. americans preferred to sit on their collective arses until it was sure that russia
Re:Nuke Free Only Until When (Score:5, Insightful)
However, what would the world have looked like if the US hadn't taken the western half of Europe? Stalin certainly wouldn't have agreed to let everything west of berlin remain democratic, would he? Can you honestly think that things would have been better with Russia as the sole superpower? The US hurts people out of ignorance and letting the wrong people have more power than they otherwise would have, but even then it doesn't compare to the types of power and brutality you saw out of the Soviet Union or other dictatorships. The US's shit doesn't smell like roses, but it sure does a better job of keeping that shit off of their friends.
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german armed forces in the west and in africa were a fraction of the forces on the eastern front, so there.
also, the thought that stalin wouldn't let the rest of germany remain democratic is wrong. stalin was fine with a democratic germany as long as it stays neutral but then truman started the cold war with his doctrine and the rest is history.
when you say that usa hurts people out of ignorance you are very wrong. usa hurts others everytime it is in their interest. also, it depends what you compare. for ex
IMF aid is, in some ways, worse than that. (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, much of this "aid" comes in the form of loans with strings attached saying "get rid of any governmental function that helps poor people" and "sell your natural resources to corporations based in our country for a pittance".
Mmm, freedom. Can you taste it?
Re:Nuke Free Only Until When (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you just really prefer allowing every two-bit dictatorship in the world to have as many nukes as they can build.
There's a reason violence is still so commonly used after so many thousands of years of human existence; it works every single time if used in sufficient quantity.
Yay, violence! (Score:5, Insightful)
For a certain version of "works". You cannot murder people into loving you, for example. You can bomb people into true submission, but that requires blazing a path of epic destruction through their homes like Hitler through Poland, only more thorough. To consider yourself one of "the good guys" when you're openly advocating that sort of thing requires the sort of masturbatory self-delusion endemic to cokeheads and Americans.
Like Hilzoy said [blogs.com], "Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to."
Bullying. How trite. (Score:3, Insightful)
Where "doing anthing to protect ourselves" means lighting a whole bunch of civilians on fire by "mistake", right? (Hey, it's not like those terrorists place the same value on life as we do!)
Of course, you might mean things like boring investigative work to monitor potential threats and bring them through the justice system in the full light of day, or not blowing up civilians as "collateral damage" and then being so darned
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Really ? Notice what North Korea was doing just as Obama announced this idiocy ?
Launching an intercontinental ballistic missile you say ? In the direction of either Japan or the US you say ... What mean, clearly untrue things you say.
Re:Nuke Free Only Until When (Score:5, Funny)
So you mean the nukes don't act as a deterrent anyway!
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Free of nukes only works until some other 4 foot 9 dictator decides to raise his status the only way he can to impress the world.
C'mon, that's hardly fair. Roosevelt was in a wheelchair.
Re:Nuke Free Only Until When (Score:5, Insightful)
Invasion guarantee (Score:5, Interesting)
Has America invaded any nuclear power?
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We've never had reason to. But if Pakistan's civilian government falls to the Taliban, you can bet your ass we'll be going in.
Re:Invasion guarantee (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you mod me down, note that I'm not saying I sympathise with Iran, just that it's a matter of public record that a major reason Israel/US hasn't invaded Iran in the last few years is due to their retaliatory capacity [ynet.co.il]. This, of course is only encouraging proliferation.
Hopefully Obama can make a break from the previous administration in this regard, but I doubt it [salon.com].
Re:Invasion guarantee (Score:5, Funny)
Has America invaded any nuclear power?
Why, Iraq of course! Don't you watch Fox News?!
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Personally, I think that comparing incapacitants like pepper spray to nerve, blood, and blister agents is to be missing the point.
And we're not using it in bulk - that would be 500 pound bombs loaded with the stuff. Did you mean peaceful protectors or protesters? Because the protests where I've seen tear gas deployed were rapidly turning unpeaceful. Besides, tear gas is the more useful stuff in mas operations, pepper spray needs to be more directly applied.
As for tasers, well, consider the old options -
Ahem. (Score:2, Insightful)
And now, Ill come forth and call to an end of mean people. And a pony. I want a pony.
Really though, nuclear technology isnt that hard. Take 2 pieces of near-critical U235 and smack them together.. Hell, we could have Soulskill clap them together.
And dont forget yeah, the US, France, UK, Russia, and China all have nukes. Those countries like India, Pakistan, and Israel also have them, and we dont have a nuclear holocaust yet, either.
