The last sentence is the best part of the article.
"When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, 'My God, that’s terrible. Having to KILL someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.'"
From their response, killing through a button isn't killing.
Can you agree that sometimes it is morally just and legally permitted to use violence?
Can you also imagine that someone may know that it is the right thing to order this violence, but be put off by physically having to hack someone up themselves?
If so, do you now see the practical problem that the friends in the Pentagon were warning of? With the capsule in the person you are clouding the judgement of the president and making it harder for them to make a cool assessment of the right course of action, not adding some kind of clever moral check. Can't you see that?
If you want to know more about this issue, read up on the 'trolley problem'. It's a more complex moral issue than your snarky comment implies.
The problem is whether they "know that it is the right thing" vs. just do it because the negative repercussions are not felt strongly enough to deter him in circumstances when it is not the right thing.
Perhaps the butcher knife and the capsule is too extreme, but on the other hand, perhaps just having to issue some codes is too easy.
The situations where a nuclear counter-attack serves any moral purpose are limited enough that such thought experiment are worthwhile means or considering what level of deterrence should be in place.
Let's be honest - the President is not going to be pushing the button unless enemy missiles are already in the air. In that situation, we're all screwed, and a retaliatory launch is the appropriate action. Under that circumstance, the President should not be required to hack someone open in order to do the right thing.
Why is it the right thing to do? A lot of people are already dead or about to die in the immediate future, why would you want to kill even more people, most of whom are not responsible for the attack? It's just pitiable revenge unless you specifically try to deter further attacks which may or may not be necessary and effectively achieved by the use of nuclear weapons.
Why is revenge pitiable? If your enemies are ruthless (and they are), then they need to believe you to be ruthless as well, so they believe you WILL launch a retaliatory strike and destroy them if they launch a first strike.
I am not a native English speaker, so maybe I choose the wrong word here but I think it fits according to the dictionary. Revenge is a bad thing, especially in this situation, you do exactly what you condemn, you kill a lot of innocent people. You try to appear strong, you tell everyone that you will lunch retaliation strikes, but the leaders of this other country don't give a shit, they really hate you and launch a first strike. Then they hide in a bunker. And now? You really want to nuke the people of that country? You won't hit the leaders and the people didn't do anything to you. Chances are that they hate the leaders as much as you do. So why on earth would you do that?
>Revenge is a bad thing, especially in this situation, you do exactly what you condemn, you kill a lot of innocent people.
I disagree. The instinct for revenge serves a very important purpose in stabilizing society. If I know you will want revenge should I kill your brother, it makes me less likely to do so, and vice versa. Revenge is also the basis of the justice system, though obviously not its total extent. For example, if you kidnap someone, we do exactly what we condemn and forcibly hold you in a facility for a number of years or life. And yet the moral implications of that are different because of the differing situation.
>You try to appear strong, you tell everyone that you will lunch retaliation strikes, but the leaders of this other country don't give a shit, they really hate you and launch a first strike.
Appearing weak doesn't prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.
>You really want to nuke the people of that country? You won't hit the leaders and the people didn't do anything to you. Chances are that they hate the leaders as much as you do. So why on earth would you do that?
The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.
I disagree. The instinct for revenge serves a very important purpose in stabilizing society. If I know you will want revenge should I kill your brother, it makes me less likely to do so, and vice versa. Revenge is also the basis of the justice system, though obviously not its total extent. For example, if you kidnap someone, we do exactly what we condemn and forcibly hold you in a facility for a number of years or life. And yet the moral implications of that are different because of the differing situation.
Revenge is not supposed to be the basis of any modern justice system, we don't lock people up to make them suffer, we do in order to change them, to make them not commit crimes again, to make them honor the rules of the society they live in. This necessarily involves an element of force, acting against the will of the criminal, but the motive is not revenge. We actually try to avoid revenge as much as we can, we condemn vigilantism because people act irrationally and are likely to overreact or even go after the wrong one. Revenge is not stabilizing, it is destabilizing.
Appearing weak doesn't prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.
If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons. You would have to support North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons because that will reduce the likelihood of war. Nuclear disarmament would be a stupid idea. You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts. It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped. Being strong and able to fight an attacker is not the same thing as being able and willing to nuke innocent people. The right thing to do is building missile defense capabilities, that might actually save your people. And you of course don't do that in order to gain first strike capabilities because you no longer have to fear retaliation strikes, you actually do it to have a strong defense against attackers. You don't develop or get rid of you offensive weapons to show that you really do it for defense and not for improving your first strike capabilities.
The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.
So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty? It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed? The people in North Korea really enjoy their liefs and support the regime? Which by the way certainly fits into a bunker. Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer? Should we kill the mother in revenge for unleashing her child onto the world? Just throw her into jail for a decade or two?
>Revenge is not supposed to be the basis of any modern justice system, we don't lock people up to make them suffer, we do in order to change them, to make them not commit crimes again, to make them honor the rules of the society they live in.
That's patently untrue. The very notion of justice is built upon revenge. To say modern justice systems aren't based on it is to say they float in the air, founded upon nothing.
>If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons.
Well, yes, it is eminently sensible in many situations to obtain nuclear weapons for your country. That doesn't mean I have to support them doing so, as it is not necessarily in MY interest for them to do so, even if it is in their own interest.
> You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts.
Our domination of the planet suggests this is the case.
>It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped.
No, it's not.
>So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty?
A dictator cannot gain power without the support of a large segment of the population.
> It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed?
Yes. It is immoral not to resist evil.
>Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
That's patently untrue. The very notion of justice is built upon revenge. To say modern justice systems aren't based on it is to say they float in the air, founded upon nothing.
Citation needed. »Justifications for punishment include retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation.« [1] Note that retribution is not revenge and that retribution is probably the most controversial justification for legal punishment. [2] What good does it do, whom does it help?
Well, yes, it is eminently sensible in many situations to obtain nuclear weapons for your country. That doesn't mean I have to support them doing so, as it is not necessarily in MY interest for them to do so, even if it is in their own interest.
Why would it not be in your interest unless you want to attack that other country? You argued that not having nuclear weapons increases the risk of being attacked, so more nuclear weapons should reduce the likelihood of armed conflicts which in turn means a more stable world which benefits everyone (besides weapons manufacturers and the like).
Our domination of the planet suggests this is the case.
How does that follow? The dominant species on a planet can certainly be benevolent. I grant you that humanity had and probably always will have a fair share of assholes and that they are good at getting into influential positions, but without good additional arguments I wilt not grant you that it is a fundamental aspect of humans that will forever prevent us from living together in peace. We certainly still have to go a long way, but we also have already come a long way.
No, it's not.
If you don't have nuclear weapons you increase the risk of being attacked, you should really consider getting some.
If you wear sexy cloths (not wear non-sexy cloths) you increase the risk of being rapped, you should really consider getting some non-sexy cloths.
A dictator cannot gain power without the support of a large segment of the population.
A coup d'état does neither require the participation nor the support of a large fraction of the population.
Yes. It is immoral not to resist evil.
That is a bold statement. How far does that go? If I see someone pointing a gun at somebody, should I try to intervene even if it is likely that I don't stand a chance? Is it my moral obligation to travel to North Korea and try to topple regime?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
You argued that the people are responsible for the actions of their leaders. It is admittedly not the best analogy but wouldn't it similarly follow that a mother is responsible for the actions of her child?
This is the second time I've seen this statement (the president won't launch nuclear missiles without being attacked first). Given that this is demonstrably false in the case of the US, I'm wondering what you're basing this on.
(The US has never been bombed by any other nation but it has bombed a couple dozens. In the case of nukes, it is the only nation that has used them against another country.)
The US has never been bombed? That's patently false. The American Philippines? Pearl Harbor? The balloon bombs? Attu & Kiska? None of that rings a bell?
At the time of their introduction, nuclear weapons were not yet understood as qualitatively different from an equally powerful amount of conventional weapons. The qualitative difference observed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped establish this qualitative difference in the minds of people.
