Whom would a country have to ask in order to be “allowed” to own/produce atomic arms?
Whom did the USofA / Russia / China / GB … ask?
hasnt any country te right of sovereignity? …
what is all the fuss about with Iran and their A-armament (like it or not)?
cheers
alfred
Its not really about rights. Anyone can make up declarations of rights as they go along. It is about maximum safety for the future of the world.
The US invented nuclear weapons for a very good reason. Now the cat is out of the bag and we all have to decide what to do.
One could argue that the world is safest with a single, rather benign superpower having most of the nuclear weapons. It may even be safer in that Serrano even if there were no nuclear weapons at all.
From there, it is a rather short step for countries like Britain and France to have them. There isn’t much additional risk there.
When you start adding countries like China and Iran and God knows who else, the risk of them actually being used escalates. The use of real nuclear weapon is a horrific scenario that could effectively start a chain of events that ends the modern world. The stakes are extremely high.
You can’t play the egalitarian philosophy game when the very existence of every nation could be jeopardized by a single misstep by anyone with nuclear weapons.
I grew up in the Cold War era when nuclear war with the USSR was a real and daily threat. People today tend to forget how dire these things can be. The U.S. has run a policy of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) in which a single nuclear launch against the U.S. from any country results in complete destruction of that country, region, and all its inhabitants and the whole process could start and be over in less than an hour beginning at any time.
The possession of nuclear weapons by an enemy nation is a dire threat in and of itself. It consumes massive military and State Department resources to keep it in check. Even then, simple mistakes can be made.
Read below about how one Soviet Colonel refused to initiate MADD against the U.S. in 1983 when all systems and procedures told him to. The world could have ended that day but it didn’t because someone was brave enough to put their neck on the line. That wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.
Atomic weapons are very dangerous. What if Hitler had had an atomic weapon? What if pol pot had had one? What if Afghanistan had one? Then again Hitler had chemical weapons and never used them. Saddam didn’t use his chemical weapons in Gulf war 1 either. Nonetheless it is better to prevent the spread of high powered weapons in a reasonably non-democratic world than allow them.
Joseph Stalin the ex head of the USSR was supposedly poisoned with warfarin because he wanted to start a nuclear war with the US (he also wanted to start another jewish holocaust).
http://coldwarsurvivors.tribe.net/thread/71af53b0-8be7-449f-ac76-96d0c61b7ac3
Granted, the only nation to ever use an atomic weapon was the US. However it should be based on things like propensity for war, national accountability, responsibility for leadership, national willingness to kill civilians, etc. Some of the nations are very responsible (UK, France), some a little less (US, Israel) and some not at all like Iraq under Saddam which almost had nukes, North Korea or the USSR under Stalin.
There are actually about 10 nations with nukes, who at least had them.
US
UK
France
Russia
China
Israel
India
China
North Korea
South Africa had them but got rid of them due to international pressure.
Don’t forget Pakistan! (India certainly wouldn’t…) (I suspect that you meant to type “Pakistan” instead of your second “China” in that list.)
Here’s Wikipedia’s list of countries that have (or once had) nuclear weapons. The latter category includes – in addition to South Africa – the former Soviet-bloc countries of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which were left with nukes after the Soviet Union broke apart.
Good to see they’re all listed in the “formerly” section! (Knock plutonium!)
Are there similar incidents, such as the Stanislav Petrov one cited by Shagnasty, from the US side? Well, most likely there were, but are they known like this one? (This is the 1st I have heard of such things).
The Cuban Missile Crisis is much more famous and another close call for humanity. Basically, the U.S. firmly believed in 1962 that there was a Soviet nuclear missile buildup in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. That would give the Soviets valuable first-strike capabilities.
Those were serious times when both the U.S. and Soviet Union had one hand ready to hit the button at all times.
The President of the United States still has a dedicated military aid that follows him around 24/7/365 and his only purpose is to keep the nuclear launch codes ready and at immediate access. MAD policy is still in effect to some degree and god help any country that lobs a missile at the U.S. mainland. The geographers better have their erasers ready.
MAD has actually been a very effective policy for controlling nuclear proliferation and (lack of) use. The hard-line stance is known to be absolute and it simply isn’t worth it for countries to build up small arsenals to threaten the U.S., Europe, Canada or other areas under U.S. military protection. However, the more (unstable) countries that get nuclear weapons, the more dangerous it is for everyone. It isn’t about fairness. It is about self-preservation and survival of modern humanity. The U.S. and others are right to keep them in check as best possible because it is a lot easier to prevent them in the first place than try to take them away.