Just a bunch of North Korea fearmongering. After all, if they do get scared,
Re:Ahem. (Score:4, Insightful)
The "gun" method will get you a low yield weapon. And everyone knows the hard part is enrichment of the uranium, and building the reactor etc... As long as existing stockpiles of weapons grade material are kept safe it takes a nation quite a while to go from zero to nuke and it's hard to hide. The whole world knows about N. Koreas secrect nuke program.
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And an ideal being one which almost assuredly cannot be realized means that it should not be attempted at all. Riiiiiiight.
A continuing reduction in the number of nuclear weapons is still a very realistic goal, and it is probably a desirable one too.
Of course its fearmongering (Score:5, Insightful)
Its how you get the populace to give up their rights 'for their protection'.
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And I really think that China relies on North Korea to the fear-mongering it can't afford to.
Re:Ahem. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a touch harder than that. First you need that highly enriched uranium, which means you'll need a reactor, reprocessing facilities and some way to refine your U238-rich Uranium into weapons grade U235. You'll also need a few other metals while you're there, such as Beryllium. Then once you have all of that, and assuming someone hasn't bombed your facilities in the mean time, you have to "smash them together" in just the right way: too fast and they'll fly apart before they reach criticality, too slow and the mass will not be compressed enough: either will lead to a fizzle.
Which is exactly what happened to North Korea by the way. Apparently even after decades of research and development, smacking to bits of metal together is pretty hard to do right.
Unless they're too late (Score:2)
After all, if they do get scared, China WILL step in and handle the situation.
Not if North Korea gets nukes first, they won't.
- Alaska Jack
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States has 5,914 strategic nuclear warheads, followed closely by Russia with 4,237 deployable warheads. (Source: Arms Control [armscontrol.org] ). The rest of the members of the nuclear club -- UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel -- have less than 1,000 combined nuclear weapons. Clearly, if Obama wants the world to take him seriously, he needs to restart the START-II treaty [wikipedia.org] and disassemble his own stockpile before he can expect others to do the same.
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I actually like having 2 superpowers both with enough nukes to make the world glow like a nite-lite.
Knowing that certain actions, like a country using atomics, WILL lead to mutual assured destruction. And that prevents a lot of "bad stuff".. And also cutting off commerce and trade also scares these likes shitless.
Re:Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty much the only reason the world is "safe" is because we have the bomb. "The Bomb" is the final word in warfare because basically, everybody loses.
Now, the "trick" to "The Bomb" making us safe is nobody actually plans to use it. Anybody who uses it will get nuked to hell in return... everybody loses. Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD.
This theory breaks when the person who uses the bomb doesn't care about their own destruction. Once you stop caring about retaliation, all bets are off.
Warfare has no
Re:Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (Score:5, Insightful)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki both got 1 10 megaton warhead
No, Fat man (detonated over nagasaki) was a 21 kiloton bomb. Little boy (detonated over hiroshima) was a 13 kiloton bomb.
Current nukes are in the 5-50 megaton range, and do really rather more damage. That's the difference between an atom bomb and a hydrogen bomb for you.
Re:Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (Score:4, Informative)
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wikipedia [wikipedia.org] suggests you are about 3 orders of magnitude wrong:
It created a blast equivalent to about 13 kilotons of TNT. (The U-235 weapon was considered very inefficient, with only 1.38% of its material fissioning.) The radius of total destruction was about one mile (1.6 km), with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles (11.4 kmÂ)
Radius of total destruction for a 100 Megaton bomb would thus be about 31 kilometers (20 miles) using your 3-rd power
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The current main weapon in the United States nuclear arsenal is the W88 on a Trident II
The Trident II is capable of having 8 W88s
A W88 is a 475kt warhead which gives it an effective area roughly the size of a medium sized city.
Now remember that there are 8 of those on each missile.
Now remember that on actively deployed submarines there are roughly 400 Trident II missiles.
The destruction that a small subset of the US nuclear arsenal is capable of would be more than e
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Not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is going to disarm if another country still has nukes, that would be suicide. Furthermore, countries that possess nukes would still have the knowhow to produce them after the destruction of all of the nuclear weapons. That alone would create an unbalance in the worldpower, some countries can still make nukes if the situation warrants it and they can be produced in a year or 4(probably less) so any war with these powers would mean a re-arming of the nation involved and as a reaction a re-arming of all other nuke-capable nations.