If it is so obviously the right thing, then "being required to hack someone open" shouldn't matter. That is the point of the thought exercise: To ask what kind of sacrifice is a suitable deterrent to ensure that a counterstrike is only ordered when it is sufficiently obvious that it is the right thing.
But you could know that it's obviously the right thing, and so know that it's the right thing to do to hack the person open, but still find it hard to actually physically do it.
Having the grit and resolution to hack someone open and being able to make a good decision about using weapons are unrelated. Why conflate them?
It's a thought experiment. It does not have to be hacking him up. The point is exactly to create a barrier that is sufficiently hard to cross to make the person think twice about making the choice.
An alternative might be to have the person carry the suitcase with orders never to surrender it, forcing you to be prepared to shoot him or order him shot if he can't be subdued, or any number of "easier" variants.
Part of the point is forcing people to think about why it is appropriate to order the murder of millions of innocent civilians if you are unwilling to kill a single person face to face.
There may be valid answers, such as if you have reasons to worry about further, more destructive additional strikes and want to try to take out their capabilities. But there are also many digusting reasons, such as being willing to carry out mass murder on innocents out of a desire for vengeance.
The knowledge that launching a first strike will invariably result in most of the nation being wiped out in the enemies retaliation is knowledge enough to prevent a first strike from being launched in all circumstances.
> Can you agree that sometimes it is morally just and legally permitted to use violence?
Even if one can agree, which I think most of us can, this particular dilemma is specific to weapons of mass destruction, because their use inevitably (and intentionally) causes the death of many, many people who aren't the target but are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, the thinking goes, it makes some sense to force the president to kill someone who isn't the target to ensure that it's a worthwhile sacrifice.
My main objection is that the person telling the anecdote is making fun of the people in the pentagon, making it look like they didn't get his clever little moral trick, when in reality, like many things in life, it isn't quite that simple and maybe they had a good point.
I wonder what else people would be more willing to do by pushing a button rather than doing it themselves.
I mean, it's not surprising that gov higher-ups would incinerate human beings with a button, dump toxic waste on people from a plane with a button, poison water supplies, launch tear-gas from choppers, etc.
They should be forced to open their eyes and WATCH the effects of their buttons. Like Clockwork Orange or something.
The problem with that is that just like with antibiotics you're left with the ones which they don't kill, you'll be left with those who would actually rather enjoy watching people getting killed.
Yeah but if you are dying of a disease, surely it's wise to do SOMETHING, right?
I mean, what's the solution to these types of problem where the adversary keeps getting better and better? I feel like Forever War touched on this too, where the Taurans just kept getting more and more advanced, and it was always an arm race to have the better technology and better weapons and better tactics, etc.
But actually _hack someone up_? I'm sure if you dehumanized the "key carrier" like the Nazis did, you could probably get someone to do it. But if you've dehumanized someone enough you're willing to hack them up to follow an order, you wouldn't be working with them.
The American military fighting in Vietnam dehumanized the Vietnam soldiers in order to justify killing them, but imagine if one of those American soldiers were told by his commanding officer that in order to kill more "Charlies", he'd have to kill his friend he's been fighting with since the beginning. Sure, you'll probably find someone crazy enough to do so, but a lot of people wouldn't do it.
TLDR: It's different when it's someone you work with
Killing via button is killing many of them "them". Hacking the innocent's chest is killing one of "us".
Part of the dilemma in this thought experiment is basically about weighing the worth of the lives of unknown numbers of "them", against one of "us".
The President must distinguish "them" or "us", otherwise he has no business leading the country in a war. He must treat the killing of one of "us" with a different judgment.
The other part of this is remote controlled killing versus visceral engagement. Suppose that pushing the button is the right thing to do for the country, but the President has a personal aversion against the bloody engagement form of killing. As President, he's supposed to push, but a personal, psychological reason is preventing him from doing it as a man.
> Killing via button is killing many of them "them". Hacking the innocent's chest is killing one of "us".
Pressing the button means killing of lot of "us" in the end too, because there's no such thing as one-way nuclear exchanges nowadays, with subs ready to fire from anywhere in the world.
Also, fallout is not restricted by borders. For example US and USSR where within 60 miles of each other at there closest borders during the Cold War. India and Pakistan share a border.
Only two countries have formally declared a no-first-strike policy: the USSR and the PRC. The USA has always reserved the right to initiate a nuclear exchange with another country.
First only if you don't count minor details like Pearl Harbor. And given that we were systematically destroying their urban areas, just less efficiently albeit with more casualties, it's again a different thing.
The policy the above poster is referring to is No First Use [1], which is specifically about the use of nuclear weapons as a means of warfare. The Pearl Harbor attack, as it was not nuclear in nature, would not be relevant the No First Use policy if it were being followed to the letter and spirit.
How most nuclear powers would actually react to large-scale non-nuclear aggression is of course a whole different discussion.
Given that those two countries were demonstrably not averse to killing millions of their own citizens, one might perhaps take those assurances with a very large grain of salt.
Yes, but that's different than that being a scenario which is remotely feasible (it's not). Not renouncing a first strike during the Cold War was a measure to counter massive Soviet conventional numerical advantages in the European theater. France also does not guarantee no first use, because it wanted the Russians to know that crossing into France would necessarily mean nuclear retaliation on their cities (as if the Russians made it to the French border, the conventional war would essentially be lost for NATO).
In short, there are no realistic circumstances under which the US would launch a first strike with nuclear weapons. The political cost is too high, and the benefits could never outweigh the costs.
There is no "them" or "us". "They" are just people. They are rarely even people that we disagree with - they're innocent civilians that were unlucky and lived in what turned into a war zone, or soldiers that are simply following orders to protect what they consider their home. The decision is whether or not to take hundreds, thousands, or even millions of lives exactly like the one of the navy officer with the launch code embedded in his chest. Lives that had nothing to do with the conflict at all.
The "bad guys", the ones you might actually refer to as "them", are sitting somewhere comfortable, far out of reach of any of this. Their only interaction in this is that they pressed a button.
It's scary that even here on HN, a comment like this would get downvoted. Seeing the world through a lens of "us" and "them", and seeing "them" as being less worthy of our humanity & consideration, has led to more human-atrocities throughout history, than almost anything else.
It is naive to think we are all one happy human race. I wish it were so but it isn't. The "others" will have no problem killing you and dance on your grave. I guess that is why the saying goes "If you want peace, prepare for war"
You're not reading the same history books, obviously.
Because again and again, humans are well-documented to NOT dance on each other's graves. We consistently pull back from the brink of destroying the "other" and not only let them live, but help them rebuild.
It doesn't matter which army is battling me, whether it is Russian, Chinese or American. They will have no problem killing me, because that's their job, and there is war. Dancing on my grave would be difficult, because that would require retrieving my body.
I'm not saying that war is not necessary, but pretending that you're fighting zombies thirsting for nothing but your blood is idiotic. The soldiers you're fighting joined their army to protect their people. The people itself most likely just want to passively continue with their life, not understanding what the war is about, knowing nothing but the date of the first bomb. The people that started the war is sitting somewhere cozy, out of reach.
It's pretty clear that the grandparent meant that for better or worse, ingroup-outgroup bias is a very real thing in human psychology abd sociology, and there wouldn't be many wars without demonization of the outgroup. I saw no indication that they actually thought that this is a good distinction to make. Is-ought problem.
You can label whatever group you find yourself in to be "us", and the rest as "them", but they're no different than you. You're just being selfish in valuing your life more than theirs.
This selfishness if of course natural for any human, but that does not make it better.
Armchair psychology: I suppose media can be blamed partly for this view. Bad news sell, and the further away places are correspondingly, stereotypically, only the worst of the news are of reporting value. Thus, people in far away places are associated with fear and chaos.
Also: Baseline human psychology is tribalistic and violent. We need education and culture to behave as modern - and sustenance amd safety.
I have no one labelled as "my own", at least not in the nationalist/patriotic sense. My family and friends my go into that category if we really must, but that's it.
