The Independent writes, “Obama calls for total nuclear disarmament”.
A misty spring sun on his back, US President Barack Obama stood before a crowd of more than 20,000 in a square beneath the walls of Prague Castle yesterday to lay out his goal of forging a world free of nuclear weapons, while acknowledging that he may not see it in his lifetime. …
The speech began with almost Disneyesque staging as the President and Mrs Obama climbed hand-in-hand on to the outdoor stage to string music, the skyline of Prague’s domes and spires behind them and a thick bank of carnations and roses at their feet. But the message the President offered was grave and weighted with unexpected new urgency by the firing overnight of another ballistic missile by North Korea.
AdvertisementAmong Mr Obama’s specific proposals was the creation of an international nuclear energy bank, from which nations would be able to draw nuclear fuel for the generation of energy and steps to support Iran in seeking nuclear energy if it proves it is not, in fact, pursuing nuclear weapons. He will also seek a new treaty to end all production of fissile material suitable for nuclear warheads.
Mr Obama also acknowledged the political divisions in the Czech Republic created by US plans, developed by the Bush administration, to build a missile defence base on its territory, as well as in Poland, to protect the allies from any future Iranian nuclear arsenal. He said the plan would be scrapped only if it can be verified that Iran has been persuaded to drop its military nuclear ambitions.
Is it possible to create a world without nuclear weapons? What about nuclear weapon equivalents, such as biological weapons? How can a world “without nuclear weapons” be achieved without the threat of force; and would not the journey toward disarmament imply at least potentially, a nuclear Showdown at OK Corral, after which there were still weapons anyway? Will liars occupy a privileged position in this new world? Open thread.
Oh crimineaser Wretchard,
You worry too much. Everybody wants what we want. Everybody has the same world vision. Hasn’t history taught you anything?
Ronald Reagan said much the same thing.
john lynch,
Would love to see a link to where Reagan said this. My recollection is that Reagan called for developing and sharing comprehensive nuclear missile defense systems. This is a lot different than nuclear disarmament.
Cheers.
L3
Reagan said “Trust but Verify” and had a much more powerful Soviet/Russian Apparatus to talk down and a much smaller China to worry about. Obama will reduce us below secure survivable second strike probability. Given the increasing complexity of our strategic challenges and given the far greater costs of conventional forces than nuclear forces for strategic impact, we should be significantly increasing all of our forces, both tactical and strategic.
an international nuclear energy bank
Name: Omnipotent Bank of Atomic Material Allocation.
CEO: Tim Geithner (it is a bank, after all).
Imagine all the people, living life in peas…
L3
The key to nuclear weapons is plutonium, and the technology to turn it into bombs. (and yes–you can make nukes from enriched uranium, but this isn’t practical for large scale production.) The elaphantoid fact in the room is that–even if you “destroy” all the nuclear weapons you still have to store the plutonium in SOME PLACE. Its toxic. It doesn’t occur in nature. You can’t just grind it up into dust and throw it into the wind. And if it is stored in some place, you can retrieve it and build another nuke in no time at all.
The Djinn is out of the bottle, and its not going back. The bottle is broken. And anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.
L3,
Reagan proposed an elimination of ballistic missiles and denuclearization track at Reykjavik and scared the pants off of Gorbachev and the Americans. See the (always to be treated like Debka) wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjavik_Summit
L3,
Reagan proposed an elimination of ballistic missiles and denuclearization track at Reykjavik and scared the pants off of Gorbachev and the Americans. See the (always to be treated like Debka) wiki.
The URL sent it into moderation, sorry, you can find it, Reykjavik Summit.
if it can be verified that Iran has been persuaded to drop its military nuclear ambitions.
And pray tell, how do you verify such a thing?
This looks more like a plan to let Iran and other rogue states acquire nuclear weapons, while the US becomes weaker and weaker. Does Obama really want to destroy the USA?
As someone said, those who try to create heaven on earth usually end up creating some form of hell.
Paul Lettow wrote a book which argued that Ronald Reagan was a “nuclear abolitionist”. The Amazon Review says,
A Washington Post review said,
Part of the reason what that it was consider unrealistic or “utopian”. The WaPo continues:
If Ronald Reagan can be considered a nuclear abolitionist, it is in the sense that he wanted to remove the incentives for their use by rendering them ineffective. They would have no utility, and hence, no one would be foolish enough to make something that was valueless. And yet, I recall that many serious national security realists argued that Reagan’s insistence on making nuclear weapons valueless were “destablizing”. Reagan was virtually accused of setting the clock to a few seconds “before Midnight”. And the most guilty part of Reagan’s plan was SDI, of course.
