I’m a pacifist who has never figured out how to apply her principles to others. I worked too many years in anti-Domestic Violence & Sexual assault shelters to scold people for self-defense merely because it, too, is a form of violence. Yet I’m extreme enough in my personal pacifism that during times when I was targeted for violence, including many, many times during a violent relationship in my 20s, that I never, not once, hit back against my attacker.
Part of that might be cowardice: violent relationships can be incredibly scary, and even if you are accomplished in a martial art (I’m not), you can always be stabbed or shot in your sleep. My own abuser frequently told me that she would stab me straight through the kidney while I slept if I ever hurt her.
Part of that might also be a devaluation of myself: I’ve always been convinced on a deep level resistant to reason that I am simply worth less than other people, and that assaults against me aren’t worthy of punishment in the way that the same violence targeting a different person might be.
But for whatever reason, my aversion to violence even in defense of myself exists and is extreme enough that I still sometimes denigrate myself for once bear hugging my abuser to stop her from hurting me one night.*1
And yet, I’ve never yet taken a stand in favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Many of my friends have, and I don’t criticize them for it. And I’ve read a little about the state of so-called “nuclear strategy”, which to my lay-mind comes across as dangerously incoherent at times. Yet I concede that even if the nuclear weapons of the USA don’t actually deter nuclear attack (and they probably do, at least to some extent – the argument is more over how much and in what situations), the possibility of disarming could be a greatly powerful lever magnifying the force of US efforts to get other countries to disarm. So I’ve always thought that it would be better to delay disarmament just long enough to get other countries to disarm with us.
It is also true, of course, that the US rocket and warhead stockpiles have been aging. And this brings us to my current dilemma: while the details are secret, we know that efforts to “modernize” missiles and warheads can only do so much and that eventually new rockets must be built from scratch, and new warheads made after melting the fissile material contained in the old and removing the impurities resulting from radioactive decay. The Trump administration is claiming that we have reached this point and is asking for a 20% increase in the modernization budget, but spending more of that money on fundamentally renewing the arsenal. A right winger at the American Enterprise Institute, Mackenzie Eaglen, told Axios that nuclear weapons systems have reached the “end of their service lives” and added, “We keep putting bandaids over bandaids and now new systems are required.”
I don’t want more nuclear weapons, and I don’t see Trump negotiating a global nuclear disarmament. Given that simply keeping these weapons systems around carries its own risks as components age and become liable to malfunctions upon which I’m not qualified to speculate and am afraid to imagine, should the responsible pacifist be calling for immediate and unilateral disassembly of dangerously aged weapons systems or supporting the new infrastructure the Trump regime is calling for?
Part of my dilemma is that much of the information I would use to make my decision is classified. How many systems would need to be immediately dismantled for reasons of safety? If it was only 70-80%, I’d be all in favor of that option. If it was 99.9%, I could probably be convinced that the right of other US citizens to self-defense against the nuclear threats of other nations outweighed my own desire to disarm. In between those numbers, I find significant wiggle room to come to different conclusions.
But there are other parts to this dilemma as well. The United States might be the most militarily active nation on the planet, certainly it is in terms of fighting outside its own borders. While there are reasons to mistrust, say, Israel and India with nuclear weapons, there simply isn’t a nuclear armed nation that roams the world in search of people to kill as freely as the United States. While some would like to see the US as one of the countries least likely to use its nuclear arms, I’m not at all sure we aren’t the most likely. If that pessimistic view is true, then getting rid of 100% of American nuclear weapons is the best possible action, even if no other nation disarms. Then there is the possibility that the US is more able to convince nations to disarm if the US had disarmed first. If this is true, then holding on to weapons as diplomatic bargaining chips is off the table as a rationale for retaining some portion of our warheads. Once again, unilateral disarmament, even 100% unilateral disarmament, would likely be the proper position to take.
