Where is there any evidence of superior moral integrity of the leadership of tolerated nuclear powers?
Who are we to say Iraq can’t have nuclear weapons and we can? What makes them so bad and us so good that we can be trusted with such power to destroy?
If you were china would you want the USA to have nukes? nope. Its simple, we are enemies, no one wants their enemies to be powerful.
What i don’t get is, pakistan is a radical islam country, and they have nukes. We don’t care about that. China has nukes. Syria/Iran/about 30 other countries are developing WMD. why not care about that?
I’d rather the 1st world have WMD over the 3rd world though.
on the topic, i found this link really good about what countries have WMD and which don’t.
I think the question is how likely is it that the countries that have the weapons will use them?
America has no plans to expand it’s foothold (yet), and neither do any other countries that have nuclear weapons.
Iraq, on the other hand, is run by a fascist dictator who is just itching to find a way of expanding his regime. He doesn’t care who stands in the way and what the result is.
Remind us of anyone we know? Of course, it’s Hitler all over again isn’t it.
Britain and America have taken alot of flak over their decision to “discipline” Iraq. But the world can not sit back and wait for Iraq to do “something”, because by then it may be too late. It was almost too late to do anything to stop the Nazis, and nuclear weapons are quicker and more devastating than any of the weapons the Nazis had available to them. We do not want to see a repeat of the Second World War do we?
What makes Iraq so bad? Their record for the past 15 years should be ample evidence.
Why should we take a superior moral stance? Because we are more mentally stable. Would you give a gun to a serial killer? No. Why? Because he’s barking, and past evidence has shown that given half a chance he will use whatever weapon is available to him to kill without remorse or reason.
Just becasue Iraq haven’t had nuclear weapons in the past, doesn’t mean we should let them have them now. They should not even be given the chance to make them. Maintaining an apathetic stance with such a dangerous and unstable country will ultimately lead to disaster.
Everyone wants to have bigger weapons than their enemies, current or potential. The US doesn’t want anyone likely to become an enemy to have WMDs. The US can’t force every country to hand the over but given recent history with Iraq it could conceivably use force to remove them or prevent their construction. That is, it’s a realistic task militarily and diplomatically. The same could not be said for removing Pakistan’s WMDs (for example).
nanite2000:
Is there any unquestionable evidence to support this? What about the evils commited by our own rulers?
muppeteer -
Perhaps you remember the Gulf War, or the gassing of the Kurds, or the use of torture by the Saddam regime.
Of course, if you consider that the human rights records of the US and of Iraq are at all comparable, you are beyond reason and there is no point in argument.
Regards,
Shodan
We said the same thing about the USSR and nothing happened.
Perhaps you have conveniently forgotten nearly twenty years of bilateral arms control agreements.
Pakistan was an ally of the US during the Cold War, and is once again an ally in good standing.
We care about China the same way we care about Russia. We may dislike each other out of fear, but we also respect each other’s power.
We care about Syria, Iran, Libya and company now.
Now I do remember a regime that tested nuclear blasts on it’s own soldiers, injected pregnant women with radio-active material and fed LSD to passers-by, just to see what the effects would be.
What country was that again, hmm?
Container ships of death. Soon may be arriving at a port near you. Free trade never glowed so well.
Sure, if I was in, say, England or the Netherlands I would feel fairly immune from the effects of horizontal nuclear proliferation now. Now. I would not have worried about the Germans in 1933 either. That’s just me.
I guess a small kernel of truth surrounded by a husk of exaggeration and outright lies is the style you want to be known for? OK, have fun.
Like many other debates, this one could go back and forth about how horrible each country has been to its own citizens, and really not get us anywhere.
A better question would be to ask - How has one country reacted to the human rights violations of the other country? Has it been a consistent stance throughout?
As far as the US and Iraq are concerned, the answer is no.
In March 1984, none other than Donald Rumsfeld was US envoy to Iraq for the second time in four months. Coincidentally, on the day of his vist (March 24), the UN released evidence that Iraq had used mustard gas and another agent called Tabun against Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war.
