The differing probabilities of deploying a nuclear weapon along the spectrum from an elected leader of a democratic state with a free press and which is a bought-up member of the international community (minimal to zero) to a delusional, self-deifying, ailing dictator who has demonstrated no concern for even his own people and has indoctrinated his entire nation with a narrative of existential struggle through perpetual war (slightly higher) makes the entire 'rational actor' analysis a bit shaky.
The talk of the danger of nuclear weapons is window-dressing. On my list of Things I Give a Shit About, Iran's nuclear program ranks low, and it's the same way for other middle easterners who aren't called King or Most Dear and Democratically Elected Eternal Ruler. It's of no concern to me. But I'm open to caring about things, and I'm totally fine with getting on board with this movement to eliminate the dangers of nuclear holocaust.
So, this is it, right? A big problem we can all unite behind?
OK, I'm down. Tell me about it.
We could all die, and nuclear weapons are terrible?
Yes, that would be something that concerns me. Dying is, like, the worst.
I should show utmost concern about this? You had at me all of us dying.
You figured it out? Awesome.
So, we're first gonna just fuck the shit out of this country in the middle east? OK, that sounds like something drastic.
And then we're... oh, and that it's it. Of course. And only keep enough nukes to destroy the world 5 times instead of 50? Well, I sure do feel safe now.
You got nothing. You build up this fear of all-out war, and global destruction, and the solution is Gulf War III? That's really it? I have no idea why westerners keep finding these problems that can only be solved by bombing some middle eastern country, but I would like it to stop.
Pi-r8 seems to be taking some strange assumptions with human emotion and the mechanics of missile-based nuclear war here - as well as the mechanics of MAD. If you want a more specific realworld example of being on the brink of nuclear annihilation, may I suggest Stanislav Petrov.
First, the decision for a counterstrike would come before you're attacked. The decision to launch a counterattack would come when enemy missiles are still en route to their targets. This was the whole point of having early warning systems. The earlier that the system can warn you, the longer you have to figure out potential targets and verify the threat before a retaliatory strike becomes limited or impossible.
Second, you have imperfect data. Of the numerous times when we've approached accidental nuclear war it's not because someone in Chicago falsely reported that they just got nuked, it's because some observatory at the Arctic Circle has a radar dish reporting something that looks suspiciously like the uncleared launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Maybe it's a weather satellite. Maybe it's a farmer in the boonies who managed to build a huge rocket in his barn. Maybe it's a computer error. Maybe's an ICBM with a MIRV warhead poised to take out the entire eastern seaboard.
Third, counterattacking limits the impact on your nation and the world (barring the environmental apocalypse being created). Only a very dangerous actor would initiate an attack. Either your enemy is a genocidal rogue or your enemy is trying to cripple you militarily. In both cases it makes more sense to counterattack. Either to remove the political entity willing to kill millions for a political goal, or to attack military installations to provide your civil and military populations with the greatest chance of success. By counterstriking your opponent you also limit their capacity to attack you repeatedly.
MAD is not as simple as not wanting to kill millions of the other guy's civillians. But the whole idea of MAD is that you don't get to that point in the first place because even before the other guy launches he knows that he cannot destroy your ability to retaliate. It's not about not retaliating, it's about not attacking in the first place.
If the warheads have already hit then MAD deterrence has already failed. It would no longer be about mutually assured destruction, it would be about enacting Pyrrhic vengeance.
Pakistan doesn't have enough warheads to annihilate India, but enough to make it not worthwhile.
5 major cities won't get a government re-elected, but the world will continue.
The fear of a US/USSR conflict was that almost every major city would be annihilated, and as a result significant fallout contamination would spread across large parts of the globe.
By far the biggest issue would be the consequent annihilation of the major minds and institutions driving technological innovation of the 21st century though, and the presumed involvement of the NATO powers in any such exchange (which would complete the elimination of modern civilization - at least at the time).
China's modern foreign policy can be roughly summarized as "we just don't want it getting back to us" - which pretty thoroughly explains NK.
All of which is fine if you assume that the international power balance over the next half-century (life-time of a child born today) is going to stay exactly the same as it is today. Which, as the past half-century, or hell even the past week suggest, is not the smartest bet to make.
In other words: if India, Indonesia and China are 3 of the 4 upcoming powers of the 21 century (which pretty much everyone agrees they are) you'd be a fool not to acknowledge the potential for some kind of NATO / Warsaw Pact regional tensions evolving.
Maybe not but I've seen no reason to think that nuclear weapons are causing significant problems, or lack thereof would solve the ones we have. The Cold War may have fucked up the world, but it taught us how to live with WMDs and not annihilate ourselves - there's no putting that cat back in the bag. A world without nuclear weapons is just asking for someone to build some and hold the rest of us to ransom.
Nuclear weapons have the wonderful side benefit of largely eliminating the sort of large-scale warfare so prevalent before their invention. Rolling a huge column of armor and infantry across a border is a really fucking stupid idea when it takes a single nuke-tipped cruise missile to destroy it.
Even today, Vanguard submarine commanders can launch their nukes without authorisation from the government. Apparently this is a safeguard against rogue launches - it was seen that a prime minister authorising the launch of nukes without due cause was more likely than a sub captain doing so.
Wait, what? That doesn't make sense at all. They still have to launch if the prime minister orders them to do that, right? So all that does is add together the possibility that a prime minister OR a sub captain could make a stupid decision. Not to mention, there's a lot more sub captains than prime ministers.
It's also so that if the C&C structure gets taken out while the sub is running quiet they can counterattack, rather than sitting around with a couple dozen megatons of weapons doing fuck-all.
The differing probabilities of deploying a nuclear weapon along the spectrum from an elected leader of a democratic state with a free press and which is a bought-up member of the international community (minimal to zero) to a delusional, self-deifying, ailing dictator who has demonstrated no concern for even his own people and has indoctrinated his entire nation with a narrative of existential struggle through perpetual war (slightly higher) makes the entire 'rational actor' analysis a bit shaky.
Right, first of all, pictures don't really constitute an argument. They constitute, well, pictures. So forgive me if I mistranslate your attempt at visual debate, but...
Stalin had nuclear capability for only 3 1/2 years of rule, during which the later Cold War tensions had not really ratcheted up to boiling point - the Warsaw Pact had not been formed by the time he died. Furthermore, if you read some of the numerous biographies of the man, they relate how his control and physical ability was seriously waning for those final years.
Mao had nuclear capability for slightly longer (tests in 1965-7, dead in 1976). But Mao was a more astute and less zealous type of dictator than either Stalin or Kim Jong Il (my initial reference), and China has always had a less expansionist mentality which doesn't really lend itself to the kind of nuclear brinkmanship which the USSR and US enjoyed. Moreover, for much of the decade when Mao had his finger on the button, US - China relations were improving and even "normalised" with the Nixon visit in 1972. There wasn't ever a real confrontation to test Chinese nuclear will under Mao.
So, aside from some pretty serious contextual effects to what I assume was your argument, you've in any case simply come back to the same basic point we mentioned before: because it didn't happen before, it won't happen again. That isn't a particularly wise approach to the potential end of civilisation as we know it. But I suppose it has the strength of being easier to convey in picture-form only:
But, my office is about 2 blocks from the White House, so I'd have a pretty good chance of being vaporized in any such attack. Which is kind of good news/bad news for me, I guess.
That was my thought process growing up. I lived pretty close to O'Hare Airport, well within a likely range of total devastation. It was widely acknowledged among people living near there that O'Hare would likely be a priority target. It was, after all, the largest and busiest airport in the world at the time, and therefore a major strategic target. So, if the shit did start flying, we'd die early.
because it didn't happen before, it won't happen again.
I've said it before in another thread but the idea of Iran having a "right" to posses nuclear weapons is insane to me. Iran is not a rational actor, we are more unsafe having nukes in the hands of dictators than in democraticly elected and accountable leaders, and most importantly with every nation that builds a nuclear arsnal our odds of a nuclear conflict go up.
The cold war is not the poster child for a global nuclear deterrant.
There's really no logical reason why anyone should order a nuclear counterstrike after your whole country is destroyed. Of course people do illogical things all the time- maybe they'd be angry, or scared, or blindly following orders, or they just don't understand the situation. But in relying on MAD to work, you have to really on people to do that illogical action.
I'm not really sure if you have an understanding of how human beings work, if you think military commanders with the means to retaliate will just throw up their hands and do nothing in that situation.
More importantly, if you're the Soviets, or China, are you going to roll the dice on the assumption that every American nuke-handler will just say "fuck it?"
What if they were convinced that the Americans were about to launch a first-strike, and their only chance of survival was hit us first? They might feel it's better to gamble on a chance of survival than to await a certain death.
I think that's a different discussion from the one we're having. If you're convinced the other side was going to launch first, you might as well go ahead and pull the trigger.
But, keep in mind that the Soviets knew we had a better 2nd strike capability than they did. We were able to track their nuclear missile subs (they were not as quiet as ours, and had less ports to sail from, so our attack subs could track them) while ours went undetected. Even if they completely got the drop on our non-sub nukes, our boomers would still wipe them out. Near the end of the Cold War, there was a decent chance that we could have launched from our boomers in a suprise attack and "won" a nuclear war. But, "win" in that context would have meant losing millions of Americans, since a few Soviet nukes would have almost certainly have been launched.
Do you have a source for this? It sounds plausable but I'd like to read about it more.
Anyway, the Soviets must have realized during the 80's that we were pulling ahead of them fast in nuclear technology. What if they decided that we were inevitably going to reach a point where we could destroy their whole arsenal with a suprise first-strike? Also, for arguments sake let's assume that the Soviet Union wasn't on the brink of collapse.
They could of course beg us to slow down the pace of nuclear development, but it's unlikely that old Ray-Gun would have listened to them (Yes he did agree to the SALT treaty, but that mainly just removed old obselete weapons while he was pushing for more high-tech weapons and the Star Wars program). They'd really only have two options: give up and concede the arms race to NATO, or attack immediately while they were still roughly at parity.
If they choose the first option, the MAD system breaks down. They'd still be able to threaten us with horrific destruction of course, but without the threat of TOTAL destruction that no longer has the same power. They'd pretty much just have to trust us to be nice to them. If decide that we can't risk letting them threaten us any more, or if just hate their guts and want them to die, we nuke them first and "win" the cold war.
