Nuclear weapons are utter madness to be "messing around" with, we need to dismantle all of them to make sure no accidents occur.
Said South Africa...
Tribal dynamics are still a very real thing there, and it's not inconceivable that a leader might decide to slime those jerks across the way that have been rivals since well before colonists showed up.
You also have to remember why the apartheid government developed the nuclear/bio/chemical programs in the first place, and who they considered to be their enemies - looking at the range of the respective payload delivery platforms (or lack thereof) should give you a hint.
> Tribal dynamics are still a very real thing there[...]
...and the apartheid intelligence apparatus fanned those flames of division to the bitter end, by supporting, and providing training for the IFP militia[1] to put the ANC on the back foot.
> [...] it's not inconceivable that a leader might decide to slime those jerks across the way that have been rivals since well before colonists showed up.
The apartheid government didn't consider black people to be citizens of South Africa, instead, they were regarded as citizens of balkanized Bantustans which were supposedly sovereign enclaves, divided by tribe, and forcibly moved (by the apartheid government). I have great difficulty believing the same apartheid government was motivated to denuclearize in order to avoid inter-tribal strife.
They had zero interest in detonating a nuclear weapon just to kill black people, especially not on their own territory. RSA intelligence services certainly investigated things like race-specific diseases, but that's not what the nuke program was for.
Maybe. What if it is like forest fire prevention? The dead timber accumulates, and thus when an uncontained fire breaks out, it is 1000s of times worse as a result.
Fully managed forests, sometimes have controlled burns now, to prevent this.
Are nukes like this? Maybe, for tension can build, and build, and then?
Note: I don't know an alternative.
Have we really left total war behind? Is it really, finally, to awful to contemplate? That would honestly be a huge step forward for humanity. It seems too good to trust. This isn't the terminal phase of history; 2,000 years from now this may be a blip.
From the Cuban Missile Crisis portion of Fog of War
"Lesson #2: 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."
I'm all for arms reduction that maintains strategic deterrence. Everyone knows that MAD is, well, mad -- but the real question is whether it is more or less mad than the alternatives, and the leading alternative is to trust a bunch of sovereign nations to act together against their best interest, and that's even more mad than MAD.
Russia detected something rising off the coast of Norway. The performance looked like an older US SLBM. It was heading towards Russia and north--not towards anything important but a viable trajectory for an EMP decapitation attack. What it really showed is how poor their systems were.
The bird was real. It really was an older US SLBM--repurposed as a scientific launcher. It was launched from an island off the coast of Norway--but the Russian systems weren't good enough to figure that out. They also weren't good enough to figure out it was really heading mostly north, basically following the coast. And their bureaucracy had lost the launch notification, probably related to the fact that it didn't have a time on it. The bird was prepped (a good reason to use a solid rocket, it can sit there on the pad for a long time) awaiting the conditions it was meant to study.
With technology open war became more and more destructive until it passed the threshold of there no longer being a point. Two modern nation states can easily entirely reduce each other to ash in a few hours, and not before the other side can do the same.
Precision weapons also make nukes unnecessary in large ways.
It’s not about tension, big wars are pointless suicide pacts.
The big world wars were about nations feeling powerful with new technology and wanting to build on that power, that’s not the case anymore. No nuclear powers are going to think they’re better off after a war.
There’s not tension building to explosion, war is obsolete between technologically advanced states. Proxy wars, civil wars, and border skirmishes are all that is left or will be until there is a major technological change that changes the cost/benefit of war.
Now Pakistan perhaps less so, but apparently the US believes it's at least secure. North Korea definitely less so, but their capabilities are comparatively very limited
The real threat from North Korean nuclear weapons (other than empowering North Korea geopolitically) is in proliferation. And that's probably one (albeit minor) reason everybody tends to look away when they skirt the embargo.
https://www.dw.com/en/pakistans-indirect-role-in-north-korea...
There is also evidence of Pakistan sharing nuclear weapons technology with Saudi Arabia.