In contrast, Obama is opposed to “unproven missile defense systems”. His approach appears to go back further to the Atoms for Peace era, in which all nuclear capability was to be held in a kind of escrow. How is it to be enforced? Apparently by international diplomacy and treaties. But the question may legitimately be asked, if the Left believed Ronald Reagan’s vision was destablizing, why should they not regard Obama in the same way? Especially since his approach doesn’t rely on defense systems, but on a kind of legal regime?
It’s interesting to compare Obama’s “world without nuclear weapons” to the idea of a “gun free society”. Now if the bad guys agree to disarm, so should the sherrif. But in practice what is to prevent the bad guys from burying their guns and digging them up again after the sherrif has melted his shootin’ irons down? The problem is that honest nations are likely to abide by a diplomatic regime proscribing nuclear weapons. But will North Korea or Iran? Will al-Qaeda? I think these are legitimate questions.
It may be possible to construct an effective shield against ICBMs but that does not eliminate the escaped Genie’s knowledge of how to construct nuclear weapons. The missile is one delivery system, there are others. Eventually we will have to have huge offshore inspection stations, like highway truck weighing stations, so that cargo ships can be stopped and searched for special weapons in a safe location. Even during bad economic times the shear volume of containers makes this a numbers game.
Hotspur is still trying to get humanity to outlaw gunpowder…
How is that working out?
I posted this on a previous thread, but the real question is whether he is planning on unilaterally disarming. This would be insane, and perhaps even criminal, on his part.
But he seems to really buy into the left-wing academia orthodoxy that all hostile acts in the world are only due to actions by the US, so it’s not something that can be entirely ruled out. If you look at what he’s done in just the first few months, by putting us in such extreme debt, and therefore necessity huge cuts in defense spending, it’s possible he may really believe that leaving us without significant military capabilities will be good for the world.
Kind of reminds me of my trip to Hiroshima and visiting the museum at the peace park. It was all interesting and informative until I reached the second floor and for the rest of the day I just couldn’t get over how naive the idea of abolitioning nuclears weapons was.
No one is even going to disarm Wretchard.
Let’s talk reality.
Iran wants and must have nuclear weapons. It allows the neutralization of the US Navy in the Gulf and dictating production levels for oil and gas to those that allow the regime to survive, and prove crippling to the West. Russia is helping for precisely this reason — they both need oil and gas at sky high levels because they have nothing else to produce to keep their patronage regimes in power.
Thus Iran MUST HAVE NUKES to threaten the Gulf.
Next, Iran has ambitions to reconstitute the empire of Xerxes. So they MUST HAVE NUKES to do this, starting with the destruction of Israel to demonstrate their leadership to the Muslim world.
In response, Israel is likely to increase nukes, and distrust Muslim President Obama about everything, including his habit of betraying allies and embracing enemies.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, and Yemen are frantically nuking up.
Czech Republic and Poland and Hungary know they are big targets of the Putin regime, so they are doubtless secretly nuking up. The nukes provide an insurance policy from takeover now that Obama has betrayed them, predictably.
Obama’s weak and pathetic response to North Korea has INSURED that Japan will nuke up, as will Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and possibly the Philippines. All threatened by China/and or North Korea.
Latin America and Africa are unlikely to nuke up, with the exception of Venezuela, Cuba, and perhaps Columbia. Brazil already has them of course. Both Latin America and Africa will sell nuclear material to the highest bidder.
Neither Pakistan nor India will give up their nukes. Period.
Demographically collapsing European states will either expand nukes (France) or get them to stave off both Russia and hungry North African neighbors as the US defense commitment collapses.
In no case will nations give up nukes, because the collapse of the US defense umbrella gives them no other alternative BUT to nuke up or be conquered by whoever DOES have nukes.
In addition, vulnerable small countries next to China or Russia can stave off aggression by nukes only. Nothing else with the collapse of the US security guarantees will do this.
For Obama’s dream to be reality, unlike Reagan’s, SOME nation would have to conquer the entire world, and run it like a Stalin-esque nightmare, wiping out everyone of different ethnicities and religions who did not like each other.