Since the Soviets didn't trust us too much, suppose they choose the second option. They launch all their nukes at us without giving us any warning. They might even hit before the president can order a counter-attack. In that case, we get into exactly the scenario that I kept talking about yesterday- we've already been nuked, so what's the point of a counter-attack? Like President Rex said, it would just be Pyrrhic vengeance. Of course we might still do it, for all the reasons people have mentioned, but it won't bring back the dead. We also might NOT do it, either because the military command structure has fallen apart or because the individuals involved might decide that it's immoral to launch a counterstrike like that. Perhaps some nukes get fired, but not enough to actually destroy the Soviet Union. In that case, the Soviets could potentially "win" just like we could "win" in the first scenario.
Notice that in both situations, the Soviets have to make a guess about how our military officers will think. If they think that our military is nice and really doesn't want to nuke them, they could win in both scenarios (either by coexisting peacefully with us or by destroying and still surviving). On the other hand, if they think that our military really wants to nuke them, both scenarios end in defeat for them.
It's especially dangerous considering how open our political process is. We had Carter as president for a while, doing everything he could to maintain peace with them. But they must have known that when Reagan took office, he was going to ramp up hostilies greatly, with all his rhetoric about "the evil empire" and so on. What if they decided to attack during the end of Carter's presidency, gambling that he wouldn't counterattack and that Reagan might launch a First Strike?
This is why I'm saying that there's a flaw in the logic of MAD. It's supposed to be a game theory situation with no winning outcome. Like the prisoner's dilemna, you don't have a winning move. "The only way to win is not to play". By offering both sides the potential for a winning outcome, the logic breaks down. At that point, with the clever game theory broken, you have to appeal to human emotions instead. Like you might argue that we would never nuke the whole Soviet Union just to avoid the chance of them nuking us, but that's no longer a logical proof, it's a human personality judgement. When you start to depend on individuals making moral decisions like that, it's when things get dicey. We were quite lucky that Gorbachev was the man in power during the 80's- imagine if a paranoid and ruthless man like Stalin was in charge? I can definitely imagine Stalin sacrificing tens of millions of his own people if he believed that the only alternative was the complete destruction of everyone.
The best setup might actually be the technology described in Dr. Strangelove which automatically destroys the world when it detects a nuclear explosion. Against a setup like that, there really is no winning option. Any nuclear attack you make would automatically destroy you, whereas the current system doesn't exactly work like that.
If they choose the first option, the MAD system breaks down. They'd still be able to threaten us with horrific destruction of course, but without the threat of TOTAL destruction that no longer has the same power. They'd pretty much just have to trust us to be nice to them. If decide that we can't risk letting them threaten us any more, or if just hate their guts and want them to die, we nuke them first and "win" the cold war.
One of the nice things about nuclear weapons is that they are so destructive it really doesn't take much to sustain a deterrent effect. Horrific destruction is pretty deterring; destruction does not have to be total to deter.
There are very few circumstances where it would be preferable for a country to sustain horrific destruction; one of the few is total destruction...the thing is, the advantage gained by totally destroying your enemy is not enough to overcome the damage to you from their horrific, but non-total, counter-attack.
Even if one side had such an advantage it could destroy the other and only lose, say, ten major cities...well, is it really worth those ten major cities if the survival of ALL your cities isn't somehow on the line?
Add in the normative deterrent to being history's greatest monster by launching first...and the logic of mutually assured destruction seems pretty solid.
And counter-attacking isn't "pointless." A nuclear engagement would take place in stages- you could try to hit your opponents remaining weapons and reduce what they can fire at you. A nuclear war would probably start with counter-force attacks; once you're ability to conduct a second strike against military targets is ablated, hitting those nice, fat juicy Moscows and St. Petersburg with what you've got left still has deterrent power even in the midst of nuclear combat. Remember for a first strike to work it has to be total and complete; even a few surviving SSBNs, for example, could go ahead and annihilate most of the civilian population of the" winning" power. And given that might lead to a cessation of hostilities, or deter even after a counter-force strike cycle has ended, preventing a counter-value...AND add in the fact that the post-war world is going to be determined by the outcome of the nuclear war- is a world ruled by an intact USSR that got away with vaporizing the US be something those surviving US sub commanders are going to allow?
Also, revenge.
The equations for MAD changed substantially when various thresholds were crossed in the late 70s and early 80s; after that point, we're talking near total human extinction, globally, so nuclear strategy sort of changed since MAD was basically guaranteed. Even a totally victorious power, who annihilated their opponents military bases and civilian population, would then have to deal with a world that basically sucks. No more American grain for the USSR, fallout, economic and scientific collapse, nuclear winter, nuclear summer...
Like the prisoner's dilemna, you don't have a winning move.
You're misunderstanding the prisoner's dilemma. In an non-iterated, blind prisoner's dilemma, the winning move is to defect and always to defect. The game theory setup of MAD is that the winning move is to guarantee retaliation. MAD is disrupted when one or the other projects an inability to guarantee retaliation in the future in themselves or their opponent, but not at present. But it's important not to exaggerate this effect. The classic example is "but missile defense would give the other guy an incentive to strike right now, before the missile defense system was in place!" Nevermind that even an in-place missile defense system would be imperfect and retaliation still entirely possible, there's still no incentive to strike first because the other guy will just retaliate, as before and you're in the same situation- fucked. The idea being fighting when you had less of a disadvantage is preferable to fighting when your opponent can destroy you with relative impunity is the smart play- and it normally is, except with nuclear weapons, since being destroyed with impunity and being mostly destroyed in a more even contest is basically equivalent. Only if you know that the contest is already begun is "mostly destroyed" and "destroyed with impunity" an actual choice to make; otherwise, inaction is the superior strategy.
This is why MAD works, and works well. There are only a few situations where two nuclear powers have any incentive whatsoever to strike first, and that's if the other nuclear power is so much weaker they could be destroyed without the attacking power sustaining non-trivial damage and/or a first strike from the other guy seems imminent, so you want to pre-empt that. In the first case, you're basically destroying a more or less defenseless enemy power with a weapon of horrific moral consequence, so there's a huge normative disincentive- it is basically the most dickish thing a world leader could. That doesn't guarantee it will never be done; many argue that Israel would have a strategic incentive to use nuclear weapons on Iran before the Iranian bomb program could arm that country with a retaliatory capability, for example. In the second case, someone has fucked up somewhere anyway in terms of nuclear strategy.
That might have something to do with the fact that Israel is the only nuclear power where not only the government, but the entire population and country are being regularly threatened with extinction. That and the fact that others have tried before and nearly succeeded.
I'd bet that focuses the mind somewhat.
Except by nuclear war in which all are.
Or if you actually think about it... Pakistan by India, India by Pakistan and the Western powers by Muslim extremists (which is about as credible a threat to complete extinction as Israel's enemies are to it).
acidlacedpenguinInstitutionalizedSafe in jail.Registered Userregular
edited February 2011
I thought the whole point of MAD boils down to:
party A: we have the upper-hand! LAUNCH ZE MISSILES!
* nuclear launch detected *
party B: welp we're fucked anyway, LAUNCH RETALIATORY MISSILES!
* nuclear launch detected *
party A: oh shiiiiii- we're fucked too, hit them with everything we've got!
* nuclear launch detected *
party B: what he said. Prepare for trouble and make it double!
* nuclear launch detected *
party C: . . . I hear Australia's nice this time of year. . .
*end story*
Anyone who observes MAD basically says yep that seems like a problem, better not nuke the other guy!
Not a copout. I can't imagine it and neither can you.
And plenty of logical reasons
- Because those are your orders and you are a member of a military
- Because all the countermeasures mean that the opposing country will get nuked anyway
- Because that country is your enemy and you want to curtail their future strategic prospects
From military standpoint there is nothing more logical then to press the button. And we are talking about military men who have trained for this their entire life. Their emotions and orders tell them to do that.
You want a real world, actual honest-to-god nuclear examples? Enola Gay. Bockscar.
And that was when victory was inevitable.
You really think those are logical reasons? They basically boil down to:
- Do what your told, no matter what
- Most people are going to die anyway, a few million more won't matter
- I hate them and I want them to die
Enola Gay and Bockscar aren't comparable because they were not counterattacks after being completely destroyed.
Anyway I'm going to bed, talk to you guys later.
They are logical reasons for a military man. Can't dispute that no matter how much you would want to.
Enola Gay and Bockscar are comparable because it's a guy dropping a nuke on a defenseless target. Same guilt, except that there is not a sense of revenge behind it all. It proves that people are capable of doing it. You can't argue otherwise.
The differing probabilities of deploying a nuclear weapon along the spectrum from an elected leader of a democratic state with a free press and which is a bought-up member of the international community (minimal to zero) to a delusional, self-deifying, ailing dictator who has demonstrated no concern for even his own people and has indoctrinated his entire nation with a narrative of existential struggle through perpetual war (slightly higher) makes the entire 'rational actor' analysis a bit shaky.
Right, first of all, pictures don't really constitute an argument. They constitute, well, pictures. So forgive me if I mistranslate your attempt at visual debate, but...
Stalin had nuclear capability for only 3 1/2 years of rule, during which the later Cold War tensions had not really ratcheted up to boiling point - the Warsaw Pact had not been formed by the time he died. Furthermore, if you read some of the numerous biographies of the man, they relate how his control and physical ability was seriously waning for those final years.
Mao had nuclear capability for slightly longer (tests in 1965-7, dead in 1976). But Mao was a more astute and less zealous type of dictator than either Stalin or Kim Jong Il (my initial reference), and China has always had a less expansionist mentality which doesn't really lend itself to the kind of nuclear brinkmanship which the USSR and US enjoyed. Moreover, for much of the decade when Mao had his finger on the button, US - China relations were improving and even "normalised" with the Nixon visit in 1972. There wasn't ever a real confrontation to test Chinese nuclear will under Mao.