And yet my consent-focussed, anti-authoritarian self deeply wants us to come to a mutual decision as a society to disarm. I’m wary of advocating unilateral disarmament over the objections of people who argue for their own right to self-defense. This doesn’t stop me from doing so where the data is clear that people are mistaken (for instance in the case of handgun ownership which is consistently correlated with higher mortality rates than disarming even while the rest of one’s neighbors have not disarmed). But data here seem so thin, that I find it difficult to make an irrefutable case that unilateral disarmament will definitely improve safety. And in the absence of that, I find myself wondering if I should be more concerned about accidental deaths from again weapons than the future threat of a renewed nuclear stockpile. Given that I can’t say for sure which path is safer, and given that the weapons already exist (I would have no trouble advocating never building nuclear weapons in a country that had none), I find myself second-guessing my own instinct to oppose Trump’s budget request.
and… that’s it. There’s no grand rhetoric in service to a definitive aim in this post. I want all the nukes gone, but I’m just not sure which step is the right next step, while the aging stockpile increases the pressure to have an answer right now even though I have yet to acquire, and quite likely will never acquire, the information I would need to make what i feel are good judgments on a topic of this importance and complexity.
I’d welcome any thoughts anyone else might have about how to respond to this current dilemma. Will those of you who hold US citizenship be contacting your representatives and senators to advocate against this suggested appropriation? Do you have more educated thoughts on whether it’s time to disarm whether or not we can get other countries to disarm with us? I’m simply at a loss.
*1 It’s hard to explain to anyone else how that night was different from others, but my partner’s violence that night was frenzied. Normally she preferred to attack unpredictably, but not wildly. That night she was screaming more in anguish than anger, and I simply intuited that holding her would allow her to calm rather than escalating the situation as it would have on other nights. I chose correctly, and she calmed after a couple minutes and I let her go, but there are times when I’m so deep in my depression that I can’t remember that the combination of self-defense and the help I provided to her that did shorten her distress more than justified an action that physically restrained her freedom.
One of the unweighed factors in the vast majority discussions of the nuclear tactic question is the environmental cost of producing nuclear materials, reprocessing old nuclear materials, or storing decomissioned radioactive materials (including radioactively contaminated equipment). The only time I see this weighed is in Native American discourses, which is, not coincidentally, where a lot of the environmental damage and disease has been centered.
Aside from the fact that it’s nearly impossible that any use of nuclear weapons would be anything but a crime against humanity in terms of civilian casualties, and arguably a crime of war in being a disproportionate response (yes, it’s possible to construct hypotheticals in which neither is true, but the difficulty of doing that tells us something, too), any use of nuclear weapons would be an environmental catastrophe, poisonous in the near and long-term.
The costs of maintaining these weapons goes well beyond current budget issues. I’m no pacifist, but I have never been convinced that there’s a succesful ethical argument for using them, and the costs of just having them are immense.
The probability of the USA using nuclear weapons against another country is 100%.
You’re the only country that has ever actually done it.
Jonathan,
Would be? Here’s a video from 2010:
USA has more nuclear weapons than any other country on this planet. Of course, they need to disarm. American wars are nonsensical. They have the audacity to talk trash about self-defense when in reality the USA is bullying the entire planet.
Oddly enough, my attitudes are somewhat opposite to yours given how I strongly oppose wars but I will never allow anybody to abuse me in a personal relationship. Last time I actually hit somebody during a conflict was back when I was about 13 years old. Of course, I have hit people a lot during martial arts practice, but that was consensual practice with both people hitting each other, so I won’t count that.
As an adult, I have never gotten to the point that I needed to fight another person with my fists. If somebody provokes me, I have a very sharp tongue. If they even try to hint about how they are thinking about physical violence towards me, I make it absolutely clear that I won’t tolerate it—I know how to fight and anybody who messes with me would regret it.
Other people just don’t even try to provoke me that much. This could be the result of my zero tolerance attitude towards any abuse attempts (abusers usually start with milder forms of abuse and test the waters to see if they can get away with it). The end result is that I absolutely refuse to put up with abuse towards me and simultaneously I also hardly ever do anything hostile towards others—and even then usually it’s only a couple of sharp words here and there. I never intentionally abuse other people. I am not a sadist, thus I would gain nothing from hurting others. But I also make it clear that I know how to defend myself if things ever escalated that far.
In passing, there are two major senses in which ‘pacifist’ is used:
1 – refusal to engage in violence at all
2 – refusal to engage in violence unless deemed absolutely necessary, and only proportionately
For mine, USAnians seem to generally think of the first sense; why it should be all-or-nothing is left as an exercise.
Immediate disassembly.
We should also negotiate treaties to have others reduce and eliminate their stockpiles too. If that addition of a diplomatic stance is supposed to be what makes this combination of ideas “not-unilateral,” okay. I don’t think the term “unilateral” is really helping to clarify what exactly is being proposed. It makes it all sound so needlessly scary to the fence-sitters.
