We all know we're going to die, but it's also hard for us to comprehend our own mortality. The brain tends to push us away from contemplating big, unpleasant subjects.
It seems to me that the reporter never asks the really important question: Can we realistically get rid of nuclear weapons. I just don't see any pragmatic way for America to disarm as long as countries who are our enemy have nuclear weapons.
The important question would be: "To what extent can we disarm, realizing tremendous cost savings and increasing safety, and still have a reliable nuclear deterrence strategy?"
"More than 100 nuclear weapons in a nation’s arsenal does more harm than good—as using them can destabilize the country that uses them even in a best-case scenario." [1]
My understanding is that nuclear deterrence is not based on the idea that you would survive using your own nuclear weapons, rather it is to insure that an enemy cannot survive using nuclear weapons on you. Therefore, I don't see how reducing the number of weapons would make a difference.
In addition, my understanding is that the reason for having so many is to prevent a scenario where an enemy decides that they can shoot down enough of your missiles to survive a counter attack.
Russia is largest country in Earth and Soviet Union + sattelites had even larger teritory. But Iran or North Korea? Do you really need 6400 nuclear warheads to cover their teritory in response? Perhaps 1609 would be enough?
it's hard to say how many you need for a truly effective deterrent when you don't know how many launch sites can be destroyed before launch or how many missiles can be intercepted in flight. iran or nk almost certainly can't hit any US launch sites and probably can't intercept many missiles, but it's hard to know exactly what Russia or China would be capable of in a hypothetical conflict.
all I'm saying is there's no number where you can say with 100% certainty "we have enough missiles to meet our strategic goals". this doesn't mean you devote your entire production capacity to making nukes, but it makes it sort of silly for laymen to sit around talking about whether we have too many. we don't have enough information to make even a halfway-educated guess.
You don't need that many, but you aren't accounting for several factors.
Firstly, missle defense, depending on the target some area have about a 20% success rate for ICBMs.
Secondly, secondary strike, if many of our sites are taken out by their misses, ground attack, or terrorist attack, we still need an arsenal that serves as a deterrent.
Lastly, failure to launch, there maybe several missle crews that refuse the order, the soldiers on the button are trained and constantly studied to insure they will do their job. But when push comes to shove many people are unwilling to end the world as we know. In addition to that, some sites may not be able to authenticate the orders, communications maybe lost, or the missle may simple not fire.
These are just a few scenarios that have to be accounted for, and when you do that, have a massive surplus only makes sense.
A few things about it strike me as hitting all of the standard points of what is essentially Soviet/Russian propaganda - overly lurid description of the injuries caused by nuclear weapons, overly long concern about the cost of maintaining them in a deployed and ready state. Meanwhile, not a single word about the threat that other countries' arsenals pose to us or to other nations that we have pledged to defend.
Note that, like it or not, our nuclear weapons are implicitly used to defend non-nuclear nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, most of Europe, etc. If the US destroyed all of our nukes, all of those other countries would have to either bow down to to Russia and China, build their own nuclear weapons, or put themselves under the protection or some other nuclear superpower. Leading to a lot more nuclear powers, and probably a higher change of nuclear war happening somewhere.
The only discordant node is the pro-Second Amendment section. Not usually present in these sorts of peacenick papers. I suppose it could fit in if you take the foreign propaganda interpretation - foreign superpowers don't really want to invade us anyways, they just don't want us to interfere when they try to dominate their local neighbors. At least until so much of the world is under their thumb that we can't ignore them anymore.
The interviewee conflates so many ideas that their argument loses cohesion. Add to that numerous factual errors and odd interpretations (the 2nd Amendment prohibits nuclear weapons?) that the article ends up just being a wandering rant.
People very much underestimate the risk of a nuclear war, because they are calculating the risk based on the situation today when that situation is naturally going to change over time. Think about any long tailed event. The financial crisis. Fukushima. What are the chances that all the backup generators and safety systems are going to fail at the same time? Very small, if you just assume they’re independent and multiply together their failure rates. But a tsunami of sufficient size demonstrates that those failures rates are not in fact independent.