So, aside from some pretty serious contextual effects to what I assume was your argument, you've in any case simply come back to the same basic point we mentioned before: because it didn't happen before, it won't happen again. That isn't a particularly wise approach to the potential end of civilisation as we know it. But I suppose it has the strength of being easier to convey in picture-form only:
The talk of the danger of nuclear weapons is window-dressing. On my list of Things I Give a Shit About, Iran's nuclear program ranks low, and it's the same way for other middle easterners who aren't called King or Most Dear and Democratically Elected Eternal Ruler. It's of no concern to me. But I'm open to caring about things, and I'm totally fine with getting on board with this movement to eliminate the dangers of nuclear holocaust.
So, this is it, right? A big problem we can all unite behind?
OK, I'm down. Tell me about it.
We could all die, and nuclear weapons are terrible?
Yes, that would be something that concerns me. Dying is, like, the worst.
I should show utmost concern about this? You had at me all of us dying.
You figured it out? Awesome.
So, we're first gonna just fuck the shit out of this country in the middle east? OK, that sounds like something drastic.
And then we're... oh, and that it's it. Of course. And only keep enough nukes to destroy the world 5 times instead of 50? Well, I sure do feel safe now.
You got nothing. You build up this fear of all-out war, and global destruction, and the solution is Gulf War III? That's really it? I have no idea why westerners keep finding these problems that can only be solved by bombing some middle eastern country, but I would like it to stop.
because it didn't happen before, it won't happen again.
I've said it before in another thread but the idea of Iran having a "right" to posses nuclear weapons is insane to me. Iran is not a rational actor, we are more unsafe having nukes in the hands of dictators than in democraticly elected and accountable leaders, and most importantly with every nation that builds a nuclear arsnal our odds of a nuclear conflict go up.
The cold war is not the poster child for a global nuclear deterrant.
Iran is a rational actor. I'm not sure how you can claim otherwise without being completely ignorant of world politics or the country itself, though I would love to see you list your reasons of why Iran is not a rational actor, though.
The odds don't go up. They stay the same. Zero. First of all, a single person in this thread hasn't been able to describe a situation which would result into a nuclear war. Stanislav Petrov, Cuban Missile Crisis, Korean War...they don't work because those are actual situations that did not result into a nuclear war. They are all very good demonstrations why nuclear war is far, far out of the realm of possibility..
Second of all, Iran, North Korea, and other such countries are completely incapable of starting a global nuclear war because their industry, population and GDP don't allow them to build and maintain anywhere beyond twenty small nukes. They don't even have an ICBM delivery system that would allow them to put them anywhere besides roughly a thousand miles from their borders. So for them, it wouldn't even be Mutually Assured Destruction. It would be Assured Destruction.
I'm not even going to go into specifics here. I would just like to ask a question and get an answer - what possible gain does any single country have in using nukes?
And the only person in the history of the world to use nuclear weapons in a war, against civilians, was a democratically elected and accountable leader...
It all bears down to wierd unwarranted paranoia not based in any real world dynamics, that still somehow gets people willing to bomb a country for doing nothing wrong.
Do you people even realize what you would have to actually stop Iran from having nuclear weapons?
You would first have to start an air war lasting months where you would have to destroy each single facility in Iran right now. That is seventeen different sites that we know of, each near or directly in a population center. Because of their protection, that would require sustained carpet bombing and probably bunker busters in a few cases.
So that's about 50,000 - 100,000 dead at the very least. Probably more. In Iran.
Of course, this full scale war means that by at this point Iran has launched all of it's conventional missiles towards Israel and any other U.S. ally in the region. Maybe they already have a nuke and that's on it's way to Tel Aviv too. And Hezbollah has unleashed it's 50,000 rockets and missiles towards Haifa and anything else in Northern Israel. So that's tens of thousands of dead in Israel, Palestine, Bahrain, Saudi-Arabia, Jordan and Iraq.
Then, to stop them from rebuilding their nuclear program again, you would have to target all the things that contribute into that knowledge. That means universities, factories, medical facilities, pretty much anything to do with industry or science. Don't forget every government facility and every other place where there might be a computer or a person who knows something about nuclear technology.
By this point, IDF is halfway in turning Lebanon and Syria to a parking lot because no way in hell they aren't going to destroy Iran's closest ally's air war capacity. So this means that if it already hasn't, Syria chips in against Israel and launches it's missiles towards in. Don't know how many die, but at least 100,000. Probably more.
Then you would have to hunt down everyone with a previous knowledge about it, because fuck, just one Iranian escaping who knows about nuclear reactors means that they could start it all over again, either in Iran or somewhere else. So you need to invade and occupy Iran because no way in hell you have enough special forces to assassinate every possibility (although they will be doing that too, no worries).
Alright, then you just have to get right into an war with Hezbollah (fuck, Lebanon will be behind them too), Syria's and Iran's conventional military against U.S. and Israel, which means about one year or so of open war. And like ten years of occupation in three different countries and forming new governments because U.S. and Israel will win, but the aftermath is going to be a bitch. Israel has to call in all it's reserves and so does U.S. because the previous wars will be nothing compared to this.
Not even going to touch the effect on economy with the Straits of Hormuz being a death zone for a few months and all oil production in Syria and Iran crippled.
Not even going to touch on the political fallout of f*cking tag team of U.S. and Israel unjustly attacking and invading three different Arab countries and starting the greatest war Middle East has ever witnessed.
So overall we are looking at deaths of at least half million people at the war stage, about two million more with the fifteen year insurgency against American and Israeli occupation, and hundreds of thousands more during the shaky governments and ongoing civil war for years afterwards.
But hey, you stopped any chance of Iran ever having nukes!*
*well, for the next thirty years or so
It won't just be squadron dropping a bomb into one half-built crappy reactor in the cover of night, unless all you want to do is make headlines. The above is what "Bomb Iran" means if you want the actual result to be "no nuclear Iran".
So you know, sorry that you can't accept this, but if any half-way advanced country wants nukes and is willing to take the political cost, they can do that and there is nothing from outright total war you can do to prevent it. China did it. Israel did it. South Africa did it. India did it. Pakistan did it. North Korea did it. Iran is going to do it, and just like in the six previous cases, the cost isn't worth in stopping them.
So people are just going to have to fucking live with it.
Once the US and USSR reached a point where neither could win a nuclear war decisively and at low cost, MAD became viable. On the other hand, while nukes were still in their early stages of development, neither side had the ability to decisively defeat the other with nuclear weapons. There probably wasn't any period in the development of nuclear weapons where (a) one of the superpowers had enough nukes to defeat the other decisively and (b) the other power did not have a significant retaliatory capability.
In the early stages of the development of nuclear arsenals, the most likely scenario where nukes would have been used would have been some sort of NATO-Warsaw Pact war which escalated to a regional nuclear exchange. But, once the superpowers developed large numbers of nukes that could be used against their opponents' homelands, the chances of a conventional war dropped dramatically. Both sides knew that a conventional war could well escalate to a regional nuclear exchange, then to a general nuclear holocaust.
Once you and your opponent reach a certain threshold of nuclear capacity, nuclear war becomes unwinnable unless one side is able to take a huge lead through some major technological breakthrough. But, even though the US was pulling away from the soviets in the '80's in terms of nuclear capacity, we still couldn't "win" a nuclear war. At best, we would suffer a lesser loss than the USSR, but that would still probably mean millions of dead Americans, which was not acceptable to any American leader (left-wing hysteria about Reagan notwithstanding).
When we're talking about countries like the US, post-Stalin USSR, China, France and the UK, you're dealing with nations that are extremely unlikely to use their nuclear weapons in any situation except where the nation's very survival is at stake. If the President of China woke up tomorrow and decided to nuke Japan for shits and giggles, the Chinese military would likely refuse to follow those orders and would remove him from power. Similarly, if President Obama had some sort of mental break and decided to nuke London, the military would probably ignore that command and the Secret Service would probably lock him in a closet until cooler heads prevailed. Unfortunately, those types of failsafes might not be present in North Korea, Iran or Pakistan.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
I'd argue against any of said leaderships not being stable. Pakistan and Iran definitely have people who would stop a figurehead from launching nukes - Pakistan in fact doesn't even have a single person who could authorize anything like that out of the blue without a massive political/military deadlock. Neither could the Supreme Leader for that matter, either the Guardian Council or Armed forces could stop him. Not counting the fact that both Khameini and Pakistan's upper military/political leadership are certainly smart and sane.
North Korea is way more centralized on to Kim-Jong Il, but the generals know about the world beyond - most of their children have probably been educated in Western countries and they recieve all the same goodies from there that Kim-Jong Il gets. They have their own interests in not being eradicated in nuclear flames.
The possibility of crazy leader pressing a red button doesn't actually exist. You don't get to the point of possessing nukes without complicated military and political institutions, and the weapons are way too much advanced of an technology without at least five different points between command and execution involving those institutions.
The thing about North Korea, Pakistan and Iran is that it's not Mutually Assured Destruction for them, it's Assured Destruction. Their opponents have more nukes and better chances of survival then they do.
North Korea faces South Korea, Japan and United States. They don't have delivery systems capable of reaching U.S. and it's arguable that they could not do much to Japan either. They could mess up South Korea, but most likely not the entire country - at best their weapons are as powerful as Little Boy or Fat Man. And they have less then a dozen of those. Their country on the other hand would be annihilated by U.S.
Pakistan has India, a country much larger and more populated then Pakistan, and with a bigger nuclear arsenal. While Pakistan could take out most major Indian cities, there would be still hundreds of millions of survivors. India on the other hand can wipe Pakistan off the map and saturate the entire country with nukes. All you have to do is look at population density maps and see who wins.
Assuming that Iran ever gets a dozen actual nukes and its delivery systems are as good as it claims, it could take out Israel because it's so small in size. Though it would probably mess up Lebanon and Hezbollah at the same time, and parts of Syria, at the least cover them in fallout if there isn't an accidental hit. But Samson Doctrine would mean that every single major population centre in Iran would be wiped out afterwards, and even if something would survive, U.S. response would finish the last ones. The "Great Satan" would of course be completely untouched. As would Saudi-Arabia, who would love to see Iran wiped off the map.
No matter what way these countries turn, at least one of their enemies will still be better off then they will be, far better of. It would be self-destruction with spite. Their reason for having nukes is not really a nuclear deterrent, though obviously that too - but invasion deterrent. No matter of the size of an arsenal, nobody is going to invade a nuclear power unless they want to see their armies dissappear in a mushroom cloud.