It depends on what these other countries are doing, what kind of diplomatic landscape we’re in. If the idea is that we got them to join with us in disarmament, it makes no difference what that percentage may be, because those threats are no more, so a claim that you’re violating these agreements because of “self-defense” doesn’t make any sense. You might violate them because of distrust or paranoia or whatever, but psychological disturbances and so on do not constitute a nuclear threat. (And if distrust/paranoia/etc. could somehow blow up entire cities, the weapons would be obsolete anyway. We’d be in real trouble, but that’s a fantasy story, not reality.)
Correct. We’re the baddies.
Might there also be baddies around the world who attack the US, with or without the use of nuclear weapons? Yes, that will always be a possibility. Should we respond to them with our own nuclear attacks? No, that first of all isn’t a “defense;” it’s a “counter-attack.” And it isn’t generally the best (much less only) option that we would have in such cases.
We have to be clear about what that difference is about. I’m a pacifist in the second sense that John Morales described. Much of the distinction revolves around that. And you could say there’s a strategic difference between “defense” and “counter-attack,” in terms of what goals these strategies are aiming to accomplish. Do you want to destroy your enemies? Well, you shouldn’t. That shouldn’t be the goal. You should want to minimize the violence inflicted on people, not make sure it’s focused on people who are unlike you.
And like Jonathan Dresner said, “it’s nearly impossible that any use of nuclear weapons would be anything but a crime against humanity.“ If you don’t think that’s true, we’re headed toward bullshit scenarios like Sam Harris’ ticking time-bombs, trying to say why (in some other world we’ll never be in) it just might possibly be okay to torture people….. I don’t think that’s a road you want to go down.
Personally, I doubt that nuclear weapons will ever go away entirely – that requires a level of trust between nations and governments that doesn’t seem likely to happen in the foreseeable future. I could be wrong, sometimes things that seemed impossible to most observers actually happen. Still, the US and Russia, which have by far the largest nuclear arsenals, could get rid of most of their weapons until they have no more than, say, China – that alone would rid the world of the majority of its nuclear weapons. Then perhaps all the nations that have weapons could negotiate further reductions.
ince the end of the Korean War, there are only two sectors of the American military that have actually accomplished the task they were built for.
One sector is the “tripwire forces” stationed in Germany and Korea, that are there to be flattened if there is an invasion, thus giving us an excuse for retaliation. So far they’ve done their job.
The other sector is nuclear weapons. Their ostensible purpose is to bully others to prevent us from being bullied by a nuclear power. So far nobody else has used one in warfare except us, so that’s success in my book. (Whether that’s ethical or not is another question, of course.)
Aside from these two successes, every single venture that we have undertaken with the most expensive military in history has been a colossal failure. Perhaps there were a few not-quite disasters in Panama, Kuwait, and Kosovo, but huge failures in Vietnam, Cuba, Libya, Syria, and ongoing failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. I agree that American instincts are to use our military might to build up a worldwide empire — however, we are stupendously bad at it. Every other empire — the Romans, the Persians, Brits — has profited the home country. We’re the only ones who have mastered the art of pouring money into our empire-building and getting nothing in return.
It depends on what these other countries are doing, what kind of diplomatic landscape we’re in. If the idea is that we got them to join with us in disarmament, it makes no difference what that percentage may be,
Exactly right. I thought I was clear about this, but perhaps I wasn’t. I am absolutely for 100% disarmament. If we could disassemble large hunks of our nuclear stockpile in an hour, I’d be for disassembling 80% of the stockpile within the next 60 minutes.
The questions come after that –
1. Does retaining a few nuclear weapons just long enough to use them as bargaining chips make global disarmament more likely? Or is global disarmament more likely if we set the example by going to 0% first before asking anything of others? Since the goal is global, not merely US, disarmament, termporarily hanging on to a few weapons might be justified. But whether it is or isn’t would require knowing much more than I do about international diplomacy and the likelihood of successfully pushing for global disarmament under different scenarios.
2. Does retaining a few nuclear weapons actually deter attack? I certainly agree that exploding a single weapon, even in retaliation, could not help but be a war crime. However, if keeping 3 in an underground warehouse prevents a war because foreign leader X is deterred by the existence of those weapons, then retaining them and “using” them in the deterrent, not explosive, sense might be justified.