If you put a gun to my head, I'm certainly not going to care if you're my local baker or a North Korean soldier, just to name a random nation. Hell, I'll probably have sympathies for the soldier, as they are just doing what they were told, like any other soldier would. Getting angry at them would be pointless, although I'd of course do my best to fight for survival, and if I came out the winner, I would be upset that the life I had to take was not the life that was to blame.
For the baker, it would be hard to tell if the hand was forced, or if the idea of slaughter was of their own making.
> The President must distinguish "them" or "us", otherwise he has no business leading the country in a war.
Starting from the 60's, the concept of MAD and a truly global, total war made this distinction irrelevant. As soon as you push that button, you're not only condemning "them" to death.
Nationalism != tribalism. Nationalism exploits tribalism, in the way that casinos exploit other natural cognitive disabilities. That does not doom all of us to losing our savings at the casino. In fact gambling has a much longer history than nationalism. 20th c. nationalism is a johnny-come-lately, like video poker machines, and could be a passing fad.
Do you really think that anyone ordered that? Do you think the President, or Governor of Ohio said, "You know what? Shoot the peaceful protestors!" Of course not. A few Guardsmen panicked and started shooting in a stressful situation (you really shouldn't use the National Guard for police work unless they're MPs). I'd bet money no one above the rank of Corporal was involved in the decision, and probably no one above PFC.
Isn't that a naive assumption of how things work? Do you really think the President (or Governor of Ohio) are actually involved in the nitty gritty of things?
They just make their general discontent known ("oh, those pesky anti-vietnam protesters" etc), allow for the cultivation of an "us and them" dynamic, and then their people ensure that for years the police is not just allowed to do bad things but even encouraged (with protecting policemen that stepped out of line, giving promotions to their leadership if not directly, then after some such scandal gets forgotten, etc).
From McCarthy and Hoover, to the treatment of the human rights activists, the 68 democratic convention and onwards to this, the Watergate and more, it's not about some "bad apple" or "stressful panicked" actor, but about systematic cultivation of such solutions.
Well, as someone alive and politically aware during the period, and who's studied that event, no, that Manichean world view doesn't match what happened in the cultural '60s in the least, a period which includes much of the '70s.
For one thing, "those pesky anti-vietnam protesters" had burned down the ROTC building a couple of days before, there was quite a bit of violent rioting prior to the shooting and the National Guardsmen had already had to use their bayonets to manage it (when bayonets get fixed and bloodied you know things got very serious). Today's "campus protests" are utterly farcical by comparison.
In general, violent civil insurrection was common, and the authorities management was very mild by the international standards of the time, and there was plenty of pressure from the bottom up for much more strenuous measures. Note it's the only major incident of that type in that period, and is a trifle when compared to atrocities like Waco.
McCarthy? Please, if you don't know what the phrase "submit to party discipline" means, and that it resulted in every member of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), back when it was popular and selective in admittance (through the '30s at minimum), was a self-declared traitor, well, read up on what the other side was saying, or things like the Venona decrypts which eventually revealed just how accurate McCarthy's raw information was.
And note how the authorities' flaccid response to GRU and NKVD spying through these traitors like Hiss paved the way for crude men like McCarthy. That's a lesson you'll see from the Weimar Republic to a lot of what's happening today, and there's plenty of history of this sort of thing in pre-modern times.
Hoover was a bad apple, I'll grant you, and the rest of the barrel remains rotten to this day; has the FBI Hostage "Rescue" Team ever actually rescued anyone? Latest is their shooting in the only fatality resulting from the Bundy Oregon mess, and then trying to cover that up.
There is huge difference though. He has to kill one of the citizens of his own country. Better example would have been lets say a convicted war criminal. He still has to do the killing, but not a person that is one of his own.
Yeah, but no President has ever launched a pre-emptive nuclear attack (saving WWII). And the likelihood of any President doing so has decreased over time. The only time the button would be pressed is if enemy missiles are in the air.
It is exactly this line of thinking that makes it worthwhile creating extra barriers to make it harder to launch a strike to force the person responsible to be very sure.
Tonight the music seems so loud --- I wish that we could lose this crowd! Maybe it's better this way: we'd hurt each other with the things we'd want to say. We could have been so good together! We could have lived this dance forever! But now? Who's gonna dance with me?
Our nuclear opponents need to think we'd be perfectly willing to push the button in order for the balance to work correctly. This destabilizes the situation, which is NOT a good thing.
I cannot find any link right now, but I remember reading about the Milgram's experiment, or one of it replication, and one of the test was with and without glass, what looked like a more direct connection between the button and the victim or via a machine, etc... and that one of the conclusion was that the more indirect connection, the more distance, the more elements between the person pressing the button and the victim, and the more likely the person was going to push the button.
By the way, have you ever wonder which type of meat you would eat if you had to kill the animals yourself?
If faced with a symmetric foe that has launched a nuclear holocaust upon my country, it would be absolutely essential to retaliate in kind so as to ensure that they could not mount a second assault and kill even more people. If I were president, I would not hesitate.
Let's put aside the likelihood of a exterminating strike (where the enemy achieves near-total destruction before you can even think about launching).
Now suppose you do also decide to retaliate to ensure 99% destruction to your foe. Would your foe's knowledge of that change whether your foe even tries an eliminating strike in the first place?
That's the problem with the MAD doctrine, see. It assumes your opponent is rational. But if he is rational, then perhaps you can agree on not having nuclear weapons in the first place.
Rationality is bounded by reality. It might be better if no one had nukes. But, if no one had nukes, what prevents a conventional war from breaking out on the scale of WWII or even larger? Nothing. Nuclear weapons are the greatest creator of peace in history.
> what prevents a conventional war from breaking out on the scale of WWII or even larger?
The same MAD principle? The knowledge that after 6 years, everybody will be exhausted by fighting, and what for exactly? Hitler wasn't rational, and maybe he would use nuclear weapons. Actors in the WWI thought it would last couple months, again, weren't exactly rational about what they are getting into.
It's not nuclear weapons what creates peace. It's the rational ability of humans to (eventually) see the hopelessness of destruction, that creates peace.
Whether the destruction comes from nuclear or normal weapons is irrelevant, however conventional weapons at least give us chance to have that rationalization later. In other words, stronger weapons require more responsible humans, not cause them to be more responsible.
The MAD doctrine is just a false rationalization of irrational fear. It is not a rational principle, it is principle adopted so that humans can feel better having nuclear weapons, although having them objectively makes the world a more dangerous place. If people indeed followed MAD doctrine as rigorously as MAD doctrine itself assumes, WWI and WWII would never have happened either.
You have 2 first strike options.
1) that will target your opponents nuclear capabilities (ensuring that no 2nd strike is possible)
2) that will target everything including population centers to achieve maximum destruction.
In both of these scenarios if you are attacked first (early warning) your only option is to attack their centers of population to either prevent an all out invasion or to retaliate.
This is exactly why MAD sort of works, because it actually ensures mutual destruction of not only the nuclear and military capabilities but also of all national and human infrastructure as the only possible answer to even a limited nuclear first strike is "fire zee missiles!".
Or to put it in a more structured manner there is virtually no room for proportionate response when it comes to a nuclear attack. When there was it was the biggest threat to "MAD" since it more or less would ensure that any side that gains sufficient advantage would be prone to launching a first strike.
Because of this very fact the nuclear arms treaties between the USA and then the USSR limited fixed launch site while promoting mobile launcher and nuclear missile subs as much as possible as the guaranteed 2nd strike capability of both nations was what MAD was actually built upon.
The biggest defect of MAD was that the Soviets correctly thought it was profoundly immoral and never accepted it, and, well, once Robert Strange McNamara, he of the oh so wise initial prosecution of the Vietnam War, pushed it through, the Soviet leaders didn't have much trouble painting us as immoral because we were.
MAD is not immoral. There's nothing immoral about preventing nuclear war. I also find it hard to believe that the Soviets, of all people would dare claim the moral high ground.