What was the US diplomats’ response? In the New York Times on March 29 of that year, it was reported:
So Rumsfeld, one of the crew howling about how Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction that could be used in terror attacks, didn’t utter one single peep of protest when the UN itself provided evidence that Iraq had gassed enemy soldiers in wartime.
Seeing as how the Washington Post, in January 1984, had reported that the US
it’s hardly surprising that Rumsfeld felt willing to overlook a minor detail like the use of weapons of mass destruction on the battlefield.
The gassing of the Kurds in 1988 didn’t seem to arouse much protest either. Between 1984 and 1988, the White House had authorized the sale of helicopters and gunships to Iraq, and that many US-built helicopters were among those dropping the gas bombs in this attack.
Congress responded by attempting to slap sanctions on Iraq, but the measure was killed by the White House.
So when did Rumsfeld finally start expressing concern about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the world? August 1990 - the week Iraq invaded Kuwait. So chemical weapons are OK, as long as you don’t try to threaten a highly profitable oil supply.
This is why it’s OK for some countries to have weapons of mass destruction and others not. Hypocrisy, pure and simple. It certainly wouldn’t make things better if every country had such weapons; rather than making things more secure it makes things that much more dangerous for the majority of us. But it’s dangerous enough for one country to have them, especially if it’s a country like the US that sees itself as the world’s cop.
I got the above information from an article in Counter Punch, which can be found here.
I think a better question to ask would be:
-Who is the US to say what leaders or regimes other countries ought to have?
Didn’t some country recently try to announce that it would again sanction itself (but no one else, of course) using tactical nukes in battle as a first strike capability? Isn’t that same country that’s been the only one to ever use a WMD in a terrorist fashion (i.e., to send a message via violent demonstration, rather than acheive a military victory) against civilian populations, and has so far expressed no official position as to that action being wrong?
Let’s face it. Access to WMD is a power thing and a national safety thing, not a moral thing against the ownship or use of WMD.
For instance, the idea that chemical weapons are somehow worse than salting an entire country with landmines is ridiculous. Chemical weapons are horrible, but their range and persistence are fairly limited, and they will usually only end up hurting their intended target (which, as with ANY weapon, can also be directed at civilians).
A good landmine operation, however, can make an entire geographical region into a death trap that lasts for decades, and the primary victims are those who AREN’T the immediate intended target, with devastation at least as horrible (especially since many landmines are designed to maim horribly instead of kill outright, slowing down armies that have to move out their wounded).
And yet one is forbidden, while the other is acceptable tactic and a rather big bussiness. The only difference is that one happens to be part of our current military strategy, and the other does not. One happens to be a choice weapon of the people who threaten us, while the other happens to be one of our weapons of choice.
Killing is a bad thing to have to do, most especially when it goes outside the intended field of combat and kills civilians. But the idea that it is wrong to have or use chemical weapons, but okay to have or even use nuclear weapons, and definately not to use things like air fuel bombs, landmine fields, etc. is nothing more than a convienient cultural bias built into the recent history of international arms agreements.
Biological warfare is a little different, because in some cases it’s not only likely to spread beyond combat, but even to spread around the world. I can definately buy the rationale on that one a lot more easily than I can on chemical weapons.
The debate over the Kurds is interesting, so allow me to be a little honest as to my confusion about our countries’ strange position on the event, as well as play devil’s advocate. As I understand it, Iraq has never officialy claimed responsbility for the attacks, but has both blamed Iran (who also used the same sorts of weapons, and even much more often the particular type of weapon used), and hinted that if it was behind the attack, it thought it was attacking armed insurgents who controlled the areas bombed.
Whatever the truth, lots of women and children either died as planned, or got in the way. When something ambiguous like that happens with U.S. forces, it is demanded that we agree that this is a sad fact of war, especially when facing guerilla warriors. Israel likewise claims the same about civilians who die in their explosive assisnation attacks: basically: oops… but it’s all for the greater good.
