Nuclear weapons

[Grasshopper27]

Interesting comments from Gen Charles Horner:

- I just don't think nuclear weapons are usable... I'm not saying that we military disarm. I'm saying that I have a nuclear weapons, and you're North Korea and you have a nuclear weapon. You can use yours. I can't use mine. What am I going to use it on? What are nuclear weapons good for? Busting cities. What president of the United States is going to take out Pyongyang?

- I want to go to zero, and I'll tell you why: If we and the Russians can go to zero nuclear weapons, then think what that does for us in our efforts to counter the new war... Think how intolerant we will be of nations that are developing nuclear weapons if we have none. Think of the high moral ground we secure by having none... It's kind of hard for us to say to North Korea, 'You are terrible people, you're developing a nuclear weapons,' when we have oh, 8,000.

- Nuclear deterrence doesn't work outside of the Russian-U.S. context; Saddam Hussein showed that.

- The nuclear weapon is obsolete. I want to get rid of them all.

- There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons... But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway.

I don't know if I really agree with this line of thinking, but at least he does have a point. How can we tell North Korea they cannot have nukes when we have thousands of them? On top of that, lets say Saddam uses WMD against Americans, what is Bush going to do, nuke Bagdad?

Grasshopper

 

[xuanman]

b/c the US always does what it wants to, not necessarily what is correct.

 

[Atrail]

Good thoughts.
The problem would be getting to that Zero nuclear weapons point with all other countries, together.
It will not happen, but its a nice thought...

 

[Colt45]

I sure hope the russians never give up all of theirs.

 

[xuanman]

Originally posted by: Atrail
Good thoughts.
The problem would be getting to that Zero nuclear weapons point with all other countries, together.
It will not happen, but its a nice thought...

i agree..i think it's all a matter of game theory.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

The general is wrong. It would be nice of nuclear weapons had never been invented. I for one hope that the UN someday controls all nuclear weapons.

However, it would be foolish at this point for the US to give up all of its nuclear weapons. Maybe it makes sense to reduce our forces to a few B-2s and maybe a handful of subs, we have to have that second strike ability to harm those who would harm us.

 

[Grasshopper27]

Originally posted by: LordSegan
The general is wrong. It would be nice of nuclear weapons had never been invented. I for one hope that the UN someday controls all nuclear weapons.

However, it would be foolish at this point for the US to give up all of its nuclear weapons. Maybe it makes sense to reduce our forces to a few B-2s and maybe a handful of subs, we have to have that second strike ability to harm those who would harm us.

True enough...

So answer me this... Can we do that with 80 nukes as opposed to 8,000?

 

[klah]

Originally posted by: grasshopper26
How can we tell North Korea they cannot have nukes when we have thousands of them?

Grasshopper

Clinton had the US build 2 new nuclear reactors in NK to replace a couple of aging Soviet-built reactors so that they could have a stable source of electricity, in exchange for their agreement not to use the nuclear material for weapons.

 

[Grasshopper27]

Those nuclear reactors were never built...

 

[HappyPuppy]

Originally posted by: LordSegan
The general is wrong. It would be nice of nuclear weapons had never been invented. I for one hope that the UN someday controls all nuclear weapons.

However, it would be foolish at this point for the US to give up all of its nuclear weapons. Maybe it makes sense to reduce our forces to a few B-2s and maybe a handful of subs, we have to have that second strike ability to harm those who would harm us.

I for one hope that the UN never controls any nuclear weapons. That would mean that we would have a one world government. Such a government would , by necessity, be socialist/communist and certainly dictatorial. There would be no opposition to keep it from becoming tyranical.

Everything in life has to be balanced.

 

[etech]

They are working on it.

Bush, Putin sign historic arms agreement
May 24, 2002
MOSCOW, May 24 (UPI) -- Standing before an ornate throne in the hall of St. Andrews at the Kremlin, President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed one of the most sweeping nuclear arms reduction pacts in history.

The three-page arms agreement calls for a two-thirds reduction of the strategic nuclear warheads of the two nations, from 6,000 each to some 1,700 to 2,200 over the next decade. It must be ratified by the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma.

 

[308nato]

Originally posted by: grasshopper26
Those nuclear reactors were never built...

Because the Charlie Chaplin government of the DPRK never stopped working on their LongDong missile or GhettoTech nuclear weapon for one day.

 

[klah]

Originally posted by: grasshopper26
Those nuclear reactors were never built...

It is not completed, but construction is still underway.

Work completed up to last June: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/sinpo.htm

Current article: http://english.joins.com/Article.asp?aid=20021113233849&sid=C00

 

[Novgrod]

Those nuclear reactors were never built...

The nuclear reactors were never built because Clinton and everybody else thought that, by the time they were due, the North Korean regime would have collapsed.