North Korea, Iran or Pakistan (or Israel, or India...)don't threaten global thermonuclear war, they just threaten themselves and those within a 1000-mile range of them. Only the Big Five could really start the track towards utter destruction, and only if they were being attacked by/attacked one of the other B5.
One interesting Cold War scenario has intrigued me, and I'm not sure why it was never implemented. I suppose someone figured it was too insane to do, not politically viable, or not economically viable. Anyhows.
There's no theoretical upper limit to the yield, and thus destructive power of a hydrogen bomb. So with enough technical expertise and resources one could construct a bomb capable of tearing the globe in half, or the equivalent of the collision that created the Moon, or whatever. The specifics aren't important so long as the device will, without a doubt, destroy the entire biosphere and start a violent re-arrangement of the Earth's crust.
Then you bury, say, five of these deep inside your own borders in top-secret locations. Hook them up to a system like the CCCP's Dead Hand. Your enemy cannot reasonably be expected to counter this, and they're effectively neutered from first-strike capability. Of course they'd eventually counter with a similar system of their own and you'd just be stuck in the same equilibrium with even more disastrous stakes.
I guess the biggest issue with this would be convincing your enemy that a) you can do this b) that you've done this. a) could be satisfied by detonating an equivalent device somewhere distant enough in space, at which point your foe would be taking a huge gamble betting against b).
I think neither side in our version of the Cold War was nihilistic enough to fund something like this, but had the political systems been different... Well, what ifs are kinda silly.
Too expensive, too scientifically far out there, really difficult/dangerous to test, and in the end, not really needed.
From the 80's onwards, a thermonuclear war between U.S. and USSR would have destroyed practically every state in the world, aside from few misfires and malfunctions that might have saved a city here and there.
People think that their nukes were only aimed at eachother, but it is more likely (and for the most part proven) that they would have taken anyone that might have been a threat in the post nuke world. That means that both U.S. and USSR had nukes aimed at China, for example. Even neutral states were most likely targets because in post-nuke world they could become future superpowers. Especially states alongside the borders of a nuclear country, because they wouldn't even need to waste any ICBMs for that. Fallout would cripple even those who were not hit directly, as would the total crumble of world politics and economy.
Plenty of nihilism right there.
DarkCrawler on
0
Options
Tiger BurningDig if you will, the pictureRegistered User, SolidSaints Tuberegular
Too expensive, too scientifically far out there, really difficult/dangerous to test, and in the end, not really needed.
From the 80's onwards, a thermonuclear war between U.S. and USSR would have destroyed practically every state in the world, aside from few misfires and malfunctions that might have saved a city here and there.
People think that their nukes were only aimed at eachother, but it is more likely (and for the most part proven) that they would have taken anyone that might have been a threat in the post nuke world. That means that both U.S. and USSR had nukes aimed at China, for example. Even neutral states were most likely targets because in post-nuke world they could become future superpowers. Especially states alongside the borders of a nuclear country, because they wouldn't even need to waste any ICBMs for that. Fallout would cripple even those who were not hit directly, as would the total crumble of world politics and economy.
Plenty of nihilism right there.
They were still gunning to keep some of their own populace alive; nuke targets tended to be military and industrial sites. I'm a few klicks from Malmi airport which was on the U.S. nuking list, so I would've had a good chance of being burnt alive were I here 30 years ago.
And of course the Russians made sure we knew they'd try to shoot down as many missiles while they were still in our air space.
The point of the globe-ending Dead Hand would mostly be a counter to the Reaganite gamma laser program or something similar. Arming NEOs wouldn't have been much cheaper than developing onwards from the Czar Bomba, that baby was built in the 60's. I think it's psychologically more satisfying to build weapons that attack your enemy instead of everyone, including your own people.
"Not needed" is a bit of a silly argument given how eager both sides were to stockpile more and more, although admittedly around Reagan's time the US was the keener party.
Good point on the testing thing, though. Again, would have to be done in outer space. Better hope the rocket doesn't malfunction!
At the height of nuclear spending each side had about 30,000 warheads. That's enough to destroy every important military and industrial target and every major population center in the world, much less in the opposing side. While there were plans to save people and some of those would be successful, it would be the end of USA and USSR and most other countries in the world.
I assume if Reagan had invented some magic system, sure, USSR might have started research towards something like you described, but it was never neccessary in our world. We still have massive problems in stopping missiles in flight, much less MIRVs and stuff like that.
I guess MAD will start seeing some problems if someone figures out a surefire 100% way to block ballistic missiles, but seeing as offensive technology seems to progress far faster then defensive technology, I don't see that happening any time soon. Besides, in a hundred years weapons are so much more advanced that right now we might not even know what we have to counter.
Hell, anyone ever looked at the target lists from the mid-to-late 80s? They were hitting tertiary targets with multiple warheads, just to guarantee a hit. We're talking stuff like grain silo complexes and train junctions, after they went through the list of everything else one might want to destroy.
Hell, anyone ever looked at the target lists from the mid-to-late 80s? They were hitting tertiary targets with multiple warheads, just to guarantee a hit. We're talking stuff like grain silo complexes and train junctions, after they went through the list of everything else one might want to destroy.
So you are saying I wouldn't be safe in my underground bunker in Kansas?
Hell, anyone ever looked at the target lists from the mid-to-late 80s? They were hitting tertiary targets with multiple warheads, just to guarantee a hit. We're talking stuff like grain silo complexes and train junctions, after they went through the list of everything else one might want to destroy.
So you are saying I wouldn't be safe in my underground bunker in Kansas?
Kansas is already been hit.
How do you think it got so flat and desolate, populated by sub humans?
because it didn't happen before, it won't happen again.
I've said it before in another thread but the idea of Iran having a "right" to posses nuclear weapons is insane to me. Iran is not a rational actor, we are more unsafe having nukes in the hands of dictators than in democraticly elected and accountable leaders, and most importantly with every nation that builds a nuclear arsnal our odds of a nuclear conflict go up.
The cold war is not the poster child for a global nuclear deterrant.
How is Iran not a rational actor? What, in the Iranian government's 30+ years reign, leads to label it as such?
because it didn't happen before, it won't happen again.
I've said it before in another thread but the idea of Iran having a "right" to posses nuclear weapons is insane to me. Iran is not a rational actor, we are more unsafe having nukes in the hands of dictators than in democraticly elected and accountable leaders, and most importantly with every nation that builds a nuclear arsnal our odds of a nuclear conflict go up.
The cold war is not the poster child for a global nuclear deterrant.
How is Iran not a rational actor? What, in the Iranian government's 30+ years reign, leads to label it as such?
Yeah I would think at this point they have pretty clearly tried to make themselves look crazier than they are.
With respect to MAD the only people who are really irrational actors are the hard core terrorist groups and their ability to procure nuclear weapons is so negligible they probably can be discounted.
because it didn't happen before, it won't happen again.
I've said it before in another thread but the idea of Iran having a "right" to posses nuclear weapons is insane to me. Iran is not a rational actor, we are more unsafe having nukes in the hands of dictators than in democraticly elected and accountable leaders, and most importantly with every nation that builds a nuclear arsnal our odds of a nuclear conflict go up.
The cold war is not the poster child for a global nuclear deterrant.
How is Iran not a rational actor? What, in the Iranian government's 30+ years reign, leads to label it as such?
Yeah I would think at this point they have pretty clearly tried to make themselves look crazier than they are.
With respect to MAD the only people who are really irrational actors are the hard core terrorist groups and their ability to procure nuclear weapons is so negligible they probably can be discounted.
I'm not sure it matters whether or not the terrorists are irrational actors.
As long as they're not government sanctioned, they're practically immune to MAD anyway. It's not like we can launch retaliatory nukes against terrorists hiding in another country - especially Pakistan.
Israel is NOT in regards to Iran. I'm not sure which one would push the button, but a nuclear armed Iran or close to it would probably mean immediate war.
Israel is NOT in regards to Iran. I'm not sure which one would push the button, but a nuclear armed Iran or close to it would probably mean immediate war.
It would mean unilateral Israeli air strikes and a US veto on a security council response. I don't believe Iran would be in a position to strike back effectively.
I find it interesting, reading books and other media from the...roughly the 50's through the 80's, how prevalent the fear of nuclear annhilalation was, and the effects of that on those generations. The threat hasn't really receded at all, it hasn't gone anywhere, but we in the west don't seem to have a similar single fear that hovers behind everything. Terrorism, feh. Climate change, we're stuck with it, buy a zodiac. etc. we seem kind of inured to a crappy future, but not one where everything is wiped out.
I had to do a research project for history at high school once that included reading old old yearbooks, and one from I think around the cuban missile crisis had a bit in the principal's spiel about a girl who had previously been a good student not bothering to study for exams or anything because "we'll all be dead by the end of the year".
Israel is NOT in regards to Iran. I'm not sure which one would push the button, but a nuclear armed Iran or close to it would probably mean immediate war.
It would mean unilateral Israeli air strikes and a US veto on a security council response. I don't believe Iran would be in a position to strike back effectively.
I strongly doubt the surrounding nations would be accept that. Especially since they would have to fly over several countries between them and iran to make the strike in the first place.
edit: Oh they could just go over saudi arabia, who would probably be the most okay with it, I guess. Still don't see it happening.
A look at how the United States has been helping curb proliferation, which is very bad, and the United States is very concerned about it because it is very bad:
At first sight, China’s proposed sale of two civilian nuclear-power reactors to Pakistan hardly seems a danger sign. Pakistan already has the bomb, so it has all the nuclear secrets it needs. Next-door India has the bomb too, and has been seeking similar deals with other countries.
Yet the sale (really a gift, as Pakistan is broke) has caused shudders at the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), an informal cartel of countries who want to stop their advanced nuclear technology getting into the wrong hands. They are meeting in New Zealand, for what was supposed to be a quiet and nerdish rule-tightening session. But their efforts may now fall victim to China’s rivalry with America.
By any measure, Pakistan is a shocker. Its proliferation record would make the serial nuclear mischief-makers of North Korea blush. If the Chinese reactor deal goes ahead, the damage will be huge: beyond just stoking the already alarming nuclear rivalry between Pakistan and India.
That does not deter China, which still seethes about the way in which the Bush administration in 2008 browbeat other NSG members into exempting America’s friend India from the group’s rules. These banned nuclear trade, even civilian deals, with countries like India and Pakistan, but also Israel and now North Korea, that resist full international safeguards on all their nuclear industry.
