5 ms·

Why would it be asinine? Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can use them. After all, that's what the Cold War demonstr

by alexqgb 13y ago

Why would it be asinine? Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can use them. After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you. In essence, your own use must be heavy enough to absolutely ensure no possibility of retaliation. Accordingly, it's not enough for Tehran to nuke Tel Aviv. They also have to nuke every city in every nation that's part of NATO and they'd have to do so at the exact same time. In the Soviet era, we mitigated a threat of this magnitude with the Nuclear Triad, which distributed our weapons on moving platforms around the globe, ensuring that even if we were obliterated by a Soviet attack, we could make our very last act one of equally devastating retaliation. The resulting situation, known as Mutually Assured Destruction (yes, MAD), was the thing that not only kept the Cold War cold, but ensured (in theory) that any direct conflicts that did break out would never go nuclear. You must realize that there is absolutely no way for any middle eastern country to build arsenals and delivery platforms formidable enough to replicate the Soviet stance. And even if there were, the enormous gulf between the size of their economies and ours means they couldn't get a quarter of the way there without the US rearming - even from from scratch - and recreating the MAD dynamic. The nuclear logic is simple: unless you can use them on a scale large enough to avoid any threat of retaliation, you cannot use them at all. You can't even threaten to use them without putting your own life at risk. In that regard, they're like trying to take hostages on an airplane post-9/11. Knowing what we all know now, every one of passengers will be thinking the exact same thing: corner the bastard and either cripple or kill him. Like soldiers dressed in bright red coats, nuclear arms are a relic of age that has passed, never to return. The more openly we can acknowledge this, the better off the world will be.