North Koreans were using one type of reactor, i believe--though more-than-a-little-suspiciously there were no real power lines leading from these nuclear reactors, and Clinton via the Sunshine policy said "give those up, and we'll give you fuel oil until we can give you reactors you can't use to build bombs."

But the Korean gub-ment didn't collapse, and i don't think anybody knows what's gonna happen now.

or maybe i'm entirely wrong.

 

[JellyBaby]

How can we tell North Korea they cannot have nukes when we have thousands of them?

Every nation is scrambling to possess WMDs because once they have them the larger nuclear capable nations can't mess with them. I think you can count on continued proliferation, announced or clandestine, of many nations currently "behind the curve".

 

[HappyPuppy]

Originally posted by: JellyBaby

How can we tell North Korea they cannot have nukes when we have thousands of them?

Every nation is scrambling to possess WMDs because once they have them the larger nuclear capable nations can't mess with them. I think you can count on continued proliferation, announced or clandestine, of many nations currently "behind the curve".

The U.S. and Russia each, unilaterally, have the nuclear power to end life on Earth as we know it. We, as the "larger nuclear capable nations" can and will "mess" with any rogue state we wish to.

The mere act of acquiring nuclear weapons does not give the host state the ability to "reach out and touch someone" that the U.S. and Russia have.

'nuff said.

 

[JellyBaby]

We, as the "larger nuclear capable nations" can and will "mess" with any rogue state we wish to.

Until they acquire nukes.

 

[markuskidd]

I for one hope that the UN never controls any nuclear weapons. That would mean that we would have a one world government. Such a government would , by necessity, be socialist/communist and certainly dictatorial. There would be no opposition to keep it from becoming tyranical.

These statements don't even have coherancy with themselves. So the opposition of other countries keeps the United States from becoming tyrannical? How could something by necessity be communist and dictatorial. That just doesn't make sense.

 

[Novgrod]

These statements don't even have coherancy with themselves. So the opposition of other countries keeps the United States from becoming tyrannical? How could something by necessity be communist and dictatorial. That just doesn't make sense.

I think (s)he means communist in the more commonly-used albania/cuba/ussr/china/north korea/gulags/cultural revolution sense, not in the Marx-Engels freaky Species-Being/proletariat revolution/dissolution of government sense. In the former usage, dictatorial and communist certainly go well together. Any communist government not created slowly by the people seems fated to become dictatorial, and the UN would certainly not be willingly accepted by Americans, who have such a long and rich tradition of successful self-governance, and such wonderful things as a constitution to protect liberties that will prevent the idiocies of voters and elected officials.

The UN will never become an effective governing body for the whole world not only because its ideas run counter to progress but also because it is fantastically slow to act, and because it will soon have to give more states more votes, and that means more conflicting opinions and fewer consensuses. (consensi?)

The opposition of other countries did prevent the US from being tyrranical outside its sphere of influence (western hemisphere) during the cold war. Look at the capture of the Suez canal by the Egyptians, and the US prompt acceptance thereof to the consternation of the british/french (fifties, i believe), just like having a divided Congress prevents anything from getting done.

 

[markuskidd]

One additional correction: the US doesn't have a long and rich tradition of much of anything. We simply haven't been here long enough. I don't think the UN will be ruling the world anytime soon, but in the grand scheme of human sociopolitical development, the US and the UN have both been around only for the last few pages of the book.

 

[Novgrod]

One additional correction: the US doesn't have a long and rich tradition of much of anything. We simply haven't been here long enough.

i'm going to sound like a real ass, but oh well.

much of masachusetts and virginia have been successfully ruling themselves since the seventeenth century, which, to the best of my knowledge, is longer than any other current democracy. And even if you count 1788 or 1776 or 1763 as the date of real american independent political thought, since the settling of western Mass, towns had been governing themselves in a manner more democratic than anything previous, including fifth century athens. Not only was this continent the first location on earth to allow people to decline militia service based on ideological opposition, the towns were run in a manner that absolutely despised authoritarianism/rule by outsiders. This long and rich tradition (according to gordon wood, david hackett fischer, pauline maier et al) is what led to the american revolution. That had only spanned some hundred years, if so much time. Most scholars of the era say that the political traditions in virginia and mass made them the most revolutionary states, so i think it's a bit presumptive to say that america doesn't have a tradition of liberty/democracy/self-rule.

Considering that this country has been drawing on this tradition since however-long-ago, i think it's fair to say that it has a rich tradition of democracy/liberty/self-rule. As such, it is uniquely suited to ruling itself, and i think (and hope and pray) that people won't willingly give up liberties to an international body of states that are, for the most part, incapable of governing themselves individually.

though, for the record, i think that the us has changed remarkably since it became a world power, and that the new us and the un haven't been around for long. That said, the history of people prior to the industrial revolution is the history of a bunch of crap not changing

 

[markuskidd]

I was just pointing out that two or three hundred years is just a short experiment in the history of democracy. Recently, this particular experiment doesn't seem to have been going to well IMO