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)
One small caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
His assumption requires that all the wielders of nuclear weapons are sane.
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)
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.
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:One small caveat (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 don't build buildings by balancing them on a single pole, or that we don't.... wait, so that's one of the few examples left where we do not try to exploit some very small stable region in a chaotic system to extract some maximum profit out of it. Let's just not add one more major system that is just barely stable, and where instability results in humanity starting over.
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: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: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: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.
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.
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:Heard this one before (Score:2, Insightful)
How is that a problem? The use of nuclear weapons ended the war and saved the tens of millions of lives that would have been lost in a ground invasion of the major Japanese islands.
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.
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.
Re:One small caveat (Score:1, Insightful)
> How about the statements of the leaders of the country, both the puppet president and the Clerical Council?
Nope, you are gonna get flamed for saying that. It is unacceptable to take the stated positions of madmen seriously.
Re:One small caveat (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, and a lot of people didn't take Mein Kampf seriously either.
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:No wars... right... (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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: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:1, Insightful)
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.
sounds like the US to me. Mod me troll if you want, but take a serious good look at what the US have done to the world in the last 10 years. Exercise to the reader: list the wars the US started, the casualty they incurred and the suffering it brought during that time frame alone.
JigJag
Re:Inevitably... (Score:5, Insightful)
This just pushed wars underground.
This is what creates FARC, AL Qaeda and KLA, etc.
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: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: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: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: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: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:More data needed. (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: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.
Re:More data needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Inevitably... (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.
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: 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?