Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz 707
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.'"
Inevitably... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Informative)
Luckily that never happens [everything2.com] and nukes are only launched after extensive consideration. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Insightful)
This just pushed wars underground.
This is what creates FARC, AL Qaeda and KLA, etc.
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget that nukes are, for the most part concentrated in the hands of nations that value human life, or at least
their own lives. Once that is changed, and the whacko religious states that see death as a pathway to virgins get
ahold of nukes and a deliver vehicle all bets are off.
AL Qaeda are symbolic pikers compared to religious zealots bent on ridding the world of something they
perceive as evil and willing to sacrifice themselves and their own citizens to do so.
In a world where everyone has weaponry of Mutually Assured Destruction, what means are left to maintain any order?
One could argue it just gives anyone a free hand to do anything short of launching to anyone else.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Insightful)
You really don't get it do you. Nukes are the weapon that most effectively targets leadership, the idiots pushing the buttons, the shit heads hiding in bunkers while every else does the fighting and dying. Every knew that wars would come to an end as soon as they created a missile that targeted the 'other guys' leadership from the top down. They are not so eager to fight when it is their worthless narcissistic arses on the line, then it's all let's negotiate and give peace a chance.
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Interesting)
You should read a bit of history, not even that far back, about how international relations worked in the 19th century. Or, in general, at any time between the start of the dark ages in the 8-9th century to into the 20th century.
Why do people feel the need to invade other countries ? Simple, historically the first and foremost reason has been because the invader believes they can win and do whatever they want, from annexing a tiny stroke of land to "this is what we do, this is how we live" mongol armies, to muslims massacring entire populations. More often than not, they were right that they could attack without consequences. Tactically speaking, wars are most often over before they even begin, since one thing is for absolutely sure : when it comes to war, nobody's interested in a fair fight.
But that's not why the west wages wars, at least not in the last 50-60 years. The west makes war to protect trade relations. Those wars are comparatively tiny, and the invader retreats without replacing the current population as most historical wars did.
Oh and by far the scariest weapon is not an atom bomb, which is really kind of pathetic, barely matching the death toll of a single bombing run, but the simple and humble knife. Several muslim empires have killed more then 200 million people each using only the simple and humble knife, and a quite dull badly made brittle knife at that. No other state or weapon has come anywhere close to those piles of corpses.
The real problem politicians have with an atom bomb is that it's near unstoppable : your hopes of protecting any location from an atomic bomb are small at best, and so you cannot protect your own ass. If you have a nuke, which is the size of a large woman's purse and the weight of 5 bricks of orange juice, it is trivial to kill, say Obama or whoever follows him, or Kim Il Sung for that matter. Just bring it near any public appearance of the guy and ...
They will have the same problems with automated sniper robots, for example.
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Until the crazy's form a nation
The likelihood of crazy people having their act together enough to form a nation with nuclear capability (or to take over a nation that already owns nukes, and then figure out how to use them) is pretty slim.
I think one problem with American media is they like to portray Muslim leaders as irrational. This makes for good propaganda ("why shouldn't we invade Iraq, it's being led by a madman anyway"), but in reality those leaders are quite rational, but they are playing by the political/sociological rules of
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This reminds me of the "Everyone should have guns, and then we'd all be safer."
"Safer" means relative to dying by the tens of millions in the next Holocaust or Stalinist regime because We The People collectively decided that the police and military should be the only people allowed to carry guns.
Read some history. Think it through.
Re:Inevitably... (Score:4, Insightful)
Read some history. Think it through.
Yeah, about that. Weren't the Blackshirts [wikipedia.org] and Brownshirts [wikipedia.org] actually citizens' militias who weren't part of the police and military after all? And in, eg, Syria today, aren't the Shabiha [wikipedia.org] also quasi-civilian militias?
But all the members of these regimes are all safer because such militias exist, I'm sure.
Fewer, but more destructive (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
More data needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Is there any doubt that the overall destructiveness is huge? It is way too unlikely that a thermonuclear war stays at the level of WWII destructiveness or just a bit above it.
The only open question is about the frequency.