3. In relation to the Trump initiative, if as a result of either question 1 or 2 we determine that keeping some small number of nuclear weapons is justified, we must then confront the question of whether or not we have that number of safely storable weapons available to us. If our nuclear stockpile is so degraded that we don’t have even 1 safely storable weapon, and if we have determined that we are going to keep one or more temporarily, then we must upgrade the number we have decided we are justified in keeping so that their continued existence does not constitute an ongoing threat of accidental devastation.
@John Morales:
In practice I am #1 or as close as possible to #1 as a person can be, but only in relation to myself. I am #2 for others, as I am unwilling to deny other people the right to self defense. Nonetheless, I strongly dislike #2 not because it doesn’t make sense in the abstract – it does – but rather because in practice “absolutely necessary” and “proportionately” look a lot fucking different to most of the world than they do to me.
George W. Bush’s administration argued that the Iraq invasion was both absolutely necessary and proportionate. Because of this and other brute facts, I find that #2 fails to implement my pacifist principles, even though it seems clear that this wording should be strict enough to be compatible with my views of ethics and justice.
I’d almost be willing to bet that this sudden urgency springs from military types talking Trump out of using nukes by telling him that they’re all expired. I mean, I know they really do “expire,” but given Trump’s publicly stated desire to use nukes I would be very surprised if he hasn’t seriously suggested it on multiple occasions, and had to be talked down by less-evil/stupid people.
I believe in Unilateral Disarmament, but I don’t see it happening. The reason I’m for UD is simple: with our current trajectory, I believe it’s inevitable that we’ll decide to “solve” the climate crisis with a nuclear holocaust. When the pressures of famines and plagues and climate refugees reach a breaking point, i.e. the point at which people are no longer will to accept the rule of the powers that be, the powers that be will choose to murder the world rather than relinquish power.
Unfortunately, I can’t imagine any scenario in which the powers that be will ever allow us to disarm. They’re the ultimate extortion weapon- do what we say, or everyone dies. Maybe if the powers that be hadn’t bought into their own propaganda, we might have a chance of reasoning with them, but I don’t see that happening now.
Revolution is our only hope, but I fear we don’t have enough time left. Real revolution takes at least a generation, a generation raised to believe in a better way. A revolution wouldn’t necessarily have to involve violence, because real revolution is about changing the way society works, not just changing the faces at the top. Teaching our children to value compassion above all else might be enough, but that’s not what our schools teach here in the USA. Here in ‘Merica, our schools teach competition, and a competitive attitude is fundamentally incompatible with our continued survival as a species.
So yes, I believe we should get rid of the nukes. It’s really our only hope. I also believe it’s almost certainly too late. It’s not really, really too late until the missiles are flying, but I can’t see any way we avoid the coming of that day.
Sorry to be a downer.
CD,
Indisputably so. Subjective it is.
Nonetheless, my point is that in general it confounds discourse between USAnians and the most of the world when dealing with these sort of issues.
FWIW, my own comment was precipitated by Andreas’, who is European.
Manifestly, he is a pacifist too — but willing to defend himself if necessary without feeling bad about it.
(Ethically speaking, your stance seems appropriate for virtue or deontological type ethics, not-so-much for consequentialist type ethics)
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In passing, I can’t offhand think of any Christian I know who actually takes Jesus’ purported messages literally; in particular, “turn the other cheek”. On the contrary.
(And, of course, the USA’s ruling elite are ostensibly Christian)
I’m a Technical Pacifist. Avoiding violence is always the preferable option, but sometimes you gotta kick a little ass.
They’re not bargaining chips; you can’t cash them in like this. They’re horribly destructive weapons that every sane person hopes will never be used again.
I know you get that, and I’m not trying to make you feel bad for talking like that…. There’s a point to this: if you don’t come to the negotiating table with a clear idea about which kind of thing you consider them to be, the negotiation will certainly fail.
The strategy you describe above depends on real-world diplomats out there in the wild having the exact wrong impression about what your own intentions are in the negotiation. That’s not good: this game isn’t about tricking them or confusing them, but about gaining trust and support so you can find a way to cooperate with one another.
It’s not like you’re in the position of a bank robber who has a few hostages (after having released a ton of them already) and hope to somehow get away with the robbery with this “deal” that you’re striking with the cops. (Not a person who’s very easy to trust, by the way.)
