Why the Nobel Peace Prize Should Go to Nuclear Weapons

[JS80]

Wow this is the second time someone hacked the editor of Time mag.

 

[imported_Equinox]

Originally posted by: Harvey

Did Clinton militate for any military action not warranted by the facts as they were understood at the moment? Did he lie in an attempt to justify such action? Legitimate mistakes don't count.

Unless you can answer "yes" to the above, Clinton was not a war monger.

Because I never believed him when he said he didn't know that Olly North and John Poindexter were selling arms to Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and I KNOW he lied about illegally sending the money to fund the Contras' war in Nicaragua and, since it's a shame to deadhead empty plains from Central America back to the U.S., importing cocaine and sell it, here, to further fund their illegal actions.

Reagan was pimping the Contras' war, which was political. When he started funding it, it became illegal. Those facts, taken together, are why I call him a war monger.

Harvey strikes hard, and he strikes after considering things.

Prof falls, because he believes in dropping the biggest "payload" without checking if it is the truth.

The truth is the truth, Prof, not whatever you say it is. Reality has a hard bias.

 

[Lemon law]

It may be worth considering the other effect of nuclear weapons in a mutually assured destruction world.

Namely the many proxy wars that get foisted off on smaller countries, as the conflicts, like the energizer bunny, keep going and going. Korea may be a first classic example, they have morphed in subtly lately, but it was a golden opportunity for Russia, China, and the US to test their military and military hardware in a conflict that would not trigger a nuclear war. And the big loser is the Korean people who are still divided and staring at each other with hostility across a narrow DMZ.

The next big proxy war was Vietnam, the Russians got to test their Sam missiles, The US got to use their B-52's, and learn how to really decimate a whole region of countries in a day when the domino theory was all the rage. And the big loser, again the Vietnamese and Cambodian people who lost a substantial part of their population.

And then it was the Russian's bears turn in Afghanistan, their Vietnam, as we got to see how effective our stinger missiles were. As the USA also taught terrorists, correct that, Freedom fighters, how to fight effectively. Of course once the Russian bear got its nose properly tweaked, Afghanistan became a worthless tool to be discarded as it descended into a long and bloody civil war the Taliban finally won. But then, lucky Afghans, Al-Quida, launched 911, and the USA assumed the role of the Russian Bear, and is still facing the same freedom fighter, correct that terrorists, we trained in the mid-1980's. In this grand shuffle, it really hard to argue that the Afghan people are not the big losers as the destabilizing effects now spread into Pakistan.

Then there is the Mid-east, Israel, Iran, and Iraq, a proxy war mongers dream come true. First Eisenhower fixed the wagon of an Iranian democracy and replaced it with a monarchy in 1953, and later GWB invades Iraq touting the virtues of democracy, while we arm Israel to the teeth knowing full well they will test and show how effective our weapons are. And the big loser, oh goody, the people in a whole wide swath of countries from Libya to Afghanistan.

As Bob Dylan sung about a future WW3, it all started at 3:00 fast, it was all over by a 1/4 past, and that is the virtue of a proxy war, they keep going and going, and it does not particularly hurt the sponsoring countries. All the munitions to be produced can aid the economy. Even WW1 and WW2 were over fast by proxy war standards.

Its somehow comforting to know, the time honored institution of war remains alive and well in the 21'th century. And that we humans have advanced so far technologically, that we humans now have the ability to kill almost every living thing on earth.

I am so proud to be human that I could puke.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: WHAMPOM

Originally posted by: ProfJohn
This article from Time is a brilliant rebuttal to Obama being award the peace prize for his 'goal' of a nuclear free world.

Finally someone takes a look back at the world before the nuclear bomb and realizes that it was a world filled with violence far beyond anything we have seen since.

I wish the peaceniks who sit around holding hands and singing songs would come to the realization that war is not caused by being strong and powerful, but by being weak.

Osama attacked us because he thought we were weak and wouldn't have the strength to respond.
Saddam invaded Kuwait because he thought we wouldn't interfere.
And Hezbollah started the 2006 Lebanon War by accident because it thought that Israel would not respond as strongly as they did.