Re:More data needed. (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say, that'd be about 1.
Re: (Score:3)
Interminable large scale conventional wars — OR — one nuclear war.
I honestly don't know which is worse. As it is we are at peace waiting for a nuclear war. I'm absolutely certain this is better than being in the middle of a conventional World War IV or V.
The thesis that nukes prevent conflicts between nuclear powers is 100% correct in my opinion. Our propensity to indulge our rage explains the invasion of Iraq; there was a deeply felt need to bloody someone more significant than Afghan warlor
Re:More data needed. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not likely to happen that way.
The most likely scenario for a thermonuclear war is between one or two smaller states with long running hatred
and religious fanatical governments.
The big players are likely to stay out of it. It will be far from a global event, and won't even fully destroy the
states involved.
Lets say Pakistan and India have a go, or Iran and Israel: I don't see any other state too interested
to jump into that mix on any of the sides. The participants get stung hard, exhaust their arsenals
and beg for humanitarian aid.
Contrary to popular belief a few tens of warheads going off is not going to affect life on earth
that much from a biological stand point.
Re: (Score:3)
It might affect human life, though. Not extinction level of course, but we've got good evidence that a hypothetical regional war with around 50 warheads of around the power of the Nagasaki bomb would bring with it a "nuclear autumn". A very large volcano blowing up a couple of hundred years ago brought "the year without a summer", this kind of regional war would bring "the decade without a summer". Growing seasons in the breadbasket of the United States would be cut by around 60 days, enough to cause food s
Re:More data needed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More data needed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, excellent, backup if global warming gets out of hand!
Re:More data needed. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually we don't have much evidence for 50 warheads theory. Maybe 200, but not 50.
Often these predictions are based on speculation and take on the trappings of truth, but when you track them down you find a single source with very little science behind it. The gigantic explosions of the Krakatoa [hubpages.com] volcano was equivalent to about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the bomb that devasted Hiroshima, Japan, during WWII, and it lowered global temperature by 1.2 degrees C for one year.
So 50 nukes = Krakatoa? No. Try something like a thousand or 500 modern day nukes for equivalent power.
But Krakatoa blew from below and lofted the entire volcano into the atmosphere. Nukes are triggered above ground and don't lift anywhere near that much material.
We heard the same predictions for all the smoke kicked up when Saddam fired all the oil wells. There were people actually wringing their hands and talking in terms of the "end of the world". You could see the smoke from space, so clearly it meant doom.
We've found at Chernobyl that radiation can also be survivable, even in fairly high quantities.
So as long as all the Nuclear nations don't fire everything at once, a regional nuclear war is likely to be a humanitarian disaster, but not that big of a deal globally.
Note: there is also the modern day assessment that only the US, China, Great Britain, and maybe France would have enough weapons to offer reprisal. And among the smaller nations, whoever strikes first would not have to face a counter attack. This would cut the number of actual warheads detonated.
This is the scary part if you ask me. With nobody else willing to step in on either side, and the participants having no launch on warning capabilities, the situation with proliferation of Nukes is such that some nut-job will sooner or later launch a surprise attack knowing they will not have their own country destroyed in return.
MAD only works if its truly MAD and if religious nut jobs don't see it as a path to heaven.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: jumping into the mix (Score:3)
Conflicts have been known to escalate beyond rationality in the past; World War I is a prime example.
Re: jumping into the mix (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:More data needed. (Score:4, Insightful)
So far we have had one nuclear war, one war between two nuclear-armed states that did not escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, and several wars between nuclear and non-nuclear states. We are still in the realm of small-numbers statistics.
Re:More data needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good thought, but the next generation of people would have no concept of the reality of war, so this weariness would slowly die out, and once again you'd be left with another not-war-fearing population.. It's not quite the same to read about war in a book as it is to actually experience it.
Re:More data needed. (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd have to rebuild society in a way that war would not occur because people would not be seeking the things that encourage people to go to war. You'd probably need to develop new language to de-emphasize the glory of conquest, acquisition of wealth, fame and things like that. You'd probably also need to get rid of top-down authoritative structures and place a lot more emphasis on the individual's responsibility in decision making, since war never looks good to the individual.