The reality of modern world is that nuclear powers get to push around every other nation without consequences, whether overtly (like US getting away with invading two countries in the recent years) or covertly (proxy wars). But the world sees the use of nuclear weapons as qualitatively different from conventional ones, so having even one nuke you can threaten other countries with seems like an effective way to deter other powers from bullying you too hard.
I only see it as a deterrent for invasion. The US and South Korea will think twice before drone striking Kim if they know there could be a nuke in the air.
For any other diplomatic purpose the other party must surely just walk away when the "or we'll nuke you" argument comes out?
On the negotiation table, there's only so far one nation can push another before the other one starts considering military options. There's no sharp line here - economics and war are parts of the same spectrum. Usually, it's in the best interest of every party to stay on the "economics" side of the talks. Both parties having nukes makes both of them try harder.
IOW, if NK lobbed a nuke anywhere they would cease to exist. I'm pretty sure Mr. Kim understands that.
That's what they said after WW1, the "war to end all wars", yet we had another and (in my opinion) rather narrowly avoided a third between the '50s-'80s.
A foolish belief that no-one would dare start another large-scale war allows nations to indulge in grand posturing and ever closer brinkmanship which will inevitably to (surprise) another war.
Interestingly enough the US has been retrofitting their nuclear arsenal with better targeting systems, making it much more effective. The Russians don't like this, which is why you hear talk of hypersonic missiles, autonomous submersibles carrying nuclear warheads, etc.
Perhaps some kind of neutron-based weapon could be developed to counteract large numbers of incoming ICBMs in the upper atmosphere, or to destroy an enemy nuclear arsenal in place. There we concepts like this, and the US even built some for defense against ICBMs (The W66 warhead).
One slightly paradoxical thing with nukes is that anti-ICBM systems makes us less safe by making the strategic landscape less stable. If a hypothetical world power trusts their “shield” then they are incentivised to strike their enemies nuclear forces in the hopes that they destroy enough enemy missiles that even if they launch them all they can be reliably soaked up by the “shield”. And it in turn incentivises the other party to strike first or risk loosing their nuclear arsenal. That sucks.
On the other hand having a survivable second strike capability can act as a stabilizing force. Those countries who believe they have this know that their enemy knows that even if they sucker punch them they will suffer. That’s the “assured” part of the MAD doctrine.
So it is not really the number of nukes which makes things more or less stable but other factors. If you are interested in these questions, and want to listen to much better analysis than what I have presented here I can warmly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1C75RVHDMY&ab_channel=DonRi...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-02-ca-1276-s...
>‘STAR WARS’ BACKERS TO AIR TV AD
>BY JAY SHARBUTT, NOV. 2, 1985 12 AM PT, TIMES STAFF WRITER
>Last May, a scientists’ group took to TV in Washington to oppose the Reagan Administration’s “Star Wars” proposal for a space-based missile defense system. Now, a group supporting the Strategic Defense Initiative, as the concept is formally known, will make its case as did the scientists--with a TV commercial.
>The two opposing sides are the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Coalition for the Strategic Defense Initiative. The former contends that a space-based missile defense system can’t be perfected, would militarize space and increase the possibility of nuclear war. The latter argues that such a system would work and prevent nuclear war.
>Although light years apart in their beliefs, the two organizations have one thing in common: Their 30-second commercials each use the powerful emotional appeal of a child facing a nuclear holocaust.
[...]
>Its commercial, which had a local TV test run in Washington on Oct. 12, opens with a child’s stick-figure crayon drawing of a family and a house, with a large sun shining above.
>A little girl is heard saying that she had “asked my Daddy what this ‘Star Wars’ stuff is all about. He said that right now we can’t protect ourselves from nuclear weapons and that’s why the President wants to build a peace shield.
>“It would stop missiles in outer space so they couldn’t hit our house. Then nobody could win a war . . . and if nobody could win a war, there’s no reason to start one.”
>As she speaks, a dome is drawn over the house and family. Incoming missiles strike the shield and are destroyed. The dome turns into a rainbow. Frowning faces become smiles, and the girl concludes with: “My daddy’s smart. Support the peace shield.”
[...]
