"Global Zero" Jordan's Queen Noor: We are approaching a nuclear tipping point

Discussion in 'World Events' started by common_sense_seeker, Jul 1, 2010.

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Do you agree with Queen Noor's view point?

  1. Yes - she sounds like a very intelligent woman to me

    6 vote(s)
    75.0%
  2. No - nuclear weapons are essential for America

    1 vote(s)
    12.5%
  3. Don't know

    1 vote(s)
    12.5%
  1. StrawDog disseminated primatemaia Valued Senior Member

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    Awesome rationale. :worship:
     
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  3. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    You said that already, and repetition is not argumentation. Are you delivering a campaign speech or a sermon here or something?

    Anyway, let's stop personifying states (as "mad" or "sane") and drop the straw man of "launching everything available at whomever seems immediately to blame."

    Those are the same thing, when it comes to strategic arsenals of nuclear weapons.

    I don't think you understand either how MAD is supposed to work, or how what you imagine yourself to be suggesting would differ from that.

    Has nobody told you that arguing from personal authority in the context of an anonymous message board is preposterous? As in, equivalent-to-conceding, facepalm-inducing idiotic?

    But even ignoring that, I'm unimpressed. My own personal acquaintanceship with the nuclear weapons industry exceeds anything you purport to have experienced.

    It's a simple matter to remove the soldiers from the loop entirely, when it comes to employing the strategic weapons in question.

    We've already used just about every viable system that came out of Star Wars. You may have heard of "Patriot Missiles?"

    The leap from that supposition to a causal, structural effect is tenuous and entirely unsupported. It may just be a temporary side-effect of the coincidence that several of the most belligerent polities around were eliminated midway through the previous century, and geopolitics has not yet had time to produce an equally fractious status.

    Presumably the same way that the various attacks on homelands were justified in times past and present: the defense of allies, territorial expansion, etc. You realize that "response to aggression" is not the sole reason that wars get fought, right?

    Which misses the salient fact that the whole reason we won't be commencing wars where we need huge nuclear arsenals, F-22's, etc. is precisely that we do have them. Avoiding such wars is exactly their utility. I personally would rather pay for a nuclear arsenal than pay to fight the sorts of wars we'd face without one. The option of not paying for either is, unfortunately, chimerical.

    Good argument.

    You should stop mischaracterizing MAD. It requires only that costs would be "beyond calculation." To translate that out of diplo-speak, that means basically that the state doing the calculating would expect to end up non-existant in short order. That doesn't require killing billions, etc., at least when it comes to most states in the world. It's only nuclear attacks on certain very large, very powerful states that present a serious risk of ending human civilization.

    And that is exactly the sort of "deterrent" that you are advocating. If there's some salient distinction between your ideas and MAD, then you should attempt to elucidate it. It would be a lot more interesting than these repeated slogans and flourishes of contempt for "Cold War Thinking" or whatever.

    Not in 1991 it wasn't.

    Wait, aren't you midway through an essay advocating "WMD deterrents?" What is that, except "the threat of doing things more evil than any nation has done in history?"

    Except that no such "compulsion" is in evidence: leaders still routinely initiate open warfare. It happens all that time.

    It's only a bluff if we don't actually go ahead and kill lots of people - and I see no evidence for that either.

    The rapidly-integrating world economy depends on the absense of major land invasions, sea disputes, etc. Take away the nukes and bring back the land invasions and naval battles, and there will no longer be an integrated world economy to deter things.

    Go fuck youself, you condescending prick.

    Capability is not a question of intent. Knowing that you are armed, your neighbors must then calculate whether to maintain their own arms, in the case that your intentions are not so benign as you say that they are (or even just to deal with whatever aggressors you deter, and whom might target them instead). And so everybody ends up owning a bunch of guns, and eventually that increased level of armaments gets expressed as shooting accidents, gunfights, etc. And in geopolitics, parties are even less able to rely on confidence in the intentions of others, especially in the long run. And so they don't: states do not generally depend for their defence on the premise that other states have only purely defensive intentions. Instead, they are forced to consider actual capabilities, incentives and disincentives.