malandrew 13y ago
I don't know about anyone else, but the simple fact that a large portion of human beings would elect other human beings with the capacity and resolution to press the button in case of a MAD-type event to be completely asinine. The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership. How we, the Russians and several other countries reached the conclusion that such people should be leading us is frightening and reflects quite poorly on the capacity of our species to scale. Is there any other social, colony-creating species out there that has developed a similar mechanism for retaliation against some threat that also guarantees the wiping out of their own colony?
- mikeash 13y ago
  It's the Prisoners' Dilemma writ large. We'd all be better off if we all cooperated, but we're individually better off if we defect. Incidentally, a lot of game theory was developed during the Cold War to analyze nuclear war.
- arethuza 13y ago
  I was very pleased to find out that at least UK politician admitted that, even if our country had been nuked by the Soviets, he wouldn't have retaliated - of course he couldn't admit that while he was in power! "You had to make people think you would use [the bomb] even when you wouldn't." http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-healey-defence-radio-interview http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-h...
- alexqgb 13y ago
  "The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership." That was the cornerstone of Cold War propaganda. The leaders who'd do this weren't our own, they were the Soviet's. And as Godless Communists, they weren't even proper human beings to begin with, which made them even more dangerous. The only way to keep these monsters in check was to let them know that killing every one of us (which was surely their deepest desire) would also be the end of them. In reality, this was just not the case. As the animated map of nuclear tests shows, the most threatening country on Earth was US, by a wide margin. We took an early, unchallenged lead in developing nuclear arms, and maintained it relentlessly for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo Watching this, it's hard to maintain the fiction that we were the good guys reluctantly responding to the looming Soviet threat. Put simply, there was no nuclear threat when we started arming ourselves heavily. In anything, you wonder why the Soviets took so long responding to the growing threat posed - without serious provocation - by the Americans.
dataisfun 13y ago
Well, Israel also has nuclear subs.
- arethuza 13y ago
  Worth noting that these are diesel-electric submarines that may have nuclear armed cruise missiles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin-class_submarine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin-class_submarine
VLM 13y ago
"You must realize that there is absolutely no way for any middle eastern country to build arsenals and delivery platforms formidable enough to replicate the Soviet stance." Why bother replicating the Soviets? You flip flop from building multiple soviet naval carriers to the concept of nuclear arms in general, which is hard to read. The delivery vehicle of the future is COTS shipping containers for inland cities, "anything that floats" for coastal cities. You have to realize this is not 1900 anymore. World trade means that part of the world ships out millions of barrels of oil per day. Not literally inside individual barrels, but you might be surprised. And as the illegal drug trade and the illegal alien invasion shows, the US borders are basically wide open. No need for hollywood plots when UPS / fedex / DHL / USPS will do just as well. Always think outside the box. More than a dozen years ago, how would Saudi Arabia knock down skyscrapers in NYC? That's insanity, they'd have to launch cruise missiles or build a battleship and successfully park it off the coast of NYC, or invade overland with bulldozers or something. The actual solution turned out to be a somewhat simpler social engineering hack against existing hostage rescue procedures. So send out a fleet of 100 "fishing boats" to all the major ports. Each with innumerable radios to communicate with each other. And (at least) one capable of going boom. Yes, I think the odds of someone replicating the USSR .mil, holodeck style, and then actually pressing the button are somewhat minimal. On the other hand, the odds of someone actually trying something equally effective are pretty good. For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen. "Yo, Bush the Third, err, I mean, Obama, pick a number between 1 and 12" and then some desert gets zapped. Then ship a disarmed, shut off one to a high value target via USPS or any other service. It'll cost two working models and you need perhaps a dozen packed up and well hidden to be effective. I would imagine the reaction would never be declassified, and I'll be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
- alexqgb 13y ago
  "Why bother replicating the Soviets? You flip flop from building multiple soviet naval carriers to the concept of nuclear arms in general, which is hard to read." "For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen." Uh, these aren't even proper English sentences. Pardon me for not taking the rest of your paranoid fever dreams about shipping nukes via UPS even a tiny bit seriously. Anyway, the question is not whether any of this is technically possible, but weather any of it can be done without danger of absolutely crushing retaliation. And as we all know, from the DOJ to the Pentagon, if there's one area in which the US Government excels, it's completely, insanely over-the-top retaliation.
rayiner 13y ago
> Why would it be asinine? Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can use them. After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you That's not true. The U.S. bombing of Japan demonstrated that you can use nuclear weapons in conventional war as long as the other side doesn't have any (or doesn't have very many). That's a good reason to have lots of nuclear weapons on hand against other countries that might have just a few.
- alexqgb 13y ago
  Sorry, I was describing the post Cold War world in which we actually live. Pulling "counterfactuals" from a totally different era that is dramatically unlike our own does nothing to disprove the logic that holds today. What next? Advocating a return to cavalry because it worked so well for Napoleon? Reality is that we have enough conventional arms to obliterate any country that threatens us in any credible way. In addition to the world's most conventionally lethal military, we also have the world's biggest economy. Even if we did disarm dramatically (e.g. cutting the military budget in half and decommissioning all our nukes), no country could take advantage of that given how quickly we could rearm, if needed.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    But we're discussing what would be the case if the US gave up its nukes.
    - alexqgb 13y ago
      Our economy will remain the world's largest and (for its size) the most open, which means pretty much everyone else's economies depend substantially on ours. Our military - even when limited to conventional arms - will remain the world's largest and most lethal. Our insanely advantageous geography (major oceans to the east and west, and our biggest trading partners to the north and south) won't shift an inch. We are safe. Very safe. We don't need nukes.
6d0debc071 13y ago
> After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you. In essence, your own use must be heavy enough to absolutely ensure no possibility of retaliation. That only works as long as your allies have nukes and are willing to use them on your behalf. Uncertainty is one of the more dangerous things when it comes to balance of force. Even assuming that other nations held on to the things. The question then becomes whether your enemy's allies would actually strike at you if you held something in reserve. Who's going to go first in striking back at you when they know that their payment for that's going to be their twenty largest cities? Who's that loyal that they'll get millions of their own killed for however many remain of yours? You can't be sure, and your enemy can't be sure, quite how that's going to work out. Someone with their back against the wall in some sense; religiously, economically - whatever; may well reason the uncertainty there is better than the certainty of defeat along some other line.
philwelch 13y ago
Well, until one side voluntarily disarms. Then MAD no longer exists, and whoever is left with nuclear weapons can dictate terms.
- alexqgb 13y ago
  Uh, no. Also, as noted, the economic gulf between the US and the middle east is so great that it would be impossible for them to secure a decisive nuclear advantage before an even fully-disarmed America could re-arm and recreated the MAD situation once again.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    So Iran is working on building weapons right now, does that mean we should voluntarily disarm and then immediately rearm because we already know they're developing a nuclear capacity? Alternately, do we really want to give Russia, China, Pakistan and India the power to dictate terms to us and our allies?
    - alexqgb 13y ago
      We're not going to nuke Tehran. Full stop. Even if the Iranians detonated a nuke in Times Square (which, come on), we wouldn't respond with a mass atrocity of our own. We'd invade, yes. And we'd absofuckinglutly destroy the Revolutionary Guard. But indiscriminate mass murder extending into the millions? Get real. Also, how does having nuclear arms allow these countries to "dictate terms" to us our allies? What, sign this trade deal or we'll nuke you? Even without nuclear arms, the Pentagon runs the largest and most lethal military force ever assembled in all of human existence. So yes, we're perfectly safe without our nukes, even if others have them. Also, we're rich enough and technologically sophisticated enough to rebuild our stocks very, very quickly if anyone is foolish enough to threaten us with armageddon. But again, why bother, when we have so many other ways to respond?
      - philwelch 13y ago
        > We're not going to nuke Tehran. Full stop. It's not whether we are, it's whether they think we might. > Even without nuclear arms, the Pentagon runs the largest and most lethal military force ever assembled in all of human existence Well, not without nukes. I'd bet on Russia or China's nukes over the US conventional military any day. > Also, how does having nuclear arms allow these countries to "dictate terms" to us our allies? What, sign this trade deal or we'll nuke you? There's a quote about this from the 90's when we were trying to use our conventional military to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, something like "in the end, you care about Los Angeles a lot more than you care about Taipei". It means that the US can't just start a war with China or threaten them with nuclear attack because a state of MAD exists. And your solution is that we should empower China to threaten us? Because whether or not we have nuclear weapons, China still knows we care about Los Angeles more than Taipei.