>He says the coalition’s ad has three aims--the first a contention that a defense-in-space system is feasible right now. Another is to drum up public support for congressional backing of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or the “peace shield” as he calls it.
>The group also wants to air its ad, he says, “to offset the anti-SDI propaganda, such as has come from the Union of Concerned Scientists with their 30-second thing, which says what SDI is about is blowing up little children.”
>He referred to the union’s TV effort last May. That $10,000 commercial showed a little boy watching the night sky, singing a snatch of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Suddenly, a star explodes like a nuclear blast and an announcer says: “Heavens are for wonder, not for wars. Stop ‘Star Wars.’ ”
[...]
i don't except that this number is greater than 0. i hope the cia and the kgb know.
Nuclear weapons have incredibly tight tolerances to be or remain viable, those tolerances degrade over time, so they require frequent maintenance in order to stay usable. Many have been "lost" over the last 70 years, sure, but few if any of them would actually still function without state-level expertise in maintaining them - the kind of capability which could just make new ones anyway.
Sure, they could still be used as fodder for "dirty bombs" but so could a lot of things and it's much less of a concern.
Dirty bombs basically just make a mess, they are not a realistic threat.
You can raise your children in relative peace because the social contract still holds. The fact that a neighbour you don't like hasn't walked into your house and shot everyone to death, has nothing to do with your goverment/military stockpiling nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons need to be dismantled or stored in neutral territory in case we encounter belligerent aliens.
Let's also not forget that social contract survives because of a legal system and people enforcing it with power overwhelming any individual trying to violate it. On an international stage, there's no such top-down enforcement (all nations are sovereign) - there's only mutual policing, and nuclear weapons are the overwhelming power.
My god, what an arrogant statement. Your faith in overwhelming force is misguided.
The social contract holds because an individual makes a choice to choose peace. That is all the law can do - give us options of consequence. The law can't stop anyone from slaughtering their neighbours or running a bus through a full schoolyard. Thats why despite the US being one of the best armed and equipped police states - school shootings, which are unheard of in most countries - have continued to exist and continue to be perpetrated by teenagers.
Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.
No, that's not all. The crucial missing ingredient here is the individual being able to assume others will make a peaceful choice too. The law offers incentives and disincentives that very strongly promote making peaceful choices - and it's because of that everyone gets to hold the belief that almost everyone else will be mostly peaceful.
(By "everyone" I of course mean "strangers" - laws and governments are not needed when communities are small and everyone personally knows everyone else. It's the scaling up that made formal governance necessary.)
> That is all the law can do - give us options of consequence.
Yes. The "consequence" part comes from the law being backed by a system of enforcement that wields overwhelming force.
> The law can't stop anyone from slaughtering their neighbours or running a bus through a full schoolyard.
It can't stop anyone who's bent on it, but it is an effective deterrent, and this is why, in fact, it does significantly reduce occurrence of such events in the population.
> Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.
Individual responsibility is a measure of how good you are at following incentive structures in your environment for longer-term benefit. It neither creates nor maintains those incentive structures.
Crimes like rape and sexual assault still happen in cases where everyone knows one another (90% of cases). Even when everyone involved is family! The law and government are still needed to give strength and redress to these victims. What recourse would they otherwise have?
People are mostly peaceful, but emphasis on the mostly. The mostly doesn’t go away when then community size decreases - people will still mostly be peaceful, but others sometimes won’t. And when they won’t, that’s what law and government are for.
No, you are the one who is misguided here for having any faith in personal responsibility. Humans are inherently greedy, and if left to their own devices without consequence they will absolutely attack their neighbors.
Of course, I'm arguing a tautology. And ignoring that while most animals in a social species are socially motivated, certainly some of them will 'cheat'.
Meanwhile, the other strong drive that both humans and other animal species share is competition between the groups. Over the course of history, humans started to form groups of hundreds, then thousands, and eventually millions of people. In such groups, the drive to subdivide and compete dominates - the history of social development is one of inventing social technologies - cultural and legal mechanisms that keep those large groups whole and defeat our competitive instincts.
