Broad Support for Zero Nukes Goal
If you’re interested in some good analysis of the importance of Barack Obama’s Prague speech framing his non-proliferation goals in terms of a long-term effort to entirely rid the world of nuclear weapons, I would recommend this from Steve Coll in The New Yorker, this editorial from The Economist, this piece by Peter Scoblic in The New Republic. You can also see brief statements from figures ranging from Chuck Hagel and Lawrence Eagelburger to Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu courtesy of the excellent group Global Zero.
Alternatively, you could listen to New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz who snifs that “nuclear weapons have served the world well” which will, of course, continue to be true right up until the day that we have a substantial nuclear exchange.
33 Responses to “Broad Support for Zero Nukes Goal”
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April 13th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Is that photo of a Howitzer firing nuclear shells? I’m sorry but the idea of army infantry controlling and firing nuclear weapons is just about the most terrifying thing ever.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:11 am
I can respect Peretz position. There is a very strong argument to be made that, in the context of the late 20th century, the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals were a positive good, promoting stability and preventing what would have been a disastrous war.
But even if one subscribes to that argument, the world has changed. The threat of proliferation and loose nukes is too high.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Or we could just keep pretending the North Koreans, Iranians, and Pakistanis, are truthful. That would leave them the global nuclear powers after the rest of the world disarms.
Yep, that’s the ticket. We’ll surrender and everything will be just peachy. Kumbayah.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:15 am
It’s an (the) Atomic Annie, TH. It was quickly surpassed by the superior (and smaller yielding) Davy Crockett. They were in service for a long time before being withdrawn in 1991.
max
['So no freaking out.']
April 13th, 2009 at 10:16 am
That be Atomic Annie, which was totally outcrazied by the Davy Crocket which was fired from a recoiless rifle.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:17 am
wierd.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Yes, Shooter, that’s precisely how arms reduction deals work; we go first and take people’s word for it that they’ve done the same. That’s how Nixon handled them, and how Reagan handled them.
WHAT?!?
Ah, conservatives: it’s easy to believe that their protestations about diplomatic efforts being exercises in naive surrender are just a pose, but then you see them faced with an actual question of diplomatic strategy, and they go and demonstrate that they’re quite serious. Thank goodness such people will have nothing to do with our foreign policy for a next decade or two.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Or we could just keep pretending the North Koreans, Iranians, and Pakistanis, are truthful.
That’s not the plan.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Remember when we insisted on having cameras and monitoring equipment installed at the North Korean nuclear lab, and alarmed the doors, as part of the deal Clinton struck?
You know, because we trust them so much.
No, seriously, you know what the IAEA inspectors do? Play Tetris and tell each other that they really trust the Pakistani government.
It’s like Ronald Reagan said: “Trust.” And that was it. He didn’t say anything after that. “Trust” was the whole sentence.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Nuclear weapons today, nuclear weapons tomorrow, nuclear weapons to the far horizon.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:59 am
to the far horizon
This is the second time you’ve written this, and it sounds just as stupid now as it did then. Just say “forever” and be done with it. The phrase sounds awkward with your “to the far horizon” insert.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:09 am
This is the second time you’ve written this, and it sounds just as stupid now as it did then. Just say “forever” and be done with it. The phrase sounds awkward with your “to the far horizon” insert.
I’m not sure if that was intended ironically, but if not, then: FYI, the construction is a gloss on some prominent Israeli politician (I forget who) who said “Settlements today, settlements tomorrow, settlements to the far horizon” to indicate the political impossibility of any other policy. Which is SLC’s reference in using it.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Any country not pursuing nuclear weapons is shirking it’s duty to defend it’s people.
As long as people like the PNAC boys are out there, every country on earth needs nuclear weapons to protect themselves from the United States of America.
Even if that weren’t true, the strategic benefit of being able to vaporize any armed force massed on your border is too much of a benefit to ignore.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Oh yeah, that worked out real well….
October 17, 2002, 2:52pm EDT
NORTH KOREA ADMITS TO DEVELOPING NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM
then we also have this…
So I’d say the kind way to characterize joel from Lowell’s naivete would “gullibility”. I have no doubt he and the IAEA “inspectors” would get along famously. Tsk.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Oh yeah, that worked out real well….
Which bitch-slapped, change the subject.
Just so we’re clear, you’re surrendering – cutting and running, as it were – from the argument that arms reduction deals involve “trusting” other parties, and changing the subject to the mechanisms of verification.
Which, btw, worked perfectly well. We didn’t trust the North Koreans, but required confirmation. The monitoring system confirmed that they were not holding up their end, we knew right away, and we didn’t go through with our end of the agreement.
then we also have this… You are aware – oh, wait, you’re obviously not aware, or you wouldn’t have written such a foolish comment – that we haven’t negotiated any arms reduction deals with the Iranians, right?
April 13th, 2009 at 11:23 am
You know what the different between IAEA inspectors and American conservatives is?