Furthermore, some countries still rely on nukes as a deterrent like Israel. I just don't see them disarming, and my believe is affirmed since Israel categorically refuses to say anything about its nuclear capabilities which leads to the last objection to these plans. You can hide your nukes and feign compliance with disarming programs.
In short, it won't work and Obama is not believing his own words if he has any intelligence.
Re:Not going to happen (Score:4, Insightful)
I think he's just blowing smoke up the ass of environmentalists, and trying to rebuild America's image of being an agent of peace.... Nobody will buy it for a second, but thats what politicians do. Every President has vowed similar things, yet all have been heavily involved in wars and armed conflicts of some kind.
The reason I don't see any harm with this kind of bullshit is that it does the opposite that Bush's Axis of Evil rhetoric did. When Bush hyped up countries as being a real evil threat, then it already put the thought of war into people's mind. Any incident, no matter how small would escalate the chances of war rapidly. If Iran farted then a lot of people were clammering for war, or at least fighting talk.
When you put forward a peace process the escalation to war in people's minds is far slower. Small incidents don't anger people as much. There's more room for compromise, etc, and people are not as hyperreactive to disagreements. Cooperation is easier.
Its bullshit, and I don't for a second believe Obama has any intention of giving up nukes, ever. In my opinion, the best strategy now is to keep things like that going so you can twist the momentum from "Lets nuke 'em", to something else, more productive.
Is this possible? (Score:2)
With states like North Korea and Iran actively pursuing nuclear technology, can the US, Russia and the other nuclear states afford to lose their deterrence? It seems that states like Pakistan that are potentially fragile are also on the list of potential threats.
I'm all for getting rid of nukes; they're the most terrible weapon we have and really serve as a weapon of last resort. However, in the current political climate, is it possible to eliminate the stockpiles and deterrence that goes with them?
Signin
Only the bad guys have guns (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not one that believes in using nuclear weapons, but not having them seems worse than having them.
Ya, I know, pretty easy to say when I'm in one of the countries with a crapton of them (US).
Yet another example of incompetence (Score:3, Insightful)
So we get rid of our nukes and so does other 'law abiding' countries. What about the 100's that really don't give a damn?
Then again, he thinks banning personal guns will work too.
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Not paying attention, I guess. Unless they amount to hundreds of total lives, though, they're a momentary blip on the chart (so far). Hint: Cars and booze each kill way more people; Misprescription of prescription medication kills more than either.
Obama's failure to think half a step ahead (Score:3, Insightful)
End result of Reagan's plan: Collapse of the USSR, and reduction of the probability of nuclear armageddon.
Obama's solution to eliminate nuclear weapons: Curtail or eliminate defenses against nuclear weapons, sign on to a treaty that would have no effect upon those that would actually use nuclear weapons, and ensure that nuclear deterrence would eventually fail, as there would be increasing uncertainty whether the nuclear weapons of the nations that had signed the Test Ban Treaty had functioning nuclear weapons or not, especially if you're going to then go and end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
End result of Obama's plan: Defenseless US et al against those whose moral duty to act includes nuking us.
Re:Obama's failure to think half a step ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
yeah because obama is defiantly fighting a cold war! terrorists leaders don't care about thier people, so launching a nuke against them isn't a threat.
Did the 5000 nukes stop osama? NO
Did the 5000 nukes, get the taliban to hand over osama? NO
Did the 5000 nukes, keep you from having to invade iraq? NO
Did the 5000 nukes, stop jim's missile program? err NO
Can the US go round killing inocent civilians? NO
Can the US even retaliate to the actions of a rouge state using a nuke? NO
So what the fuck do you want them for? other than to lose a moral high ground and mean you have no right to tell others that they shouldn't have them!
Re:Obama's failure to think half a step ahead (Score:4, Insightful)
There are so many things wrong with that post I hardly know where to begin, but here goes.
1. You are implying that correlation implies causation in the most ludicrous way imaginable. Are you seriously suggesting that "Star Wars" was responsible for the Soviet Union's collapse? The USSR did not break up because it felt it had lost the ability to emerge victorious in a war with the United States (if it ever had it), but because of the enormous dissent within its member states. While there may, may, be some argument that the Reagan presidency caused or accelerated the USSR's collapse, it certainly wasn't because of his plans vis-a-vis nuclear weapons, and more than likely it would've happened no matter who was president of the USA. Gorbachav, not Reagan, was responsible for the breakup of the USSR. This point is all moot though, because:
2. Reagan's plan was never finished in the first place. This one's pretty simple. Do we have a functioning missile defense system, capable of protecting us from ICBMs? Answer: no. Since Reagan didn't actually accomplish anything in this regard, how can you attribute any lasting effects, political or otherwise, to it?