Same thing with nuclear war. The chances of having a) a crisis of sufficient size to suggest the use of nukes b) two leaders who would actually push the button c) total diplomatic failure and so on would appear to be small. And it is- today. But what about in a situation where there is mass migration of people due to climate change, and the rise of authoritarian leaders in response, and war between major states? Now what’s the risk?
Remember that in the Second World War, every weapon that was developed during the war was immediately used, including nuclear ones. Because it was a different context. If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow morning, the whole conversation would change in ways that seem unimaginable today. Think about how everything changed after 9/11. It was a totally different landscape.
The only way to truly reduce the chances of nuclear war is to dismantle the nukes, and if their use seems unlikely now, that’s an indication that the time to dismantle them is now, when it’s relatively easy, not later, when it might be impossible.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.3 ms ] threadOnce we get rid of nukes we can go back to killing each other like civilized people.
The important question would be: "To what extent can we disarm, realizing tremendous cost savings and increasing safety, and still have a reliable nuclear deterrence strategy?"
"More than 100 nuclear weapons in a nation’s arsenal does more harm than good—as using them can destabilize the country that uses them even in a best-case scenario." [1]
[1] https://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2018/june/more-harm-than-go... (More Harm Than Good: Assessing the Nuclear Arsenal Tipping Point)
https://www.defensenews.com/space/2019/01/24/heres-how-many-... (Here’s how many billions [$494 billion] the US will spend on nuclear weapons over the next decade)
In addition, my understanding is that the reason for having so many is to prevent a scenario where an enemy decides that they can shoot down enough of your missiles to survive a counter attack.
Firstly, missle defense, depending on the target some area have about a 20% success rate for ICBMs.
Secondly, secondary strike, if many of our sites are taken out by their misses, ground attack, or terrorist attack, we still need an arsenal that serves as a deterrent.
Lastly, failure to launch, there maybe several missle crews that refuse the order, the soldiers on the button are trained and constantly studied to insure they will do their job. But when push comes to shove many people are unwilling to end the world as we know. In addition to that, some sites may not be able to authenticate the orders, communications maybe lost, or the missle may simple not fire.
These are just a few scenarios that have to be accounted for, and when you do that, have a massive surplus only makes sense.
Note that, like it or not, our nuclear weapons are implicitly used to defend non-nuclear nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, most of Europe, etc. If the US destroyed all of our nukes, all of those other countries would have to either bow down to to Russia and China, build their own nuclear weapons, or put themselves under the protection or some other nuclear superpower. Leading to a lot more nuclear powers, and probably a higher change of nuclear war happening somewhere.
The only discordant node is the pro-Second Amendment section. Not usually present in these sorts of peacenick papers. I suppose it could fit in if you take the foreign propaganda interpretation - foreign superpowers don't really want to invade us anyways, they just don't want us to interfere when they try to dominate their local neighbors. At least until so much of the world is under their thumb that we can't ignore them anymore.
Same thing with nuclear war. The chances of having a) a crisis of sufficient size to suggest the use of nukes b) two leaders who would actually push the button c) total diplomatic failure and so on would appear to be small. And it is- today. But what about in a situation where there is mass migration of people due to climate change, and the rise of authoritarian leaders in response, and war between major states? Now what’s the risk?
Remember that in the Second World War, every weapon that was developed during the war was immediately used, including nuclear ones. Because it was a different context. If China invaded Taiwan tomorrow morning, the whole conversation would change in ways that seem unimaginable today. Think about how everything changed after 9/11. It was a totally different landscape.
The only way to truly reduce the chances of nuclear war is to dismantle the nukes, and if their use seems unlikely now, that’s an indication that the time to dismantle them is now, when it’s relatively easy, not later, when it might be impossible.