The Soviets attack our military establishment, and our moral response is to burn Soviet children to death in their beds?
Yeah, right. And the Soviets most certainly took advantage of this moral error, for as you note, they're hard pressed to do so with a straight face otherwise.
Yes. That is how you prevent nuclear war. By being prepared to do terrible things that you hope to never do. Only by being ready to commit atrocities can you hope to not have atrocities committed at all.
There is no moral error here, only moral reality.
Also, it's not like our military establishment is separate from our civilian population centers. The SF bay area, New York, San Diego, among others, would be devastated in a counter-force first strike, no matter how precise.
> If faced with a symmetric foe that has launched a nuclear holocaust upon my country, it would be absolutely essential to retaliate in kind so as to ensure that they could not mount a second assault and kill even more people. If I were president, I would not hesitate.
OK, and it's the end of the world as we know it. Like, Game Over, the survivors are back to the Stone Age and the civilization can start from scratch with 99% less people. Sounds like a sound decision you'd make.
This is well-trodden ground, though perhaps long enough ago that younger people have never heard it. A lot of stuff that sounds really sweet and nice and moral turns into nightmares if you play it out in the real world. Advertising to the world that you won't strike back even if you are wiped out is, over the long term, an invitation to be wiped out. Of course if you want to signal your morality to certain types by valuing your own people at zero that may sound better than striking back, but you're still in the end advocating for millions of deaths, whether you meant to or not. If nothing else, allow me to appeal to your own naked self-interest in pointing out you'd be one of them.
It is ironic, but by taking a strong "We will strike back" stance, you decrease the chances of ever having to strike.
On the flip side, some of the well-trod ground is now out of date, too. Arguments about how maybe we could try non-proliferation instead become irrelevant as nuclear weapons become relatively speaking easier and easier to acquire due to advancing and dispersing technological sophistication.
Anyhow, upshot, if you're serious about thinking through the issues this turns out to be a really challenging stage to get up and morally preen at people on. It's very easy to end up advocating a strategy that kills billions of people while preening. It may be unpleasant to you, but you do in fact have to think. Hard. With neither rose-tinted glasses nor excessive cynicism. The easy answers don't work. The sweet answers don't work.
Indeed given that in the real world a false alarm is far more likely than an actual inbound missile strike, maintaining a convincing illusion of willingness to carry out tit-for-tat" is a far better survival strategy than one which involves actually launching the nukes. If you're too late to retaliate, it doesn't really make much difference to your civilians' survival rates but it certainly does if you fire prematurely when the enemy wasn't* in the process of escalating the conflict
Even that is dangerous, because it means that an adversary who think they have inadvertently crossed a line will have every reason to go all out, because they'll expect a full scale retaliation.
Indicating a willingness to use nuclear weapons at all may also make an adversary more willing to believe you may deviate from policy and strike first, which again may lead them to believe an all out first strike is safer than holding back (e.g. I've mentioned Able Archer 83, where the Soviet leadership allegedly considered a first strike because they thought the US was planning one)
Part of the problem is that neither you nor the other side knows whether your opponent will stick to any given strategy, nor if they will behave rationally.
Parent was merely saying that you shouldn't actually launch missiles back, not that you shouldn't advertise that you're willing to do so. Deterrence is no longer relevant once missiles are in the air.
I think the position you are presenting is wrong. You are essentially saying that it is irresponsible for a country to not have nuclear weapons because that invites other countries to wipe it out, after all there is no difference between not having nuclear weapons and convincingly asserting that you will not use them for retaliation strikes.
During Able Archer 83, the Soviet Union allegedly got close to launching a first strike against the US because they feared an imminent US attack because of what they picked up of the exercise.
Advertising to the world that you have a firm policy against nuclear attacks other than in very limited, clearly defined scenarios puts you at risk of the other side decides it is ok to strike you for their own gains, but it also protects you against potential adversaries who have no designs on you but who you might inadvertently scare.
Able Archer 83, and the realisation that it appears to have genuinely terrified the Soviet leadership is often credited with changing Reagans course and making him determined to sit down with the Soviet leadership.
> retaliate in kind so as to ensure that they could not mount a second assault and kill even more people
The bigger issue is that they are more likely to initiate the strike if they know about this protocol and believe it will reduce the likelihood of a counter strike.
Or they might be less inclined to strike first to pre-empt a strike. I've mentioned Able Archer 83 elsewhere: The Soviets appears to have gotten close to strike first because they believe the US was preparing to strike. Knowledge of a policy that appeared to indicate a distinct goal of deterring the President from launching a strike might have made the Soviets less nervous.
A while afterwards Reagan wrote that he long thought that the Soviet leadership, like the Americans, did not believe a US first strike was a serious possibility. But he eventually learned that this was a flawed assumption: The Soviet leadership saw the US as a possible - even likely - aggressor, and interpreted US actions accordingly. In that context, posturing was incredibly dangerous, and this realisation made him change tack and become determined to sit down and talk to them.
For those in this thread that speculate about hitting this or this before reacting: nuclear weapons take a certain time to reach a target and retaliation would happen before _any_ nuclear explosion occurs.
In the MAD era, there was the theory that we (the US) had a sufficiently robust retaliatory infrastructure that we could ride out the first wave of a first strike and only launch, or in the case of bombers give the PAL codes to arm the warheads to the crews, after the first nuclear explosions happened and were sufficiently confirmed. Launch on Warning was always recognized as an inherently dangerous doctrine.
He prefers to become your friend over many years, have great experiences together, then shoot you in the face and make you apologize for your role in the incident.
Errr, that is exactly what happened, and an apology was due.
While it's primarily the responsibility of an upland bird hunter (anyone shooting, of course, but in this sort of hunting you move around a lot and flush out birds unexpectedly) to keep track of everyone and not shoot when any of them are down range, everyone in the hunting party also has a responsibility to follow previously agreed upon protocols to make this easier and less error prone. The guy who got shot screwed that up big time.
I mean the implied accusation that Chaney was at fault but due to some coercion got the guy to say that it was his bad, which is usually what the subtext is when this gets trotted out.
To be, somewhat, fair getting shot is a risk you have to assume when going hunting, especially with other people. (Depressingly) Routine hunting accidents don't usually turn peoples lives into a media circus. That's ostensibly why the apology.
Of course A)as VP Cheney's life was already a media circus B) Cheney shot the dude in his face and assumed-risk-or-no Cheney bears the responsibility for that.
Eh, it's pretty safe, and the Four Rules most certainly apply, it's just that implementing Rule 4 is much more difficult.
In ~70 years of it, one of my father's favorite pastimes, he got shot exactly once, although there was no excuse for it like there was in the Chaney accident. Then again, he was both careful in picking his hunting partners and only hunted with some of them once after they demonstrated they didn't have their act together.
As long as you wear glasses and there's some distance, serious injury is unlikely, as happened with him. A tough shirt is also recommenced, that stopped penetration of the shot that hit his chest.
Well I mean he did shoot his friend in the face. His friend did apologize for it. That's public record. Mallorean didn't list any motive which would be where a conspiracy would come in. I mean yeah there were a lot of videos on youtube afterwards saying "he must have shot him from much closer range than they claim" but that's not really here nor there when it comes to: did Dick Cheney shoot a man in the face.
Are there any among the other 49 states that don't permit self-defense when being pursued by an attacker with a knife?
edit: The difference is that some states have a requirement that the defending party retreat. Got it. For my part, I imagine I'd always retreat if given the chance and if it's reasonable (ie, I'm not going to retreat and leave my family in harm's way, etc). Of course, I can't fault anyone for making a different choice; who knows how one might act in such a situation.
None, although some have a "duty to retreat" which might come into play, especially in after the fact 20/20 hindsight trials where the prosecutor ignores the dictum of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife."
In various parts of e.g. Europe, though, that would get you a prison sentence, very notably the U.K., since you would be using more force than the aggressor. The US principle is that once the threshold of lethal force is reached, other forms of lethal force in response are legitimate.
