North Korea tests a nuclear weapon and some countries are pissed. So, how is it determined that some can have these and others cannot? I put this in IMHO because I don’t know if there is an empirical test for this decision. Feel free to move it to another forum, it it plays better there.
Sure. It’s okay for countries that your country trusts to have nuclear weapons. It’s not okay for countries your country regards as “untrustworthy” or “dangerous”.
It’s at least as consistent as any other foreign policy, particularly those involving weapons.
No, it shouldn’t be right. As modern humans, countries should be allowed to do what they please with the resources they have, besides there’s too much to risk in all out war for any party involved.
And if it does happen, all out war that is, I sure hope everyone has enough missiles to throw around so we get done with the whole thing as quickly as possible.
yep. especially if that country is north korea
You’ve got it. We can have them, and some trusted* Western countries can have them, and we can’t do anything about the Commies having them, but that’s it. And I have no problem with that. We should probably nuke any country trying to get nukes.
Assuming those in power are rational actors.
Which assumes that the US was acting rationally when they used the bombs in Japan. Which, of course, opens up that whole discussion…because one man’s rational is another man’s crazy.
No, it doesn’t. Etsudo was saying that no country would use nuclear weapons when there was too much to risk in all out war. Are you arguing this assertion is correct?
Do you feel that a person diagnosed with paranoid delusions should be able to have a gun? How is it determined that they can’t have a gun? Society, acting through the medical and legal professions, determine their status. There’s no framework like that at the country level, but we (the good guys) use the UN, other multinational organizations (like NATO), diplomacy, and coercion.
There is a legal justification since all but a handful of nations have signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons which restricts nuclear weapons to the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China.
The only non-signatories are India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and South Sudan. So by “international law”, Iran can’t have the bomb, but South Sudan can.
Um..yeah. That’s right. We don’t want countries that chant “Death to America!” to have nuclear weapons.
And I think our policy has been pretty consistent in that we want to avoid ANY new country from aquiring nuclear weapons. But the fact is, certain countries have demonstrated that they are not mature enough to play with the big boy toys.
That’s idiotic.
Also a stupid idea.
Whoh! Lets not make this about the Second Amendment!
[QUOTE=msmith]
That’s idiotic.
[/QUOTE]
To expand on this. It is idiotic because countries shouldn’t “be allowed to do what they please with the resource they have” when what they please is to use their resources to attack other countries or further some sort of extremist, totalitarian agenda. In spite of my joke, **Telemark **has the right idea that you do not give a dangerous mental patient a means to hurt themselves or others.
This is really pretty simple.
Here’s a list of countries that can have nuclear weapons:
- Us.
- Our friends.
- People too powerful for us and/or our friends to prevent from having them.
Here’s a list of countries that cannot:
- Everyone else.
Wowsers.
Am trying to fathom whether that means nuclear proliferation extending to the entire western-aligned hemisphere from the Federated States of Micronesia up;
Or it really means:
- Us
- People too powerful for us to prevent them (because they have nukes)
Fact is that for every country that has them, their nukes are a stabalising factor which arebthe ultimate guarentor of security. Other people’s nukes are at best tolerable or dangerously unstablisng at worst.
I think that’s the most succinct summary of the value of nuclear weapons I’ve read in a long time. I like it.
Tom Lehrer, of course, said much the same thing, except that he also played the piano:
Optimally, no country should have nukes. But you can’t make a country that already has nukes get rid of them, because, well, they have nukes. So the next best thing is to make sure that no *other *countries get nukes.
Western countries have seemed to decide what countries are “dangerous”, “a threat to Western civilization”, “a threat to humanity” etc and have declared themselves protectors and the world’s police, and so that seems to be why some countries can have nuclear weapons and others, if there is even a thought that they might, it’s all of a sudden very scary.
Do you think that is going to be anymore successful than any efforts to hide the secrets of gunpowder would have been, long term? Nukes have been around for about 70 years, a second in terms of recorded histiory In 1945, you would have been laighed straight into the mental hospital for suggesting that Israel, Pakistan, India and North Kores would get nukes, note none of those countries even existed on August 6 1945.
Sometimes, you just have to keep bailing water. We’re probably all going to die in nuclear fire at some point - but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to postpone that day as long as we can.