Why not ban nuclear weapons all together?
I know it may look naive at first, but intelligence services are super advanced these days. If some country would try to develop one, we should know immediately.
I know it may look naive at first, but intelligence services are super advanced these days. If some country would try to develop one, we should know immediately.
Here's an existing worldwide ban that a bunch of countries already signed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_N...
But nuclear powers like United States, Russia, China, North Korea didn't sign it.
Now what? What's the game theory logic that would incentivize a country to disarm its nuclear weapons? Even if a country signs it, how do you monitor every underground missile silo or submarine in the ocean for compliance?
An equally powerful/cost effective weapon that left no radiation damage and no burning city afterwards even if there is still only a crater left.
That way you can have mutual destruction without destroying the rest of the world as collateral. It will be a technology replacement.
You will not loose any strategic capability, meaning you can make progress without the "timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment" thing that is never going to happen with the incentive structure as its now.
There is no incentive for weapons that can destroy the entire world if the entire world is not aligned, only for weapons that can destroy nations.
That said, this line of thinking makes me sick, while at the same time it seems impossible to me without something similar, you have to make them obsolete.
We need to talk about it more. With 9/11 (and some American attempts to establish nuclear 1st strike doctrine), it sort of fell off the radar. Noam Chomsky always mentions nuclear weapons as the biggest threat to humankind, along with global warming.
We need to emphasize the uselessness/cost of nuclear weapons for rational/moral actors and the risk of irrational actors taking control.
The two largest nuclear arsenals (Russian and American) have been steadily decreasing over past 30 years, but it could happen faster.
I doubt this will ever happen. But maybe in a post-Putin, more democratic (or subdued) Russia we could get there. Not sure how enforcement would work, but a global inspection organization combined with national intelligence capabilities might be sufficient to detect any significant build up. One can dream I guess.
Still safer for the world in general though.
I'm inclined to put this one on the "shrug and accept it" pile and focus on other things. It's not like we have a shortage of other problems to contend with.
Like present day North Korea and Iran? Intelligence services let us know that development is underway. But as GI Joe would remind us, knowing is only half the battle. Who enforces the ban, and who pries nukes out of US, Russia and China's cold dead hands without setting any of them off?
Because you will become the slave of some country that does not ban those?
I mean, it does not require a tremendous amount of imagination after you can see it for yourself in Ukraine.
>I know it may look naive at first. >If some country would try to develop one, we should know immediately.
I don't know what "we" means, the US of America? Certainly small countries have not such bast resources and intelligence as the US to control the rest of the world. But even the US is not omniscient, and if it were and could know everything it is not omnipotent to tell the other countries what to do.
No country is going to give up their nukes. Ukraine did exactly that yet here we are...
If that were true, how do you reconcile every Western intelligence agency being 100% wrong about the likelihood of Russia invading Ukraine?
https://mobile.twitter.com/rnaudbertrand/status/149849110790...
No. You seem to forget that many strategists also thought Russia wouldn't launch a full scale war against Ukraine.
Predicting the next war now prior to any such planning/moves is a silly expectation of people, even if they're experts.
Russia threatened Finland with invasion if they join NATO. Are the Russians actually going to invade Finland when the later joins NATO?
If Russia starts moving troops towards Finland, and intelligence agencies start getting indications from electronic and human intelligence, and the rhetoric starts ramping up, you start being able to make more educated predictions.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/25/us-intel-predicted-russias-i...
> For months, the White House made highly unusual releases of intelligence findings about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to attack Ukraine. Hoping to preempt an invasion, it released details of Russian troop buildups and warned repeatedly that a major assault was imminent.
> Critics of U.S. intelligence — including Russian officials who dismissed invasion allegations as fantasy — had been pointing to past failures like the false identification of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But Russia’s invasion so far has played out largely as the Biden administration said it would back in December, with nearly 200,000 troops striking from several sides of Ukraine.
Dec 4, 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/us/politics/russia-ukrain...
Dec 23, 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/us/politics/russia-ukrain...
Jan 19, 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/biden-putin-r...
Feb 11, 2022: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-ukraine-invasion-any-tim...
Down to the day of the invasion, it was as if the western intelligence services were two steps ahead throughout the build up and actual invasion, dispelling the Russian misinformation campaign in real time.