by alexqgb 13y ago

malandrew 13y ago

I don't know about anyone else, but the simple fact that a large portion of human beings would elect other human beings with the capacity and resolution to press the button in case of a MAD-type event to be completely asinine. The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership. How we, the Russians and several other countries reached the conclusion that such people should be leading us is frightening and reflects quite poorly on the capacity of our species to scale. Is there any other social, colony-creating species out there that has developed a similar mechanism for retaliation against some threat that also guarantees the wiping out of their own colony?

mikeash 13y ago
It's the Prisoners' Dilemma writ large. We'd all be better off if we all cooperated, but we're individually better off if we defect. Incidentally, a lot of game theory was developed during the Cold War to analyze nuclear war.
arethuza 13y ago
I was very pleased to find out that at least UK politician admitted that, even if our country had been nuked by the Soviets, he wouldn't have retaliated - of course he couldn't admit that while he was in power! "You had to make people think you would use [the bomb] even when you wouldn't." http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-healey-defence-radio-interview http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-h...
alexqgb 13y ago
"The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership." That was the cornerstone of Cold War propaganda. The leaders who'd do this weren't our own, they were the Soviet's. And as Godless Communists, they weren't even proper human beings to begin with, which made them even more dangerous. The only way to keep these monsters in check was to let them know that killing every one of us (which was surely their deepest desire) would also be the end of them. In reality, this was just not the case. As the animated map of nuclear tests shows, the most threatening country on Earth was US, by a wide margin. We took an early, unchallenged lead in developing nuclear arms, and maintained it relentlessly for decades. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo Watching this, it's hard to maintain the fiction that we were the good guys reluctantly responding to the looming Soviet threat. Put simply, there was no nuclear threat when we started arming ourselves heavily. In anything, you wonder why the Soviets took so long responding to the growing threat posed - without serious provocation - by the Americans.

dataisfun 13y ago

Well, Israel also has nuclear subs.

arethuza 13y ago
Worth noting that these are diesel-electric submarines that may have nuclear armed cruise missiles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin-class_submarine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin-class_submarine

VLM 13y ago

"You must realize that there is absolutely no way for any middle eastern country to build arsenals and delivery platforms formidable enough to replicate the Soviet stance." Why bother replicating the Soviets? You flip flop from building multiple soviet naval carriers to the concept of nuclear arms in general, which is hard to read. The delivery vehicle of the future is COTS shipping containers for inland cities, "anything that floats" for coastal cities. You have to realize this is not 1900 anymore. World trade means that part of the world ships out millions of barrels of oil per day. Not literally inside individual barrels, but you might be surprised. And as the illegal drug trade and the illegal alien invasion shows, the US borders are basically wide open. No need for hollywood plots when UPS / fedex / DHL / USPS will do just as well. Always think outside the box. More than a dozen years ago, how would Saudi Arabia knock down skyscrapers in NYC? That's insanity, they'd have to launch cruise missiles or build a battleship and successfully park it off the coast of NYC, or invade overland with bulldozers or something. The actual solution turned out to be a somewhat simpler social engineering hack against existing hostage rescue procedures. So send out a fleet of 100 "fishing boats" to all the major ports. Each with innumerable radios to communicate with each other. And (at least) one capable of going boom. Yes, I think the odds of someone replicating the USSR .mil, holodeck style, and then actually pressing the button are somewhat minimal. On the other hand, the odds of someone actually trying something equally effective are pretty good. For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen. "Yo, Bush the Third, err, I mean, Obama, pick a number between 1 and 12" and then some desert gets zapped. Then ship a disarmed, shut off one to a high value target via USPS or any other service. It'll cost two working models and you need perhaps a dozen packed up and well hidden to be effective. I would imagine the reaction would never be declassified, and I'll be surprised if it hasn't already happened.

