Comment by post_from_work | Hacker News Reader

Comment by post_from_work | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>>>Some very powerful governments (like Austria, Brazil, and Indonesia) have already signed it and it is already ratified by 59 nations. This is hardly a bunch of plebs signing a petition.

Austria? Brazil? Indonesia? None of those are nuclear-armed states...which means that their "power" is effectively ZERO. It also costs them nothing to slap a signature on a document that has no material impact on their national security, because they have no capability to lose. You seem to have a very....idealistic view of international relations. Let me explain how nuclear disarmament would play out in the real world:

UN Signatories: We don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons.

US/Russia/China/etc: Nah, keeping these "just in case" is an important part of our international influence.

UN Signatories: I guess we will have to forcibly disarm you?

Nuke States: You can try. Invade me, and I'll burn your entire population to cinders, and make your lands glow in the dark for the next 10,000 years. ( https://geopolitics.news/euroasia/russia-adopts-nuclear-firs... )

UN Signatories: Ok on second thought we'll just send you another sternly-worded letter....

And that's how the conversation ends. Because sovereign states that are unable to enforce their will on others have no real power.

>>>What I’m pitching here is for you to contact your national government and encourage them to sign it if they haven’t done so already.

I'm a citizen of not only a nuclear-armed state, but arguably the world's most influential global hegemon: the USA. If any of my politicians even HINTED at supporting such a disarmament, I'd vote them out of office ASAP.

I read the entire treaty here: ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_... ). The Preamble reads like it was drafted by a drum circle of hippies, stoned on a beach in California. It's not written in a manner that is in any way persuasive to the people who actually need to be convinced: the national security leadership.

If this is a policy you seriously want to advance, I recommend taking a hard look at how national security professionals establish values and objectives, assess problems, and work through cost-benefit analyses in pursuit of said objectives. Know your audience, or you will never talk them into an alternative course of action.

> I'm a citizen of not only a nuclear-armed state, but arguably the world's most influential global hegemon: the USA.

That's essentially an unveiled admission of a want to hold the rest of the world hostage and establish domination. There's little rational nor justifiable about such a want from the perspective of anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.

> Because sovereign states that are unable to enforce their will on others have no real power.

Well, they signed the treaty anyway, did they? I'd say the implicit signal here was: "We don't listen to a hegemony who isn't willing to listen to the rest of the world." What they did was take a moral high ground, and condemn anyone who didn't sign.

Call it virtue signaling, but in international diplomacy, it's a pretty powerful statement. The U.S. may have nuclear weapons, but it's still very much a part of the rest of the planet.

The same is true for all the COP conferences from Rio to Glasgow, and climate protocols, over the past 30 years.

> If this is a policy you seriously want to advance, I recommend taking a hard look at how national security professionals establish values and objectives, assess problems, and work through cost-benefit analyses in pursuit of said objectives.

Which objectives? To who's benefit? Yours? The U.S.? The rest of the world?

The U.S. is in a tentative spot of taking an exclusive role in determining what is or isn't a moral high ground. Whether that's nuclear disarmament, or reducing CO2 / curbing climate change, or social equity.

This is used as an argument for new, upcoming powers like India or China to forge their own path forward, for better or worse. If the U.S. wants to keep playing a role of significance in the 21st and 22nd centuries, it will have to relinquish its hegemonic stance.

>>>That's essentially an unveiled admission of a want to hold the rest of the world hostage and establish domination. There's little rational nor justifiable about such a want from the perspective of anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.

We've already been holding the world hostage, arguably since we ended Breton Woods in favor of the Petrodollar, and definitely since the Soviet Union collapsed. This might be rational or justifiable to non-US citizens if we better communicated how Pax Americana is to their benefit. But we suck at soft power, and have squandered much of our goodwill with our devastation of the Middle East. So I fully understand and appreciate, for example, Russia and China doing everything in their power to break the back of our supremacy.

>>>Well, they signed the treaty anyway, did they?....Call it virtue signaling, but in international diplomacy, it's a pretty powerful statement.

It cost the signatories nothing substantive, and it changed nothing substantive. I will absolutely call it virtue signaling.

>>>Which objectives? To who's benefit? Yours? The U.S.? The rest of the world?

Which objectives? The objectives of the nations that employ said security professionals, as typically laid out in a "National Security Strategy" or similar document. So my point here is that in order to convince the people who control nuclear assets to change, one needs to understand them. You can't persuade them if you are not communicating with language that resonates with them in the first place.

>>>This is used as an argument for new, upcoming powers like India or China to forge their own path forward, for better or worse. If the U.S. wants to keep playing a role of significance in the 21st and 22nd centuries, it will have to relinquish its hegemonic stance.

This is actually something I strongly agree with. I think it is folly for a mismanaged nation of 330 million to expect to continue to lord over 7+ billion people that are rapidly closing the gap of technical and/or institutional competency across the board. The US is failing on several key fronts 1) failing to recognize the limitations of its hard (aka military) power 2) failing to make the necessary domestic investments in infrastructure and education to even keep it abreast of rising, high-population nations 3) failing to capitalize on existing soft power.

We should have begun to pivot away from the Petrodollar after the Soviet Union fell, should have kept the footprint in Afghanistan smaller, and never should have invaded Iraq. I would have cut the active-duty Army and Air Force to the bone outside of special operations forces, and relied on expeditionary Navy/Marine forces, sailing from the US itself. That's still an overwhelming amount of combat power for most global security threats. Spend the money saved on high-speed rail, thorium reactors, fusion research, and pre-collegiate education that doesn't suck.