There are societies that are hard to imagine going to war, it's just that the people with the nukes don't belong to such societies.
Realistically, these kinds of changes would be necessary before we can go to space in any meaningful way. Technology that enables space travel is so powerful that making it easily available to everyone would practically guarantee a global nuclear war.
Re:More data needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wars pretty much happen because of scarcity of resources and imbalance of information. Both sides think they can win (even factoring in the cost of war) and both sides can't have the resources. Structuring languages and governments can make more slightly less likely, but not significantly so.
You can't fix the imbalance of information as no society will believe a simulation all the time, especially of war, which depends on all sorts of human factors. The only way out, really, is to have unlimited resources. That is actually the main thesis implied by the push for globalization: That through capitalism, we can have a non-zero sum game (drastically increase available resources to all nations) and avert real war. And it seems to work -- but it leads to the (reasonable) criticism of the anti-globalists: that there is still a finite amount of resources and sooner or later capitalist technological innovation won't be able to extend them any further.
Which leads to the basic final disconnect: Are you fundamentally optimistic about technology or pessimistic? If you're an optimist, we've already solved the long term problems that create world wars, and the last two were simply a painful transition period. If you're a pessimist, we've only delayed the inevitable and they were merely a preview of coming attractions -- which increased resource use is hastening.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wars pretty much happen because of scarcity of resources and imbalance of information.
It's not just resources. Lots of wars are about fighting over ideas. I'd say that most conflicts of the past century have been more over ideas than resources (examples: communism vs. capitalism, dictatorship vs. democracy, religion vs secular).
Re:More data needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
At least that's what they write in the history books.
Don't believe it for a second. Name a conflict and I (or someone) will follow the money and resources that someone wanted.
Re: (Score:3)
Both sides don't have to think they can win.
The side trying to take the resources from someone else would have to think they can win (well baring insanity of course). But the side defending its resources might know it can't win but figure fighting is better than handing them over. Or maybe the leadership sees fighting in order to secure better terms of surrender or a chance to escape as worth it?
See the US invasion of Iraq - Iraq fought even though it had zero chance of winning.
Re:More data needed. (Score:5, Funny)
No human anyway, but I'm sure some kind of ant would wonder what kind of creature managed to make it to the moon without an exoskeleton.
Maybe. It's speculative, and data is missing. (Score:3)
I don't think it's at all certain that quick and devastating nuclear strikes would amount to more dead than the conventional wars which nuclear weapons have made impossible.
This is, of course, as-yet unknown, since there has never been a war that has started with both sides already in possession of nuclear weapons.
Approximately 60 million people were killed in World war II, or about 2.5% of the world population. "Only" approximately 150,000-246,000 of those dead were killed by atomic weapons.
Well, true, but the second world war was actually two separate wars, one in Europe and one in the Pacific. The war in Europe was over before nuclear weapons were introduced. Even counting them both together, since world war II lasted about 2170 days and three of those days were fought with one of the two combatants armed with nuclear weapons, you're saying that 0.1
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Insightful)
That(along with the desire to have feeble little countries that can't say no to their betters' proxy wars, and a mutual desire to spend less on maintaining ICBMs) is really what bolsters the enthusiasm for arms control even among countries that already have lots and lots of nukes. Up to a point, the availability of nuclear arms can reduce conflict, or at least relocate it to countries nobody loves very much; but their broad availability could get unpleasant.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, by writing this article in the first place.
I mean, what does "peace" mean?
Does it mean that a government with nukes can abuse the crap out of its own people because outside forces dare not intercede for fear of starting a nuclear war?
Re:Inevitably... (Score:4, Interesting)
Nukes are easy for YOU to get rid of.
Making sure everyone ELSE gets rid of THEIRS is the hard part.
One small caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
His assumption requires that all the wielders of nuclear weapons are sane.
Re:One small caveat (Score:4, Interesting)
His assumption requires that all the wielders of nuclear weapons are sane.
Even when they are, war still finds a way.
