Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Ever Known," Says Waltz 707
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the especially-when-we-drop-them-on-people dept.
from the especially-when-we-drop-them-on-people dept.
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.'"
Re:One small caveat (Score:1, Informative)
He also assumes that all nuclear states are politically stable. Civil war and government breakdown in a nuclear state could lead to some very undersirables (ie terrorists and criminals) getting hold of nuclear weapons. At that point all bets are off in term of if they will use them or not.
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Informative)
Luckily that never happens [everything2.com] and nukes are only launched after extensive consideration. [wikipedia.org]
The citizens of Hiroshima are not convinced. (Score:3, Informative)
The citizens of Nagasaki second the argument.
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:One small caveat (Score:4, Informative)
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:Inevitably... (Score:5, Informative)
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.