That’s not the case about you, and the people on the other side already know this about you. The premise is that you’ve been steadily releasing these “hostages,” tossing hundreds of them out like yesterday’s trash, over a period of years most likely. Also, you have been openly discussing this fact in your country’s political arena, most likely for many years, before you ended up actually doing it. However your country ends up doing that, everybody and their dog sees all of this happening, and that does include the diplomats on the other end of the negotiating table with you. At this point, it is not (and shouldn’t be) any kind of a secret that your goal that you set for yourself is to release all of your “hostages.” (I’ll just stop using that metaphor now.)
You will not credibly use these weapons against other countries, and they know this. That fact is the best reason they have for thinking you’re a credible negotiator and potential ally and/or trade partner, who will be helping them make the same kind of progress that they also want to make in their own country. They will be able to dump out their own trash and resolve the problem with you, as genuine partners (in a treaty), because they can see what you’re demonstrating in terms of reducing your own stockpile.
Once you’ve reached the last few nukes, you’ve already done 99% of the work that’s required. The deal is that they will (not might) be gone as soon as is practical, within some timeframe/etc. set up in the treaty. The last weapons are not kept hanging around, deliberately, so that you can make thoroughly empty threats against your negotiating partners. That makes them have a lot of negative feelings of betrayal and disappointment and so forth. That’s no good.
They should already be on very good terms with you by this point, making good progress on their stockpiles as well, given this good-faith effort that you’ve both put into disarmament. They’ve gone to the same kind of trouble as you all this time, meaning they’ve given you just as much reason to trust their intentions and continue this cooperative agreement which benefits you both.
What I described might sound hopelessly “optimistic,” or just plain weird maybe, if you’re used to the sort of rhetoric our idiot Republicans tend to blurt out on Fox/CNN/etc. to make themselves look sufficiently evil to their voters. Just ignore them. This is a cooperative game, where both players can win if they follow the rules. What works (and isn’t surprising, once you understand the point of the game) is this kind of consistently “positive” approach toward your partners in the treaty. They’re your friends now, so all you really have to do is act like it, which isn’t too hard to do most of the time. (Unless you’re a Republican politician who has no idea what friendship is.)
@consciousness razor
I do get what you’re saying, and no it doesn’t sound weird. It’s just that I don’t, in fact, know how diplomats think. I’ve done legal analysis of this treaty or that, but that post-facto stuff doesn’t really help much in getting into diplomats’ heads (or the heads of heads of state, which might be even more relevant). And even in law school none of the work that I did was on arms treaties, so even that work doesn’t really help me.
Mostly I worry about something similar to your concern here:
Since we have a powerful coalition in this country that you don’t trust to do the right thing, I don’t feel like I can assume that people will do the right thing. Not Trump, not Putin, not Xi. I don’t know enough about Khan to declare him untrustworthy, but I certainly would not trust Modi.
And even without trusting them, maybe 100% disarmament this second is the right thing to do, but my ignorance makes me hesitant to assume I know which path is actually most likely to be successful.
Of course, you can’t succeed if you don’t try, and the Trump administration is certainly not going to try so that adds another layer to this.
I guess the easy answer is that if there’s a disarmament rally, I’ll be there. If there’s letter writing campaign about this, I’ll write in and add my voice. But I’m deeply bothered by the idea of spending billions to upgrade or even remake weapons by melting old cores and purifying them into fresh fissile material and yet I don’t know what I should advocate to my Senators and rep.
I wish like hell that someone (vastly!) more knowledgeable than me were already organizing a campaign around this issue so that I could follow. This just isn’t an area where I feel informed enough to lead.
Firstly, is the US pursuing some kind of multilateral disarment negotiations of which am I unaware? Because if it’s not (and I don’t believe it is*), then this argument is null and void. The closest the US comes to such negotiations these days seems to be “disarm or we’ll bomb the crap out of you” – usually demanded of somebody who doesn’t actually have the weapons in question as a pretext for invasion. And secondly, who in their right mind would trust the US to honour its committments in this scenario?
Regarding “dangerously aged” nuclear weapons, I don’t think there’s any such thing. The principle danger with nuclear weapons is that somebody will use them. The main “risk” that aging poses is that they don’t work when you try to use them – which I would argue actually makes them safer. They don’t become likely to go off accidentally as they get old, they just stop working. Good.