Re: (Score:3)
No. If the US were nuked and we traced the fuel back to the Iranian enrichment program, no one would care about the subtleties. Iran would be leveled before the cries for blood died down enough for people to start thinking clearly again.
It wouldn't matter if Iran did it or "merely allowed their nuke to get stolen".
Re:One small caveat (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the assumption is that, despite the religious fanaticism and/or grandiose visions of world conquest of some leaders, those in possession of nuclear weapons are actually motivated by self-interest and self-preservation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the assumption is that war is intrinsically undesirable. Clearly, it serves an important purpose, or we would have set it aside long ago. I'd say the purpose of war is to destroy a state that has become a liability to the human race, and it's past time.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only that - it assumes that no one fucks up. Nuclear war was avoided for two reasons: both the USSR and the US were rational actors, and on both sides there were people who would rather die in a nuclear attack than press the button that started the nuclear war.
If every nation in the world has nukes - some more, some less - it is guaranteed that some nutjob will think that it is better to kill your enemy and be incinerated yourself than to tolerate the affronts for one more second.
There is a reason we do
Re: (Score:3)
It's a common phenomenon in board games. Players who no longer have a chance of winning may accept a worse or earlier loss in order to play "kingmaker" and give their favored adversary the victory over another who may otherwise have had the win locked up. Risk is especially notorious for this, since one can usual tell when one's position is hopeless before every avenue of suicidal but devastating attack has been cut off.
It's one of the ways that too much player interaction in a game can make it worse, esp
Re:One small caveat (Score:4, Funny)
We can prove this scientifically.
First, assume a spherical dictator. For example, Kim Jong-un.
Re:One small caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, he assumes that the problem is that someone wants to start a war with a nuclear-armed state, rather than the nuclear-armed state starting a war with someone else.If Iran nukes Israel, it won't be because Israel started it.
Re:One small caveat (Score:4, Interesting)
According to this map [wikipedia.org] from the article you cited I think you man Iraq and not Iran.
If you actually followed some of the links from the article you cited you would fined this [wikipedia.org]. The idea that Zionist want parts of Iraq in a conspiracy theory.
growing fanatical religious movement that have strong power base within the country
Care to cite something that supports this statement. All I can fined is a reference to a political party [wikipedia.org] that merged with a larger one on 1976. By the way, a single professor, Hillel Weiss, does not make a "strong power base".
I know Israel is widely suspected of already having them
There is quit a but of evidence [wikipedia.org] that takes the possibility of Israel having nuclear weapons far beyond "suspected". It is generally accepted that they have them but have not officially admitted to it because they do not want to open the conversation as to what they want them for.
The only connection between Israel and Iran is Iran's desire to "remove Israel from the pages of history". Israel has no desire to Iranian lands.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have anything to support your supposition that they're willing to go through... Not mutual, but uni-directional self-destruction in order to lop a couple of nukes at western cities?
Re:One small caveat (Score:4, Insightful)
How about the statements of the leaders of the country, both the puppet president and the Clerical Council?
Never underestimate the suicidal tendencies of someone who is part of an apocalyptic death cult like fundamentalist Islam or fundamentalist Christianity.
Re:One small caveat (Score:4, Informative)
Re:One small caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
you clearly werent in Kansas during the 90s, when the suicide bombers blowing up abortion clinics were all the rage.
There was a clear and present vandetta against Dr Tiller. It only stopped when they shot him in the face. [nytimes.com]
Look it up.
Fundies are more scary-dangerous than you realize.
Re:One small caveat (Score:4, Insightful)
Protip: They weren't suicide bombers.
A suicide bomber doesn't mind dying while they blow other people up.
The whole abortion clinic bombing thing reduced down to a few crazy-asses who liked using bombs, which, curiously, doesn't require religion as an excuse. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Care to cite any Kansas suicide bombers? According to this article [wikipedia.org] there has been none. In all bombings the perpetrator threw or set the bomb and left.
The main method of murder of abortion clinic employees has been guns and not bombs.
Re:One small caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
I've met lots of scary fundamentalist Christians and none of them would strap a bomb to his/her chest and run into a crowded market.
