This author wants to award the nobel peace prize to nuclear weapons

Great Debates
1

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091011/us_time/08599192955300

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1929553,00.html?xid=rss-fullnation-yahoo

His argument is that nuclear weapons pose such a mutually assured destruction scenario that it kept the world’s major powers out of war.

I’ve heard the theory before. However I have some problems with it.

  1. Most of the deaths that occurred in the 20th century due to war were due to two wars, which were arguably just continuations of each other. The first world war and the second world war (which was fought while trying to reclaim territory and status the German government felt they lost in the first world war).

So saying ‘3 million people a year died, then it went down to 1 million after nuclear weapons’ neglects the fact that most of the deaths from 1900-1945 were due to two wars which were arguably one single war. There were still wars and conflicts, but nobody had the level of destructiveness the world’s powers has in WW1 and WW2. There was less killing because the nations doing the killing weren’t as good at it as they were in WW1 and 2.

  1. MAD only works when there is mutual destruction. Historically only a handful of nations have had nukes. The US, USSR, France, UK, China were the major ones. Then India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and South Africa.

So MAD would not apply except in a war between the communists and capitalists. So I don’t think nukes are a major deterrent.

  1. The democratic peace theory states that nations which have functioning liberal democracies rarely go to war with each other.

I believe the number (of the 192ish countries on earth) that were considered liberal democracies was roughly 0 in 1900, 40 around 1970 and 90 starting around 1990.

So democratic peace caused by a world of functioning liberal democracies could explain the decline in deaths as well.

  1. Stalin may have been murdered by his inner circle because he was planning a massive pogrom and nuclear war against the US.

So if there was a drastic reduction in deaths after WW2 it wasn’t due to nuclear weapons (those would’ve added to the deaths), it was due to Stalin’s death.

The world has come close to nuclear war before. The bay of pigs or the 1983 incident.

So all in all, it doesn’t sound to me like nukes help bring about peace. To me the major reasons for fewer deaths is that the world’s major powers didn’t go to war because of issues like Stalin’s death, economic interdependence or the democratic peace theory. Plus most of the deaths before nuclear weapons were due to 2 wars which were arguably just one war with 20 years of relative peace in the middle.

2

Point 4 makes the point that MAD is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Nuclear war BAD. Stalin is crazy old bastard who wants to do it anyway. Other crazy old bastards figure this is a BAD idea. Old crazy bastards kill even more crazy old bastard to save their own (and everyone else’s for that matter) asses. And considering plotting to kill Stalin is probably about as dangerous a move as you can get in life, these guys apparently knew just how bad nuclear war is for everyone.
Point 4 makes the exact opposite argument that you seem to think it does. Assuming of course that the planning of war and assasination actually happened.

3

Much as I hate the whole concept behind MAD, I’ve come to the view that it did in fact help prevent the cold war from progressing into an all out war that would probably have been even worse than WW1 and WW2 combined. But one of the main reasons it would have been so bad is the nuclear weapon technology in the first place…

Anyway, MAD only works as an open strategy between sufficiently powerful states: you can’t plan it in secret, all the parties involved need to know about it, they need to have something to lose, they need to have the potential for a powerful retaliatory strike, and everybody has to accept the logic behind it.

Which was fine as far as it goes during the cold war, but it doesn’t work in many other scenarios. A country with a large nuclear capability can take out any non-nuclear opponent with impunity as long as they’re willing to use those nukes (like the suggested use of nukes in Vietnam, for example). And small groups with nuclear capability that aren’t easily identified with particular regions have a lot less to lose and a lot more to gain from using nukes instead of “traditional” warfare, even against nuclear opponents.

I really would not be surprised to see nukes being used in attacks during my lifetime, though I think the risk of it escalating to WW3 is probably a lot lower now than it used to be. But the technology is spreading, there is not way to put the genie back in the bottle and it only takes a few motivated and well funded nutbags to kill a couple of million people. Also see: tactical nukes.

4

The nations doing the killing weren’t worse at it, they were pulling their punches.

5

It is a kind of plausible idea, except you can’t give an award to a thing, and all the architects of MAD are dead. I’d extend it to Hiroshima. I think that seeing the impact of an atomic bomb on real people did a lot to make the public understand what would happen if there was a war, far more than seeing fake towns in Nevada blown up.
The question is: what would have been the probability of a NATO - Warsaw Pact war in central Europe without MAD? That would have led to tens of millions of casualties and the total destruction of Germany at least, yet again, and would have dwarfed the wars we have had,

6

Then it is simple. Give nukes to every country in the world. Then war will end because the fear of nukes will save us all. Who would go to war if you knew for a fact that your enemy had nukes?
We have plenty of nukes, so we could give each county 10 of them and still have a bunch left over.

7

Sure you can.

8

http://www.thephantomcity.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/20070629simpsonscarbonrod.jpg

9

Its the internation equivalent of handguns.

Responsible, rational people/nations have em ? Probably a net positive. Every crazy dipshit has them? Probably not so good.