UK: no it wouldn't. UK law permits 'reasonable force'; shooting someone coming at you in close quarters with a knife sounds reasonable. Shooting someone who punches you, not so much.
Of course this is probably untested in court as no one here carries a gun.
In practice, that "reasonable force" judgement call and the often demonstrated lack prosecutoral good will results in atrocities like this one, which was merely the first I found with a quick Google search: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1461346/Five-years-in...
It can most certainly come up in home invasions, another article by the BBC mentioned about 11 cases in the recent past.
UK: no it wouldn't. UK law permits 'reasonable force'; shooting someone coming at you in close quarters with a knife sounds reasonable. Shooting someone who punches you, not so much.
Of course this is probably untested in court as no one here carries a gun.
Not a big deal. Air Force One actually has operating rooms on board. Just have a cardiothoracic surgeon with the President whose job it would be to retrieve the launch codes.
If you really wanted to be clever about it, have a non-medically trained person begin the operation... and then the surgeon would have to step in to save the patient.
Observe the sneaky trick this story tries to play: The president is supposed to kill one of his own before he's allowed to retaliate against the enemy.
As a thought experiment, let's implant the launch code into, say, a captured enemy spy. Is it still the same story?
The piece that I found particularly interesting about the proposal is the that the person with the implanted codes is a volunteer.
Not only would you need to have a President take hands-on ownership of taking a life (the first of many if the launch proceeds), but you have a martyr who is first to die for a cause that they feel most strongly for.
So far, since the top of the comments, you're the only one that acknowledged the volunteer has thoughts too. I think everyone is just looking at the moral part of this and not how the interaction between the volunteer and president would be when he's hesitant but the volunteer still believes it's the right decision. It does call into question what kind of volunteer this is. Someone who's ready to die for the country from the get go wouldn't work out very well.
I am almost cynical enough to believe that a modern neoliberal president surrounded by hawkish advisors could be convinced quite easily to personally kill the keeper and retrieve the launch codes. I believe that the hawkish "at any cost" mindset of modern American politics distorts human empathy so much that it's completely within the realm of belief for me for this to occur.
More likely, I think, that those holding prestigious enough office can find ways to get around very high procedural barriers like this one by assigning the task to a secret service agent or other on-hand staff of a martial trade.
Personally I think we've seen plenty of evidence that those in high office might personally carry out and enable heinous acts of individual violence if the stakes are made to appear grave enough to them.
All I know is that if I did get drunk enough to volunteer I'd spend the rest of my life running away from the president anytime there was a hint of a foreign relations dust up.
You wouldn't just be running away from the president. You'd be running away from a whole country full of hysterical people afraid of an imminent communist invasion and blaming it on you.
There would be a legal memorandum about how it's not murder, written by a relatively, in bureaucratic terms, sharp legal mind, subsequently rewarded by a sinecure at a public university.
There's a good reason: to make real the human suffering that can be caused in a quick, momentary decision.
Previous forms of warfare took longer amounts of time to cause immense destruction.
Read the story of Ronald Reagan's response to watching the movie The Day After [1] and you will realize that such representations of the suffering can have a great impact.
> The story only makes sense in signalling that you think that nuclear weapons are pointless.
Absolutely not. You can think that nuclear weapons are important, and still take seriously their immense destructive capacity.
Throughout human history human leaders have caused great suffering at little cost to themselves.
I can't remember where, but recently I read about a similar proposal that would have required the US and Soviet power structure to designate a relatively close family member that would take up residence in the other capital. It wouldn't have been as dramatic as hacking a complete stranger, but it tied into the strong genetic drives to protect one's family.
The entire calculus of having nuclear weapons in the first place rests on the assumption that no one will use them because to use them invites a retaliatory strike. Reducing the likelihood of a retaliatory strike, under this model, increases the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used.
Now of course, this model may be wrong (pre-emptive strike on non-nuclear state with no nuclear allies); but I'm somewhat disturbed that the Pentagon employees don't seem to understand this. Maybe they do, and the author only gave the initial reaction rather than their full counterargument.
This was all in the context of "Warmonger Reagan" becoming president. Assuming bad will on the part of the author is perhaps not required, but it was a safe bet back then.
And Reagan presided over two years of increase in tensions and hostility vs. the Soviet Union worse than any others since Kennedy, to the point where there's indications that the Soviet Union were concerned that Able Archer 83 was preparation for a real attack and considered a first strike.
It was first faced with the reality of the level of Soviet fear of an US attack that appears to have set him on a new course.
In '81, worrying about Reagans antagonistic foreign policy was quite rational.
Worse than any since Kennedy, but to a purpose: the end of the Soviet Union, which he actually achieved. Kennedy blundered into his crises by projecting weakness, and being worse than weak in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Reagan at least was making a calculated gamble that paid off, when few thought the inevitable end of the Soviet Union could be a fraction as peaceful as it was.
And I noticed no "new course" on his part, your claim elsewhere in this discussion that it made "him determined to sit down with the Soviet leadership" is not supported by my memory. He was certainly willing to "sit down with" them, he just wasn't willing to surrender even more to them. The accession of Gorbachev to was almost certainly a more significant factor (then again, maybe Gorbachev's hand was strengthed by Able Archer 83 et. al.), and note for example the much hyped "failure" at Reykjavík following the earlier one in Geneva.
"And Reagan presided over two years of increase in tensions and hostility vs. the Soviet Union"
No, the increase in tensions and hostility occurred as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred under Jimmy Carter (another Nobel Peace Prize winner).
That was the real start, for sure, but Reagan took the pressure of every type, except silly things like the grain embargo, to 11. For instance ... actually, I can see moralist Carter saying something like this after he saw the light, but still:
Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely..uh..declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
Well, why should the US sell grain to nations whose established goal is to end our way of life? "We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us." So let's not sell them rope. Or grain, in this case.
Because it's a fungible commodity in plentiful world supply, and we're better off benefiting from that trade ourselves?
Because it most directly puts the lie to their claims their economic system is superior? "If it's so good, why can't you grow enough food for yourselves but have to buy it from us?"
Why is it only a weapon to use in a hot war? We don't trade with North Korea, sanction Russia, and sanction many other countries. Why shouldn't we have refused to sell the Soviets grain?
That's possibly true.
That they need to by grain puts lie to it, the US selling grain to them was merely secondary.
The "cut open an innocent's chest" "thought experiment" is what I'm talking about, but with the changing of the original URL to one that doesn't focus or start with it, this whole thread and many others makes much less if any sense.
And I for one didn't call him that, it was people like those making up such things who called him that and much worse. Although I'll admit I've found "Nobel Peace Prize Winner Obama" to be funny ever since it happened, it will be such forever.
So far no one seems to be discussing the "volunteer". S/He can fight back. Use the butcher's knife against the president. Maybe even be in the right, or not. The moment this person "volunteers" to carry the codes inside, it becomes suicide, even if it never happens, they have to be ready to be hacked to death, and not try to avoid it when the moment comes, and this I believe is next to impossible, and effectively compromises the president's ability to carry out whatever actions deemed necessary. It's a nice thought experiment, but not more than that.
I'm from country without nuclear weapons and even I think that idea is really bad.
Here's why, either Russia or China could launch a first strike if they believed USA wouldn't retaliate. Or simpler they would use conventional means more aggressively and if that escalated to conflict with USA then they would simply make first strike.
Key point is neither country should ever think USA would definitely NOT use nuclear retaliation on nuclear first strike. In a sense by making a major nuclear weapons power less likely to do use its own weapons increase overall chance of nuclear war.
And finally this system also gives additional urgency for aggressive actions for opposing great powers, by forcing them to act and finish all their aggressive plans during term of a president they perceive in capable of ultimate action.
What a ridiculous and insulting proposal. People in the military agree to serve the country within certain bounds defined by tradition, they are not simply meat that can be used for any purpose.
How about use any politician who has every voted for the use of US military overseas. Or even better, a volunteer from their families. Or any professor who has advocated for such, or their families. Because I think that this would cover a lot of people who smugly accuse others of being drive by an "us vs them" mentality.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadFrom their response, killing through a button isn't killing.
