> But none of the nine known nuclear powers in the world - including the UK and the US - endorsed it.
Proving that this group is completely ineffective and their peace prize is a joke. Just a bunch of bureaucrats who sit around saying "oh yes, nuclear weapons bad, pass the caviar please".
Things must be said, even when there are no immediate consequences.
It's the same with the torture performed by the US during the Bush administration: The torturers got away with it (for now), should we not even shame them?
The nuclear weapons states have failed to act. The international community is using shame (which has worked in the past for other treaties) and reaffirming their commitments to non-proliferation. Would you rather they do nothing?
The countries in question have plenty of shame already, this is a speck of dust on their mountains of shame.
Nuclear weapons are different. Everybody has to deactivate them at the exact same time, otherwise you end up with power imbalances, which end with more proliferation.
This group is like a shrieking woman in a room with 6 other people all pointing guns at each other - completely ineffective, just adding more noise to an already tense situation.
There are pathways to risk reduction and disarmament if we have the political will to take them. For instance, in the United States, we could push congress to pass S.200 "Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons" https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/200 We can also push towards minimal deterrence first and then organize a multilateral disarmament.
It's unlikely the US military was the part of the government that endorsed it. The US government is so big, so bureaucratic, that it's less a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and more like the right 300 hands are working in direct opposition to the other 400 left ones.
The U.S. representative was hanging out in the hall with a few of our supporters denouncing the working group while the treaty was being discussed. We know exactly what we're doing and it would be comical if it weren't so deadly serious.
Serious , but somewhat rhetorical question. I don't expect an answer, certainly not a simple answer.
Why just nuclear weapons?
Shouldn't the scope be wider, say all weapons of mass destruction? But even then, conventional weapons become weapons of mass destruction when used in massive quantities (e.g.: massive aerial bombing during WWII).
So in a world without nuclear weapons, wouldn't state actors just go back to doing things nuclear weapons do but with conventional weapons?
Nuclear/biological/chemical weapons have the distinct ability to have lasting effects on the area/population they are used on. "Conventional" weapons have their immediate effect (death, destruction) and then that's it.
The fact that some of us are able to at least try to limit their use is great considering humanity's track record...
Of course this is all generally speaking, as each class of weapons have effects that last shorter or longer than others within even the same class. e.g. nuclear air-burst has less fallout than a ground-burst. Some chemical weapons break down fairly quickly and become inert, while others linger, etc.
Then you have to consider cluster munitions and land mines, which while apparently conventional, are quite indiscriminate and also can linger for decades. These devices have also been more successfully restricted than other conventional weapons.
It should be major point of shame for the US that they haven't signed the treaty to ban land mines. When you go to Cambodia or Laos you quickly see how evil these mines are.
Residual radiation and fallout will hardly affect the land if the warhead is detonated high in the air like in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The fallout relative to the explosion radius is also smaller with a thermonuclear weapon. The number of people that die from higher cancer risk due to radiation is actually lower with a typical thermonuclear weapon because the lethal blast radius is bigger.
So I don't think the lasting effect on the population is a good argument against nuclear or at least thermonuclear weapons.
My view is that nuclear weapons are really dangerous because you don't need a lot of resources to deploy them and the high density of destructive power.
It is much easier to "lose" 1MT worth of TNT with a nuclear warhead than with conventional bombs. It is also easier to deploy that 1MT worth of TNT if it is just one bomb.
A mistake with a nuclear weapon can also cause a nuclear war. Now it isn't a single nuclear warhead against 100k conventional bombs, it is thousand nuclear weapons against maybe a few million conventional bombs.
Incendiary bombs used against Germany[0][1] and Japan[2] arguably caused more death and destruction in single air-raids than the singular nuclear attacks on Japan; albeit with a use of greater manpower in the attacks themselves.
We're talking orders of magnitude higher yields in modern nuclear weapons compared to the first ones which were roughly comparable to entire air armada's of bombers at the time.
There was a post to HN earlier this year of a site that would estimate damage and allow you to customize the yields, burst-height, prevailing winds, etc. I did not bookmark it as the results are too terrifying.
Conventional weapons cannot destroy every population center in a large country in 30 minutes.