3. You are badly misinterpreting Obama's plans for missile defense. Obama is on record as saying that he is not opposed to missile defense systems if they can be shown to work. And if they can't, we shouldn't be spending on them anyway.
4. You are making up attributes to his disarmament plan out of whole cloth. His statements were the typical grandiose words that politicians have been making at summits since time immaterial. If you look through his words carefully, this plan is very open-ended and could be implemented any one of several ways (if it is at all).
5. You are implying that "lacking nuclear weapons = defenseless". Even if we got rid of all our nuclear weapons, we would still have the most technologically advanced, well-financed military on Earth, easily strong enough to act as a sufficient deterrent to so-called "rogue states".
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Your distortion of history is ... unbelievable.
Star Wars never worked, would never have worked, was never built, will never be built.
What Reagan may have done was probably hasten the end of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend like crazy on weapons programs. Then again, I think he was lucky. The Soviet Union was ripe for collapse anyway, and it just happened on his watch. I think that's the most likely explanation.
What Reagan DID do was almost cause WWIII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 [wikipedia.org] Afte
there is only one way to be sure (Score:2)
We have to nuke the nukes from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
Nukes are obsolete. (Score:2, Interesting)
To respond to a bunch of folks here:
First of all, it would be economic suicide for any country to be a nuclear aggressor. The World's economy is so integrated that it can't happen among countries that trade internationally or want to.
Now the countries that don't want to: N. Korea. International trade would undermine his regime. Yes, Jong Ill will use nukes for blackmail purposes. Launching missiles, threatening the World, mostly the US, with nuclear aggression. From what I'm seeing, he's so fucked up, he do
In Other News (Score:2)
A fools call (Score:5, Interesting)
The nuke has very effectively prevented WWIII from happening as the deterrent of MAD has proven to be histories most effective peace policy. The concept of non-proliferation, to keep nukes from spreading is one that that world has turned it's back on. You want to make the world a safer place, get real about nuclear programs run by countries like Iran and North Korea.
In the event that nukes were somehow magically put back in the nuclear genie bottle, countries would simply go back to larger standing armies. Conventional armies with conventional weapons have proven their ability to kill in large quantity time and time again.
Read between the lines ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's political posturing, with more important objectives.
In short, the "nuke-free world" is window-dressing for more real, practical objectives.
"I say let the Wookie win." (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice idea, but way before it's time (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, I know I'm paraphrasing pro-gun rhetoric here, but I believe it applies. The only way that International Law works, is if all the countries involved agree to abide by said laws -- which we all know doesn't work often enough. One day, assuming the human race actually lives long enough to see it, we MAY evolve enough, physioligically and mentally, that our needs for things like solving problems with aggression will become obsolete; THEN things like nuclear weapons will have a chance to go the way of the dinosaurs. Until that day comes this technology will (unfortunately) have to exist. You can't put the genie back in the bottle once you've let it out, after all; knowing something is possible is half the battle towards MAKING it possible, even if we effectively buried the knowledge of how to create nuclear fission, physicists would work backwards and rediscover how to make it happen anyway. I applaud Obama's sentiments on the subject, as I applaud the realism of his thoughts when he says "not in my lifetime".
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Monopoly (Score:5, Funny)
The problem is there's a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Thats why nukes are such a security risks with terrorists about, and a lot of attempts to acquire missiles by al queda. They will succeed as long as nukes are in the hands of a small few. The solution is to make nuclear weapons open source, so we can better secure them. Open source = better security.
If nukes are available to the common man for free, then anybody from part-time nuclear engineers, to hobbyist reactor specialists in their spare time, at home, can better analyze the security around them, test them in their backyard, etc. Put the specs on the internet for everybody to download and install in their home uranium enrichment centres. Most security holes are found by accident, so home-made nukes will help reveal more holes than any other method available.
Open Source Nukes, FTW!
The US can't use them anyway! (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is large scale deliberate civilian killing is not acceptable by any democratic country, in the cold war era it was barely acceptable when the US could have been destroyed. MAD doesn't work when your fighting an enemy that are smaller than you and surrounded by innocent people.
