Nukes make you more dangerous the same way owning a firearm you’re statistically more likely to put a bullet in your head than you are to commit a justified homicide protecting your family.
You can sit here, or any one else for that matter and argue we need nukes to prevent russia from doing XYZ, but in reality russia is doing XYZ regardless if we have nukes or not, and as I repeated time and time again having nukes is more dangerous than not having them. You’re justifying the ownership of WMDs with things that happen regardless of whether we have them or not. Your position here is wrong, I gave you a proposal. Create a treaty that has a goal of complete disarmament by a certain date then have the US lead that treaty. Our goal here should be to get rid of nukes, not come up with reasons why we need nukes.
You have no foreseeable future where there is complete disarmament. I do, and in that future countries still do things we don’t like, the only difference is everyone isn’t sitting in their chair holding a remote that launches nuclear missiles targeting millions of people.
In the very first three sentences of this thread I stated people responding likely will bring up Russia or the consequences of not having nukes, in which case those things would happen regardless if we had nukes or not. Tell me this, are the american people ready and willing to drop nukes on Russia for invading states formerly apart of the USSR?
Apparently not, we haven’t used our nukes since WW2. This idea of holding a gun to each others head is stupid and ineffective. None of us have any intention to use nukes, I doubt there will ever be an intentional launch of a nuke ever again, I’m far more certain that eventually nukes will be detonated but by accident whether its malfunctioning or misinformation.
“justified homicide” represents only a minuscule fraction of defensive gun uses. Likewise, nukes provide utility aside from actually killing people. Like firearms, they serve as an effective deterrent, even when not being actively fired.
Barack, you still have not answered the question of what prevents US allies from going nuclear once or if America rids itself of its nukes. Do you think a world with a nuclear-armed South Korea, nuclear-armed Japan, nuclear-armed Poland, etc. but no nuke-armed America, is safer than the current status quo as is?
This is the part of your opinion that I think many don’t accept, believe, or agree with you on. That and the many other unsupported assertions of opinion as fact.
And yet, what do you use to back up your opinion here with? There are certainly more nukes in the world today than there were in 1945, yet the only time they have ever been used in combat was in 1945. There were a LOT more nukes back in the cold war era, yet they were never used. So, even if I accept your gun analogy (way to keep pushing that btw), there is no evidence for your assertion. IOW, you are pulling it out of your ass. Again.
No, Russia is NOT doing XYZ. That’s the point you seem to be incapable of grasping. They AREN’T in fact, going full out in the Ukraine, with a major invasion. They are NOT invading or otherwise seeking to re-dominate Eastern Europe, or specifically the Baltic states. The reason they are not doing that is that the balance of power doesn’t favor them, and a big part of that is the US. And a big part of the reason why they don’t want to tangle with the US is we have nukes too.
As for a treaty to limit arms, I have no issue with that. I have an issue with your silly, crazy ‘Let’s disarm our nukes and see what happens’ approach. It won’t work. It won’t work for all the reasons you’ve been told and have handwaved away. It’s a stupid idea that is also never going to happen because, frankly, everyone BUT you seems to see how stupid it is.
I get it. Nukes scare you or something. They are scary. And mistakes could happen. They have nearly happened in the past. But the world has, frankly, but more peaceful in the past 70 odd years than it was in the previous 200 or so. We haven’t had a direct major powers conflict since WWII, and a new one seems unlikely. Mainly, this is because all the major powers have nukes and any sort of direct conflict between them could lead to total destruction of not only the combatants but everyone else.
If you want to reduce or even eliminate nuclear weapons you have to do it jointly, with everyone on board doing it. At a minimum, the major players need to agree to reduction in kind. China would LOVE it if nukes were completely off the table. The US would like it even more. An elimination of nuclear weapons plays right into the US’s hands, frankly, as our conventional forces are so far above everyone else it would seal our military dominance. Russia is who wouldn’t like it, since in every other way except nuclear weapons, they are a 2nd rate power. At the same time, they want to recapture their former glory and regain all the ground they lost after the break up of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for them, their former ‘allies’ aren’t too keen on that, so the only way to do it is by force.
No, I don’t see a foreseeable future with complete disarmament. Sorry, but you don’t either. Your crazy plan wouldn’t see complete disarmament in any way, shape or form for all the reasons pointed out to you. The biggest being that just because the US disarms, doesn’t mean everyone else would. In fact, I guarantee that they wouldn’t. What would happen is many nations that currently don’t have nukes would scramble to get them, those with them would scramble to leverage them to gain strategic goals that currently are beyond them, and the result would be a less stable world with the use of a nuke being more likely to happen.
That’s the thing you can’t seem to get. While having nukes today is a risk, it’s a fairly low risk. After all, we’ve now had them longer than I, you and probably most posters on this board have been alive. Yet they have only ever been used in one conflict…the last conflict that major powers directly went to war with each other. What you propose to do is to unbalance the equation and destabilize a situation that’s been stable for over half a century and ‘see what happens’, without a clear idea of what that might be and, frankly, without a seeming understanding of even how the dynamic works or what even the most obvious effects would be. Like I said…this is something Trump would be proud of.