alexqgb 13y ago
"Why bother replicating the Soviets? You flip flop from building multiple soviet naval carriers to the concept of nuclear arms in general, which is hard to read." "For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen." Uh, these aren't even proper English sentences. Pardon me for not taking the rest of your paranoid fever dreams about shipping nukes via UPS even a tiny bit seriously. Anyway, the question is not whether any of this is technically possible, but weather any of it can be done without danger of absolutely crushing retaliation. And as we all know, from the DOJ to the Pentagon, if there's one area in which the US Government excels, it's completely, insanely over-the-top retaliation.

rayiner 13y ago

> Why would it be asinine? Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can use them. After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you That's not true. The U.S. bombing of Japan demonstrated that you can use nuclear weapons in conventional war as long as the other side doesn't have any (or doesn't have very many). That's a good reason to have lots of nuclear weapons on hand against other countries that might have just a few.

alexqgb 13y ago
Sorry, I was describing the post Cold War world in which we actually live. Pulling "counterfactuals" from a totally different era that is dramatically unlike our own does nothing to disprove the logic that holds today. What next? Advocating a return to cavalry because it worked so well for Napoleon? Reality is that we have enough conventional arms to obliterate any country that threatens us in any credible way. In addition to the world's most conventionally lethal military, we also have the world's biggest economy. Even if we did disarm dramatically (e.g. cutting the military budget in half and decommissioning all our nukes), no country could take advantage of that given how quickly we could rearm, if needed.
- rayiner 13y ago
  But we're discussing what would be the case if the US gave up its nukes.
  - alexqgb 13y ago
    Our economy will remain the world's largest and (for its size) the most open, which means pretty much everyone else's economies depend substantially on ours. Our military - even when limited to conventional arms - will remain the world's largest and most lethal. Our insanely advantageous geography (major oceans to the east and west, and our biggest trading partners to the north and south) won't shift an inch. We are safe. Very safe. We don't need nukes.

6d0debc071 13y ago

> After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you. In essence, your own use must be heavy enough to absolutely ensure no possibility of retaliation. That only works as long as your allies have nukes and are willing to use them on your behalf. Uncertainty is one of the more dangerous things when it comes to balance of force. Even assuming that other nations held on to the things. The question then becomes whether your enemy's allies would actually strike at you if you held something in reserve. Who's going to go first in striking back at you when they know that their payment for that's going to be their twenty largest cities? Who's that loyal that they'll get millions of their own killed for however many remain of yours? You can't be sure, and your enemy can't be sure, quite how that's going to work out. Someone with their back against the wall in some sense; religiously, economically - whatever; may well reason the uncertainty there is better than the certainty of defeat along some other line.

philwelch 13y ago

Well, until one side voluntarily disarms. Then MAD no longer exists, and whoever is left with nuclear weapons can dictate terms.

alexqgb 13y ago
Uh, no. Also, as noted, the economic gulf between the US and the middle east is so great that it would be impossible for them to secure a decisive nuclear advantage before an even fully-disarmed America could re-arm and recreated the MAD situation once again.
- philwelch 13y ago
  So Iran is working on building weapons right now, does that mean we should voluntarily disarm and then immediately rearm because we already know they're developing a nuclear capacity? Alternately, do we really want to give Russia, China, Pakistan and India the power to dictate terms to us and our allies?
  - alexqgb 13y ago
    We're not going to nuke Tehran. Full stop. Even if the Iranians detonated a nuke in Times Square (which, come on), we wouldn't respond with a mass atrocity of our own. We'd invade, yes. And we'd absofuckinglutly destroy the Revolutionary Guard. But indiscriminate mass murder extending into the millions? Get real. Also, how does having nuclear arms allow these countries to "dictate terms" to us our allies? What, sign this trade deal or we'll nuke you? Even without nuclear arms, the Pentagon runs the largest and most lethal military force ever assembled in all of human existence. So yes, we're perfectly safe without our nukes, even if others have them. Also, we're rich enough and technologically sophisticated enough to rebuild our stocks very, very quickly if anyone is foolish enough to threaten us with armageddon. But again, why bother, when we have so many other ways to respond?
    - philwelch 13y ago
      > We're not going to nuke Tehran. Full stop. It's not whether we are, it's whether they think we might. > Even without nuclear arms, the Pentagon runs the largest and most lethal military force ever assembled in all of human existence Well, not without nukes. I'd bet on Russia or China's nukes over the US conventional military any day. > Also, how does having nuclear arms allow these countries to "dictate terms" to us our allies? What, sign this trade deal or we'll nuke you? There's a quote about this from the 90's when we were trying to use our conventional military to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, something like "in the end, you care about Los Angeles a lot more than you care about Taipei". It means that the US can't just start a war with China or threaten them with nuclear attack because a state of MAD exists. And your solution is that we should empower China to threaten us? Because whether or not we have nuclear weapons, China still knows we care about Los Angeles more than Taipei.