Thus all 175 million Pakistanis would have to die, and all 1 billion Indians. The three hundred million Indonesians, or so, and the 1 billion Chinese. Every Israeli, every Arab, every Muslim, and so on. Since as long as they exist, there is a possibility they will construct nukes in secret to survive and regain their nation-hood, and they will fight to the end to stay their own nations, not conquered.
Yes World Peace is quite possible. Simply slaughter about 4 billion people, and rule the rest like Stalin.
Obama is the worst of both worlds, a closet Muslim with all the bigotries and hatreds of Osama bin Laden, and the soft feminized unicorn and rainbow stupidity of the SWPL Western Elites, who are stupid indeed.
Reagan=visionary. Obama=airhead.
No ‘democratic’ government of Japan will ever develop nuclear weapons.
The man who turns his swords into plowshares is the servant of the man who does not.
@ 5. Leo Linbeck III:
Remind me to buy you a beer if we ever meet, perchance.
Reagan didn’t like the damn things, but he wasn’t going to give them up unless the Soviets did. He was the first President to ever reduce the number of nuclear weapons on the planet. How to accomplish that goal is the big difference. Reagan believed in bargaining from a position of strength; Obama wants to set an example. Which way works better depends on what history you want to read.
Now, what Reagan actually did was more important than what he said. Obama seems to get credit for what he says without having to do anything. THAT’s the important point. If Obama doesn’t actually do anything, then it doesn’t matter.
There is a constituency that longs to believe we live in a word where we could just renounce our atomic weapons and everything would be fine. Obama wants their votes, and all they want in exchange is to hear him say the words, so he says them.
The rest of the Democratic Party is confident that he is just pandering to the kooks to further their own agenda. They are probably correct.
People who thought they were smart turned out on several occasions during the twentieth century to be wrong though, about who was pandering to whom.
“No ‘democratic’ government of Japan will ever develop nuclear weapons.”
If the Japanese need a nuke, I imagine they have the tooling and materials in place to run up a reasonable number within thirty days.
They are engineers of uncommon elegance. Even though they had the crap rightfylly knocked out of them (to include nukes) during the late war, even more thoroughly than the did the Germans, I think that by them being an island nation they didn’t fold into a baby sat/utopic escapist existence quite as placidly as did the surviving huns.
I don’t think they will go gently into that good night. Not at the hands of a Korean, at any rate. And there is also the track record with China to consider: never peaceful neighbors, at the very least always competitors. If not that, then conquerors, or vanquished.
The first duty of a democratic government is to protect the freedom of the people.
Lincoln started out his efforts to that end by vacating habeus corpus. It was necessary.
Adults do necessary. Children hope for the best.
Here’s my philosophical problem with all forms of weapons abolition. Almost every example of a practical, peaceful society — with the exception of monastic communities where all the monk’s cells are unlocked — are based on the idea of a monopoly of violence in the hands of a consensus ruler. It’s called the King’s Justice. The opposite of the King’s Justice is not Paradise on Earth, but Hell on Earth: barbarism.
Now for the last 60 years, we’ve had a kind of Nuclear King’s Justice. First, the US Nuclear Monopoly, then the Bipolar World in which there was a monopoly of nuclear violence, but it was held by two rational parties paralyzed by mutual terror. This is the reason Armaggedon hasn’t happened.
If we disarm the King’s Men without making absolutely sure that weapons are completely eliminated, then the result won’t be peace but instability. Now if the US disarms, who holds the monopoly of violence characteristic of the King’s Justice? Either it is some international institution or it is the idea that violence will no longer occur because all the instruments of violence will be abolished.
But it is not true that wars will automatically decline with the abolition of nukes. One of the reasons conventional wars have declined in frequency since the Second World War is that not only were they trumped by the King’s Justice, but they always risked escalating into a nuclear confrontation. War became momentarily too dangerous. With the removal of nuclear weapons — total destruction — from the game, limited war becomes possible again. It becomes cost-beneficial to think in terms of national conquest, where today the risks would be too high.