America argued that India had a spotless non-proliferation record (it doesn’t) and that bringing it into the non-proliferation “mainstream” could only bolster global anti-proliferation efforts (it didn’t). The deal incensed not just China and Pakistan but many others, inside and outside the NSG. An immediate casualty was the effort to get all members of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), who have already promised not to seek the bomb, to sign up to an additional protocol on toughened safeguards. Many have, but on hearing of the America-India deal Brazil’s president is reputed to have flatly ruled that out. And where Brazil has put its foot down, others have also hesitated.
What particularly riles outsiders is that America did not get anything much out of India in return. It did not win backing for new anti-proliferation obligations, such as a legally binding test ban or for an end to the further production of fissile uranium or plutonium for bombs. India has since designated some of its reactors as civilian, and open to inspection, but others still churn out spent fuel richly laden with weapons-usable plutonium. India can potentially make even more of the stuff. Now that it can import uranium fuel for its civilian reactors, it can devote more of its scarce domestic supplies to bomb-making.
Pakistan suffers no such uranium shortage and is determined to match India. According to analysis of satellite imagery by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, it is greatly expanding its capacity to produce weapons-usable plutonium, as well as uranium.
China has given Pakistan lots of nuclear and missile help in the past. It even passed it a tested design of one of its own missile-mountable warheads. This was one of the most damaging proliferation acts of the nuclear age, since the same design was later passed by Pakistan to Libya and possibly Iran and others.
But after China joined the NPT in 1992 and the NSG in 2004, it reined in such help, at least officially (some Chinese firms are still involved in illicit nuclear trade with several states). But on joining the NSG, it argued that it had already promised to build the second of two nuclear reactors for Pakistan at Chasma in Punjab and would therefore go ahead. Some grumbled. But it seemed a price worth paying to have China inside, playing by the NSG’s rules rather than outside, undermining them. The latest sale blows a hole in that hope.
A big leaky tent
China is trying a legalistic defence of the sale of the third and fourth reactors at Chasma. But its real point is this: if America can bend the rules for India, then China can break them for Pakistan.
Pakistan hopes that it will eventually get a deal like India’s. Some in Barack Obama’s administration have supported this, on the ground that America needs Pakistan’s support in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taleban. Israel wouldn’t mind such an exemption either.
The NSG’s damage-control efforts now centre on a new rule to bar the sale of kit for uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing to any country outside the NPT. That, predictably, annoys India.
The deal also affects efforts to contain Iran. Western diplomats seeking support for UN sanctions on the Islamic republic find themselves receiving a wigging over the double standards used with India. Iranian officials used to argue that they just wanted to be treated like Japan. It has free access to advanced nuclear technology. But unlike Iran, Japan does not repeatedly violate nuclear safeguards. Some Iranian officials now muse boldly that the big powers will eventually come to do deals with them, just as they did with India. Iran’s latest raspberry in response to a fourth round of UN sanctions was to ban two nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear guardian. Iran dislikes its reports on the regime’s dubious nuclear activities.
If Pakistan really is worried about India’s growing nuclear arsenal, diplomacy might work better than an arms race. George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment, a think tank, says Pakistan should lift its veto on a ban on the production of fissile materials for bombs. That would put India (which claims to support a ban) on the spot. Like enriched uranium, hypocrisy can be costlier than it seems.
Great job, America. Now to bomb a middle eastern country and continue with those valiant efforts to make the world safe. Yaay!
There are other ways that a nuke could be used also. A smaller regional conflict like you mentioned, a terrorist act, or a major nation just getting pissed off and deciding to show its might. Those add up in his calculations also. Granted, when I looked at his paper it seemed like there was a lot of guesswork involved by him.
His calculations are bogus. Besides the method(which is not serious) lets just think about the consequences.
He either thinks that there is a 1/10 chance that everyone on the planet will die in a nuclear war. Or he thinks that 10% of the population will be killed by a nuclear war. Or somewhere inbetween those options. A 10% chance of nuclear war is pretty ridiculous all things considered, and even if it did happen it would likely not be on a world destroying scale. Since all of the likely conflict zones do not possess enough weapons to kill that many people(lots, but not 500 million within any conflict zone) and the most likely detonation seems like it would be terrorist to me, which means it would be both small, and not retaliated against with nukes
I disagree. If we can agree that at the very least MAD is analogous to a global-scale Mexican stand-off then having not acquired nuclear weapons will mean that you are not a threat to the other nuclear nations which would make you a low or no value launch target. To keep with the Mexican Stand-off analogy, I think the best way to avoid getting shot is to not have a gun in the first place.
This is true only if the Mexican's have only two arms, are holding two guns and have no other way of harming people.
Without nuclear weapons you are a target for conventional war. "Not being a threat" only works if you have nothing to steal.
And everyone has something to steal.
Of course, you can't steal things with nukes either, since you're going to destroy what you're hoping to gain. Another handy property of the weapons.
It's been successful for roughly 30 years, from the time at which we had enough nuclear firepower for it to work, until the breakup of the Soviet Union. That is what I call a temporary success. It is a logical fallacy to say that because a strategy has worked for 30 years, it will then work forever.
It only takes a handful of nukes for deterrence. In the 1970's, when the United States infrastructure was much more distributed than it is today, the U.S. Congress commissioned a report detailing the strategic threat of nuclear weapons to the United States.
They determined that, at the time, it would take about 300 warheads to entirely destroy the United States as a political entity. It only stands to reason that you could do so with less today. The 300 warhead mark was reached at least 50 years ago.
Well, ignoring Vietnam and Afghanistan and numerous other crises like the Cuban Missile Crisis... Part of the problem with this strategy is that it reduces the chance of a conventional war by increasing the risk of nuclear armageddon. Once again I'll go back to my Housing Derivitive analogy, which was a strategy that decreased the chance of a short term loss while also increasing the chance of a catastrophic loss.
Actually it decreases both the liklihood of conventional and the severity of conventional warfare.
I know how it works. I don't think you understood my argument. Let's get back to my original argument then- Let's say that you're a sub captain who's just been told that the your country was destroyed by a surprise nuclear First Strike. What do you do? Do you obey orders to counterattack the country that attacked you?
Doesn't matter. So long as there is a reasonable belief that they might retaliate then MAD will hold.
We came within a hair's breadth of nuclear war on several occasions, and that's what really worries me. The strategies involved meant that any direct conflict would have resulted in a massive nuclear war- no other option was possible.
And without MAD and the weapons that spawned it we would have had a world war three that made the first and second look like children's games.
Don't confuse the "full" strategic armament/war game with the subgame in which MAD actually takes place. The rational yet non-credible threat of MAD keeps a group of rational players, each with second strike capability, from unilaterally deviating from the status quo - by launching, or by disarming. This is good. As a model, it's perfect. The real life flaws comes from the applicability of the model - we've already mentioned stuff like false positives, and touched on the fact that as a model, it presumes that each player values the outcomes in a similar fashion: Everyone needs to think that their respective nations ending as political entities in nuclear holocaust is a bad thing. But as long as it's applicable, it works like a charm.
What happends in the subgame where some stupid fuck has already launched is a display of brutal bloodthirst and nihilism that is completely irrational and cruel beyond anything we've ever done - which is saying something. This doesn't mean that there are no rational positions in the full game; There totally is, and it involvs never entering the subgame of slaughter. But should we ever find ourselves in that subgame of slaughter, there would be nothing rational about it.
The (non-credible) threat of MAD is about never ever ending up in that subgame where MAD actually takes place. Not about how rational, non-bloodthirsty, noble and order following we would be if we ever end up there.
Israel is NOT in regards to Iran. I'm not sure which one would push the button, but a nuclear armed Iran or close to it would probably mean immediate war.
It would mean unilateral Israeli air strikes and a US veto on a security council response. I don't believe Iran would be in a position to strike back effectively.
They have missiles capable of hitting Israel, and Hezbollah with it's 50,000 rockets/missiles/probably SCUDs right at Israel's doorstep.
Israel wouldn't really be able to destroy Iran's nuclear capacity with conventional air strikes like it did with Syria's and Iraq's single shitty reactors. Iran's nuclear program was started like 40 years ago, with the help of America, when Shah was in power. There are seventeen different known sites contributing to a nuclear program and probably more clandestine sites. They are already at a nuclear power level in the sense that they have reactors capable of creating power.
So like previously said, it would require an long-lasting air war with the entire IDF Air Force committed into it, hundreds or thousands of casualties, and without a doubt a reprisal from Iran and Hezbollah. And Iran is certainly not defenseless against an air attack and most of it's nuclear sites are heavily protected - which would mean Israeli casualties as well.
And US certainly wouldn't veto Israel if it goes all Gaza on one of the most important countries in Middle East, even they have a limit. And Saudi Arabia sure as hell wouldn't let IDF use their ground as a base in an open war - single air strike, maybe - they would get lynched by their own populace and provide massive fuel for the Islamists inside in the nation. They didn't let U.S. use them as a staging ground in Iraq War either. And they hated Saddam just as much.
So you know, open war is impossible for Israel logistically and politically as well and wouldn't be painless to itself even if it somehow managed to get it's entire air force in Iran.
There is this sort of mythical view of IDF being capable of doing whatever it wants in the region, but as powerful as it is, it has limits. United States and Russia are pretty much the only countries with an Air Force capable of destroying Iran's nuclear capacity at will and close enough. Maybe Turkey if it was willing to absorb the casualties. Latter two are almost allies of Iran, former one is not going to get into a third horrible Middle Eastern war against even an harder foe.
So Iran is going to get nukes. There is literally nothing that Israel can do about it short of nuking Iran.
And Israel is a rational actor too, no less then Iran is. No way in hell they would have gotten where they are right now without some major brains.
The real life flaws comes from the applicability of the model - we've already mentioned stuff like false positives, and touched on the fact that as a model, it presumes that each player values the outcomes in a similar fashion:
No, just within a very broad range. And clearly it can handle false positives.
What happends in the subgame where some stupid fuck has already launched is a display of brutal bloodthirst and nihilism that is completely irrational and cruel beyond anything we've ever done - which is saying something.