    And, unlike a gunfight, a nuclear war has dramatic, permanent consequences for everyone else.

    And that deterrent is also an offensive capability: you could pick up that gun and invade your neighbor's house if you chose to. And the risk is as assessed by yourself: if any of your neighbors takes a lower view of the risks in question, then your acquisition of "deterrent" will seem disproportionate and so threatening - from their point of view, you're acquiring an offensive capability unjustified by any threats you face, and so they'll need to get their own deterrent to prevent you from getting the wrong idea. Except then their capabilities will seem, from your perspective, outmatched to the risks they face (since you exclude yourself from their risk calculus) and you'll feel the need for more capabilities, and so on. This is how arms races happen, and providing everyone with powerful enough arms to destroy nations will make that worse, not better.

    What structural factor is going to eliminate the risk of conflict between nations? Economic integration, supposedly? Except economy causes as much conflict as it solves: certain resources are both scarse (and getting scarser), concentrated in weak states, and essentialy to the function (and further integration) of the world economy. The force of nationalism shows no sign of abating, nor the hunger of powerful men for ever-greater influence. You're going to need a lot more than a determination to wave your hands and repeat feel-good mantras if you want to convince me that we're on the cusp of a golden age of peace and harmony.

    False dichotomy - wars and destruction are as often products of reasoned calculations as of impulse. Reason is no more a benign, harmonious force than are Justice or Equality. In particular, Reason is not the same thing as Peace.
     
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  5. StrawDog disseminated primatemaia Valued Senior Member

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    @Quad
    Good to see you back and making sense. :m:
     
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  7. hypewaders Save Changes Registered Senior Member

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    12,061
    I think that states can behave rationally, with sanity- or irrationally, in madness.

    Is this not the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine?

    I’ve been talking here about deterrence, and you about Total War/Total Destruction.

    No, M.A.D. proclaimed mutual destruction. A nuclear deterrence could include the threat to fire WMDs at a massing invasion force, for example. The MAD doctrine was for instant total war. Certainly a deterrent, but an extreme example of deterrence- overkill in my opinion, and a bitter expression of blind revenge that in my view "deterence" became in the 1960s a more palatable euphemism for M.A.D.

    Here's how one of its chief architects described M.A.D.:



    Ask me nice, and I'll explain the basis for my opinion. Give me better information, and I'll change it.

    So people you've asked about doomsday orders really expressed no reservations?

    Is that so? When did this happen?


    The Patriot system did not work as advertised when first employed as a point-defense system in Gulf War 1: As a countermeasure to Scuds, Patriot had the effect of causing more damage to occur in sensitive and populated areas, by bringing down more wreckage and munitions in those places than otherwise would have fallen.

    But Star Wars aside, The world is full of many more lethal devices than ever before, yet people are killing each other in inverse proportion to their proliferation.

    Speculate on the future as you like. I'm talking about what we know: People can more readily kill each other now more than ever, but we're increasingly careful not to.

    Absolutely. Wars are initiated in aggression, and there are various responses a nation can take. Some nations seemingly collapse under aggression, but then the invader is slowly bled out by resistance, until an occupation is defeated.

    Or it could also be that commencing great wars has become unprofitable.


    Who is likely to invade the USA in your view, if we reduced our nuclear arsenal to a handful?

    Why- is it some sort of religion?



    It was just such a scenario (of superpower megadeath) that was termed MAD.


    No, I advocate maintaining, enhancing, and promoting many more reasonable and justifiable deterrent than threats of mass-murder. Many nations have been unconquerable by "superior" force. Might does not make right. Militarists recoil from contemplating this, but it's still true.

    A deterrent is the explanation to a potential invader of how aggression will be punished and not rewarded. MAD is an irrational and immoral cry for revenge. MAD is the "pre-emptive" surrender of the higher moral ground.



    ...

    Saddam's WMD arsenal was a fiction that Saddam collaborated in maintaining, because he wasn't only afraid of the USA-

    Saddam's arsenal was never a serious threat to his region, certainly not a threat to the USA, and certainly not cause for the USA to recklessly throw our hand as regional hegemon. We ended up looking more heedless of humanity than Saddam, which was a new low in world opinion for us to sink to. We've got to find a better deterrent than the threat of doing things more evil than any nation has done in history.