If I could flick the switch and abolish all nuclear weapons today, China and India would become the most powerful countries on earth because in a situation without WMDs, the nation without the greatest conventional warfare capacity and the brutality to use it, would become the dominant power. What it would achieve is not the abolition of military effort, but a sea change in the military balance. The game would continue but with a different set of front runners. We are very familiar with the world before nukes. It is the period before 1945. Was there war before then? Ask your grandfathers. If we rid ourselves of nukes, would war be abolished? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.
Japan will rely on the US to protect it. The idea of Japan developing nuclear weapons is seriously a no go in Japan. I can’t imagine that ever changing unless democracy goes away again in Japan.
He looked upon the carnage wrought
By the new weapon all had thought
Should never be in use by civ’lized man
Sticks and stones should be enough
But clubs make warfare mighty tough
So he proposed the club face future ban
They argued for a good long while
And as they talked the warfare style
Progressed beyond the club that raised such fears
For now the weapon form of choice
Was one that had its own cruel voice
As men were killing men with swords and spears
Conferences were called again
And hopes were raised that if and when
Agreement could be reached no mat how slow
That spears would be forever banned
And peace would reign upon the land
But by that time some people had the bow
And so it went as time went on
That new replaced the weapons gone
At first the musket then the Gatling gun
The breech-load rifle then the tank
We have the inventors to thank
For giving us this most delicious fun
It must be fun if not then why
Do men then fight and men then die
With and by the weapons that they knew
It hasn’t worked this banning biz
Because there’s always some smart whiz
Who comes up with a weapon fresh with dew
So if you try to ban the nukes
Be sure that somewhere’s a Klaus Fuchs
Who smiles and says those fools don’t have a clue
The man who says we’ll have world peace
If we can make the science cease
Is either fooling him or fooling you
@ 23. David
Japan will rely on the US to protect it.
At some point, they would realize that is not going to happen. By hook or crook, they’ll nuke up, they’ll have no choice.
Japan will bend over backwards to ensure that the US protects it before developing nukes.
And even if they come to the conclusion that the US will not protect it (which is really unlikely to ever happen, both ways) they will pour trillions of yen into a defence shield.
The prequisit to do all this involves a massive cultural change for a people that has had anti-nuclear weapons thought drilled into their brains since birth. Nothing short of the origional bombings and occupation, or Black Ships, would change this.
By late 1944 and into the spring of 1945,
Japan was ahead of the United States in being able to mass produce nuclear weapons. The only thing they lacked was fissionable material.
If the U234 had made it through with the U235, that gap would have been filled. Plus, they knew how to produce dirty bombs from the by-products.
They did all this while being cut off from outside raw materials. If they get scared enough, they will decide that some other people need the same lesson they got in 1945.
BTW: I’ll lay you $5 to a sackful of doughnut holes that somebody in Japan knows how to
manufacture and contain another form of explosive: anti-matter.
I predict that fixed emplacement strategic nuclear weapons (MIRVed ICBMs in silos) and ballistic missile submarine launched SLBMs will eventually be eliminated after a nuclear power wannabe like Iran or North Korea gets burned down after a regional nuclear war (it’ll probably happen within a decade). Only after many millions of people are killed will the developed nations realize that nuclear proliferation leads directly to nuclear war. The developed nations will present the nations of the developing world with binary options, i.e. give up your nukes peacefully or face surgical nuclear strikes to have your nukes destroyed. The developed world will then go through a show of eliminating their countable silos (which are already obsolete) and ballistic missile submarines (which are also obsolete because they can be tracked with radar satellites). Existing nuclear powers like the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russian, China, etc. will retain some nuclear weapons capability in the form of cruise missiles. Cruise missiles have almost perfect accuracy and can be launched from torpedo tubes or conventional aircraft. Cruise missiles are not really “countable” so a nation can go through the show of nuclear disarmament but still retain full capability of destroying any conceivable enemy.
I should mention that the worst conceivable weapon of mass destruction is the designer virus. Splice something like HIV on a common cold virus. The weaponized virus initially spreads rapidly like a common cold, goes dormant in the victim’s spine or brain, counts down about 5-10 years before becoming lethal. Unlike with nuclear weapons, in about 10-20 years any two-bit country ruled by a tin pot tyrant will be able to develop designer virus weapons (they’ll call it “medical research”). The only way the human species can fully protect itself against designer viruses is to build human settlements on Mars. We should have done that 20 years ago as was planned by von Braun. It’s too late now.
“You know what makes this rocket go up?”
