Alessan, I would assume each country would make sure their nuke could not be had by another power. I’d assume it’d be done by having to turn a dozen keys to fire said missile. In any case, it’s not even an issue in this matter.
Monty, North Korea is in the 21 countries that does not get a nuclear weapon.
Ravenman, just because one country may have 5 enemies and those 5 enemies decide to throw all 5 of their weapons into that enemy country, that wouldn’t mean that someone else would strike them. It also wouldn’t mean that they WOULDN’T strike them either. They’d also lose their one and only nuclear weapon. There’s a built in deterrent in that, I suppose. The US/Soviet arms race was predicated upon a debatably rational or irrational non zero sum “game”. A gain oe one nuclear weapon on one side wasn’t just a gain of one for them, it was seen as a loss of one for the other side. Of course, after a while, it doesn’t matter if you have 3000 or 3001 nuclear weapons, the world dies if you use them all anyways. It’s the international equivalent to “keeping up with the Jonses”, I suppose.
bup, If you have said argument handy, I’d like to see it. I didn’t get this argument from anyone, I tinkered around and wondered about it on my own.
mrklutz, that’s also a board game with no real world ramifications. I find it hard to believe that upon the first day of having these weapons, half the world becomes a crater.
Obviously, the most stable situation would be to erase ALL nuclear weapons. I’d like that, but with our saber rattling as of recent years in this country, that’s not going to happen any time very soon.
Well, if you are going to make wishes (i.e. limit all countries to a single nuke) then why not go the whole deal? Wish em all away!
I seriously don’t see how limiting countries to a single nuke would make the world more stable to be honest (leaving aside such pesky considerations of HOW you are going to limit every country to one nuke, how you would enforce this limit and prevent cheating…and how you would make the major powers like the US agree to such a limit). I would think it would make the world MUCH more unstable. Countries would be forced to form alliances to pool their nukes…and this would give them bigger hammers when going against smaller groups of countries or isolated nations. Countries like the US would STILL wield the majority of power because they could, though economic and other pressure bind more nations to them and ‘have’ their nukes by proxy.
And of course unless all the nations of the world were going to band together against the US, this would make the US’s current military supremacy even more prominent as conventional forces would become even more vital…and their use an even bigger level for the US to be able to use to get its way.
And none of this even touches on those nations that presently don’t have nukes but suddenly came into the possession of one. Some would use the nuke as a bargining chip to join this or that alliance and grant the use of their nuke by proxy.
In short I think this plan would have just the opposite effect as that intended by the OP…instead of stability I think we’d have chaos. JMHO.
You also might want to consider what some theorists call the “cult of the offensive.” In World War I and various other periods, there occasionally has developed a sense that a strategic advantage is offered to those who are willing to take the offense: that is, that war can be so quickly won and so devistating to the loser that those who are willing to begin a war can essentially wipe out their opponent before they have a chance to counterattack.
The flip side of this idea is that no country can possibly wait to be attacked before responding, because they will have no chance to counterattack. Therefore, the international system is destabilized in favor of countries beginning a war, rather than taking some measure of security that their defensive measures would allow time to stall a surprise attack by a neighbor.
So, if most every country has a nuclear weapon, does that rebuild an era of a cult of the offensive? On first blush, I’d say it is a real possibility – in effect, it would be turning deterrence on its head, and create a situation in which countries believe that they are compelled to try to initiate a conventional strike to take out another’s lone nuclear weapon for fear that the cost of allowing another state to push the button is too great.
Good point. As an enhancement to this, you have nations like the US that have the capability of potentially taking out a smaller nations single nuke via conventional means. You’d be in the catch 22 position of either having the weapons so well protected that you couldn’t easily get at it to use it or having it vulnerable to a percision air strike via something like a super/hardened MOAB. I can definitely see conventional first strikes becoming more prevelant and nations like the US spending more on conventional weapons and tactics designed to accomplish this.
In addition there are conventional weapon systems that may be developed that aren’t nukes but have similar effect (like a fuel air bomb for instance). THESE could be used in the same ways as nukes current are…to intimidate opponents and brow beat them to conform to the aggressors wishes.
Really its not about the nukes today IMHO. Thats been pretty stable for quite a long time now. Nukes aren’t what make the US such a dominant military power in the world after all. Limiting everyone, including the US to a single nuke really just has the effect of making the US concentrate MORE on conventional military (it certainly free’s up a large amount of money we won’t have to spend on R&D and maintenance of our current nukes or nuclear bomber fleet)…making us even more dominent. Now, I myself don’t have a major problem with this…but I doubt many non-American’s would agree. Much as I love my country I’m not sure if the world would be more stable with a US that had the level of mastery it would have if the nuclear playing field were leveled in such a way. The temptation to TRY and do good (I do believe that we always TRY and do good) via military force would be over whelming depending on the waxing and waning of the right/left political swings in the US.
How about we use the finger in the shotgun method instead?
We rig up every nuke so that whoever pushes the button has the bomb backfire, leaving his face covered in black powder, blowing his hair back in a spiky silhouette, and forcing him to utter “sufferin succotash” just before his teeth fall out and plink on the ground like piano keys.
Yes, I realize that. My illustration was a tangential example that I admit I didn’t put much effort into. And I didn’t mean to imply that it would happen on the first day everyone has these weapons, but I do think that if every nation had one, they would not be as hesitant to use them in a war as you might like to believe.
The whole principle behind MAD is that you know the enemy can deliver an attack you simply cannot absorb and recover from. A single nuke provides no such deterrent. While they are incredibly powerful weapons, a single one per nation can do less damage than conventional attacks did in WWII. Given that, I think that military planners in any number of nations would overcome the visceral aversion to their use (which most of us have), calculating that they could absorb the damage from a retaliatory strike and still emerge victorious.