The enemy know the US won't use a nuclear weapon on them so it doesn't act as a deterent:
*9/11
*Taliban handing over Osama
*Both Gulf wars
*etc
Nobody takes the threat of the US launching a nuclear attack seriously. The only things that the huge stockpile does:
*Cost a fair bit of money
*Remove any high ground the US may have, you can't expect other to give up their weapons if you keep yours
*Increase the risk of one going missing (minor in the US, but in Israel/Russia/china this is a risk)
*Increase the risk of semi-produced materials being stolen (Again lower in the US, but non-trivial elsewhere)
So by starting to reduce the pointless arsenal in America (see above), Obama can try and convince other to follow. Negotiations are just that, and you never get anything by just shouting louder. Even if Obama only convinces the 'good' guys (US/china/russia/uk/france) to disarm, that is still a significant reduction in the risk of one of them inadvertently helping the bad guys (hell in the uk we seam to be losing everything, I wouldn't trust us with a nuke), while simultaneously putting you in a better position to convince the 'bad' countries (Iran) that they should disarm.
The total loss for the US is NOTHING, you can't use the nuclear weapons anyway!
"No nukes?" "No nukes." (Score:3, Insightful)
A "nuke free" world would be one in which we use no fission/fusion of atoms for the energy. Weaponizing it is one aspect of the technology.
The problem is, a power plant program can (and likely will) be used to make weapons. The horse is out of the barn. Obama is advocating that we can have the knowledge to make steel, but no one will make swords.
It's somewhat naive. We'll see how he executes his plans, or us.
--
Toro
Further reading (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.newsweek.com/id/183673 [newsweek.com]
by Henry Kissinger
The real story is about the fact that nuclear prolifiration and nuclear disarmament should have gotten a lot more attention from previous presidents (both Clinton and Bush completely failed on this one) and Obama's pledge came much too late. Now trying to go as far as possible (nuke free world) is the least he can do.
theory aside, let talk reality (Score:3, Insightful)
b. In that region, nuclear weapons are still a hot topic political issue.
c. Obama gives the crowds what they want to hear. He's prven that already. In essence, a good (but typical) politician.
d. Slashdot took the bait, and now we're discussing what was discussed 10yrs ago. Only difference is we think we have someone that can do something about it... Just like 10yrs ago.
No,he is very clever :) (Score:3, Insightful)
By the end of the projected total nuclear ban, there will be much stronger weapons than nuclear. Why stick to some outdated weapons?
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason nuclear weapons are outdated is because they still exist. They remove the incentive to go WWII on somebodies ass. Because of nuclear weapons, if you wanna cause trouble you now have to find other ways that don't lead to your country or people turning into a glass parking lot.
In other words, warfare has evolved to deal with nuclear weapons much like bacteria have evolved to deal with antibiotics. New kinds of bacteria have been created that are immune to bacteria--but that doesn't mean the old kinds of bacteria aren't still lying around in some latent form. If you stopped using antibiotics, those old "extinct" forms of bacteria would come back. Same with warfare--if we could somehow get rid of every single nuclear weapon on earth--all the old tactics of war would suddenly become relevant and useful again.
Basically, the existence of nuclear weapons make the old tactics obsolete. Remove the nuclear weapons and the old ways are no longer obsolete.
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough. Let me try on a better word.
"The old strategies of war". You can't just go invade half a continent anymore. The Commies aren't gonna fly 3,000 bombers across the arctic and bomb America. Hitler ain't gonna be able to just invade half of Europe. Those days are over. The Cold War marked the end of that kind of stuff.
These days, if you wanna go evil, you gotta take a couple guys and put them in a shipping container strapped with $WEAPON. Your strategy isn't to take over the country... just fuck with them and weaken them. Once you get their nation to fall, you aren't planning on moving in to their homes, you just wanted them gone from the planet.
So yeah, nuclear weapons might not render the tactics of war obsolete. But nuclear weapons have certainly rendered the strategies of war obsolete.
Does that work?
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I cannot say I share your unbridled optimism with regard to the H-bomb. I would be surprised not to see a global conflict in my lifetime. It is going to be terrible, just unbelievably awful, but that alone will not stop it from happening. It does not matter if anyone can truly benefit from the conflict. The only big net winner in WWII was USA, and that only because the war did not go anywhere near it. Germany and Russia wanted war and lost. Allies were against the war, and they also lost, even though they w
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:5, Interesting)
You are mistaken. If your opponent's intention is to conquer you, the VERY last thing he wants is for you to nuke his invading army, and his homeland. In that situation, possession of nuclear weapons DOES prevent an attack by conventional troops, by allowing you to maintain a far lower conventional troop strength.