Yes, now they wouldn't, because they are part of the ruling class. Wait for the day when they reside in someplace where an Islamic army is the occupier.
Re: (Score:3)
We do have setups exactly as you describe (Christians living under Islamic regimes). Curiously, there seems to be a lack of Christian suicide bombers in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria...
Can you point some out for us, perhaps?
Christian are arguably worse bny anecdote (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, and a lot of people didn't take Mein Kampf seriously either.
Re:One small caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
The most radical Zionist factions in Israel are not in control of the government and believe throroughly in not dying, roughly "We're not dead yet, nyah nyah nyah!" even if they are aggressive colonizers. They don't have an apocalyptic religious ideology.
The mass suicide as Masada was in response to military conquest and siege. They were about to be slaughtered by the Roman army anyway.
I don't really see any parallel.
A really serious problem though with Iran is the same as North Korea, once Iran gets nukes, its people will never be free of its crazy tyranny, and I think that's a real motivation for the leadership.
Re:One small caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
A really serious problem though with Iran is the same as North Korea, once Iran gets nukes, its people will never be free of its crazy tyranny, and I think that's a real motivation for the leadership.
I think you misunderstand why the Kims are still in power.
It is not because the have nukes as they were in power for decades before they had them. Nukes only stop someone else invading, using them to prevent your own population rising up and overthrowing you has certain inherent problems to do with the fact that you kill yourself in the process. The reason the Kim's are in power still is because China has spent the last 3 decades supplying them with weapons in order to have a nice comfy buffer zone between them and South Korea (ie: the US).
In the last Korean war the US basically overran the entire Korean peninsula before China felt threatened and sent its troops in to drive them back. It was a proxy war between China and the US. China then viewed North Korea in kind of the same way that Russia view most eastern block countries in the 60's in that they were scared of the US invading them in the name of fighting the evils of communism.
Let's remember that we in the west did fight an awful lot of wars in the name of driving back communists where it was our troops fighting against local people who simply did not want us to pick their leaders for them. This has left many scars in peoples minds, and made many countries scared of us even now.
As to nowadays I think the Chinese are utterly embarrassed by their southern neighbour but not quite willing to give up their buffer zone and risk the country uniting under a government more friendly to the west.
Re: (Score:3)
"If they're a suicidal death cult, why have they held back from trying to "wipe Israel off the map" for the last 20-30 years?"
Uh, suicide bombers aren't in it for the suicide, they're in it for the bombing.
And if they had WMD's then why are they getting nukes? (because in reality especially chemical weapons are far less powerful and biological weapons are very unreliable).
Most likely, when they get nukes they will start up with nonnuclear war through Hezbollah.
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He should see Fog of War with Robert McNamara, and quote:
"Rationality will not save us. I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today."
That's a heck of a movie. Frightening the prospect Cutis LeMay advocated just nuking the heck out of Cuba and being done with it, never mind the fallout blowing around the Caribbean, Gulf and ultimately Northern Hemisphere.
Re:One small caveat (Score:4, Informative)
A counter-quote: "You make your own luck."
Not only were Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro rational, but also Stanislav Petrov and the dozens of other people over the decades who didn't panic (much):
http://www.skeptically.org/onwars/id7.html [skeptically.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Claims that Iran could do Israel serious harm are still dubious, but if it did launch any kind of a nuclear attack on Israel, all tacit support for Iran from China and Russia would evaporate instantly, and Israel's allies would be given pretty much instantaneous approval to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. Let's remember for all Iran's big numbers of armed forces members, most are poorly equipped Basij "weekend warriors". They're navy, air force and major military installations are highly vulnerable to atta
Re: (Score:3)
Those who tend to rise to power in religious circles are rarely concerned with religion and usually more concerned with power.
It's only the peons who blow themselves up.
Re: (Score:3)
Correction (Score:2)
Preventing large scale conflict between Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Western Europe, United States.
Meanwhile, we've had almost non-stop wars, revolutions, invasions and a few instances of genocide since Nagasaki & Hiroshima
I don't think it's working...
