MSD

Disarmament is a feel-good bullshit gesture, and mutually assured destruction, not idealism or goodwill, is what has kept us from being destroyed. The only surefire way to keep rational actors from using weapons of mass destruction is to ensure that they know there will be an equal or greater retaliation.
Did you ever play hide-and-seek when you were young? Did you ever pick the same hiding place as another kid? If you were both almost invisible, chances are you would have bumped into each other.

Baraka_Guru

If this were completely true, France and England would still be at war and not merely bumping their nuclear toys into each other during their oceanic bathtime.

But I think I get your point on one end of the spectrum, and it's unfortunate.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Cynosure

I followed the link to that Ogle Earth page, which was mentioned in the news article that I quoted in my previous post...



Wow. I hadn't imagined a modern-day nuclear sub would have a prop like that. It looks wicked, like something out of a Jules Verne story.

roachboy

this sounds very doctor strangelove.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Cynosure

Maybe it does sound like something out of Doctor Strangelove. But it is true, for the most part, that it's been "mutually assured destruction", and not idealism or goodwill, that has kept the world from being destroyed by a nuclear war.

As for "disarmament": What is the difference, really, whether the world has 1,500 operational (i.e. not merely intact) nuclear warheads, or 15,000? Because, 1,500 would be more than enough to destroy the world.

ring

1500 are too many...1 is too many.


"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."
Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu epic recalled by J. Robert Oppenheimer while viewing the first nuclear explosion in Alamagordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945
"And just at that instant there rose as if from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green supersun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great wall of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years."
William L. Laurence, New York Times, August 26, 1945, Account of the Trinity Test on 16 July 1945

"We can sum it up in one sentence: Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.......Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments -- a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason."
Albert Camus, Combat, 8 August 1945

"We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business. Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out a salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear. Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction."
Bernard Baruch, Speech to UN Atomic Energy Commission, 14 August 1946

"There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction."
John Foster Dulles, Speech to UN General Assembly, 1952

"The survivors would envy the dead."
Nikita Khrushchev, Pravda, 20 July 1963

"A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes...could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors--as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, `the survivors would envy the dead.' For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors."
President John F. Kennedy, address to the nation on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 26 July 1963

"In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second--more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide."
President Jimmy Carter, Farewell Address to the American People, 14 January 1981

"From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive."
Pope John Paul II, Address in Hiroshima, 1981

"it is not morally acceptable to intend to kill the innocent as part of a strategy of deterring nuclear war."
U.S. Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace, 1983

"It is simply not acceptable that our future lies in the hands of only five nuclear weapon states. It belongs to all nations, to all peoples, to present as well as future generations."
Joint declaration of the members of the Five Continent Peace Initiative, 22 May 1984

"Almost imperceptibly, over the last four decades, every nation and every human being has lost ultimate control over their own life and death. For all of us, it is a small group of men and machines in cities far away who can decide our fate. Every day we remain alive is a day of grace as if mankind as a whole were a prisoner in the death cell awaiting the uncertain moment of execution. And like every innocent defendant, we refuse to believe that the execution will ever take place."
Members of the Five Continent Peace Initiative, Argentina, India, Mexico, Tanzania, Sweden, and Greece, The "Delhi Declaration" 28 January 1985

"Humankind continues to face the threat of nuclear annihilation. Today's hesitation leads to tomorrow's destruction. The fates of all of us are bound together here on earth. There can be no survival for any without peaceful coexistence for all."
Takeshi Araki, Mayor of Hiroshima, 6 August 1985

"Nuclear weapons are clearly inhumane weapons in obvious violation of international law. So long as such weapons exist, it is inevitable that the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be repeated -- somewhere, sometime -- in an unforgivable affront to humanity itself."
Takashi Hiraoka, Mayor of Hiroshima, Hiroshima Peace Declaration, 6 August 1995

"The human race cannot coexist with nuclear weapons."
Iccho Itoh, Mayor of Nagasaki, Nagasaki Peace Declaration, 9 August 1995

The Insanity
"It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives."
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Testimony to House Appropriations Committee, 1961
"Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around...Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it."
T.K. Jones, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, Research and Engineering, LA Times 16 January 1982

"U.S. defense policies ensure our preparedness to respond to and, if necessary, successfully fight either a conventional or nuclear war."
FY 1983 Budget of the United States Government

"the supreme guarantee of the security of the [NATO] Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance. ...Alliance nuclear forces continue to play a unique and essential role in the Alliance's strategy of war prevention..."
NATO Communique, 29 November 1995

"Anyone who considers using a weapon of mass destruction against the United States or its allies must first consider the consequences. ...We would not specify in advance what our response would be, but it would be both overwhelming and devastating."
Secretary of Defense William Perry, 18 April 1996

Seaver

The newer design is even cooler. I won't go into it... but those engineers know what they're doing.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