Can you agree that sometimes it is morally just and legally permitted to use violence?
Can you also imagine that someone may know that it is the right thing to order this violence, but be put off by physically having to hack someone up themselves?
If so, do you now see the practical problem that the friends in the Pentagon were warning of? With the capsule in the person you are clouding the judgement of the president and making it harder for them to make a cool assessment of the right course of action, not adding some kind of clever moral check. Can't you see that?
If you want to know more about this issue, read up on the 'trolley problem'. It's a more complex moral issue than your snarky comment implies.
Perhaps the butcher knife and the capsule is too extreme, but on the other hand, perhaps just having to issue some codes is too easy.
The situations where a nuclear counter-attack serves any moral purpose are limited enough that such thought experiment are worthwhile means or considering what level of deterrence should be in place.
Why? So that when a new intelligence emerges on this planet they'll know the value of deterrence?
I disagree. The instinct for revenge serves a very important purpose in stabilizing society. If I know you will want revenge should I kill your brother, it makes me less likely to do so, and vice versa. Revenge is also the basis of the justice system, though obviously not its total extent. For example, if you kidnap someone, we do exactly what we condemn and forcibly hold you in a facility for a number of years or life. And yet the moral implications of that are different because of the differing situation.
>You try to appear strong, you tell everyone that you will lunch retaliation strikes, but the leaders of this other country don't give a shit, they really hate you and launch a first strike.
Appearing weak doesn't prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.
>You really want to nuke the people of that country? You won't hit the leaders and the people didn't do anything to you. Chances are that they hate the leaders as much as you do. So why on earth would you do that?
The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.
Revenge is not supposed to be the basis of any modern justice system, we don't lock people up to make them suffer, we do in order to change them, to make them not commit crimes again, to make them honor the rules of the society they live in. This necessarily involves an element of force, acting against the will of the criminal, but the motive is not revenge. We actually try to avoid revenge as much as we can, we condemn vigilantism because people act irrationally and are likely to overreact or even go after the wrong one. Revenge is not stabilizing, it is destabilizing.
Appearing weak doesn't prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.
If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons. You would have to support North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons because that will reduce the likelihood of war. Nuclear disarmament would be a stupid idea. You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts. It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped. Being strong and able to fight an attacker is not the same thing as being able and willing to nuke innocent people. The right thing to do is building missile defense capabilities, that might actually save your people. And you of course don't do that in order to gain first strike capabilities because you no longer have to fear retaliation strikes, you actually do it to have a strong defense against attackers. You don't develop or get rid of you offensive weapons to show that you really do it for defense and not for improving your first strike capabilities.
The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.
So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty? It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed? The people in North Korea really enjoy their liefs and support the regime? Which by the way certainly fits into a bunker. Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer? Should we kill the mother in revenge for unleashing her child onto the world? Just throw her into jail for a decade or two?
That's patently untrue. The very notion of justice is built upon revenge. To say modern justice systems aren't based on it is to say they float in the air, founded upon nothing.
>If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons.
Well, yes, it is eminently sensible in many situations to obtain nuclear weapons for your country. That doesn't mean I have to support them doing so, as it is not necessarily in MY interest for them to do so, even if it is in their own interest.
> You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts.
Our domination of the planet suggests this is the case.
>It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped.
No, it's not.
>So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty?
A dictator cannot gain power without the support of a large segment of the population.
> It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed?
Yes. It is immoral not to resist evil.
>Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Citation needed. »Justifications for punishment include retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation.« [1] Note that retribution is not revenge and that retribution is probably the most controversial justification for legal punishment. [2] What good does it do, whom does it help?
Well, yes, it is eminently sensible in many situations to obtain nuclear weapons for your country. That doesn't mean I have to support them doing so, as it is not necessarily in MY interest for them to do so, even if it is in their own interest.
Why would it not be in your interest unless you want to attack that other country? You argued that not having nuclear weapons increases the risk of being attacked, so more nuclear weapons should reduce the likelihood of armed conflicts which in turn means a more stable world which benefits everyone (besides weapons manufacturers and the like).
Our domination of the planet suggests this is the case.
How does that follow? The dominant species on a planet can certainly be benevolent. I grant you that humanity had and probably always will have a fair share of assholes and that they are good at getting into influential positions, but without good additional arguments I wilt not grant you that it is a fundamental aspect of humans that will forever prevent us from living together in peace. We certainly still have to go a long way, but we also have already come a long way.
No, it's not.
If you don't have nuclear weapons you increase the risk of being attacked, you should really consider getting some.
If you wear sexy cloths (not wear non-sexy cloths) you increase the risk of being rapped, you should really consider getting some non-sexy cloths.
A dictator cannot gain power without the support of a large segment of the population.
A coup d'état does neither require the participation nor the support of a large fraction of the population.
Yes. It is immoral not to resist evil.
That is a bold statement. How far does that go? If I see someone pointing a gun at somebody, should I try to intervene even if it is likely that I don't stand a chance? Is it my moral obligation to travel to North Korea and try to topple regime?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
You argued that the people are responsible for the actions of their leaders. It is admittedly not the best analogy but wouldn't it similarly follow that a mother is responsible for the actions of her child?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment
[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-punishment/
(The US has never been bombed by any other nation but it has bombed a couple dozens. In the case of nukes, it is the only nation that has used them against another country.)
At the time of their introduction, nuclear weapons were not yet understood as qualitatively different from an equally powerful amount of conventional weapons. The qualitative difference observed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped establish this qualitative difference in the minds of people.
Having the grit and resolution to hack someone open and being able to make a good decision about using weapons are unrelated. Why conflate them?
An alternative might be to have the person carry the suitcase with orders never to surrender it, forcing you to be prepared to shoot him or order him shot if he can't be subdued, or any number of "easier" variants.
Part of the point is forcing people to think about why it is appropriate to order the murder of millions of innocent civilians if you are unwilling to kill a single person face to face.
There may be valid answers, such as if you have reasons to worry about further, more destructive additional strikes and want to try to take out their capabilities. But there are also many digusting reasons, such as being willing to carry out mass murder on innocents out of a desire for vengeance.
Even if one can agree, which I think most of us can, this particular dilemma is specific to weapons of mass destruction, because their use inevitably (and intentionally) causes the death of many, many people who aren't the target but are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, the thinking goes, it makes some sense to force the president to kill someone who isn't the target to ensure that it's a worthwhile sacrifice.
I wonder what else people would be more willing to do by pushing a button rather than doing it themselves.
I mean, it's not surprising that gov higher-ups would incinerate human beings with a button, dump toxic waste on people from a plane with a button, poison water supplies, launch tear-gas from choppers, etc.
They should be forced to open their eyes and WATCH the effects of their buttons. Like Clockwork Orange or something.
I mean, what's the solution to these types of problem where the adversary keeps getting better and better? I feel like Forever War touched on this too, where the Taurans just kept getting more and more advanced, and it was always an arm race to have the better technology and better weapons and better tactics, etc.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
The American military fighting in Vietnam dehumanized the Vietnam soldiers in order to justify killing them, but imagine if one of those American soldiers were told by his commanding officer that in order to kill more "Charlies", he'd have to kill his friend he's been fighting with since the beginning. Sure, you'll probably find someone crazy enough to do so, but a lot of people wouldn't do it.
TLDR: It's different when it's someone you work with
Part of the dilemma in this thought experiment is basically about weighing the worth of the lives of unknown numbers of "them", against one of "us".
The President must distinguish "them" or "us", otherwise he has no business leading the country in a war. He must treat the killing of one of "us" with a different judgment.
The other part of this is remote controlled killing versus visceral engagement. Suppose that pushing the button is the right thing to do for the country, but the President has a personal aversion against the bloody engagement form of killing. As President, he's supposed to push, but a personal, psychological reason is preventing him from doing it as a man.