If this excuse is good enough to cover us, why not Iraq? The fact that they used chemical weapons to do their killing is hardly less despicable than killing civilians by any other means, and at the time, we seemed to be at least tacitly condoning their usage in that war, so it seems a little hypocritical to be complaining about their use now. Even in the worst case scenario, why couldn’t Iraq simply claim that it was sending a message to Kurdish rebels that they’d better give up or else: thus saving countless Iraqi lives, just like Hiroshima? Is this arguement legitimate only when people we like use it?
For the record, I’m all for a regime changes and massive military interventions, as long as they are sincerely driven by a desire to stop major human rights abuses and democratize. I have no idea if that’s really the case in this particular instance, though I figure that there’s a good chance of it being so, with the whole world looking on. However, we as a country have an absolutely despicable record on this sort of thing, and half the reason Arab critics hate us so much is that they see us propping up dictators all over the last century, and toppling burgeoning democracies like Iran and Algeria whenever we don’t like what the party in power has to say. So if we do go in, we’d better do it right this time.
I’d also point out that Iraq’s rocket attacks against Israel during the gulf war were a lot less ambiguously a demonstration that they were willing to try and kill civilians simply out of hatred and in winning brownie points with hoped-for allies.
Getting back to the initial question, and away from the human rights and cultural preference I support the U.S. position because I think WMD in general are a bad idea. No one is questioning the distribution of the AK-74, or the construction of Air-Craft Carriers, or the conscription of civilians in to the military at all. Nor are we inhibiting anyones ability to defend themselves in any way at all. What we are trying to do IMHO is reduce the number of people with a purely offensive weapon from their arsenal.
My POV on this is the same for Iraq, Mexico, and Sweden for that matter. Everyone agrees you can not un-invent anything and with WMD’s out of the closet people are bound to make them or at least try too. Possesing WMD’s has sort of become a right of passage, how sick is that, from third world to second or even first world status in the eyes of some people. The fact that Russia, and China, and the US have them does not make it right for other people to make more. They are an abomination, and we as a species should be trying to destroy the weapons and the technology instead of making more. (Besides can we make them actually give them up by force?? But that is a different issue all together.)
I am not against anyone shooting some foreign aggresor, or hell for that matter a little desired expansionisn is even acceptable on some level. But to simply have the ability to vaporize 50 square miles, making it uninhabitable by anyone, is just reckless and stupid.
But again this is just my opinion…
Chris
Well, I sometimes worry about the U.S.A. in 2002. That’s just me.
I will assume that the nuclear bomb tests are commonly known, for the testing on pregnant women look here. For the LSD tests, just do your own scans, look for MKULTRA.
Well, I sometimes worry about the U.S.A. in 2002. That’s just me.
I will assume that the nuclear bomb tests are commonly known, for the testing on pregnant women look here. For the LSD tests, just do your own scans, look for MKULTRA.
—The fact that Russia, and China, and the US have them does not make it right for other people to make more.—
But this isn’t any sort of serious arguement about “right” anyway. If it were, then what is right or wrong to have would apply to all nations, not just those OTHER than the most powerful.
What is quite relevant is the fact that “Russia, and China, and the US have them” is a major incentive for other nations to try and get them. Of course, so would Russia, and China, and the US NOT having them, so its too late to go back. It’s all about relative power.
Put pretty simply - at this time, certain states w/o nuclear weapon capability currently want it, while just about everyone who currently enjoys it doesn’t want anyone else to join the club. The list of folks pursuing them is relatively short, because such pursuit is VERY expensive and, unless the country is very wealthy or considers itself to be in a specific regional power struggle, most countries acknowledge that the resources are better directed elsewhere. To certain states, membership is seen as conferring status as a serious player on the regional if not global stage, whose opinion must be considered. The lengths differ as to how far nuclear powers will go to dissuade particular prospective members.
If you feel like researching it (it has been some time for me) there is a pretty rich and interesting history of how the club got to its present size, with various members openly assisting others into the club, and other nuclear powers going behind each other’s back to sell technology.
Moreover, the mere fact that at one time a nation has demonstrated nuclear weapons capability, does not necessarily mean they retain that capability or that they can deliver such weapons against any particular target.