    I'm advocating the wide array of options that do not include evil things.

    No, it does not happen "all the time". Much of the world understands that they can (when push comes to shove) call our US bluff, and bankrupt us while we try to do intimidate within the margins of a positive national self-image.

    In the USA, our society (including mainstream media) is still reticent to count or acknowledge the millions who we will kill merely to save national face, called out in a belligerent bluff without just cause. Our obscenely overdone nuclear deterrent, like our hubristic notions of reshaping Iraq or Afghanistan to our liking, is useless for keeping other nations down. These scenes do put the last nails in the coffin of 20th-Century style land invasions by superpowers, but so does the rapidly-integrating world economy.

    The rationality of nuclear war, land invasions, and sea battles are all going into the dustbin of history.

    Obviously you and I differ in our study habits.

    We also differ in our communications here. I'm pleased discuss things with you as a peer, and I really do hope you will keep your composure. If you will review my comment above, I've made no insult of your history-study habits. Obviously your education and mine are not the same. Somewhere between us waits the truth, and I want to know it. For all I know, so do you.

    I was thinking just the same thing, until I got to the part insulting another member, same as before. Shit!

    Moderator Note: quadraphonics will receive a 1-day holiday for insulting another member, as soon as I finish making this post.

    I've never witnessed a gunfight in my present neighborhood, but we have a lot of guns around here. I have heard of accidents and suicides, but I don't think that the availability of lethal implements results in a higher rate of killings. On the contrary (this is the point that I tried to make to you with my automotive analogy) with the proliferation of lethal things, we're all trying harder not to kill each other in anger or other negligence.

    I don't agree. I think that today we have much better means of understanding the intentions of other nations, and that lucidity has always been improving, and I expect it will continue to become more clear over time.

    There are other disincentives than total war.

    Agreed. And unlike a gunfight, any nuclear nation escalating into total war forfeits the moral advantage. I realize that the moral advantage has often been lacking in the calculus of militarists, but that is why they are so often surprised by the outcome of asymmetrical wars as seen in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

    But I know the consequences of wrongful invasion on the part of myself or my country.

    That makes no logical sense to me.

    I don't believe it's necessary for all nations to be able to destroy other nations with nuclear weapons for there to come a proper time for complete global nuclear disarmament. I do believe that an end to the disproportionate hoarding of nuclear weapons by a belligerent hyperpower (the USA) will be conducive to a global decline in missile envy.

    Bingo.

    I don't possess the raw materials to build myself a modern car. That doesn't mean I must use deadly force to get one. It is the same for peaceful nations trading for goods and services. Further, it is becoming increasingly understood around the world that by lifting up economically the most impoverished populations, we enhance the security of all.

    Of course it does. People used to march off to war for utterly ludicrous reasons, and purely out of nationalistic reflex. Now it takes increasingly-sophisticated campaigns of disinformation to convince citizens of prosperous and powerful nations that an exaggerated threat requires the wholesale killing of foreigners.


    Well, I think that's mostly stayed the same. We haven't made enough progress in exposing war-mongers and other ruthless exploiters.

    We're a resourceful and intelligent species. We can do anything we set our minds to. Are we on the cusp of making all the right choices next week or next year? I don't expect so. But among the hopeful trends that I can observe, nations that go belligerent are most frequently coming up losers, and more and more people are beginning to notice that. Reason is eclipsing aggressive impulse in human evolution.

    Granted reason is not exactly equal to peace, but peace is more reasonable than the alternative.

    Peace, quadraphonics. Please come again, I would enjoy more debate with you.

    Mod Note: After a day's penance, that is (sorry to have delayed commencement of your minimal suspension for so long, while responding- It was mostly a great post there!)
     
    Last edited: Jul 7, 2010
  8. StrawDog disseminated primatemaia Valued Senior Member

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    Well said friend Hype. I agree. I say nay to the naysayers. We will not go gently into that good night. :m:

    And, this is the exact sentiment that is causing the lasting furore re Israel`s recent behaviour.
     

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