Finally, there is no such thing as “self defense” when it comes to nuclear weapons. There is deterrence (which is arguable), and there is suicide. You can no more defend yourself with nuclear weapons in a conflict on one planet than you can defend yourself with a hand grenade in a fist fight in an elevator.
* Last I heard, the US position on multilateral disarmement was basically “fuck you, we’ll do what we like, but we expect you to honour the treaties we’re openly violating”.
@Dunc:
I was referring to deterrence as a form of self-defense. Maybe you see them as separate categories. I wasn’t making that distinction. Sorry for any confusion.
Here’s another problem with pacifism. Imagine that next week Trump announces that all the armies in the world except the US’ are to stand down or their countries will be subject to 1st strikes from orbital platforms. Further, any move that looks like a preparation to retaliate will bring obliteration. In the name of peace the world is ordered to surrender.
Now, what?
PS – the US could do it.
If it were with the object of saving our efforts expended on war in order to work on climate change, it might even be a good idea. “Surrender!”
Marcus:
The USA would probably be obliterated if it tried to actually follow through.
It’s big and powerful, but not bigger or more powerful than the rest of the world combined.
But it’s not really in the name of peace, is it? It’s in the name of conquest.
The label does not matter, the clear message is “surrender or die!”, as you concede.
@Marcus:
I’m a little confused as to the problem for pacifism in that scenario. It seems more like a problem for militarism. Maybe you could flesh it out a bit so I could see where you’re going with that?
cf. Pax Romana
I’m guessing that most , if not all, of you were born after the end of the cold war. Unilateral disarmament is suicide. Let’s say that you and three other people are standing in a circle, pointing guns at each other. You want everyone to put their guns down and find a way to get along. The other three want to either kill you or take all you own. You put your gun on the floor and ask the others to do the same. Knowing human nature as we do, they will kill you. Now maybe you can convince everyone to eject one bullet together, which is good as long as you can see (confirm) that they all act in good faith. If you can get everyone to eject all their bullets and put all guns on the floor at the same time, you’ve accomplished something extraordinary. Now all you have to worry about is fists and clubs, and making sure nobody grabs and reloads a gun. This is verification. Now for a little history. During the 1950’s and early 60’s, the US and the Soviet Union were involved in a massive arms race, building ever-more dangerous and sophisticated nuclear weapons., although the US pledged never to use nukes in a first strike. The strategy in place was known as Mutually- Assured Destruction (MAD). Both we and the Soviets understood that should one launch a pre-emptive strike on the other, the other could launch enough missiles in time to destroy the aggressor. This is known as deterrence. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought us to the very brink of nuclear Armageddon. It rightfully scared the living crap out of everyone. So the US and USSR began to negotiate arms treaties like the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). The key was verification, and as much as I hate to give Reagan credit, he was right. However, during the Bush 43 administration, for some reason, we pulled out of the ABM treaty. Even Putin called it a mistake! And somewhere in there, the no-first- strike policy changed. It is now worded in such a way that we could strike first under certain ill-defined circumstances, and the President has sole power to pull the trigger. That’s why Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Adam Smith last year introduced a bill prohibiting first use of nukes. Now, Trump has pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, and who knows what other stupid things he might do. So, yes, I understand the desire for peace– I want it, too. But we dare not give up our weapons unless everyone else does. The best we can do is to push our government to involve all parties in disarmament negotiations, but it would take a nuclear war, I think, to convince everyone to disarm.
Dear Crip, you say your not informed enough to lead–then get informed! READ! There are plenty of publications out there that will help, such as Jane’s Defense Weekly and Foreign Policy. Don’t get your info from social media–it’s not trustworthy. I understand that your views and questions are shaped by your experiences, and I’m truly sorry that you have suffered such violence. But dammit girl, stand up for yourself! Even if you go down, go down fighting! The best defense you can have is knowledge ( and a good kick to the groin). Good luck.
@ publicola, #22
I can’t speak for all of the people here, but for most of us the answer is no.
A poor analogy. The situation is closer to:
You are standing in a circle with three other people who don’t like you. You’re all wearing suicide vests. Any one of you decides to detonate, and that’s it for everyone. That’s not a perfect analogy either, since the real world situation being analogized would involve the person who pulled the trigger dying much more slowly and painfully than the intended victim, but it’s closer than ‘everyone has a gun.’