Pressing the button means killing of lot of "us" in the end too, because there's no such thing as one-way nuclear exchanges nowadays, with subs ready to fire from anywhere in the world.
There is never going to be a one-sided nuclear exchange when a substantial number of powerful, ideologically opposed countries have access to ICBMs.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the most destructive bombing runs in WWII.
The March 9th 1945 bombings of Tokyo were far more destructive.
How most nuclear powers would actually react to large-scale non-nuclear aggression is of course a whole different discussion.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use
In short, there are no realistic circumstances under which the US would launch a first strike with nuclear weapons. The political cost is too high, and the benefits could never outweigh the costs.
The "bad guys", the ones you might actually refer to as "them", are sitting somewhere comfortable, far out of reach of any of this. Their only interaction in this is that they pressed a button.
It's the self justified "us" than do most damage, not some "others".
Any evidence for that?
Because again and again, humans are well-documented to NOT dance on each other's graves. We consistently pull back from the brink of destroying the "other" and not only let them live, but help them rebuild.
I'm not saying that war is not necessary, but pretending that you're fighting zombies thirsting for nothing but your blood is idiotic. The soldiers you're fighting joined their army to protect their people. The people itself most likely just want to passively continue with their life, not understanding what the war is about, knowing nothing but the date of the first bomb. The people that started the war is sitting somewhere cozy, out of reach.
Simply not true in the case of, say, an aggressor who initiates conflict by invading other countries.
Many a times there is definitely a right an wrong in war.
The side which is right has no choice but to respond with aggression. Fight, or else be laughably annihilated for the sake of a pacifist ideology.
And yet you demonstrate it yourself with, "I expect them to do it, but not us in the HN community. We're different here."
This selfishness if of course natural for any human, but that does not make it better.
Also: Baseline human psychology is tribalistic and violent. We need education and culture to behave as modern - and sustenance amd safety.
If you put a gun to my head, I'm certainly not going to care if you're my local baker or a North Korean soldier, just to name a random nation. Hell, I'll probably have sympathies for the soldier, as they are just doing what they were told, like any other soldier would. Getting angry at them would be pointless, although I'd of course do my best to fight for survival, and if I came out the winner, I would be upset that the life I had to take was not the life that was to blame.
For the baker, it would be hard to tell if the hand was forced, or if the idea of slaughter was of their own making.
Starting from the 60's, the concept of MAD and a truly global, total war made this distinction irrelevant. As soon as you push that button, you're not only condemning "them" to death.
This shows just how much 20th c. nationalism still holds sway in many minds when it is as ridiculous as sports fandom.
As if the establishment haven't killed (and allowed the killing) of tons of "us" without flinching an eye...
From this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
to much worse stuff. But suddenly when it becomes matter of open public scrutiny it's some kind of big conundrum...
They just make their general discontent known ("oh, those pesky anti-vietnam protesters" etc), allow for the cultivation of an "us and them" dynamic, and then their people ensure that for years the police is not just allowed to do bad things but even encouraged (with protecting policemen that stepped out of line, giving promotions to their leadership if not directly, then after some such scandal gets forgotten, etc).
From McCarthy and Hoover, to the treatment of the human rights activists, the 68 democratic convention and onwards to this, the Watergate and more, it's not about some "bad apple" or "stressful panicked" actor, but about systematic cultivation of such solutions.
For one thing, "those pesky anti-vietnam protesters" had burned down the ROTC building a couple of days before, there was quite a bit of violent rioting prior to the shooting and the National Guardsmen had already had to use their bayonets to manage it (when bayonets get fixed and bloodied you know things got very serious). Today's "campus protests" are utterly farcical by comparison.
In general, violent civil insurrection was common, and the authorities management was very mild by the international standards of the time, and there was plenty of pressure from the bottom up for much more strenuous measures. Note it's the only major incident of that type in that period, and is a trifle when compared to atrocities like Waco.
McCarthy? Please, if you don't know what the phrase "submit to party discipline" means, and that it resulted in every member of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), back when it was popular and selective in admittance (through the '30s at minimum), was a self-declared traitor, well, read up on what the other side was saying, or things like the Venona decrypts which eventually revealed just how accurate McCarthy's raw information was.
And note how the authorities' flaccid response to GRU and NKVD spying through these traitors like Hiss paved the way for crude men like McCarthy. That's a lesson you'll see from the Weimar Republic to a lot of what's happening today, and there's plenty of history of this sort of thing in pre-modern times.
Hoover was a bad apple, I'll grant you, and the rest of the barrel remains rotten to this day; has the FBI Hostage "Rescue" Team ever actually rescued anyone? Latest is their shooting in the only fatality resulting from the Bundy Oregon mess, and then trying to cover that up.
Please stay!
"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
By the way, have you ever wonder which type of meat you would eat if you had to kill the animals yourself?
If faced with a symmetric foe that has launched a nuclear holocaust upon my country, it would be absolutely essential to retaliate in kind so as to ensure that they could not mount a second assault and kill even more people. If I were president, I would not hesitate.
If your foe launches a strike that would kill 99% of the population of your country would you retaliate to ensure same level of destruction?
Now suppose you do also decide to retaliate to ensure 99% destruction to your foe. Would your foe's knowledge of that change whether your foe even tries an eliminating strike in the first place?
The same MAD principle? The knowledge that after 6 years, everybody will be exhausted by fighting, and what for exactly? Hitler wasn't rational, and maybe he would use nuclear weapons. Actors in the WWI thought it would last couple months, again, weren't exactly rational about what they are getting into.
It's not nuclear weapons what creates peace. It's the rational ability of humans to (eventually) see the hopelessness of destruction, that creates peace.
Whether the destruction comes from nuclear or normal weapons is irrelevant, however conventional weapons at least give us chance to have that rationalization later. In other words, stronger weapons require more responsible humans, not cause them to be more responsible.
The MAD doctrine is just a false rationalization of irrational fear. It is not a rational principle, it is principle adopted so that humans can feel better having nuclear weapons, although having them objectively makes the world a more dangerous place. If people indeed followed MAD doctrine as rigorously as MAD doctrine itself assumes, WWI and WWII would never have happened either.
In both of these scenarios if you are attacked first (early warning) your only option is to attack their centers of population to either prevent an all out invasion or to retaliate.
This is exactly why MAD sort of works, because it actually ensures mutual destruction of not only the nuclear and military capabilities but also of all national and human infrastructure as the only possible answer to even a limited nuclear first strike is "fire zee missiles!". Or to put it in a more structured manner there is virtually no room for proportionate response when it comes to a nuclear attack. When there was it was the biggest threat to "MAD" since it more or less would ensure that any side that gains sufficient advantage would be prone to launching a first strike. Because of this very fact the nuclear arms treaties between the USA and then the USSR limited fixed launch site while promoting mobile launcher and nuclear missile subs as much as possible as the guaranteed 2nd strike capability of both nations was what MAD was actually built upon.
But MAD is not without it's faults, heck so far i think Norway out all countries was the one that brought us closest to total nuclear war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
Yeah, right. And the Soviets most certainly took advantage of this moral error, for as you note, they're hard pressed to do so with a straight face otherwise.
There is no moral error here, only moral reality.
Also, it's not like our military establishment is separate from our civilian population centers. The SF bay area, New York, San Diego, among others, would be devastated in a counter-force first strike, no matter how precise.
The article says "a team of Norwegian and American scientists". I am not surprised.
OK, and it's the end of the world as we know it. Like, Game Over, the survivors are back to the Stone Age and the civilization can start from scratch with 99% less people. Sounds like a sound decision you'd make.
It is ironic, but by taking a strong "We will strike back" stance, you decrease the chances of ever having to strike.
On the flip side, some of the well-trod ground is now out of date, too. Arguments about how maybe we could try non-proliferation instead become irrelevant as nuclear weapons become relatively speaking easier and easier to acquire due to advancing and dispersing technological sophistication.