You're right that WWII conventional bombing campaigns visited total destruction on cities to an extent that sometimes rivaled or surpassed what happened in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But there are two key differences.
One is that those campaigns required hundreds of bombers and a near total effort from the Allied air forces to destroy one city. With nuclear weapons, that turns into hundreds of cities destroyed at once.
The other is that nuclear weapons have become much smaller and much more powerful. A conventional bombing raid could match the devastation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but could never come close to the devastation something like a W88 would cause to a major city. The bombs used on Japan barely fit in the largest bomber of the era, but a modern bomb can fit a dozen on a single missile.
A single Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine carries nearly 200 bombs. It could create an order of magnitude more destruction than all bombing raids of WWII combined (including the nuclear ones) less than an hour after being given the order. The US Navy operates 14 of them, and that's just one weapons system operated by one country.
Conventional weapons cannot do the things nuclear weapons do, not even close.
One guy in N Korea with a nuclear weapon at his disposal vs Cuba and no nuclear weapon and we can see how difficult it is to imagine Cuba posing a real destabilizing threat vs N Korea.
W/o nuclear weapons, N Korea, in order to invade S Korea and overwhelm it would need millions of troops clothed and fed for months, logistical support, etc. A couple of bombs and the same is achieved without spending billions a month in maintaining troop and armaments levels.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. Nothing has done more to stop large powerful nations from getting in serious shooting wars than the background threat of nuclear retaliation.
Without nuclear weapons, I think there's a better than even chance the Red Army storms through the Fulda Gap at some point 1945-1960. If for no other reason than that all of the resources devoted to atomic weapons, and the requisite delivery platforms for them (submarines, ballistic missiles, intercontinental bombers, etc) would have been diverted elsewhere.
For people wanting really great analysis of nuclear issues, check out Jeff Lewis's Arms Control Wonk podcast. There's three episodes analyzing the Convention on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons treaty amongst many other fascinating topics like missile defense.
This is disgusting. How do they deserve any reward when north Korea has atomic weapons, when Iran nearly had atomic weapons, and probably will have it after 10 years when the agreement is over.
Nobel prizes for peace have become "what is the biggest historical ironical joke we can make this year". Obama getting that prize for worse than nothing, then this.
Actually, it seems incredibly appropriate to award this organization the award to emphasize that we need anti-nuclear organizations to be supported and funded now more than ever. If all this prize accomplish is provide publicity for them then it's doing something positive given how grave the threat of nuclear war is.
When it comes to Obama, you can say that it was a prize that was given to encourage the president of the most influential country in the world to do the right things.
It was given early in his presidential term and may have influenced his decisions later on small and big things.
Obama didnt create war, he infact de-escalated one potential and many other smaller matters where the US was already engaged.
> When it comes to Obama, you can say that it was a prize that was given to encourage the president of the most influential country in the world to do the right things.
One could, but the real reason that Mr. Obama received it was that he was not Mr. Bush. One may approve or disapprove of that fact, but it remains a fact regardless.
Can you point to specific failures on the part of ICAN? They’re not the world police. They can only work within the mandate and resourcing available.
In other words, do you think the situation would be better without ICAN? The Iran agreement is not perfect, but surely it’s better than no reins.
Don’t forget about the countries that have voluntarily ended their nuclear programs or stopped expanding them. Successes in this field are by nature much less visible than the failures.
The ~7,000 warheads that the US and Russia still have are a clear and present danger to humanity, but I would hesitate to get rid of all of them and have world scale conventional war return. Maybe a few dozen very well protected and spread-out nuclear warheads and delivery systems per country would be the ideal situation.
I'm torn. The post-WWII era has been amazingly peaceful, but at what risk?
If nuclear weapons mean we avoid large-scale total war in exchange for, say, a one-in-a-million chance per year of annihilation, that might be worthwhile.
If they mean we avoid large-scale total war in exchange for a 1% chance per year of annihilation, that's so very much not worthwhile.
What are the actual chances? It's impossible to tell. I suspect it's closer to 1% than one-in-a-million but that's really just a guess.