If any of the major powers decided to wipe out another major power with nukes, the radioactive and toxic fallout would destroy the aggressor just as surely as it kills the target nation. The aggressor nation would have to fire off hundreds of nukes in order to overwhelm the target’s defenses and destroy their ability to retaliate (we have plenty of nasty non-nuclear ways of doing so), and you can’t do that without rendering the planet mostly uninhabitable for large mammals.
We’re sort of clever mammals, so we’d probably find a way to preserve some of our species after an event like one of the major powers going nuke-happy, but that would be the end of world politics as we know them. But if everyone shoots their nuclear load, the odds of anything of our species surviving beyond a thin layer of plastic particles go way down.
Let’s say the United States and our NATO allies got rid of all our nuclear weapons tomorrow, while Russia keeps all theirs. Russia then nukes a US city, and threatens to completely destroy the United States unless we let Putin take control of as many European nations as he wants.
What will happen is that NATO forces and other allies will hit Russia with everything in their considerable conventional arsenal before the glow has even faded from the sky over the nuked city. Russia doesn’t have the military to counter an attack like that, so their only chance would be to nuke the US and most of Europe, which would seal Russia’s fate even more thoroughly than our counterstrike.
MAD only requires one major power to nuke a rival, these days. If, for example, India and Pakistan have it out, we’re all pretty well screwed. The fallout will contaminate the entire planet, and the repercussions will be catastrophic, even if no one else does anything suicidally stupid. Especially in light of our other problems, like climate change (I’m really not sure how a geographically limited nuclear exchange will effect climate change, but I suspect any benefits will be severely outweighed by the negative consequences).
I support unilateral disarmament because I believe the US is far and away the most likely to commit a nuclear first strike. If we have no nukes, the chances of us destroying the world go down a bit. If it forces us to reign in some of our military adventurism, so much the better. Besides, getting rid of our nukes doesn’t mean that we have to stop developing anti-nuke defenses, nor does it mean that we can’t look for other means of deterrence that are less likely to cause the extinction of our entire species.
publicola @22:
I was born in 1960. I doubt I’m the oldest participant in this thread.
Well, South Africa must then be dead after its suicide.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Dismantling)
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Not a good start to your comment, but you do provide some truths, e.g.
Exactly. You are not daring. You are cautious. Scared, even.
So you feel the need to be geared-up for mass destruction, because you want peace.
A bit like the USA idea that having firearms in the home will make you and your family safer, contrary to all actual research and statistics.
Or, @23:
You do see the irony here, where you are providing information via social media (this very place), no?
vucodlak@24: In your scenario, Russia doesn’t need an equivalent-strength army. All it needs is its arsenal of tactical and medium-range nukes to severely whittle down Nato forces. They then come in with their conventional forces and mop up. Do you really think they will allow us to just roll in and take over without using their nukes? Doesn’t our lack of nukes give them a decided advantage? Do you believe that, having nuked one of our cities, they weren’t ready to go all-in? What is our next move now? Morales@25: I was referring to American unilateral disbarment. South Africa is an existential threat to no one. They are not bordered by entities who desire their destruction. They have nothing to lose by disarming, although I applaud them for doing so. Yes, I am cautious. There is a vast difference between daring and foolhardy, and knowing the difference is crucial to survival. And , yes, I see the irony, so don’t take my word for it. Go to reliable sources of information and draw your own conclusions. And, no, you are not the oldest participant. Thanks
@26 I said disbarment–I meant disarmament. Duh!
Wow, publicola. You seriously imagine that, were the USA to dispense with its nuclear arsenal, it would promptly be invaded?
That’s not caution, that’s fearfulness.
As for my own conclusions, in this case my conclusion is that the purpose of the USA’s nuclear arsenal is not self-defense, but rather the enforcent of its hegemony.
Main difference these days is that it’s not “speak softly and carry a big stick”, but “speak loudly and carry many big sticks”.
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Sage advice; obviously, us youngsters would have never thought of that on our own.
I wonder which country would invade the USA; seems to me that the only two plausible candidates are Canada and Mexico. Not known for their nuclear bombs.