10

Even dipshits are afraid of nukes. We have guns and bombs. Apparently they are not scary enough.

11

Is the lesson, that if Russia did not get nukes, we would have used nukes on them? Is that what you believe? The only reason America did not use them was because the commies managed to get them too quickly? Perhaps we owe the Rosenbergs a thank you.

12

Supposedly when Stalin was contemplating nuclear war he looked at all the people in the USSR who had died from famine, pogroms and WW2. It came to roughly 1/6 of the nation and he decided that because the USSR could still function after everything it’d been through from 1920-1950, that it would survive nuclear war.

Kim Jong Il isn’t going to use nukes because he doesn’t want to lose his lifestyle and power after the world beats his country to death in retaliation. But Al Qaeda would if they could. And Stalin would because he feels his nation would still survive.

If anything, EMP weapons might be the ultimate deterrent. The idea of causing trillions in damage to another nation’s infrastructure and property could be a strong deterrent to war.

13

Who are you addressing with this question?

The US didn’t use nukes on Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq or any other nation we’ve gone to war with other than Japan.

MacArthur wanted to attack the USSR in 1945, before they had nuclear weapons. That idea was shot down. So the idea of attacking had already been presented and shot down.

14

It is the logic. We didn’t use them because Russia got them. And the obverse that Russia didn’t use them because we didn’t. The idea that nukes makes the world safer in illogical. Apparently when countries that fear the US attacking them, getting nukes it is a no no. I wonder why we object? If we gave Iran nukes, then Israel would be less likely to attack them. The US might be more wary of attacking Iran. See ,peace in our time.

15

. . .

16

I wish you were just making an ironic joke in bad taste, but I know that you’re not.

The above poster, and the author cited by the o.p., both seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of both the underpinnings and limitations of (Mutually) Assured Destruction; to wit, that it is a game between two players with effective parity, both of whom are assured that the other cannot launch some kind of disabling strike or counterforce attack, and neither of whom perceive a net gain despite the impact of a strategic nuclear exchange.

The author also seems to be under the misapprehension that because no exchange occurred, Assured Destruction therefore “worked”, i.e. was the proximate cause of the stalemate; never mind the at least half a dozen incidents where one party or the other was within a hair’s breadth of launching weapons because of the fear that the other party would levy a disabling strike first, or, due to equipment malfunction and human error, was already engaging in an attack. So the author compares a hypothetical “might have been” without nuclear weapons to a “what was” with them, rather than factoring in the number of people who would have been killed had a nuclear attack occurred. This isn’t just apples to oranges; it is a pineapples to papayas comparison.

While aversion to attack was certainly factored into all strategic decisions between the United States and its NATO allies and the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact “client states”, the fact is that planners in the Soviet Union never fully subscribed to the basic tenets and conclusions of Assured Destruction. Their reluctance to launch an attack, even when they had numerical superiority of weapons (late 'Sixties through the early 'Eighties) wasn’t based on a fear of utter destruction, but the fact that they just didn’t really have anything to gain, whereas fielding (or often pretending to field) new classes of weapons and delivery systems gave them considerable political clout at the negotiating table.

At any rate, basic game theory shows that with more than two players, Assured Destruction becomes an unstable, untenable game. See the Diner’s Dilemma for an illustration as to why. In reality, the lack of parity between players makes this potentially more unstable, especially if alliances are drawn between powers that have a significant disparity between force capability.

Also, while the Nobel Peace Prize can be granted to an organization rather than an individual, it cannot be bestowed upon a nebulous entity or entities with no corporate personhood. I realize the author was being hyperbolic in this regard, but this also highlights his general cluelessness with regard to global politics and strategy.

Or a way to level the playing field between haves and have-nots. Far from being a bloodless attack, the destruction of power-generating, transportation, refrigeration, and medical instrumentation would result in millions, perhaps tens of millions of deaths almost immediately, and perhaps hundreds of millions in weeks as food and medicine become unavailable. I suppose for a Luddite this would be the ideal; for an adult human being who believes that there is benefit to the advantages of modern society and technology, this is a horrific stance to adopt.

Stranger

17

It’s not so much nukes that bring peace, but great offensive capability of any type. What brings war? Defensive capability.

MAD will stop working if we build missile shields and expect them to work, for example.

18

That’s exactly what happened. Bloody america couldn’t wait to invade the soviet union and suppress its dangerous revolutionary ideology for the benefit of all moneyed gentlemen. That’s why we nuked Japan for no good reason… twice. That’s why we tried to invade Cuba, and did other dumb things. The West was always the agressor. The communists were content with doing nothing because they more than agreed with the West’s paranoia that it would revolt against capitalism from within.

19

Yes, it’s true. Communist nations have never participated in aggression or invasion of another nation, certainly not anywhere in Southeast or Central Asia, or in Eastern and Central Europe. And the Soviet Union never sponsored or support an organization with the avowed goal to “by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.”

Stranger

20

Pinochet, Arenas, Batista, Trujillo, Samoza…any of these names ring a bell?