> Austria? Brazil? Indonesia? None of those are nuclear-armed states

This is a little bit moving the goal post, I was only arguing against your point that this treaty was just a bunch of plebs signing a petition. But I would just like to point out that South Africa is a previous nuclear state which is a party to this treaty. Disarmament has precedence.

History has examples of nuclear states cooperating. 6 of 9 nuclear states have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (China, France, Israel, Russia, UK, and USA) and 3 have ratified both annexes (France, Russia, and the UK). No signatory (including the USA) has conducted a nuclear test since 1997 and North Korea is the only country to conduct a test since 1998. This treaty has been a huge success even though we can still do better with respects to North Korea.

The Non-proloferation treaty is an even greater success. India, North Korea and Pakistan are the only nuclear states which haven’t ratified it. Since it came into effect in 1970 we’ve seen the worldwide stockpile decrease by more then half. But we can still do better.

At the risk of muddying this post with unnecessary geopolitics I’m gonna be equally speculative and come up with made up scenario which counters yours. The point of this exercise is not to make predictions—as they will probably not come true—but to demonstrate that fictional scenarios can back up either cause. You did yours, so here is mine:

* During this decade more and more countries will sign and become parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. At some point a NATO member will become a signatory (perhaps Germany or Norway from popular demand and favorable government; or Turkiye to assert their independence).

* At some point, seeing the world take the cause of total elimination, the UK might become the first nuclear country to sign the treaty. Perhaps after a Labour victory during a push from party members which oppose the nuclear weapons program.

* With most of Europe having signed the EU might pressure France into signing.

* Israel might go the way of South Africa, with a post apartheid government dismantling the program on their own volition.

* India and Pakistan might have an easing of relation and as a sign of good will they might sign this treaty jointly.

* Korea might unify, and the unified government might want to put it’s dark past behind it with a strong sign of cooperation.

* After most of the world has signed China might fear the optics and might sign in the hope to prove it’s moral superiority over the USA. But secretly sees their program as expensive and unrealistic so this treaty—if proven popular—might be a good excuse out.

* Russia might follow Europe if tensions around Ukraine ease and sign the treaty from popular demand both domestic and from other countries. Or it might cop out for similar reasons as China in this hypothetical scenario.

* This leaves only the USA. Maybe in a decade or two—if this treaty proves popular—and only the USA and a few microstates which depend on aid from the USA haven’t signed it. And maybe the democratic leadership shifts towards more progressive candidates which takes issues with the American exceptionalism which the current Democratic and the Republican parties share. Maybe then the USA will become the last nuclear state to sign.

Again don’t take this as a prediction, this won’t be this easy. This is only an exercise in speculation. My point is only to counter a hypothetical scenario which favors one outcome with another equally fictional that favors the other. My main point is that international treaties have proven effective in the past, and there is no reason to think they won’t this time.

>>>I was only arguing against your point that this treaty was just a bunch of plebs signing a petition.

I don't mind going down the rabbit hole on this word usage. I was trying to use plebs to communicate "not the people making impactful decisions in the halls of power". The governments of non-nuclear powers have no ability to force nuclear states to do anything, so for all practical purposes they are indistinguishable from the commoner folk.

I'll agree that digging deeper into the case of South Africa might yield some insights, but I think much of it boiled down to avoiding international pariah status, which was already a problem due to apartheid.

The Comprehensive Test Ban is one of those brilliant "pulling up the ladder after you've made it" moves. It's a tool to hang over the heads of anyone that needs to debug their nuclear weapons, such as up-and-coming nuclear powers (NKorea, Iran). It hurts the existing nuclear powers (who already have giant datasets and fine-tuned nuclear equations) less than it hurts potential newcomers. And even still, it's not enforced as most of the existing nuke powers haven't ratified it.

>>> My point is only to counter a hypothetical scenario which favors one outcome with another equally fictional that favors the other.

Our two scenarios are not in any way, shape, or form "equally" fictional. Anyone with even the most basic real-life work exposure to the national security establishments of Great Powers can attest to that. And often the populations themselves are cut from a similar cloth. My hypothetical, where the nuclear powers ignore the requests of the non-nuclear nations, isn't too far off from the long-standing refusal to modify the permanent membership/veto power of the UN Security Council. ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1758-5899.1... ) So we already have precedent for the Great Powers telling everyone else to pound sand.

In contrast, your hypothetical scenario that posits Russia would eliminate nukes due to "popular domestic demand" is completely out of touch with reality. Look at Figures 6 & 7 from this paper: ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep29483.16 ) A whopping 68% of Russians support either maintaining or expanding the number of nuclear weapons. In the second chart, 52% say the government does "enough" to ward off external aggression via nukes and a further 23% responded the government doesn't do enough and should do more. Although what "the people" want is of limited concern as they don't run Russia anyway ( https://www.amacad.org/publication/russias-oligarchs-unlikel... ). Look at similar public perception survey results for China: ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205316802110328... ). The population wants their government to retain nuclear weapons. Overwhelmingly. The Chinese don't "fear the optics" of nuke possession, or see the program as expensive and unrealistic. Their population, especially the younger generations, are quite hawkish ( https://uscet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/How-Hawkish-Is-... ) As for India and Pakistan easing tensions and jointly signing an anti-nuke treaty?!?! These two nations don't even have an established back-channel for defusing nuclear escalation! ( https://www.iiss.org/blogs/research-paper/2021/05/nuclear-de... )

I'll bow out, I doubt we will reach any common ground, but I applaud you for maintaining a cordial conversation on a serious and difficult subject.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com