Ah, the classic American delusion that everybody else is a crazed military hegemon ruthlessly bent on world domination… Pure projection, in my opinion. The idea the Russia would start throwing nukes around at the first opporunity is ridiculous – Russia’s strategic posture has always been defensive, provoked by US aggression. Your brain has been addled by decades of Red Scare propaganda. Russia needs the economies of Europe intact to keep their economy afloat by buying their gas, and that isn’t going to happen if they start throwing nukes around and invading people. Not to mention the minor fact that the prevailing winds would carry the fallout from any nuclear detonations in Europe straight back over Russia… It would be suicide, and Putin’s not that stupid.
If you had read what I said carefully, you would see that I was responding specifically to vucodlak’s scenario. I never said Russia would invade. Ask Ukraine about Russia’s defensive posture. I’m no expert, and my analysis could be wrong. It’s only my opinion. and I wasn’t trying to be snarky when I made the comment about being born after the cold war, but in retrospect I shouldn’t have said. I’ll say no more.
@ publicola, #26
…which would have the same or worse consequences for Russia that launching ICBMs against the continental US would. Launching nukes right there in their own backyard would be suicide. They would have nothing to gain from doing so, and a whole lot to lose. The fallout would drift right over their most populous cities, and most fertile farmlands. That would be the end of Russia.
So, they would send their forces into areas adjacent to places they’d just nuked? Huh. I guess that’s one way to reduce the surplus population, which is something they’ll definitely need to do to deal with the famine they just created.
Why would we roll in and take over? A conventional counterstrike would devastate Russian infrastructure. Yes, they could nuke many of the counterstrike’s troops, but not all of them. And again, nuking troops as they cross over your own borders would be catastrophic for their own people. Millions would die.
Russia would gain no territory or wealth, their infrastructure would be in tatters, and they’d lose millions of soldiers and civilians. Their country would collapse, all without the US or NATO having to fire a single nuclear weapon. Yes, the US and NATO would also suffer massive casualties but, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, why would Russia ever use a nuke to start with?
The only thing we lose is the ability to completely and totally extermination our own species. Well, that, and the ability to threaten other nations by saying “Do what we say, or everybody dies.” I’m just fine with that.
I don’t believe they would nuke one of our cities, because they have nothing to gain from doing so, and everything to lose. That was the whole point of my comment. This isn’t 1945 anymore; we can hit Russia from just about any angle, at any time, using non-nuclear weapons. Destroying one city gets Russia nothing but an international retaliation that will destroy them. Hitting us hard enough that they destroy our ability to retaliate kills them just as surely as it does us. What could they possibly hope to gain by nuking us?
Do you really think they want to murder the entire world in some kind of self-destructive tantrum, just so no one else can have it? If so, what makes you think the United States is any less likely to do the same thing?
And that’s assuming that they can hit us that hard. The Russians have been known to falsify their maintenance and readiness. It’s entirely possible that the failure rate of their missiles would be catastrophically high – meaning that they would spread the debris of warheads (through the non-nuclear explosion of the rockets carrying them) over their own and adjacent territories.
@publicola
The lack of knowledge the makes it hard for me to make a final decision about whether to immediately move to complete nuclear disarmament or to stop at vast reduction in nuclear armament is not my lack of knowledge about the weapons themselves, but about the details of diplomacy and how retaining a few weapons would or wouldn’t affect our ability to negotiate a reduction in others’ weapons. And those details are vast, complex, and classified. I can’t read about what psychological leverage works best against this or that head of state in Jane’s Defense Weekly. I am confronted with the truth that because international diplomacy is secret in significant part, then I will always be lacking a significant part of the relevant information unless and until I become Canada’s Foreign Minister or the US Secretary of State. Given that I’m a far-left transsexual human rights lawyer with no history of international diplomacy beyond moving back and forth between Canada and the US, and that’s only if you count talking to border patrol agents as “international diplomacy”, it seems unlikely I will ever be confirmed to either post.
I have to make my decisions about the best strategy for implementing nuclear disarmament with important gaps in my knowledge. Gaps even JDW can’t fill.
As for standing up for myself, many people here can attest that when I’m certain of my values I stand very firm and very tall. Refusing to punch back isn’t necessarily refusing to stand up for myself. I am happier and healthier when I commit no violence, not even violent self defense. The psychological underpinnings about why I treat myself differently than I treat others might be complex, but those complex underpinnings don’t change that simple truth. And they certainly don’t change the details of international nuclear diplomacy.
None of which is to say that I don’t appreciate you encouraging me to stand up for myself, of course. Your goodwill is appreciated.