Anyhow, upshot, if you're serious about thinking through the issues this turns out to be a really challenging stage to get up and morally preen at people on. It's very easy to end up advocating a strategy that kills billions of people while preening. It may be unpleasant to you, but you do in fact have to think. Hard. With neither rose-tinted glasses nor excessive cynicism. The easy answers don't work. The sweet answers don't work.
Indicating a willingness to use nuclear weapons at all may also make an adversary more willing to believe you may deviate from policy and strike first, which again may lead them to believe an all out first strike is safer than holding back (e.g. I've mentioned Able Archer 83, where the Soviet leadership allegedly considered a first strike because they thought the US was planning one)
Part of the problem is that neither you nor the other side knows whether your opponent will stick to any given strategy, nor if they will behave rationally.
The correct action may be to back down from a full scale launch while saying that you will respond in kind.
PS: South Africa actually gave up nuclear weapons. Which is the extreme end of not shooting back scale.
Advertising to the world that you have a firm policy against nuclear attacks other than in very limited, clearly defined scenarios puts you at risk of the other side decides it is ok to strike you for their own gains, but it also protects you against potential adversaries who have no designs on you but who you might inadvertently scare.
Able Archer 83, and the realisation that it appears to have genuinely terrified the Soviet leadership is often credited with changing Reagans course and making him determined to sit down with the Soviet leadership.
The bigger issue is that they are more likely to initiate the strike if they know about this protocol and believe it will reduce the likelihood of a counter strike.
A while afterwards Reagan wrote that he long thought that the Soviet leadership, like the Americans, did not believe a US first strike was a serious possibility. But he eventually learned that this was a flawed assumption: The Soviet leadership saw the US as a possible - even likely - aggressor, and interpreted US actions accordingly. In that context, posturing was incredibly dangerous, and this realisation made him change tack and become determined to sit down and talk to them.
He prefers to become your friend over many years, have great experiences together, then shoot you in the face and make you apologize for your role in the incident.
While it's primarily the responsibility of an upland bird hunter (anyone shooting, of course, but in this sort of hunting you move around a lot and flush out birds unexpectedly) to keep track of everyone and not shoot when any of them are down range, everyone in the hunting party also has a responsibility to follow previously agreed upon protocols to make this easier and less error prone. The guy who got shot screwed that up big time.
Of course A)as VP Cheney's life was already a media circus B) Cheney shot the dude in his face and assumed-risk-or-no Cheney bears the responsibility for that.
In ~70 years of it, one of my father's favorite pastimes, he got shot exactly once, although there was no excuse for it like there was in the Chaney accident. Then again, he was both careful in picking his hunting partners and only hunted with some of them once after they demonstrated they didn't have their act together.
As long as you wear glasses and there's some distance, serious injury is unlikely, as happened with him. A tough shirt is also recommenced, that stopped penetration of the shot that hit his chest.
I live in Texas so it would permit certain actions on my behalf.
edit: The difference is that some states have a requirement that the defending party retreat. Got it. For my part, I imagine I'd always retreat if given the chance and if it's reasonable (ie, I'm not going to retreat and leave my family in harm's way, etc). Of course, I can't fault anyone for making a different choice; who knows how one might act in such a situation.
In various parts of e.g. Europe, though, that would get you a prison sentence, very notably the U.K., since you would be using more force than the aggressor. The US principle is that once the threshold of lethal force is reached, other forms of lethal force in response are legitimate.
Of course this is probably untested in court as no one here carries a gun.
It can most certainly come up in home invasions, another article by the BBC mentioned about 11 cases in the recent past.
Of course this is probably untested in court as no one here carries a gun.
Does everyone promise to do this and have them nowhere else?
If you really wanted to be clever about it, have a non-medically trained person begin the operation... and then the surgeon would have to step in to save the patient.
To save the country, he'd have to sacrifice himself.
Should any of his direct reports consider killing him to access the codes, that'd be capital-offence treason ( " levying War against them" ).
As a thought experiment, let's implant the launch code into, say, a captured enemy spy. Is it still the same story?
The piece that I found particularly interesting about the proposal is the that the person with the implanted codes is a volunteer.
Not only would you need to have a President take hands-on ownership of taking a life (the first of many if the launch proceeds), but you have a martyr who is first to die for a cause that they feel most strongly for.
Stronger forms:
- Pieces of the code in multiple people.
- Inside a loved one.
- In the arm or leg of the president.
More likely, I think, that those holding prestigious enough office can find ways to get around very high procedural barriers like this one by assigning the task to a secret service agent or other on-hand staff of a martial trade.
Personally I think we've seen plenty of evidence that those in high office might personally carry out and enable heinous acts of individual violence if the stakes are made to appear grave enough to them.
2) Politicians / leaders are orders of magnitude more likely to be psychopaths.
I assume that is part of the moral of the tale. The story only makes sense in signalling that you think that nuclear weapons are pointless.
There's a good reason: to make real the human suffering that can be caused in a quick, momentary decision.
Previous forms of warfare took longer amounts of time to cause immense destruction.
Read the story of Ronald Reagan's response to watching the movie The Day After [1] and you will realize that such representations of the suffering can have a great impact.
> The story only makes sense in signalling that you think that nuclear weapons are pointless.
Absolutely not. You can think that nuclear weapons are important, and still take seriously their immense destructive capacity.
Throughout human history human leaders have caused great suffering at little cost to themselves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...
Now of course, this model may be wrong (pre-emptive strike on non-nuclear state with no nuclear allies); but I'm somewhat disturbed that the Pentagon employees don't seem to understand this. Maybe they do, and the author only gave the initial reaction rather than their full counterargument.
It was first faced with the reality of the level of Soviet fear of an US attack that appears to have set him on a new course.
In '81, worrying about Reagans antagonistic foreign policy was quite rational.
And I noticed no "new course" on his part, your claim elsewhere in this discussion that it made "him determined to sit down with the Soviet leadership" is not supported by my memory. He was certainly willing to "sit down with" them, he just wasn't willing to surrender even more to them. The accession of Gorbachev to was almost certainly a more significant factor (then again, maybe Gorbachev's hand was strengthed by Able Archer 83 et. al.), and note for example the much hyped "failure" at Reykjavík following the earlier one in Geneva.
No, the increase in tensions and hostility occurred as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred under Jimmy Carter (another Nobel Peace Prize winner).
Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely..uh..declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
That was in 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_empire
Because it's a fungible commodity in plentiful world supply, and we're better off benefiting from that trade ourselves?
Because it most directly puts the lie to their claims their economic system is superior? "If it's so good, why can't you grow enough food for yourselves but have to buy it from us?"
That's possibly true.
That they need to by grain puts lie to it, the US selling grain to them was merely secondary.
We're actually still formally at war with the DPRK, something they remind us and most especially our ROK allies of all too often.
The rest are sanctions that stop short of using food as a weapon.
As for "Warmonger Reagan", how many shooting wars did he actually get us into?
How many shooting wars are we in right now, under "Nobel Peace Prize Winner" Obama?
And I for one didn't call him that, it was people like those making up such things who called him that and much worse. Although I'll admit I've found "Nobel Peace Prize Winner Obama" to be funny ever since it happened, it will be such forever.
The new article talks about the point of deterrence, and the associated logic, in greater depth.
Here was the original article that had been posted:
http://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/proposal-keep-the-nuclear-l...
Alex3917:
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u...
Here's why, either Russia or China could launch a first strike if they believed USA wouldn't retaliate. Or simpler they would use conventional means more aggressively and if that escalated to conflict with USA then they would simply make first strike. Key point is neither country should ever think USA would definitely NOT use nuclear retaliation on nuclear first strike. In a sense by making a major nuclear weapons power less likely to do use its own weapons increase overall chance of nuclear war. And finally this system also gives additional urgency for aggressive actions for opposing great powers, by forcing them to act and finish all their aggressive plans during term of a president they perceive in capable of ultimate action.
How about use any politician who has every voted for the use of US military overseas. Or even better, a volunteer from their families. Or any professor who has advocated for such, or their families. Because I think that this would cover a lot of people who smugly accuse others of being drive by an "us vs them" mentality.