Being strong does not start wars, being weak does.
Time Magazine via Yahoo.com

President Barack Obama's Nobel peace surprise was given "primarily for his work on and commitment to nuclear disarmament," according to Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician who served on the award committee. Valle told the Wall Street Journal that the stewards of the prize wanted to "support" Obama's goal, as expressed recently at the United Nations, "of a world without nuclear weapons."
It's tough to think of a goal more widely espoused than the dream of an H-bomb-free planet. Ronald Reagan and Jane Fonda, political opposites, came together on this one - in his second term, Reagan stunned his own advisers and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by suggesting a treaty that would take nuclear arsenals down to "zero." (See pictures of President Obama's first eight months of diplomacy.)
As long as a nukeless world remains wishful thinking and pastoral rhetoric, we'll be all right. But if the Nobel committee truly cares about peace, they will think a little harder about actually trying to make it a reality. Open a history book and you'll see what the modern world looks like without nuclear weapons. It is horrible beyond description.
During the 31 years leading up to the first atomic bomb, the world without nuclear weapons engaged in two global wars resulting in the deaths of an estimated 78 million to 95 million people, uniformed and civilian. The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age. The version of this story we are most familiar with today is the Nazi death machinery, and so we are often tempted to think that if Hitler had not happened, we would never have encountered assembly line murder. (See TIME's photo-essay "Fun with Photoshop: Obama's Other Awards")
The truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser's army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million, or 78 million - somewhere in there.
So, when last we saw a world without nuclear weapons, human beings were killing each other with such feverish efficiency that they couldn't keep track of the victims to the nearest 15 million. Over three decades of industrialized war, the planet had averaged around three million dead per year. Why did that stop happening? (See the top 10 Obama-backlash moments.)
Is it because people no longer found reasons to fight? Hundreds if not thousands of wars, small and large, have been fought since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is it because nations and tribes found a conscience regarding mass death? Clearly not - the slaughter in China during the Cultural Revolution, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, in Rwanda between Hutu and Tutsi offer bloody proof. Is it the United Nations? Um, no. Is it globalism, and the web of commerce that increasingly connects the interests of the major powers? Yes, that certainly has an impact. But the global economy is a creation of the nuclear age. Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high.
A world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about. The industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell. The science and technology of nuclear weapons is widespread, and if nukes are outlawed someday, only outlaws will have nukes. (See TIME's Person of the Year: Barack Obama)
Instead of fantasies about a nuke-free planet where formerly bloodthirsty humans live together in peace, what the world needs is a safer, more stable nuclear umbrella. That probably means fewer nukes in fewer hands - when President Obama talks about strengthening the non-proliferation regime and stepping up efforts to secure loose nukes, he is on the right track. Nuclear weapons are only helpful if they are never used.
But zero weapons is a terrible idea. As bad as they are, nukes have been instrumental in reversing the long, seemingly inexorable trend in modernity toward deadlier and deadlier conflicts. If the Nobel committee wants someday to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, they will award a peace prize to the bomb.

Not such a strange mix, Noble Peace Prize and Nuclear Weapons. The inventors of dynamite, air planes and the A-bomb had the common hope that their inventions would make war too horrible to prosecute.

If that's what Alfred Nobel was thinking, he was deluded. However, what is the legacy of the atom bomb? It was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not since. There's been some weird tactical use of nuclear materials, but I have the vaguest idea of the details, perhaps they've been kept secret to some extent. They use depleted uranium in some armor, is my understanding, and with some bad consequences, however there has been no use of a nuclear bomb in warfare since those 2 instances on Japan which brought a swift end to WW II, and it can be argued that those had to happen both to end the war without a prolonged and far more catastrophic ending to WW II and to make it plain to the world that the age of potential nuclear warfare had definitely arrived and everybody was put on alert that in the future it was a game of mutual suicide to engage in nuclear warfare with nations with a large nuclear arsenal.

 

[ProfJohn]

Originally posted by: Equ1n0x

Originally posted by: ProfJohn
This article from Time is a brilliant rebuttal to Obama being award the peace prize for his 'goal' of a nuclear free world.

.

Offer a true opinion when you have served a day in uniform, and aren't getting paid to claim that you have.

You haven't, and you are paid to lie and act like you have Prof. You do it on Digg, you do it on HP. You are a liar, a shill and I may have only 20 posts, but I can call you out right now as you are.

You have never in your life put on a uniform, but you, like the other shills that work with you getting checks from the GOP, think you have enough honor to speak for them.

You do not. You have not earned that honor.[/quote]
When are you going to provide some proof of what you claim?

Or at least admit that you are full of shit.

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: ProfJohn

Originally posted by: Equ1n0x

Originally posted by: ProfJohn

This article from Time is a brilliant rebuttal to Obama being award the peace prize for his 'goal' of a nuclear free world.

.

Offer a true opinion when you have served a day in uniform, and aren't getting paid to claim that you have.

You haven't, and you are paid to lie and act like you have Prof. You do it on Digg, you do it on HP. You are a liar, a shill and I may have only 20 posts, but I can call you out right now as you are.

You have never in your life put on a uniform, but you, like the other shills that work with you getting checks from the GOP, think you have enough honor to speak for them.

You do not. You have not earned that honor.

When are you going to provide some proof of what you claim?

Or at least admit that you are full of shit.

(Above quoted post corrected to reflect actual quotations)

I could be wrong, but I believe I recall that you have posted, elsewhere, that you have never been in the military, your support for the article in your OP and the fact that I've busted you for your lies numerous times is plenty of proof that you're full of shit.

The only remaining question is whether you're actually paid to post your crap, and it doesn't matter. You're just as much a shill and just as wrong either way.

 

[ProfJohn]

Harvey, he claimed to have PROOF that I posted on other sites and had IP addresses etc.

I am just calling him out on his BS.

BTW I don't post on anywhere else and don't even know what HP stands for.

 

[Jeff7]

Yup, nuclear weapons are excellent peacekeepers - until the wrong person decides to use them on the wrong country at the wrong time.

Then they may well cause devastation that'll make all previous wars look like playground fights.
Yes, as has been said, Pandora's Box is open, etc etc. That doesn't mean that the weapons, or humanity's general bloodlust, need to be glorified.
They exist because we're too primitive and stupid to resolve petty conflicts in a reasonably civil manner.