The lack of a subgame perfect equilibrium for "one player has launched" does not matter is no one risks attempting to first strike
And for the last damned time, the threat is clearly credible.
If the threat were not credible, someone would have been nuked by now.
I haven't had time to poke my head in here and read everything. This is a topic that I enjoy a lot. If any of you are interested in a few good books or movies, let me know. I'll recommend Alas, Babylon right off the bad. Easily one of the best cold war nuclear apocalypse books in existence. Also for movies you should try The Day After and Testament - newer than Alas, Babylon but still amazing.
The real life flaws comes from the applicability of the model - we've already mentioned stuff like false positives, and touched on the fact that as a model, it presumes that each player values the outcomes in a similar fashion:
No, just within a very broad range. And clearly it can handle false positives.
What happends in the subgame where some stupid fuck has already launched is a display of brutal bloodthirst and nihilism that is completely irrational and cruel beyond anything we've ever done - which is saying something.
The lack of a subgame perfect equilibrium for "one player has launched" does not matter is no one risks attempting to first strike
And for the last damned time, the threat is clearly credible.
If the threat were not credible, someone would have been nuked by now.
Posts
So, this is it, right? A big problem we can all unite behind?
OK, I'm down. Tell me about it.
We could all die, and nuclear weapons are terrible?
Yes, that would be something that concerns me. Dying is, like, the worst.
I should show utmost concern about this? You had at me all of us dying.
You figured it out? Awesome.
So, we're first gonna just fuck the shit out of this country in the middle east? OK, that sounds like something drastic.
And then we're... oh, and that it's it. Of course. And only keep enough nukes to destroy the world 5 times instead of 50? Well, I sure do feel safe now.
You got nothing. You build up this fear of all-out war, and global destruction, and the solution is Gulf War III? That's really it? I have no idea why westerners keep finding these problems that can only be solved by bombing some middle eastern country, but I would like it to stop.
First, the decision for a counterstrike would come before you're attacked. The decision to launch a counterattack would come when enemy missiles are still en route to their targets. This was the whole point of having early warning systems. The earlier that the system can warn you, the longer you have to figure out potential targets and verify the threat before a retaliatory strike becomes limited or impossible.
Second, you have imperfect data. Of the numerous times when we've approached accidental nuclear war it's not because someone in Chicago falsely reported that they just got nuked, it's because some observatory at the Arctic Circle has a radar dish reporting something that looks suspiciously like the uncleared launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Maybe it's a weather satellite. Maybe it's a farmer in the boonies who managed to build a huge rocket in his barn. Maybe it's a computer error. Maybe's an ICBM with a MIRV warhead poised to take out the entire eastern seaboard.
Third, counterattacking limits the impact on your nation and the world (barring the environmental apocalypse being created). Only a very dangerous actor would initiate an attack. Either your enemy is a genocidal rogue or your enemy is trying to cripple you militarily. In both cases it makes more sense to counterattack. Either to remove the political entity willing to kill millions for a political goal, or to attack military installations to provide your civil and military populations with the greatest chance of success. By counterstriking your opponent you also limit their capacity to attack you repeatedly.
MAD is not as simple as not wanting to kill millions of the other guy's civillians. But the whole idea of MAD is that you don't get to that point in the first place because even before the other guy launches he knows that he cannot destroy your ability to retaliate. It's not about not retaliating, it's about not attacking in the first place.
If the warheads have already hit then MAD deterrence has already failed. It would no longer be about mutually assured destruction, it would be about enacting Pyrrhic vengeance.
Nuclear weapons have the wonderful side benefit of largely eliminating the sort of large-scale warfare so prevalent before their invention. Rolling a huge column of armor and infantry across a border is a really fucking stupid idea when it takes a single nuke-tipped cruise missile to destroy it.
It's also so that if the C&C structure gets taken out while the sub is running quiet they can counterattack, rather than sitting around with a couple dozen megatons of weapons doing fuck-all.
Right, first of all, pictures don't really constitute an argument. They constitute, well, pictures. So forgive me if I mistranslate your attempt at visual debate, but...
Stalin had nuclear capability for only 3 1/2 years of rule, during which the later Cold War tensions had not really ratcheted up to boiling point - the Warsaw Pact had not been formed by the time he died. Furthermore, if you read some of the numerous biographies of the man, they relate how his control and physical ability was seriously waning for those final years.
Mao had nuclear capability for slightly longer (tests in 1965-7, dead in 1976). But Mao was a more astute and less zealous type of dictator than either Stalin or Kim Jong Il (my initial reference), and China has always had a less expansionist mentality which doesn't really lend itself to the kind of nuclear brinkmanship which the USSR and US enjoyed. Moreover, for much of the decade when Mao had his finger on the button, US - China relations were improving and even "normalised" with the Nixon visit in 1972. There wasn't ever a real confrontation to test Chinese nuclear will under Mao.
So, aside from some pretty serious contextual effects to what I assume was your argument, you've in any case simply come back to the same basic point we mentioned before: because it didn't happen before, it won't happen again. That isn't a particularly wise approach to the potential end of civilisation as we know it. But I suppose it has the strength of being easier to convey in picture-form only:
That was my thought process growing up. I lived pretty close to O'Hare Airport, well within a likely range of total devastation. It was widely acknowledged among people living near there that O'Hare would likely be a priority target. It was, after all, the largest and busiest airport in the world at the time, and therefore a major strategic target. So, if the shit did start flying, we'd die early.
It was an oddly comforting thought.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
I've said it before in another thread but the idea of Iran having a "right" to posses nuclear weapons is insane to me. Iran is not a rational actor, we are more unsafe having nukes in the hands of dictators than in democraticly elected and accountable leaders, and most importantly with every nation that builds a nuclear arsnal our odds of a nuclear conflict go up.
The cold war is not the poster child for a global nuclear deterrant.
Do you have a source for this? It sounds plausable but I'd like to read about it more.
Anyway, the Soviets must have realized during the 80's that we were pulling ahead of them fast in nuclear technology. What if they decided that we were inevitably going to reach a point where we could destroy their whole arsenal with a suprise first-strike? Also, for arguments sake let's assume that the Soviet Union wasn't on the brink of collapse.
They could of course beg us to slow down the pace of nuclear development, but it's unlikely that old Ray-Gun would have listened to them (Yes he did agree to the SALT treaty, but that mainly just removed old obselete weapons while he was pushing for more high-tech weapons and the Star Wars program). They'd really only have two options: give up and concede the arms race to NATO, or attack immediately while they were still roughly at parity.
If they choose the first option, the MAD system breaks down. They'd still be able to threaten us with horrific destruction of course, but without the threat of TOTAL destruction that no longer has the same power. They'd pretty much just have to trust us to be nice to them. If decide that we can't risk letting them threaten us any more, or if just hate their guts and want them to die, we nuke them first and "win" the cold war.
Since the Soviets didn't trust us too much, suppose they choose the second option. They launch all their nukes at us without giving us any warning. They might even hit before the president can order a counter-attack. In that case, we get into exactly the scenario that I kept talking about yesterday- we've already been nuked, so what's the point of a counter-attack? Like President Rex said, it would just be Pyrrhic vengeance. Of course we might still do it, for all the reasons people have mentioned, but it won't bring back the dead. We also might NOT do it, either because the military command structure has fallen apart or because the individuals involved might decide that it's immoral to launch a counterstrike like that. Perhaps some nukes get fired, but not enough to actually destroy the Soviet Union. In that case, the Soviets could potentially "win" just like we could "win" in the first scenario.
Notice that in both situations, the Soviets have to make a guess about how our military officers will think. If they think that our military is nice and really doesn't want to nuke them, they could win in both scenarios (either by coexisting peacefully with us or by destroying and still surviving). On the other hand, if they think that our military really wants to nuke them, both scenarios end in defeat for them.
It's especially dangerous considering how open our political process is. We had Carter as president for a while, doing everything he could to maintain peace with them. But they must have known that when Reagan took office, he was going to ramp up hostilies greatly, with all his rhetoric about "the evil empire" and so on. What if they decided to attack during the end of Carter's presidency, gambling that he wouldn't counterattack and that Reagan might launch a First Strike?
This is why I'm saying that there's a flaw in the logic of MAD. It's supposed to be a game theory situation with no winning outcome. Like the prisoner's dilemna, you don't have a winning move. "The only way to win is not to play". By offering both sides the potential for a winning outcome, the logic breaks down. At that point, with the clever game theory broken, you have to appeal to human emotions instead. Like you might argue that we would never nuke the whole Soviet Union just to avoid the chance of them nuking us, but that's no longer a logical proof, it's a human personality judgement. When you start to depend on individuals making moral decisions like that, it's when things get dicey. We were quite lucky that Gorbachev was the man in power during the 80's- imagine if a paranoid and ruthless man like Stalin was in charge? I can definitely imagine Stalin sacrificing tens of millions of his own people if he believed that the only alternative was the complete destruction of everyone.
The best setup might actually be the technology described in Dr. Strangelove which automatically destroys the world when it detects a nuclear explosion. Against a setup like that, there really is no winning option. Any nuclear attack you make would automatically destroy you, whereas the current system doesn't exactly work like that.
One of the nice things about nuclear weapons is that they are so destructive it really doesn't take much to sustain a deterrent effect. Horrific destruction is pretty deterring; destruction does not have to be total to deter.
There are very few circumstances where it would be preferable for a country to sustain horrific destruction; one of the few is total destruction...the thing is, the advantage gained by totally destroying your enemy is not enough to overcome the damage to you from their horrific, but non-total, counter-attack.
Even if one side had such an advantage it could destroy the other and only lose, say, ten major cities...well, is it really worth those ten major cities if the survival of ALL your cities isn't somehow on the line?
Add in the normative deterrent to being history's greatest monster by launching first...and the logic of mutually assured destruction seems pretty solid.
And counter-attacking isn't "pointless." A nuclear engagement would take place in stages- you could try to hit your opponents remaining weapons and reduce what they can fire at you. A nuclear war would probably start with counter-force attacks; once you're ability to conduct a second strike against military targets is ablated, hitting those nice, fat juicy Moscows and St. Petersburg with what you've got left still has deterrent power even in the midst of nuclear combat. Remember for a first strike to work it has to be total and complete; even a few surviving SSBNs, for example, could go ahead and annihilate most of the civilian population of the" winning" power. And given that might lead to a cessation of hostilities, or deter even after a counter-force strike cycle has ended, preventing a counter-value...AND add in the fact that the post-war world is going to be determined by the outcome of the nuclear war- is a world ruled by an intact USSR that got away with vaporizing the US be something those surviving US sub commanders are going to allow?