This is just plain silly. They might as well award the thing to my old friend Paul, who styles himself a peace poet, and writes shit poor poems about how we should all just, you know, not make war on each other anymore. At least he really needs the money. Nukes don't go away because profiled do-gooders whine about them.
The litterature prize, btw, really, really, really needs to go to Randall Munroe one of these years. Yes, I'm dead serious.
Interesting... just the other day, there was a discussion concerning the physics prize being giving to three people (which is already bending the rules) when there are often dozens or hundreds of people involved. The will is quite specific about "person" for all of them.
It always surpises me how little people fear nuclear weapons. Given that it takes to launch only one of them to trigger the cascade and that there are some 15,000 of them around the world the scenario seems pretty believable. What's worse, virtually every doomsday scenario ends with nukes burning everyone alive.
Scared of global warning? Here we go: Icebergs melt, the sea level rises. Bangladesh is under water. 100M refugees flood India, Pakistan and China. Recall the political turmoil caused by couple of million refugees in Europe. How would it go if it happens at much larger scale in the area with three nuclear powers? Boom! You are fried meat.
Is economic inequality your nightmare? Are you afraid it can lead to similar outcomes as in 1914? Well, add nuclear weapons to the mix. Inequality causes political instability, political instabiliy ends up with nuclear weapons in the hands of weird people. Kaboom! There goes breathable atmosphere.
Nanotechnology eating the world? Antibiotic-resistant supergerms? Out-of-control artificial intelligence? Whatever your nightmare scenario is it always ends the same way. Catastrophe leads to chaos. Chaos leads to loss of control of nukes. One is lauched. All other follow automatically. Adieu, cruel world.
Now, this is a genuine question: How come that people, even intelligent people, like those on HN, are not scared shitless?
52 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 99.2 ms ] threadOr Aung San Suu Kyi, though she was awarded before she became complicit in an ongoing genocide.
Proving that this group is completely ineffective and their peace prize is a joke. Just a bunch of bureaucrats who sit around saying "oh yes, nuclear weapons bad, pass the caviar please".
It's the same with the torture performed by the US during the Bush administration: The torturers got away with it (for now), should we not even shame them?
Nuclear weapons are different. Everybody has to deactivate them at the exact same time, otherwise you end up with power imbalances, which end with more proliferation.
This group is like a shrieking woman in a room with 6 other people all pointing guns at each other - completely ineffective, just adding more noise to an already tense situation.
Why just nuclear weapons?
Shouldn't the scope be wider, say all weapons of mass destruction? But even then, conventional weapons become weapons of mass destruction when used in massive quantities (e.g.: massive aerial bombing during WWII).
So in a world without nuclear weapons, wouldn't state actors just go back to doing things nuclear weapons do but with conventional weapons?
The fact that some of us are able to at least try to limit their use is great considering humanity's track record...
Of course this is all generally speaking, as each class of weapons have effects that last shorter or longer than others within even the same class. e.g. nuclear air-burst has less fallout than a ground-burst. Some chemical weapons break down fairly quickly and become inert, while others linger, etc.
Then you have to consider cluster munitions and land mines, which while apparently conventional, are quite indiscriminate and also can linger for decades. These devices have also been more successfully restricted than other conventional weapons.
To clarify, it appears we will stop using such ordinance which leaves >1% un-exploded as of next year. [0]
Considering such devices have hundreds of individual munitions, that is still not something I would consider "safe".
[0]http://www.acq.osd.mil/tc/treaties/ccwapl/DoD%20Policy%20on%...
Residual radiation and fallout will hardly affect the land if the warhead is detonated high in the air like in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The fallout relative to the explosion radius is also smaller with a thermonuclear weapon. The number of people that die from higher cancer risk due to radiation is actually lower with a typical thermonuclear weapon because the lethal blast radius is bigger.
So I don't think the lasting effect on the population is a good argument against nuclear or at least thermonuclear weapons.
My view is that nuclear weapons are really dangerous because you don't need a lot of resources to deploy them and the high density of destructive power.
It is much easier to "lose" 1MT worth of TNT with a nuclear warhead than with conventional bombs. It is also easier to deploy that 1MT worth of TNT if it is just one bomb. A mistake with a nuclear weapon can also cause a nuclear war. Now it isn't a single nuclear warhead against 100k conventional bombs, it is thousand nuclear weapons against maybe a few million conventional bombs.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_Wa...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Mee...