By the same token, if he wants to conquer and rule you, the last thing he wants to do is attempt to nuke you into submission, since that wrecks all the nice farmland and factories and French farm girls he wants to conquer.
Read up on the troop strength of the old Soviet Union, and on the number of tanks they could field. If the Soviets had wanted to, they could have lined up, North-South, along the old Iron Curtain, across ALL of Europe, and headed West. There was never any doubt in anyone's mind, on either side of the Iron Curtain, that they wanted to do it. The West did not (and does not, even today) have anything even remotely resembling the conventional troop strength necessary to stop such an assault.
If you believe they didn't want to do it, review the history of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, during the period between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. For that matter, review the history of the Berlin Wall.
There was just this one little problem. The Soviets knew that such an attack would trigger BOTH strategic nuclear counterattack against Moscow and Russia, *AND* tactical nuclear response against their skirmish line. The tactical nuclear response would have broken the attack, and the strategic response would have hurt them even worse than they got hurt in World War II. (While you're doing your troop strength homework, look up how many casualties the Soviets took during World War II, expressed as a fraction of their population. The number is, by Western standards, astonishingly high. Russia KNEW, during the 1960s, what kind of casualties they could take, survive, and recover from.)
This is why the West refused to sign up for the "No First Use" policy that the Soviets pushed. Without the option to escalate to nuclear weapons, the West had NO chance of stopping a conventional Soviet attack.
The Soviets also understood this. It is why they attempted to install ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons on Cuba, in the early days of the Kennedy Administration. It is what brought the world within a gnat's eyelash of World War III.
None of the above is fiction, none of it is speculation. I had the privilege several years ago of talking, over lunch at The Men's Club of Dallas, with a guy who turned out to be the only B-52 aircraft commander in the United States Air Force who didn't fly his airplane out to his Fail/Safe point that day. He and his crew had just landed from a training flight when the orders were given. As he and his crew were walking in, he met everyone else going out to their airplanes. He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:5, Interesting)
None of the above is fiction, none of it is speculation. I had the privilege several years ago of talking, over lunch at The Men's Club of Dallas, with a guy who turned out to be the only B-52 aircraft commander in the United States Air Force who didn't fly his airplane out to his Fail/Safe point that day. He and his crew had just landed from a training flight when the orders were given. As he and his crew were walking in, he met everyone else going out to their airplanes. He reported that every single one of them was white as a sheet: they all believed that This Was It.
The Cuban Missile Crises is something that I believe is significantly downplayed by most high school and even university professors when covering modern American history. It is everything you claim and more.
Those who participated in the military at the time were of my father's generation, and to a man every single one of them knew the proverbial shit was hitting the fan at the time. Weapons lockers that were never, ever touched were opened and a massive mobilization of forces happened that was simply incredible. One guy I know was sitting in a Marine landing craft fully armed and provisioned for a month's operations about 20 miles from Havana when Khrushchev finally backed down. I don't know how much of that was saber rattling, but a full-out aggressive war was at least a very real possibility.
The world would have been very different if those plans had been put into motion, and it wasn't due to a lack of nukes or a President without balls. Similar incidents happened during the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations BTW, both of which get even less coverage than the Cuban Missile Crises. How World War III was avoided in 1973 is one of those facts of history that you have got to read about and investigate to believe, and just as remarkable.
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear weapons push things to standoffs and force armies backing down. The consequences are just too great if nukes come out. The Cuban missile crisis is an example of that. And obviously, had things gone differently, the whole world could have become a radioactive smoking cinder.
But nuclear weapons have prevented WWII style wars. Wars now are at least confined to one country's borders instead of spreading.
Why do people think that China hasn't invaded and taken Taiwan back? They have weapons lined up ready to strike but haven't. They are trying to push the USA financially, but ultimately, until they can be assured that we won't defend Taiwan militarily, they won't attack.
But if the USA disarms and China holds onto its nukes, does anyone really think China will continue to hold off enforcing its claim that Taiwan is really a part of China?
Not a chance. They will do as they please and if the USA interferes, all they need to do is threaten our forces with being nuked. End of story. Taiwan becomes part of China and the USA backs down with its tail between its legs.
The reality is that nukes are here and other countries have them. They are all different explosive sizes and they can and will be used by other countries if the USA disarms ours.
I guarantee to you that very few other countries feel the same "moral obligation" to disarm or to not use nuclear weapons in battle.
Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes, saw his soul and saw a friend. Bush was a fool. Russia and China are rebuilding their militaries, with China building faster than anyone knew until recently. Throwing away our only deterrent against these countries is simply giving them the green light to do as they please and use the Cheney salute ("Go F Yourself") to tell us what they think about any intervention.
As they say, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
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Basically, the existence of nuclear weapons make the old tactics obsolete. Remove the nuclear weapons and the old ways are no longer obsolete.
Of course the tough part is 'remove the nuclear weapons'.
...but the Libyans still have one. Well--guess who calls the shots.
Let's say the US and Russia totally ditch every nuke.
It would be the same if everyone in the world suddenly didn't have a gun--but I did. I'd be king. At least until someone invents phasers.
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MAD was the destruction of industrialized continents, not despotic third-world countries.
Using nukes to take out a Libyan dictator would do the USA more harm than good in the long term.
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Actually, it's not even that. Let's say Libya has the only nuclear weapon left in the world and there is nothing we can do to stop them from using. They use it to blow up a city. Now, no one has nuke. Next, we carpet bomb the shit out of every
Nukes were never viable in the first place. (Score:3, Interesting)
The only reason nuclear weapons are outdated is because they still exist....Basically, the existence of nuclear weapons make the old tactics obsolete. Remove the nuclear weapons and the old ways are no longer obsolete.
Ah, I strongly doubt it. If anything nuclear weapons have created alternative ways to wage war, because after they became the doomsday device they still are today, NO ONE in their right mind would ever use them. We simply tiptoed quietly back from that dark road the superpowers went down, but kept our finger on the infamous button.
It's a last-resort device, capable of damn near wiping out the planet if ever used in any large scale, which there is NO other scale, really.
That being said, taking away the n
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:4, Insightful)
Outdated indeed. The new tactics of war are about guerrilla battles, and small nimble forces that can wear down the enemy overtime. Using a nuke on them is like trying to swat a fly with a grenade.
No. Destroy an entire people and there is no-one to draw these "small nimble forces" from.
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral, and not a military one. They would be very, very effective militarily.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No,he is very clever :) (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral, and not a military one. They would be very, very effective militarily.
Maybe in the very short term, and assuming you don't want those assets that you are blowing into smithereens, or you don't mind not being able to get to the oil resources because they are in or near a "hot" zone.
I think you're also forgetting that the fallout would blow over US allies, and those US allies aren't going to like that. It's hard to maintain a hegemony if your hedge bolts.
Also, those people that you nuke, most often have relatives outside of the nuked zone, and they're going to be upset. The problem with the war on terror is that the1 "collateral damage" euphemism is covering up the fact that some of the families that are accidentally killed are going to be pushed to extremism. So for every bad guy you kill with an innocent bystander killed, you add another family that gets pushed into extremism, creating at least one more "bad guy". This is the danger of the "long war", it becomes never ending because you create your own endless cycle of enemies.
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You overestimate the effectiveness of nuclear weapons. In Hiroshima there were survivors in reasonably sturdy buildings 100 meters from the center of the blast. Even a fairly severe use of them would not evaporate enough people to significantly impair guerilla recruitment; to engage in bombings in the amount necessary to achieve any kind of extermination would cause significant fallout elsewhere on intolerable levels.
In fact, the result would probably be to provide them with a whole host of recruits locally
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Re:Rhetorical Question ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Rhetorical Question ... (Score:4, Insightful)
He isn't naive. Nobody is gonna get rid of their nukes, especially the USA, and he knows it. It puts international pressure on countries who really have no business with them. It is just good politics.
It would also be a hell of a lot less safe too. People know this too. We might say "down with nuclear weapons" in public, but if you put it to a vote, I promise you a large majority would vote to keep every nuke we own.
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He isn't naive. Nobody is gonna get rid of their nukes, especially the USA, and he knows it. It puts international pressure on countries who really have no business with them. It is just good politics.
In terms of countries that don't need nukes, I'd submit that any country with less than 10 million citizens (more or less) should never really consider having nuclear weapons. The main reason is one of cost and maintenance.
Nuclear weapons are costly... from the viewpoint of monitoring the weapons and using them. Not only does it require technically brilliant people to create them in the first place, but you have to have extremely skilled folks to even deploy them once you have an objective. Also, no sane
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That is what happens when you get your news from a very narrow band of sources.