Depends on which states you mean, doesn’t it? Those states that are in NATO? Yeah, of course…that’s what a mutual defense treaty is for. Those states (chiefly the Ukraine) that aren’t? Probably not, but we would certainly push back with sanctions and possibly military aid to the embattled nation. Which is something we couldn’t do if we didn’t have nukes backing us up and they did.
People have brought this up to you because you don’t seem to understand even the basics of the international dynamics between the US and the rest of the world. You are trying to formulate…well, saying ‘policy’ is really giving you too much credit but a theory I guess based on what is clearly a little understood subject to you, and I can see you are getting frustrated by the lack of a warm response to your cherished idea.
You say that, but the first sentence contradicts your second. Clearly it HAS been effective and not stupid at all. It’s worked and continue to work. We have not HAD to drop nukes on Russia because Russia hasn’t tried to invade western Europe and NATO. Do you suppose this is an accident? :dubious:
Sorry, but you are, again, simply wrong. The US would absolutely have used nukes had we gone to full on war with the Soviet Union. We knew it and they knew. And, conversely, we knew they would use nukes as well. The fact that you think everyone was just bluffing is another indication that you really don’t understand even the basics of this subject.
The point you don’t seem to get is that the chances of countries doing fucked up shit and detonating nukes goes up if the US unilaterally disarms. Up, not down - up.
My Japanese and his hearing probably aren’t that good, but I’ll give it a shot.
**HEY DOUBLE-HIBAKUSHI GUY! IT’S BETTER IF THE US DOESN’T UNILATERALLY DISARM! **
“Multilaterally” is rather different than the US just disarms and let’s see what happens.
That’s a non sequitur.
Are you more concerned about the survival of the human race if North and South Korea, Japan, Poland, Russia, etc., have nuclear weapons and the US does not?
Well I initially made the thread to get responses and I’ve been lead to formulate this conclusion. Now when do we disarm all the nukes? 2050? 2100? 2150?
Chances are, the only time we’ll ever dismantle our nukes is if some newer, even deadlier and more devastating weapon is invented that surpasses nukes (if such a technology is possible.)
Why not invade Russia and see what happens? They have never used their nukes, so, they aren’t gonna. If it works, China next, then NK, Pakistan, India, France and England, and we won’t ever even need our nukes.
I’d guess that it won’t be any time soon, if ever. Basically, Russia gets nothing out of complete nuclear disarmament. The biggest beneficiary of total, global disarmament is the US because we have the largest and most powerful conventional military. China gets some benefit out of it, as they don’t have a huge investment, but total disarmament weakens them also, strategically. And this is just taking into account the dynamic of the big 3. Then you have to start looking at the smaller countries that have nukes…and when you do, you will find that they have no incentive to disarm either, an in fact a lot of incentive to keep their nukes. Then you have all of the various powers who WANT to be nuclear powers, or are powers but not officially. At that point you have to recalculate even the big 3’s stance.
Basically, IF you could get everyone to disarm then it would benefit the US and probably NATO/EU…and really, no one else. Russia would be the big loser, but there would be a lot of losers. Mainly the winners would be on the US side. Of course, that’s with the fantasy that we COULD get everyone to disarm. As that’s not realistic, any country that disarms is going to be in a MUCH weaker position (unless they are a direct US ally…and unless someone takes your original crazy plan seriously and disarms the US, in which case it would be complete chaos).
So…realistically, we will perhaps have reductions in types of nukes or categories of nukes, but never get rid of them completely. Things the various powers are doing will mitigate the threat, or increase it using new launch vehicles designed to get around the mitigation. And things will pretty much go on as they have been.
Russia will never give up its nukes, because without them it’s got nothing. Russia’s GDP is 12th in the world, behind such geopolitical powerhouses as Italy, Brazil and Canada.
The only way Russia maintains any geopolitical clout is with the threat posed by their nuclear arsenal. They shouldn’t even be in the UN security council - it’s their nukes that keep them there.
Cyber warfare tactics with malware that spreads across networks could be used to fuck with infrastructure, grids, hospitals, etc… and we already do that and there were reports earlier this year of US developed malware being found on Russian power grids.
Genetically modifying diseases or animals to cause chaos is a possibility as well.
I think there a lot of dangerous things potentially more effective than nukes, and I don’t think having those things will reduce nukes. the only way we’re going to reduce nukes is if putin loses to a bunch of young progressives that take over the Russian government and come up with a better solution to keep their foothold without needing to use nukes as threats.
I’m pretty sure that in Russia, disarming nukes completely would be even more of a political nonstarter than here in the US. Partial nuke reduction - maybe, such as akin to SALT or START. But for Russia to go completely nuke-free is a pipe dream; they’d be even more adamant about holding on to their arsenal than us.