Now sharks with lasers, that might do the trick...
Maybe if we eliminated (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Nuclear technology is verifyable and in a reasonably stable world it is possible to enforce a ban. So we should. Bioweapons and cyberwarfare isnt verifyable so we should be working on that.
Obligatory Simpsons quote (Score:5, Funny)
Lisa, I want to buy your rock...
false (Score:2)
Gandhi's threats of NUCLEAR WEAPONS never kept me from going to war with him, so clearly this premise is false.
Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what he said, wars have been relegated to "peripheral states", not major states. Proxy wars between major states inside a third-party country is not the same thing as a direct war between the two major states.
Re: (Score:3)
The whole point of the interview is that they wouldn't have died if both sides of those conflicts had had nukes. Put the pedantry on pause and RTFA.
Wars are impossible? (Score:3, Insightful)
If nuclear weapons have made war so unlikely, then why does the USA spend so much time and money fighting wars?
Re: (Score:3)
His whole argument is to let the "over there" states get nukes also and we can no longer fight on their turf at risk of being nuked ourselves.
Ozzy thought of that decades ago (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimate Time Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ultimate Time Bomb (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if I can be blunt, what you state are the words of a simpleton.
The fact is, there are nuclear weapons in the world. They are here and they are not leaving until something more powerful comes along and to decry their existence is pointless and left for debating by simpletons who live in a dream world.
Permeant peace is an unachievable dream since every State has their own goals and many of those goals go against another States goals. In a sense, nuclear weapons create a temporary peace that is very very very long. Creating a balance where if one nuclear actor strikes another, they will strike back with nuclear weapons. This creates a very balanced, and I will admit, frightening peace.
Iran and North Korea, with all of their bluster, are never going to strike their nuclear neighbors since the neighbors will strike back with nuclear weapons. The balance being; anything they have to gain will be lost in the mushroom clouds that soon form over their own cities. Their leaders might be crazy, but they know the day they strike with nuclear weapons, is the last day they are in power and power is all they care about.
Re: (Score:3)
> Their leaders might be crazy, but they know the day they strike with nuclear weapons,
> is the last day they are in power and power is all they care about.
Yes, and what if they are about to removed from power, e.g. uprising? What's to stop them from having the
mentality of "if I can't have, no one will".
I tried this on a micro-scale once... (Score:3, Funny)
Why can't they see that I'm trying to keep them safe?
Ponder This (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Ponder This (Score:4, Informative)
Which is nonsense. The USSR didn't even attack Japan until August 18, which was after both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Truman making the decision to drop the atomic bombs to prevent the Soviets from grabbing more than Kurils when the Soviets didn't have the Kurils till after the bombs were dropped would be an amazing example of prescience....
Re: (Score:3)
Would it have taken Nostradamus to figure out that the USSR would do the same thing to Japan that they did to Eastern Europe if given the chance?
Re: (Score:3)
At the Tehran and Yalta Conferences Stalin agreed to wage war on Japan within 3 months after the war ending in Europe. And the U.S.S.R. did so to the day on August 9, 1945.
Althought there may have been thoughs about limiting Soviet opportunities for expansion, dropping the bombs on Japan was the alternative to amphibious invasion by the United States, Britain, and the other allies. From Wikipedia's article on Operation Downfall [wikipedia.org]:
Japan's geography made this invasion plan quite obvious to the Japanese as well; they were able to predict the Allied invasion plans accurately and thus adjust their defensive plan, Operation Ketsug, accordingly. The Japanese planned an all-out defense of Kysh, with little left in reserve for any subsequent defense operations. Casualty predictions varied widely but were extremely high for both sides: depending on the degree to which Japanese civilians resisted the invasion, estimates ran into the millions for Allied casualties[1] and several times that number for total Japanese casualties.
The citizens of Hiroshima are not convinced. (Score:3, Informative)
The citizens of Nagasaki second the argument.