IAEA inspectors eliminated the Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:24 am
That’s the system working, shooter. When it doesn’t work we aren’t getting to zero. This is a goal you either get to after decades or you don’t.
These fantasies about someone secretly developing an arsenal under whatever inspection regime would exist that has been signed on to by everyone on the planet are risible. That’s not possible. You might be able to hide something that could cough out low-yield bomb every couple years under the technology that exists today both for processing and surveilance. Assuming what we have today couldn’t be drastically improved under a global inspection covenant, what would that get you?
April 13th, 2009 at 11:31 am
It was on the distinctly non-naive, non-gullible watch of Dick Cheney and John Bolton that the North Koreans created their first atomic warhead, their first two-stage missile, their first three-stage missile, and their plutonium processing capacity.
Thank goodness we spent all those years not negotiating with them!
Talk about naive – even after watching the two remaining members of “the axis of evil” move steadily along the path to the nuclear club, there are still people who think pursuing the same policy towards the issue will accomplish something!
April 13th, 2009 at 11:40 am
You condone Hiroshima-Nagasaki?
April 13th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
This is just silliness. Weapons control programs have never worked in the past, and they won’t work in the future. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
April 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
After the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in what was to that date the largest battle between soildiers using guns in the entire history of this planet, the Japanese gave up the gun.
April 13th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
What you’re failing to notice about Japan in that era is that it was a closed island. Last time I looked, closing the entire planet to a specific technology was just a wee bit harder.
April 13th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
@3: Shooter242 is right. What this country needs is an old fashioned arms race. The United States has only spent 12 trillion dollars on nuclear weapons. If I want to see us pass the 20 trillion mark in my lifetime, we gotta get movin’.
The trick is, we need to face off against a Goliath again. These namby pamby states, N. Korea, France, Iran maybe, what good are they? We need to antagonize China, get the Chinese to pour their national budget into Nukes.
Then we can start pouring our national budget into designing and building the next generation of SuperNukes.
LETS GO!!!
April 13th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Ed,
The Pakistani centrifuges and their Iranian and N. Korean offshoots are not close to state of the art. In the 1960s, western nations had developed centrifuges over 60 times as effective as anything those countries have. Just 4 of the cetrifuges could put out a bomb per year. A small, easily hidden facility could house manufacturing, maintanence and opertaions to produce several bombs per year.
Considering that the mechanics of manufacturing thermonuclear devices is even easier to conceal, each atom bomb could be an H-bomb.
If the US could do it 40 years ago, many nations could probably do it now or soon.
It would be nice to get rid of all nuclear weapons, but I think the easiest way to do it is to make war a thing of the past.
April 13th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Re James Robertson
Actually, the Naval Treaties of the 1920s worked fairly well during that time period in that Britain and the United States abstained from wasting large sums of money on worthless battleships which were verging on obsolescence even during the 1st World War. The eventual violators of the treaty, Germany and Japan, paid the cost of developing useless hulks like the Bismarck and the Yamato by not using the funds and materials to build more submarines in the case of Germany and more aircraft carriers in the case of Japan.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Barring some technological advance in concealment, IR detection or is going going to notice the effluent chemicals and thermal radiation involved in building an H-bomb. That’s with today’s tech.
It’s an important measure and it’s not technologically undoable. It may be politically undoable, but that’s not a reason not to try.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Marty Peretz is an ignorant dog-man who ought to be put down.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
SLC is right. (though Germany was never a signatory of the Washington Naval Treaty — its shipbuilding was restricted by Versailles)
Another example of successful arms control: chemical weapons. The Geneva Protocol of 1925 (Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare) was respected by pretty much everybody. Italy used chemical weapons against Ethiopia and Japan against the China, but other than that, WWII was chemical weapons free.
(note: all powers kept a supply as a deterrent, but as I understand it the treaty only forbade the use of such weapons)
This arms control treaty worked so well that even the Nazis respected it enough not to violate it. Under the right circumstances, arms control treaties work.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Bonus points for realizing that if we get rid of most nukes, Skynet has nothing to fight with!
April 14th, 2009 at 6:15 am
Ian@30, the Nazis didn’t refrain from using their chemical weapons because of a respect for treaties: their intelligence analysts thought the Allies had nerve gas because of restrictions on scientific publications (ones actually intended to protect DDT, which was a secret at the time), and the Nazis were afraid of retaliation in kind. (A Higher Form of Killing has a lot of detail about this.)
The historical record between the two World Wars suggests that chemical weapons will be used against those unable to retaliate in kind-cf. French and British use in colonial wars, Italian use in Ethiopia, etc.
April 14th, 2009 at 6:18 am
Obama’s desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons is impractical and unrealistic.
Just like it was when Ronald Reagan wanted to do the same thing.
(Add “eliminating nuclear weaponry” to the list of Reagan ideas modern conservatives-and liberals-have never heard of, along with the idea that Israeli settlements in the Occupied territories are illegal.)