Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Even Known" | Hacker News Reader

Nukes Are "The Only Peacekeeping Weapons the World Has Even Known"

thediplomat.com

21 pointsdshankar14 comments

Comparing Iran to China or Russia is absurd. It is a terrorist run nation that openly says it wants to wipe Israel from the face of the Earth. It being a nuclear power is not a deterrent that will bring peace.

Consider whoever told you this an unreliable source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#...

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/israeli-minister...

It's obvious that some in Iran's government don't like Israel, but that's a long way from pressing the button to wipe it off the map.

I didn't see any mention of the scenario where Iran sells nukes to Al Qaeda who may perform a strike by proxy. Nuclear material can be sourced back to the lab of origin in some cases, but I wouldn't bank on that being enough to dissuade terrorists.

Would you rather have a 5% chance of a war that kills 50,000 people, or a 0.01% chance of a war that kills 5 billion people?

You have no idea of whether these probabilities and payoffs are correct. WWII killed tens of millions of people, not including nuclear weapons. I have zero doubt that there would have been a conventional war between US and USSR in the 20th century if it hadn't been for nuclear weapons, and that war would have killed millions.

So which is better: a 100% chance of a war that kills millions, or a 0.01% chance of a war that kills 5 billion? On a calculated payoff basis, a 100% war would only have to kill half a million people before it's "worse".

We don't know the probabilities here. I don't think the actual probability for global nuclear war is as high as 0.01%, for one; and I do think nuclear weapons are the biggest reason for global peace. Politicians would love to start more wars if they could.

Those who have studied the issue put the annual probability of a nuclear war on the order of one to three percent per annum.

People tend to dismiss the risk because it hasn't happened yet, but it's fairly easy to game many possible scenarios.

This isn't the study I was thinking of, but it was the first that I found.

http://phys.org/news167327145.html

My point wasn't that the probabilities were correct, my point is that the author pretends like this "marginal utility" based argument has no merit. In a world with nuclear weapons, there is some non-zero chance of a nuclear war that results in massive casualties (if not complete eradication of the human race.) Counterbalancing this scenario with the one whereby there is more likelihood of a large-scale war but less likelihood of global extinction simply shows that the point the author is making is not as clear cut as he/she makes it out to be.

Does that make the United States the most peaceful nation the world has ever known?

Only until the first one is let loose in a conventional war.

And or only if we're talking about at least modestly rational nation states (all bets off in the hands of 'rogue groups' or terrorists).

It's not amazing at all that Israel has remained the sole nuclear power in the Middle East. Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria have all been attacked (in one form or another) over the years to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons.

It should be noted that nuclear weapons weapons were used twice during a war that is almost universally thought of as 'conventional'. Furthermore, they were used against a state that arguably had ceased to act as a rational entity quite some time before August 6, 1945.

Later the increasing quantity and quality of nuclear weapons combined with the de-fusion of the underlaying technologies to a growing number of international actors in the 1950's and 1960's lead to the Soviets and Americans backing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty regiem. This was done to avoid an August 1914 Nuclear-Redux in which the super powers would be pulled into a full scale nuclear exchange. Thus the situation in the middle east today can be traced back to actions taken almost 50 years ago.

Do you have any reading material that you could point to in regards to your comment about "the situation in the middle east"?

I'm not saying you are incorrect - actually the opposite is true (I believe this to be the case). I'm not much of a student of history and would like to educate myself.

Thanks.

Sure thing.

Frist, the NPT is part of a larger system of treaties, alliances and agreements that grew during the Cold War and its aftermath. 'Cornerstones of Security: Arms Control Treaties in the Nuclear Era' (2003) by Thomas Graham and Damien J. Lavera is somewhat dry but exhaustive.

Secondly, here is an interesting over view of US Government thinking on weapons of mass destruction at the end of the cold war:

http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1993/9341/9341.PDF

Finally, Nigel Ashton's 'The Cold War in the Middle East: Regional Conflict and the Superpowers 1967-73' covers the actions of many international actors in the middle east during the critical years during which the Non-Proliferation Treaty was put into effect.

With luck both of these books should be available via inter-library loan.

I intentionally left out WW2 because only one nation on earth had nukes, and only at the end of the war. It's not a valid reference in a discussion about multiple countries having nukes and that acting as a form of peaceful standoff.

The point about conventional war is, for example, if India were stomping Pakistan in a conventional war, there would be an inflection point at which Pakistan would be willing to unleash nuclear war to stop India. History is a pretty consistent reminder about how irrational nations can be, there's nothing about nukes that prevents that.

Japan had not acted rationally for a very long time. They invaded China and slaughtered civilians by the tens of thousands. They initiated war against the the Ally powers and joined with Adolph Hitler. I'm not sure what your point in referring to that is however.

I think the biggest propaganda coup of the US in recent years is convincing the world that "rogue", "terrorist" etc. groups are irrational. It justifies so much.

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