“Funding makes this rocket go up. No Bucks ,no Buck Rogers” Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff
The facts are extravagant enough; the theories take our breath away
“The Great Depression in the United States,” wrote Milton Friedman, “…is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of a country.”
What a wonderful time to be alive! We get to see things we had only read about in the history books…such as a Great Depression. A depression, of course, is a natural and recurring feature of capitalism. But a Great Depression usually requires lobbying.
The grubby facts are not in dispute and are hardly worth recalling. The Fed dumped on the fertilizer. Asset prices grew like weeds. Investors got carried away. Consumers let themselves go. Wall Street and the City lost their heads.
Then, the capitalists lost their money. Big deal. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Capitalism is inherently dynamic and unstable…full of sturm and drang, boom and bust, creativity and destruction. It’s always prone to blow itself up just when people count on it most.
As for the present crisis, even a central banker could have seen it coming. When you lend money to people who can’t pay it back, you have to expect trouble. But that doesn’t stop capitalists from whining to the authorities when trouble comes. Half fool, half-knave, governments mobilized; $14 trillion, or thereabouts, has been put up to prevent capitalism from correcting itself Protectionism is on the increase – even while heads of state rail against it. Banks have been bailed out. In Europe they are shortening the life expectancy of automobiles. In America, the feds are effectively running the largest automobile industry…the largest insurer…and the largest mortgage finance business too. Soon, they may have a chain of hamburger joints. More mistakes…more chicanery – in other words, just what you’d expect.
Even their supposed friends say free markets have been exposed as a failure and a mountebank. That is why the G20 met in London – they meant to decide what to do about it. Peter Thal Larsen in the Financial Times:
“The global financial system as we know it was forged by deregulation underpinned by a belief in free markets. That approach failed. The task now is to prove it can be set running again with better brakes and steering… By the end of the G-20 Report, the world will have a clearer idea whether the system can survive.”
William Pesek at Bloomberg: “There’s no doubt the world that Reagan envisioned didn’t work out. The ‘Washington Consensus’ of free markets, small government and unfettered globalization that characterized the 1990s also is over.”
Meanwhile, over in the other camp, they are sitting around open fires…realizing that they are lost in the woods. The Nation magazine has a feature on “Re-imagining Socialism,” in which Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher write: “Do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorites adjectives) future? Let’s just put it right out on the table: we don’t.”
With no ideas from the usual do-gooders…the world turns its lonely eyes in a novel direction. Who can save capitalism? The communists!
“Market forces, if left unchecked, will lead to asset bubbles and ultimately a disastrous market clearing in the form of a financial crisis like the current one,” says a report from the Chinese central bank.
Everyone wants to be Chinese. Because the Chinese have money. And because they don’t have free markets. It is widely believed that the Middle Kingdom can more effectively fight a downturn without democratic, consensus-driven institutions staying its hand.
But here is where we gasp for air. What theory holds that central planning – whether by Chinese communists or American Democrats – can do a better job of allocating capital than the people who own it?
There is none. That is why the world’s leaders – and most of its economists too – permit themselves a luscious fib; they say they don’t need theory at all. “Pragmatism” was the word on every pair of lips in London at the G-20. Free from chains to dead economists, they said they will try “whatever works.” Oh, the loveable lunkheads! Naïve enough to believe anything; receptive as a trashcan. “Pragmatism” in economics is as phony as the men who preach it. Every one of them has a dog-eared copy of Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in his briefcase and an ace up his sleeve. And every supposedly new, pragmatic idea they come up with is merely a version of the same quack cures that kept the economy in the hospital last time.
Perhaps you can paint a bridge pragmatically. If you don’t like the color, you can change it quickly. But if you’re building a bridge, an airplane or an economic system, you can’t make it up as you go along. You have to have an idea of how it works before you start. Besides, results from fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies don’t happen overnight. The feedback loop takes years. It took the Bolsheviks seven decades before they realized they’d been had. Friedman’s critique of America’s Great Depression policies didn’t appear until 30 years after the event. In Japan, they still don’t know what they did wrong. And by the time the feds catch on this time, they will have turned an ordinary depression into a great one.” Bill Bonner has it about right.
John O’Sullivan’s book, “The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World” presents a summary of the interchanges between Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Thatcher leading to the deployment of Pershing II missiles and to Reykjavik. It’s clear that Reagan wanted to rid the world of nukes.