Also, revenge.
The equations for MAD changed substantially when various thresholds were crossed in the late 70s and early 80s; after that point, we're talking near total human extinction, globally, so nuclear strategy sort of changed since MAD was basically guaranteed. Even a totally victorious power, who annihilated their opponents military bases and civilian population, would then have to deal with a world that basically sucks. No more American grain for the USSR, fallout, economic and scientific collapse, nuclear winter, nuclear summer...
You're misunderstanding the prisoner's dilemma. In an non-iterated, blind prisoner's dilemma, the winning move is to defect and always to defect. The game theory setup of MAD is that the winning move is to guarantee retaliation. MAD is disrupted when one or the other projects an inability to guarantee retaliation in the future in themselves or their opponent, but not at present. But it's important not to exaggerate this effect. The classic example is "but missile defense would give the other guy an incentive to strike right now, before the missile defense system was in place!" Nevermind that even an in-place missile defense system would be imperfect and retaliation still entirely possible, there's still no incentive to strike first because the other guy will just retaliate, as before and you're in the same situation- fucked. The idea being fighting when you had less of a disadvantage is preferable to fighting when your opponent can destroy you with relative impunity is the smart play- and it normally is, except with nuclear weapons, since being destroyed with impunity and being mostly destroyed in a more even contest is basically equivalent. Only if you know that the contest is already begun is "mostly destroyed" and "destroyed with impunity" an actual choice to make; otherwise, inaction is the superior strategy.
This is why MAD works, and works well. There are only a few situations where two nuclear powers have any incentive whatsoever to strike first, and that's if the other nuclear power is so much weaker they could be destroyed without the attacking power sustaining non-trivial damage and/or a first strike from the other guy seems imminent, so you want to pre-empt that. In the first case, you're basically destroying a more or less defenseless enemy power with a weapon of horrific moral consequence, so there's a huge normative disincentive- it is basically the most dickish thing a world leader could. That doesn't guarantee it will never be done; many argue that Israel would have a strategic incentive to use nuclear weapons on Iran before the Iranian bomb program could arm that country with a retaliatory capability, for example. In the second case, someone has fucked up somewhere anyway in terms of nuclear strategy.
Except by nuclear war in which all are.
Or if you actually think about it... Pakistan by India, India by Pakistan and the Western powers by Muslim extremists (which is about as credible a threat to complete extinction as Israel's enemies are to it).
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
party A: we have the upper-hand! LAUNCH ZE MISSILES!
* nuclear launch detected *
party B: welp we're fucked anyway, LAUNCH RETALIATORY MISSILES!
* nuclear launch detected *
party A: oh shiiiiii- we're fucked too, hit them with everything we've got!
* nuclear launch detected *
party B: what he said. Prepare for trouble and make it double!
* nuclear launch detected *
party C: . . . I hear Australia's nice this time of year. . .
*end story*
Anyone who observes MAD basically says yep that seems like a problem, better not nuke the other guy!
They are logical reasons for a military man. Can't dispute that no matter how much you would want to.
Enola Gay and Bockscar are comparable because it's a guy dropping a nuke on a defenseless target. Same guilt, except that there is not a sense of revenge behind it all. It proves that people are capable of doing it. You can't argue otherwise.
Iran is a rational actor. I'm not sure how you can claim otherwise without being completely ignorant of world politics or the country itself, though I would love to see you list your reasons of why Iran is not a rational actor, though.
The odds don't go up. They stay the same. Zero. First of all, a single person in this thread hasn't been able to describe a situation which would result into a nuclear war. Stanislav Petrov, Cuban Missile Crisis, Korean War...they don't work because those are actual situations that did not result into a nuclear war. They are all very good demonstrations why nuclear war is far, far out of the realm of possibility..
Second of all, Iran, North Korea, and other such countries are completely incapable of starting a global nuclear war because their industry, population and GDP don't allow them to build and maintain anywhere beyond twenty small nukes. They don't even have an ICBM delivery system that would allow them to put them anywhere besides roughly a thousand miles from their borders. So for them, it wouldn't even be Mutually Assured Destruction. It would be Assured Destruction.
I'm not even going to go into specifics here. I would just like to ask a question and get an answer - what possible gain does any single country have in using nukes?
And the only person in the history of the world to use nuclear weapons in a war, against civilians, was a democratically elected and accountable leader...
It all bears down to wierd unwarranted paranoia not based in any real world dynamics, that still somehow gets people willing to bomb a country for doing nothing wrong.
Do you people even realize what you would have to actually stop Iran from having nuclear weapons?
You would first have to start an air war lasting months where you would have to destroy each single facility in Iran right now. That is seventeen different sites that we know of, each near or directly in a population center. Because of their protection, that would require sustained carpet bombing and probably bunker busters in a few cases.
So that's about 50,000 - 100,000 dead at the very least. Probably more. In Iran.
Of course, this full scale war means that by at this point Iran has launched all of it's conventional missiles towards Israel and any other U.S. ally in the region. Maybe they already have a nuke and that's on it's way to Tel Aviv too. And Hezbollah has unleashed it's 50,000 rockets and missiles towards Haifa and anything else in Northern Israel. So that's tens of thousands of dead in Israel, Palestine, Bahrain, Saudi-Arabia, Jordan and Iraq.
Then, to stop them from rebuilding their nuclear program again, you would have to target all the things that contribute into that knowledge. That means universities, factories, medical facilities, pretty much anything to do with industry or science. Don't forget every government facility and every other place where there might be a computer or a person who knows something about nuclear technology.
By this point, IDF is halfway in turning Lebanon and Syria to a parking lot because no way in hell they aren't going to destroy Iran's closest ally's air war capacity. So this means that if it already hasn't, Syria chips in against Israel and launches it's missiles towards in. Don't know how many die, but at least 100,000. Probably more.
Then you would have to hunt down everyone with a previous knowledge about it, because fuck, just one Iranian escaping who knows about nuclear reactors means that they could start it all over again, either in Iran or somewhere else. So you need to invade and occupy Iran because no way in hell you have enough special forces to assassinate every possibility (although they will be doing that too, no worries).
Alright, then you just have to get right into an war with Hezbollah (fuck, Lebanon will be behind them too), Syria's and Iran's conventional military against U.S. and Israel, which means about one year or so of open war. And like ten years of occupation in three different countries and forming new governments because U.S. and Israel will win, but the aftermath is going to be a bitch. Israel has to call in all it's reserves and so does U.S. because the previous wars will be nothing compared to this.
Not even going to touch the effect on economy with the Straits of Hormuz being a death zone for a few months and all oil production in Syria and Iran crippled.
Not even going to touch on the political fallout of f*cking tag team of U.S. and Israel unjustly attacking and invading three different Arab countries and starting the greatest war Middle East has ever witnessed.
So overall we are looking at deaths of at least half million people at the war stage, about two million more with the fifteen year insurgency against American and Israeli occupation, and hundreds of thousands more during the shaky governments and ongoing civil war for years afterwards.
But hey, you stopped any chance of Iran ever having nukes!*
*well, for the next thirty years or so
It won't just be squadron dropping a bomb into one half-built crappy reactor in the cover of night, unless all you want to do is make headlines. The above is what "Bomb Iran" means if you want the actual result to be "no nuclear Iran".
So you know, sorry that you can't accept this, but if any half-way advanced country wants nukes and is willing to take the political cost, they can do that and there is nothing from outright total war you can do to prevent it. China did it. Israel did it. South Africa did it. India did it. Pakistan did it. North Korea did it. Iran is going to do it, and just like in the six previous cases, the cost isn't worth in stopping them.
So people are just going to have to fucking live with it.
In the early stages of the development of nuclear arsenals, the most likely scenario where nukes would have been used would have been some sort of NATO-Warsaw Pact war which escalated to a regional nuclear exchange. But, once the superpowers developed large numbers of nukes that could be used against their opponents' homelands, the chances of a conventional war dropped dramatically. Both sides knew that a conventional war could well escalate to a regional nuclear exchange, then to a general nuclear holocaust.
Once you and your opponent reach a certain threshold of nuclear capacity, nuclear war becomes unwinnable unless one side is able to take a huge lead through some major technological breakthrough. But, even though the US was pulling away from the soviets in the '80's in terms of nuclear capacity, we still couldn't "win" a nuclear war. At best, we would suffer a lesser loss than the USSR, but that would still probably mean millions of dead Americans, which was not acceptable to any American leader (left-wing hysteria about Reagan notwithstanding).
When we're talking about countries like the US, post-Stalin USSR, China, France and the UK, you're dealing with nations that are extremely unlikely to use their nuclear weapons in any situation except where the nation's very survival is at stake. If the President of China woke up tomorrow and decided to nuke Japan for shits and giggles, the Chinese military would likely refuse to follow those orders and would remove him from power. Similarly, if President Obama had some sort of mental break and decided to nuke London, the military would probably ignore that command and the Secret Service would probably lock him in a closet until cooler heads prevailed. Unfortunately, those types of failsafes might not be present in North Korea, Iran or Pakistan.
Rigorous Scholarship
North Korea is way more centralized on to Kim-Jong Il, but the generals know about the world beyond - most of their children have probably been educated in Western countries and they recieve all the same goodies from there that Kim-Jong Il gets. They have their own interests in not being eradicated in nuclear flames.
The possibility of crazy leader pressing a red button doesn't actually exist. You don't get to the point of possessing nukes without complicated military and political institutions, and the weapons are way too much advanced of an technology without at least five different points between command and execution involving those institutions.
The thing about North Korea, Pakistan and Iran is that it's not Mutually Assured Destruction for them, it's Assured Destruction. Their opponents have more nukes and better chances of survival then they do.
North Korea faces South Korea, Japan and United States. They don't have delivery systems capable of reaching U.S. and it's arguable that they could not do much to Japan either. They could mess up South Korea, but most likely not the entire country - at best their weapons are as powerful as Little Boy or Fat Man. And they have less then a dozen of those. Their country on the other hand would be annihilated by U.S.