MSD

And they're here to stay. They're going to sit and decay, be replaced with newer, more powerful, more efficient ones when they reach the end of their shelf life, and politicians are going to continue to squabble about the numbers, brag about their achievements when the numbers go down, and point fingers at each other and call names when the numbers go up.

roachboy

the assertion--it's not an argument---that mutually assured destruction, which was the american nuclear "strategy" during the cold war, the "winning" scenario within which was a bunch of military types wandering bunker system beneath the surface of some irradiated wasteland every once in a while pausing to congratulate themselves on having won---is somehow responsible for the fact that we've not all been vaporized is the kind of claim that could be made about anything, really: since the middle 1950s, people have consistently sat in chairs and we've not been vaporized so sitting in chairs has contributed to our not being vaporized. you could say the same thing about any action. and it'd be no more absurd than the claim that the rationale behind nuclear proliferation has somehow made us safer.

i don't think that disarmament is necessarily "feel-good bullshit"---it's more a problem for the extensive patronage networks that have taken shape around the nuclear procurement systems of the national security state. by extension, what disarmament poses a direct challenge to is the national security state, which has no ongoing justification, which is an incredible drain of resources and which really should be dismantled.

dismantling nuclear weapons systems is a desirable goal and is in principle entirely within the realm of possibility. of course to do that, those rational actors who sell such technologies would have to do something else. or be stopped. which is also doable. it would not be a simple matter, particularly at the level of enforcement, so long as obsolete notions of nation-states persist--but even there, nothing about the difficulty of disarmament leads to a metaphysical claim as to impossibility.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

shakran

The reason it's feelgood bullshit is that even if Russia claims to have gotten rid of all its nukes, how do we know that's true?

Now, I agree that having enough nukes to kill off the planet 100 times over is a bit much, but having enough to do the job 3 or 4 times pretty much guarantees that the other guy won't think he can wipe your country off the face of the planet on a whim.

I remind you that no country, including ours as was evidenced by the previous Commander in Chief, is immune from having reactionary idiots at the helm with their finger inches from the launch button. If Khrushchev had gotten the notion that a nuclear attack on the US would result in the US getting wiped out with no damage to the USSR, do you seriously think he'd not have attacked? I'm more comfortable with both of us having weapons of mass destruction that we're too afraid to use because the other guy would use his too, than I am with either one of us being the only side with nukes.

roachboy

these are all self-evident problems that say almost nothing about the assertions concerning mad earlier.

the problems of verification are mostly political. at this point, the same problem you raise about russia could be raised about the united states or israel...the political question is resolvable once it is decided that these weapons are not worth having. and i do not think that they are worth having in principle: but you have to recognize that circulation of technologies, materials and designs through the magickal market (for example) places limits on what disarmament can functionally mean--but reducing the number of nuclear weapons to the greatest possible extent seems a good idea. i don't see the objection to it on principle, and think that these "realistic" assessments confuse a political situation with a natural situation.

closest analogy so far--international agreements to ban the use of shit like mustard gas after world war 1.
does that mean that such items are not produced? hell no--the cold war was a great time for the migration of the worst possible types of thinking about weapons systems. has gas been used since world war 1? in isolated cases, yes--but the key is in isolated cases. so it's possible for the international community to simply decide that there's no ethical or political justification for NOT dismantling nuclear weapons to the greatest possible extent and doing it.

the counter argument seems to me to amount to a reading of the word "disarmament" so that it can only be operative if it's total.
i don't see that as a particularly compelling interpretation.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

Yeah, I should start by writing a letter to my member of parliament....oh, wait—

Never mind. That isn't necessary.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

ring

The current world wide financial implosion, that seems to be snowballing
more quickly than even the experts can fathom or control,
just might perhaps be beneficial towards disarmament as a necessity.

Nationalism has been dead for some time now.
I believe that the US, and other countries,
will be moving past this denial phase we've been clinging to,
soon.

Seaver

I have to disagree. Nationalism is NOT dead. If it were, we'd have a heck of a time getting new recruits and we would have ran out of re-enlistees a long time ago.

As far as nuclear disarming, it would be as effective as the Pope outlawing the crossbow. Few powers can afford to live without it. Hopefully it'll never again come to be used, but the ultimate trump card retaliation is hard to ignore. Much may have been made about MAD, arguably too much, however in the parallel universe of no-nuclear weapons it's hard to imagine the massive standoff not coming to blows.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

MSD

Look at non-trivial armed conflicts since 1945. How many armed conflicts have been perpetrated against nuclear states compared to the number perpetrated by non-nuclear states, and against whom they are perpetrated. It is a matter of performing a very simple cost-benefit analysis to conclude that if the number on nuclear weapons in the world is equal to or greater than one, it is more beneficial to have one or more than to have none.