There was a post to HN earlier this year of a site that would estimate damage and allow you to customize the yields, burst-height, prevailing winds, etc. I did not bookmark it as the results are too terrifying.
You're right that WWII conventional bombing campaigns visited total destruction on cities to an extent that sometimes rivaled or surpassed what happened in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But there are two key differences.
One is that those campaigns required hundreds of bombers and a near total effort from the Allied air forces to destroy one city. With nuclear weapons, that turns into hundreds of cities destroyed at once.
The other is that nuclear weapons have become much smaller and much more powerful. A conventional bombing raid could match the devastation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but could never come close to the devastation something like a W88 would cause to a major city. The bombs used on Japan barely fit in the largest bomber of the era, but a modern bomb can fit a dozen on a single missile.
A single Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine carries nearly 200 bombs. It could create an order of magnitude more destruction than all bombing raids of WWII combined (including the nuclear ones) less than an hour after being given the order. The US Navy operates 14 of them, and that's just one weapons system operated by one country.
Conventional weapons cannot do the things nuclear weapons do, not even close.
One guy in N Korea with a nuclear weapon at his disposal vs Cuba and no nuclear weapon and we can see how difficult it is to imagine Cuba posing a real destabilizing threat vs N Korea.
W/o nuclear weapons, N Korea, in order to invade S Korea and overwhelm it would need millions of troops clothed and fed for months, logistical support, etc. A couple of bombs and the same is achieved without spending billions a month in maintaining troop and armaments levels.
Reminds me of the award going to Obama.
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/podcast/
Nobel prizes for peace have become "what is the biggest historical ironical joke we can make this year". Obama getting that prize for worse than nothing, then this.
It was given early in his presidential term and may have influenced his decisions later on small and big things.
Obama didnt create war, he infact de-escalated one potential and many other smaller matters where the US was already engaged.
Personally I think it was fine.
One could, but the real reason that Mr. Obama received it was that he was not Mr. Bush. One may approve or disapprove of that fact, but it remains a fact regardless.
In other words, do you think the situation would be better without ICAN? The Iran agreement is not perfect, but surely it’s better than no reins.
Don’t forget about the countries that have voluntarily ended their nuclear programs or stopped expanding them. Successes in this field are by nature much less visible than the failures.
If nuclear weapons mean we avoid large-scale total war in exchange for, say, a one-in-a-million chance per year of annihilation, that might be worthwhile.
If they mean we avoid large-scale total war in exchange for a 1% chance per year of annihilation, that's so very much not worthwhile.
What are the actual chances? It's impossible to tell. I suspect it's closer to 1% than one-in-a-million but that's really just a guess.
This was of course largely avoidable if president Kennedy had chosen to stand down as his Russian counterpart was offering[1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban-...
The litterature prize, btw, really, really, really needs to go to Randall Munroe one of these years. Yes, I'm dead serious.
https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/will-full.html
https://twitter.com/BeaFihn/status/915598750969712640
Honoring an anti-nuclear group at least seems to be in the proper spirit, compared to some of the more ridiculous awards in recent decades.
Scared of global warning? Here we go: Icebergs melt, the sea level rises. Bangladesh is under water. 100M refugees flood India, Pakistan and China. Recall the political turmoil caused by couple of million refugees in Europe. How would it go if it happens at much larger scale in the area with three nuclear powers? Boom! You are fried meat.
Is economic inequality your nightmare? Are you afraid it can lead to similar outcomes as in 1914? Well, add nuclear weapons to the mix. Inequality causes political instability, political instabiliy ends up with nuclear weapons in the hands of weird people. Kaboom! There goes breathable atmosphere.
Nanotechnology eating the world? Antibiotic-resistant supergerms? Out-of-control artificial intelligence? Whatever your nightmare scenario is it always ends the same way. Catastrophe leads to chaos. Chaos leads to loss of control of nukes. One is lauched. All other follow automatically. Adieu, cruel world.
Now, this is a genuine question: How come that people, even intelligent people, like those on HN, are not scared shitless?