Pakistan has India, a country much larger and more populated then Pakistan, and with a bigger nuclear arsenal. While Pakistan could take out most major Indian cities, there would be still hundreds of millions of survivors. India on the other hand can wipe Pakistan off the map and saturate the entire country with nukes. All you have to do is look at population density maps and see who wins.
Assuming that Iran ever gets a dozen actual nukes and its delivery systems are as good as it claims, it could take out Israel because it's so small in size. Though it would probably mess up Lebanon and Hezbollah at the same time, and parts of Syria, at the least cover them in fallout if there isn't an accidental hit. But Samson Doctrine would mean that every single major population centre in Iran would be wiped out afterwards, and even if something would survive, U.S. response would finish the last ones. The "Great Satan" would of course be completely untouched. As would Saudi-Arabia, who would love to see Iran wiped off the map.
No matter what way these countries turn, at least one of their enemies will still be better off then they will be, far better of. It would be self-destruction with spite. Their reason for having nukes is not really a nuclear deterrent, though obviously that too - but invasion deterrent. No matter of the size of an arsenal, nobody is going to invade a nuclear power unless they want to see their armies dissappear in a mushroom cloud.
North Korea, Iran or Pakistan (or Israel, or India...)don't threaten global thermonuclear war, they just threaten themselves and those within a 1000-mile range of them. Only the Big Five could really start the track towards utter destruction, and only if they were being attacked by/attacked one of the other B5.
There's no theoretical upper limit to the yield, and thus destructive power of a hydrogen bomb. So with enough technical expertise and resources one could construct a bomb capable of tearing the globe in half, or the equivalent of the collision that created the Moon, or whatever. The specifics aren't important so long as the device will, without a doubt, destroy the entire biosphere and start a violent re-arrangement of the Earth's crust.
Then you bury, say, five of these deep inside your own borders in top-secret locations. Hook them up to a system like the CCCP's Dead Hand. Your enemy cannot reasonably be expected to counter this, and they're effectively neutered from first-strike capability. Of course they'd eventually counter with a similar system of their own and you'd just be stuck in the same equilibrium with even more disastrous stakes.
I guess the biggest issue with this would be convincing your enemy that a) you can do this b) that you've done this. a) could be satisfied by detonating an equivalent device somewhere distant enough in space, at which point your foe would be taking a huge gamble betting against b).
I think neither side in our version of the Cold War was nihilistic enough to fund something like this, but had the political systems been different... Well, what ifs are kinda silly.
From the 80's onwards, a thermonuclear war between U.S. and USSR would have destroyed practically every state in the world, aside from few misfires and malfunctions that might have saved a city here and there.
People think that their nukes were only aimed at eachother, but it is more likely (and for the most part proven) that they would have taken anyone that might have been a threat in the post nuke world. That means that both U.S. and USSR had nukes aimed at China, for example. Even neutral states were most likely targets because in post-nuke world they could become future superpowers. Especially states alongside the borders of a nuclear country, because they wouldn't even need to waste any ICBMs for that. Fallout would cripple even those who were not hit directly, as would the total crumble of world politics and economy.
Plenty of nihilism right there.
And of course the Russians made sure we knew they'd try to shoot down as many missiles while they were still in our air space.
The point of the globe-ending Dead Hand would mostly be a counter to the Reaganite gamma laser program or something similar. Arming NEOs wouldn't have been much cheaper than developing onwards from the Czar Bomba, that baby was built in the 60's. I think it's psychologically more satisfying to build weapons that attack your enemy instead of everyone, including your own people.
"Not needed" is a bit of a silly argument given how eager both sides were to stockpile more and more, although admittedly around Reagan's time the US was the keener party.
Good point on the testing thing, though. Again, would have to be done in outer space. Better hope the rocket doesn't malfunction!
I assume if Reagan had invented some magic system, sure, USSR might have started research towards something like you described, but it was never neccessary in our world. We still have massive problems in stopping missiles in flight, much less MIRVs and stuff like that.
I guess MAD will start seeing some problems if someone figures out a surefire 100% way to block ballistic missiles, but seeing as offensive technology seems to progress far faster then defensive technology, I don't see that happening any time soon. Besides, in a hundred years weapons are so much more advanced that right now we might not even know what we have to counter.
So you are saying I wouldn't be safe in my underground bunker in Kansas?
Kansas is already been hit.
How do you think it got so flat and desolate, populated by sub humans?
How is Iran not a rational actor? What, in the Iranian government's 30+ years reign, leads to label it as such?
Yeah I would think at this point they have pretty clearly tried to make themselves look crazier than they are.
With respect to MAD the only people who are really irrational actors are the hard core terrorist groups and their ability to procure nuclear weapons is so negligible they probably can be discounted.
I'm not sure it matters whether or not the terrorists are irrational actors.
As long as they're not government sanctioned, they're practically immune to MAD anyway. It's not like we can launch retaliatory nukes against terrorists hiding in another country - especially Pakistan.
Israel is NOT in regards to Iran. I'm not sure which one would push the button, but a nuclear armed Iran or close to it would probably mean immediate war.
It would mean unilateral Israeli air strikes and a US veto on a security council response. I don't believe Iran would be in a position to strike back effectively.
I had to do a research project for history at high school once that included reading old old yearbooks, and one from I think around the cuban missile crisis had a bit in the principal's spiel about a girl who had previously been a good student not bothering to study for exams or anything because "we'll all be dead by the end of the year".
I strongly doubt the surrounding nations would be accept that. Especially since they would have to fly over several countries between them and iran to make the strike in the first place.
edit: Oh they could just go over saudi arabia, who would probably be the most okay with it, I guess. Still don't see it happening.
kpop appreciation station i also like to tweet some
Great job, America. Now to bomb a middle eastern country and continue with those valiant efforts to make the world safe. Yaay!
His calculations are bogus. Besides the method(which is not serious) lets just think about the consequences.
He either thinks that there is a 1/10 chance that everyone on the planet will die in a nuclear war. Or he thinks that 10% of the population will be killed by a nuclear war. Or somewhere inbetween those options. A 10% chance of nuclear war is pretty ridiculous all things considered, and even if it did happen it would likely not be on a world destroying scale. Since all of the likely conflict zones do not possess enough weapons to kill that many people(lots, but not 500 million within any conflict zone) and the most likely detonation seems like it would be terrorist to me, which means it would be both small, and not retaliated against with nukes
This is true only if the Mexican's have only two arms, are holding two guns and have no other way of harming people.
Without nuclear weapons you are a target for conventional war. "Not being a threat" only works if you have nothing to steal.
And everyone has something to steal.
Of course, you can't steal things with nukes either, since you're going to destroy what you're hoping to gain. Another handy property of the weapons.
It only takes a handful of nukes for deterrence. In the 1970's, when the United States infrastructure was much more distributed than it is today, the U.S. Congress commissioned a report detailing the strategic threat of nuclear weapons to the United States.
They determined that, at the time, it would take about 300 warheads to entirely destroy the United States as a political entity. It only stands to reason that you could do so with less today. The 300 warhead mark was reached at least 50 years ago.
Actually it decreases both the liklihood of conventional and the severity of conventional warfare.
Doesn't matter. So long as there is a reasonable belief that they might retaliate then MAD will hold.
There is nothing irrational about it either. Its neutral.
Are you willing to risk destruction to shoot on the assumption that no one will shoot back?
And without MAD and the weapons that spawned it we would have had a world war three that made the first and second look like children's games.
What happends in the subgame where some stupid fuck has already launched is a display of brutal bloodthirst and nihilism that is completely irrational and cruel beyond anything we've ever done - which is saying something. This doesn't mean that there are no rational positions in the full game; There totally is, and it involvs never entering the subgame of slaughter. But should we ever find ourselves in that subgame of slaughter, there would be nothing rational about it.
The (non-credible) threat of MAD is about never ever ending up in that subgame where MAD actually takes place. Not about how rational, non-bloodthirsty, noble and order following we would be if we ever end up there.
They have missiles capable of hitting Israel, and Hezbollah with it's 50,000 rockets/missiles/probably SCUDs right at Israel's doorstep.
Israel wouldn't really be able to destroy Iran's nuclear capacity with conventional air strikes like it did with Syria's and Iraq's single shitty reactors. Iran's nuclear program was started like 40 years ago, with the help of America, when Shah was in power. There are seventeen different known sites contributing to a nuclear program and probably more clandestine sites. They are already at a nuclear power level in the sense that they have reactors capable of creating power.
So like previously said, it would require an long-lasting air war with the entire IDF Air Force committed into it, hundreds or thousands of casualties, and without a doubt a reprisal from Iran and Hezbollah. And Iran is certainly not defenseless against an air attack and most of it's nuclear sites are heavily protected - which would mean Israeli casualties as well.
And US certainly wouldn't veto Israel if it goes all Gaza on one of the most important countries in Middle East, even they have a limit. And Saudi Arabia sure as hell wouldn't let IDF use their ground as a base in an open war - single air strike, maybe - they would get lynched by their own populace and provide massive fuel for the Islamists inside in the nation. They didn't let U.S. use them as a staging ground in Iraq War either. And they hated Saddam just as much.
So you know, open war is impossible for Israel logistically and politically as well and wouldn't be painless to itself even if it somehow managed to get it's entire air force in Iran.
There is this sort of mythical view of IDF being capable of doing whatever it wants in the region, but as powerful as it is, it has limits. United States and Russia are pretty much the only countries with an Air Force capable of destroying Iran's nuclear capacity at will and close enough. Maybe Turkey if it was willing to absorb the casualties. Latter two are almost allies of Iran, former one is not going to get into a third horrible Middle Eastern war against even an harder foe.
So Iran is going to get nukes. There is literally nothing that Israel can do about it short of nuking Iran.
And Israel is a rational actor too, no less then Iran is. No way in hell they would have gotten where they are right now without some major brains.
The lack of a subgame perfect equilibrium for "one player has launched" does not matter is no one risks attempting to first strike
And for the last damned time, the threat is clearly credible.
If the threat were not credible, someone would have been nuked by now.
The Apocalypse Has Never Been More Fun
Secret Satan Wishlist!! Thinkgeek Wish List
Besides that, I'm not disagreeing in any way.