A conventional weapons force is expensive in terms of money and trained people. Nukes are cheap in comparison, especially when rogue and failed states will sell the technology for the weapon and the delivery system.
great stuff, Habu @31. Thanx.
habu, when dawned the year 2001, the USA had less than a trillion dollars on the books in credit default swaps. In the middle of 2007 when a few people at the top of a captured regulatory body changed leverage allowables from 12 to 40, dropped uptic, and adopted M2M, USA was already getting flashing red lights from subprime and ninja credit, and by the following summer oil was at 150 and we had 62 trillion of CDS on the books. then in six trading days in early September banks stocks got knocked down 70% by serial naked shortselling which reached in half a month ten times normal monthly short volume. At this point in time under lock and key at the DTCC settlement authority sit seven billion orphan shares of stock, the residue from naked short sales that cannot settle because they are nonexistant. Nobody will audit the DTCC, at least not until we have a different –probably 3rd –political party to demand it. The sales proceeds from these seven billion illegal transactions? Nobody seems to know, or want to talk about. the sellers? i’ll report here if and when i get something reliable and non-conflicting. Somebody knows, tho.
oh, and almost to a man or woman, the people responsible for the yr 2000 passage of new regulations and specific non-regulations such as guaranteed privacy of Credit Default Swap transactions, the Swiss & US banking/brokerage mergers, and the London-based hedge fund formations which enabled and drove the activities pointed to above, are either from 20087 on newly retired/fired with huge golden parachutes from atop several of our large broker/dealer and investment banks, or have new and powerful financial regulatory jobs in the new administration, or, like the guy who installed the SEC chairman who missed everything, the same guy who sold his USA business to UBS and set up one of the offshore hedge funds in 2000, are now, along with the UBS CEO, on the PERAB, the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which has yet, in it’s several month’s life, despite the stream of epochal events, to hold a meeting, at least one known to the public.
Obama is analogous to a multiple personality competing with itself, all equally delusional.
Like they are the son(s) of octo-policy, each of the various Obamas learn early on, that platitude-as-policy gets the ego gratifcation.
So we go from “oceans will recede”, to “we gotta do it now, don’t read the fine print, it’ll take to long”, to “we will disarm”.
Each of Obamas multiple Obamas deciding to see the other Obamas bet, then raising it another platitude, from an endless, (seemingly) inexhaustible, re-*new*able supply of platitude larder.
The Sorcerers Apprentice. We are forced to supply our own source of cartoon analogies for Obamas magical child fantasyland, and then during the meanwhile reality will ultimately intrude.
Buddy,
You’re not saying that chief resident obama is not fostering a climate of transperancy, that’s heresy but we shall see, won’t we.
obama is now heavily into doublespeak and doublethink in an effort to keep the electorate off there feet and scratching their heads in an effory to cut through the disinformation.
This is tradecraft at it’s most elementary. Both the KGB and CIA would regularly change the names of departments just to keep things in a constant state of the unknown. Enter obama doing the KGB thing.
David @ 17, 24 and 27 …
I imagine that the Japanese will one day have to choose between survival and political correctness/atonement for the sins of their ancestors and my bet is that they’ll choose the former. And anything that gets in the way of that choice might not exactly be called ‘democracy.”
Your title had it right. This is nothing more than a pretty dream and a warm fuzzy speech to show the Euro’s just how cuddly America can be as Obama completes his PR tour. Nukes will never go away — well at least not until some newer more modern weapon replaces them.
Actually, if your magic switch did work and they all disappeared, wouldn’t we just roll-back to the 1940′s with Navies ruling the world? China and India have always had a lot of people, but without means to move or supply them they haven’t played a decisive factor on the world stage.
The level of erudition and thought at Belmont Club continues to rise. As a frequent reader and somewhat infrequent troll, it is fascinating to watch minds, like keen swords, being constantly sharpened against each other and for the open source benefit of all. What a concept.
Now, back under my bridge I go.
Tradecraft — NOW i get it.
Like, you walk into the New York Federal Reserve’s President’s office to ask him why he never said anything about the six year’s growth from 1 to 62 trillion dollars of casino bets among a few big houses as to who would belly up first, when each of those houses knew that neither they themselves nor the other could possibly pay up in any case without a federal bailout, and WHOOPS! he’s not the head of the Fed anymore, he’s the new Treasury Secretary ?