Modern corporations contradict that claim.
Corporations are strongly structured internally. They usually have a "spine" of bog-standard hierarchical organization[0], and some form of secondary, graph-like, functional organization, different in every big company. Like e.g. (roughly real structure, but fictional names):
- Hierarchical spine: I currently work for team Awesome, under business unit BU1, under department D1; I report to manager Eve (Awesome), who reports to Fred (BU1), who reports to Greg (D1) who reports to Helen (CEO).
- Secondary organization: My team (Awesome) closely works with teams Invincible (BU1) and Jazzy (BU2), all with slightly different reporting chains.
There are dozens other teams in the corporation and several more BUs. I almost never interact with them directly. My social cooperation instinct covers my team and other teams in the "secondary organization" section. Separation of responsibilities and complex structure prevents my team from actively competing with other teams - we either cooperate with them, or don't know they exist.
This is how corporations scale. If you want to see a scaled-up system demonstrating competitive tendencies, that's... the market itself. And it needs the strong, top-down, hierarchical regulatory system to prevent that competition from immediately turning bloody[1].
--
[0] - Which is the fundamental social technology we've invented that allowed us to scale the societies and build a civilization. It's why every large (> ~100) group of people you can find has some form of hierarchical governance.
[1] - As a social technology, the modern symbiosis between the market and governments is a marvel. It's by no means perfect, but the fact still is: we didn't just suppress our competitive tendencies while scaling societies up - we've harnessed them and put them to work, and it mostly turned out OK.
Having to distrust your business partners is not uniquely American in the slightest.
The only major exception is perhaps for certain limited sectors of the finance industry where derivatives contacts are understood to be a zero sum game. So everyone looks for clever ways to screw their trading partners. But European financial firms are just as ruthless as their American counterparts. In fact the Europeans have often been more willing to cross ethical lines.
Honestly, you're both wrong. It's obvious that overwhelming force doesn't work as a deterrent, at least in the context of the modern US, as you point out, and it's not great as a response. But as the other poster says, you need to be able to assume that most of the time, everyone else will choose peace, and in the modern US, that's not at all a safe assumption.
Both of you are ignoring two factors: culture, and material conditions. I'm only going to address material conditions, because while culture is important, there's not actually a lot you can do about it except through changing material conditions. In the modern US, people generally live in "atomized" conditions — you may know your neighbors, but you're not interdependent with them in any way. Most people don't really have any say in what their community is like, other than the individual act of voting once in a while. Most people work for a living, but don't really have any say in what their work life is like, because that's decided by managers, and people don't have much incentive to identify with their work or take pride in it, because the conditions of their work are decided by someone else, and the product of their work goes to someone else. People are encouraged to identify with their consumption choices, but in the end that just increases the framing of human social interactions as commodity exchanges.
In that context, it's not surprising that the social contract breaks down and that force is not terribly effective in enforcing it. If you want to change that, you have to change the underlying material conditions producing that alienation. Doing so is left as an exercise for the reader.
TL;DR: It no longer pays off. Before the industrialization, the way to improve your countries productivity was to acquire more land, more people, more resources - annex your neighbor. After the industrialization, that is no longer true. Any war against a power that is roughly approaching your power is likely to be net negative: You'll loose more of your economical improvements than you'll gain by annexing lands that are probably destroyed by war. It's what makes guerrilla warfare so powerful. The author also convincingly argues that the first and second world war were a product of people still stuck in the old, per-industrialization mindset while the economics and destructive power of post-industrialization applied.
(very selective) Quote:
Historically speaking, there is actually something to this. As Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization (2006), for most of human history, war ‘paid,’ at least for the elites who made decisions. In pre-industrial societies, returns to capital investment were very low. ( ...) For antiquity, the Roman Empire (...) one estimate, by Richard Saller, puts the total gains per capita at perhaps 25% over three centuries.
But returns to violent land acquisition were very, very high. In those same three centuries, the Romans probably increased the productive capacity of their empire by conquest 1,200% (...). Consequently, the ‘returns to warfare’ – if you won – were much higher than returns to peace. The largest and most prosperous states tended to become the largest and most prosperous states through lots of warfare and they tended to stay that way through even more of it.