Re:Rhetorical Question ... (Score:4, Insightful)
She was the only person "skilled" enough to bring out the base of die-hard republicans. Without her, McCain wouldn't have been able to count on the vote of the republican base. To the die-hard republican, she *was* the person they were voting for! The problem was, by bringing in Palin, McCain wasn't able to get the vote of so-called left-leaning republicans and "Regan democrats" (aka "The Undecideds").
Basically, McCain was trying to win the vote of two completely different bases that didn't like eachother's policies. By wining one base, he'd lose the other. But that is to be expected when you've got such a polarizing figure leading your party for eight years.
But now we've drifted so I'm done with this!
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I really think he does believe that the world is like Star Trek, where you can have a meeting with someone that totally hates you, and suddenly love breaks out
It worked for Jimmy Carter. Sort of.
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I really think he does believe that the world is like Star Trek, where you can have a meeting with someone that totally hates you, and suddenly love breaks out
It worked for Jimmy Carter. Sort of.
Yeah, it worked until Iran decided to take over the U.S. Embassy and he discovered that the military was in such horrible shape that it couldn't do what he wanted them to do. The fiasco of the hostage rescue mission was so bad that the U.S. military spent years afterward trying to fix the problems.
Oh, I guess you were talking about the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks. Yeah, that seemed to work out real well.... just look at how well Gaza turned out.
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Yeah, Bush did a great job boosting our leadership status. Cough.
At least we tried. If they dont cave, fuck them.. at least we'll have our allies helping us. Bush didn't try and just said "fuck em... we'll go at it alone and if you dont help, you are an enemy to". Now we are broke footing the bill for a war we never should have got in.
- Theodore Roosevelt.
Re:Rhetorical Question ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing as how the US essentially IS NATO, no matter what, we'd be stuck supplying most of the troops and most of the money.
And before people start foaming at the mouth about how I'm want war, I think the current war is idiotic and that the only justified war that the US has fought in a century is fighting against Japan during WWII. Outside of that, the US has never fought anyone who harmed them / posed a threat. That's why I laugh when I hear people talk of soldiers in Iraq / Afghanistan "defending our freedom" -- our freedom was never threatened by them.
Not as preposterous as it seems to us (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider if someone in 1910 had suggest than in less than a century europe would probably never have another war. Moreover all of the countries would acquiesce to a single common currency without losing in a war.
People would think you were nuts. in was unforseable. Yet the League of nation set the stage for cooperative behaviour, and the generation after WW2 made it happen.
in his speech in strassbourge he challenged the youth of europe not to take peace for granted but imagine a world that extended it even
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>No one will give up their trump card.
South Africa and Ukraine did so in the past.
Re:And nuclear power? (Score:4, Informative)
It won't.
There are many reactor designs (CANDU in particular) that don't require any enrichment at all. What he's talking about is no longer producing highly enriched U235 and/or PU239.
Of course, that's great and all, but there are already fairly sizable stockpiles of both within the established nuclear powers.
He's either posturing or pipe-dreaming.
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The answer is, unfortunately, depended on installed base technologies.
The ancient, prototype nuclear plant (the ones installed all over the western world in the 1950's and 1960's) DO require the very same enrichment cycle that nuclear weapons require.
The new types of reactors. Pebble bed, light water, what have you, don't require any kind of enrichment cycle (but would, in the US and all over Europe and Russia, require replacing most, if not all, existing facilities). Dropping the enrichment cycle would als
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The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune. Once they had breathed our air, germs, which no longer affect us, began to kill them. The end came swiftly. All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall. After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth.
Clearly, we have to pour money into germ warfare.
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only outlaws will have nukes!
You can pry my nukes from my hot, glowing hands? :)
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I don't see it that way at all. It sounds like that on the surface, but I don't think it's like that at all.
Take a society without guns (zero, none whatsoever) and put 1 gun into the hands of one side of an argument and 1 gun into the hands of the other side. Both sides are smart enough that they know using t
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The one thing to realize is that crazy guy isn't gonna have a mass stockpile of them either. He might get one or two of them and then use them to blow up $RANDOM_COUNTRY. It would suck a *lot* and justifiably piss people off *a lot*, but as long as everybody sane keeps their cool, the world wouldn't end. The world would end if the sane folk got into nuclear war... but but if they actually nuked each other, they wouldn't be sane would they.
What you *dont* want is to sit aroun
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But seriously, what the heck are we doing with over 10,000 nuclear warheads on our planet and over half of them in the north american continent.
I mean 100 wouldn't do it? We need 6000?
"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." - Carl Sagan
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Pandora is the owner of the box, she wasn't what came out of it.