No wars... right... (Score:3, Insightful)
So the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Dominican Republic wars, the Arab-Israeli and Yom Kippur wars, the Soviet and American invasions of Afghanistan, two Persian Gulf wars, the Falklands War, the Invasion of Grenada, the Serbia-Bosnia war, and too many more to list... those are just what, "police actions"? Some of them you can discard as "non-major countries", but too many of them had major, nuclear-armed powers on at least one side.
In fact, you could argue that nukes have produced *more* wars. Just look at Wikipedia. They obviously don't have a single page listing every war that ever was, but they've got it broken up by dates:
List of wars before 1000
List of wars 1000–1499
List of wars 1500–1799
List of wars 1800–1899
List of wars 1900–1944
List of wars 1945–1989
List of wars 1990–2002
List of wars 2003–2010
List of wars 2011–present
Weird how roughly 40% of all wars happen *after* 1945, when he says war basically ended. That assumes that all sub-lists have approximately the same length, which isn't precisely true, but it's close enough for our purposes (in fact, the longest seem to be the 1900-1944 and 1945-1989 lists). So you could easily argue that, while nukes may prevent major wars, they do so by converting them into numerous small wars.
And even his premise of "no major wars" is not proven. Sure, we haven't had a World War since '45. That's 65 years or so. They've had wars that *lasted* longer than that. Having a peace that lasts that long in "Western and Northern Europe and North America" isn't exactly uncommon. I can imagine people made the same argument about the rifle in pre-Napoleonic Europe, and I know people said such things about machine guns after WWI.
The Fallout games had it right - war never changes.
Re: (Score:3)
Considering the Western Hemisphere, there were several "general wars", involving the major powers of the day. The Seven Years War could probably be considered the first actual world war, as it involved the Great Powers and their overseas empires.
That is considerably different than regional or civil wars. Yes, there have been more of those, but when you compare them to the sheer losses of massive conflicts like the Thirty Years War or WWII, it's hard see how your comparison is all that fitting.
Re:No wars... right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
No wars... right... (Score:5, Insightful)
The article doesn't say no wars. You just refuted a point the article didn't make.
Some of them you can discard as "non-major countries", but too many of them had major, nuclear-armed powers on at least one side.
Exactly as the article says. Things like police actions and proxy wars will still be fought.
I can imagine people made the same argument about the rifle in pre-Napoleonic Europe.
Imaginings are not evidence.
Also: Any Wikipedia list of anything will be biased toward current events.
He is absolutely right (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
357 magnum peace keeper, now Nuclear Rocket (Score:3)
Yes and no (Score:5, Interesting)
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 flaw (Score:3)
The flaw in this argument, of course, is nuclear weapons prevent wars between great powers in the same way the IMF, World Bank, and the Fed prevent the collapse of banks. That is, they can do so for decades, but when the banking system fails everyone goes down together.
It's an academic question anyway. There isn't any way to verify a country hasn't stashed a few nukes away on the sly, which means nobody is going to get rid of their arsenal completely. There will never be a nuclear weapon free world.
Think of the game developers! (Score:3)
But if we don't abolish nukes, then we won't get a proper world war going again, and what will FPS developers do?
Huge logical hole. First prove your premise (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
...Two little nagging problems with this are Hiroshima/Nagasaki, which weren't very peaceful as about 135,000 people died in two flashes of light.
I will remind you that the war in the Pacific was killing that many people per month, so if the bombings hastened the end of the war by as little as 5 weeks, they saved as many lives as they took. (Not even accounting for those who would die by starvation due to the fact that the Japanese had drafted all the farmers into the war effort.)
With or without nuclear weapons, the war was brutal.
Nuclear weapons haven't kept much peace (Score:3)
Or the IRA from attacking the UK military. Or Chechen separatist from attacking the Russian military.
For that matter, nuclear weapons didn't stop forces from nuclear-armed superpowers from directly engaging each other in Korea, Vietnam, and a number of other places, either.
So, nuclear weapons haven't stopped:
1. State actors without nuclear weapons from engaging in armed conflict with nuclear armed states on the other side (Arg
Re: (Score:3)
Peter Singer, in discussing his book, Wired for War [pwsinger.com], once pointed out that the difference between a nuke and a drone-launched missle is largely academic to the people at the point of impact.