As Gat notes, the industrial revolution changed this, breaking the agricultural energy economy. Suddenly it was possible, with steam power and machines, (...) to do work (...) – for the first time, societies could radically increase the amount of energy they could dispose of without expanding. Consequently – as we’ve seen – returns to infrastructure and other capital development suddenly became much higher. At the same time, these new industrial technologies made warfare much more destructive (...). Those armies were so destructive, they tended to destroy the sort of now-very-valuable mechanical infrastructure of these new industrial economies; they made the land they acquired less valuable by acquiring it. So even as what we might term ‘returns to capital’ were going wildly up, the costs of war were also increasing, which mean that ‘returns to warfare’ were going down for the first time in history.
It’s not clear exactly where the two lines cross, but it seems abundantly clear that for the most developed economies, this happened sometime before 1914 because it is almost impossible to argue that anything that could have possibly been won in the First World War could have ever – even on the cynical terms of the competitive militarism of the pre-industrial world – been worth the expenditure in blood and treasure.
. Underestimation of the cost of an early 20th C. war. Some glorious charges, you win, get home in time for dinner.
. A game theory problem in that once you start mobilizing you can't stop. Not starting the war is more dangerous than simply drawing down.
. The simple fun (for leadership) and profits in a war. Pushing pieces around a map is an enjoyable endeavor.
. Interlocking treaties with single points of failure.
etc.
Probably not at all, although it's hard to think/talk in a general fashion about such large systems.
The Axis Powers strike me as fighting a more reasonable war than (for instance) their WWI aggressor predecessors if you view it as simply a grab for land and resources. It's a thing that a Khanate or a Roman governor would understand and appreciate. I'd say that the actions of the Germans and Japanese would make perfect sense to the ruling class of most pre-modern states.
It's hard work to avoid Historian's Fallacy.
If they've traveled across the stars to find us, I suspect nukes ain't going to save the day.
If you replace inter-stellar with inter-continental, that might just be something that a (misguided) Aztec wise man would say when he met Cortez.
Another take at this is from Charles Stross in Singularity Sky [2], where a whole human fleet is again destroyed by aliens like a flick of a switch.
I know these two are science fiction, but like comment, a nuke won't save the day when aliens have been forced to live in the void for the travel time and have engines capable of taking them here.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168817-the-dark-forest
2. https://www.goodreads.com/series/189931-remembrance-of-earth...
3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81992.Singularity_Sky
It still blows my mind that it’s 53 years old.
Lifeforms able to travel the universe are unlikely to be vulnerable to our nuclear weapons in a significant way. They might just not care about us and eat our sun. Or they might infect our planet with their spores.
The idea that space-faring aliens would be at a comparable technological development to our species has no base. That we would have a chance to respond to an attack is even more remote. It just makes for a story we can respond to emotionally, which is why these stories are told. Hoarding nuclear weapons for for such an occasion would be like goat-sacrifices to the gods.
A nuke with no way to get it to an alien ship in space is irrelevant. The alien ship will have no problem throwing rocks at us. It's pretty hard to imagine some sort of stardrive that doesn't provide a practical kinetic bombardment capability.
About the closest to a weaponless drive would be the Bergenholm of the Lensman series--but even that was eventually used to throw planets.
I'm still mind bogglingly confused at how badly the San Onofre nuclear power plant got butchered that I really think there was sabotage involved. It's hard to believe what happened to the place is all because of sheer stupidity.
You probably know this, but nuclear reactors, despite how well known various incidents are, are still among the safest, cleanest, and lowest carbon ways to make electricity we know [1]
Nuclear weapons don't last forever and need to be dismantled/replaced at some point, so dismantling them all doesn't add additional risk as long as it's done over a long enough period that they would have needed to be replaced anyway.
Have you any link to a good summary? The Wikipedia is interesting but doesn’t make us sound as malicious/scandalous as you suggest.
The idea that nuclear war are mad but lets keep normal wars seems really insane to me.