THAT kind of tradecraft, you mean ?
I support the efforts to ban nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in international law. Any weapons that cause lasting damage to the environment should be banned by international law.
This is one initiative of the Barack Administration that I support fully. I hope he makes a lot of progress in this direction.
wretchard (@23)
Now if the US disarms, who holds the monopoly of violence characteristic of the King’s Justice?
The USA can use conventional weapons to isolate and devastate any other country.
wretchard (@23)
Now if the US disarms, who holds the monopoly of violence characteristic of the King’s Justice?
The USA can use conventional weapons to isolate and devastate any other country.
Gee, he’s going to do that while eliminating world hunger and sickness, too!
This is all part of his Ruby Slippers Doctrine. Issue shiny red slippers to all, we’ll all click our heels together, and we’ll all live in peace, happiness, and fluffy puppies.
I’m not sure which bothers me more: that we have a President who engages in such mindless platitudes or that we have people on the planet who actually believe his shit will work.
If you outlaw nuclear weapons, only outlaws will have nuclear weapons. That would finally cinch the “Americans are war criminals” meme, wouldn’t it? Mission accomplished!
We live in a world of proportional response, If our enemies hit us with a missile carrying only 2000 lb warhead that’s what we are expected to lob back.
If the enemy hits us with a nuke then we will have to take consideration as to how big a country we are compared to the enemy”s and only hit back with the same percentage of destruction. In this way the USA doesn’t need nukes.
BUT a world without nukes? that’s bullshit we may discard them but other’s will not, kinda like gun control when nukes are outlawed only outlaws will have nukes. then the ones with the nukes will make the rules.
If we want to throw a big wrench into NoKo’s, Beijing’s and even Rusia’s plans, we would offer Japan real statehood. “Nippon” could follow Alaska in the fold.
A couple bene’s come immediately to mind:
1. This would codify our current defense and trade relationship with Japan, rendering old “rubs” (like Japan’s atrocities in Manchuria) moot.
2. This would force Putin to renounce his Federation’s claims to Nippon’s northern islands, or take us on for-real. My guess is, faced with real US determination, he’ll back down.
3. This would end NoKo’s provocative arms-development habit of firing test missiles at neighboring countries’ territory in violation of signed international agreements; each would constitute an “Act of War” against America (and we know where that’ll lead – there’ll no more pussy-footin’ around).
4. The prospect that Nippon may become a west-ward extension of the Hawaiian islands would generate very interesting debate in UN forums.
Most interesting to me is the posturing that is sure to ensue in global media and UN forums should Japan and America combine. This debate and the stances adopted by individual delegations will “call-out” illiberal national governments and America’s pretend allies, and, in the end, it could conceivably nudge debate in world bodies towards greater liberalization.
Right now, they think we’re on the run. This may be the perfect time to expand American influence and protections (as Bush did in Iraq), not shrink them.
42. buddy larsen:
Yep thats it…they like to pose it as not leaving any crisis go to waste, so as opposed to a crisis management team they have a crisis development team.
The just when the crisis breaks and the people start to focus on who did what when they come in with the doublespeak experts and shuffle the the cards around while adding or subtracting from the deck.
Then they send out that guy who uses Brylcreme to not answer questions from the press.
BTW did everyone get a chance to see our Supplicant in Chief kowtowing to the Saudi King?
It is a great emetic if you ever need one.
Vomit-0-bama.
Sweet “Imagine” reference at the top as that song is the “Rock of Ages” of dumbass peaceniks and the can’t we all just get along crowd(Rodney King wasn’t the only one on PCP)
Lennon’s opus also imagines no religion, no nations,etc. and that’s the gist of the problem. The left totally misreads human nature. Instead of ravenous wolves wanting to slit our throats and rape our women; to the left our enemies are noble and misunderstood. If we could only eliminate our own belligerence ,then it follows they would love us . So let’s just disarm and inspire them to do the same.
Here’s a quote from the good book on coming events: Zechariah 14:12: And this shall be the plague wherewith the Lord will smite all the people who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh shall consume away while they stand on their feet and their eyes shall consume away in their holes and their tongue shall consume away in their mouths”
What kind of war does that sound like?
Among Mr Obama’s specific proposals was the creation of an international nuclear energy bank, from which nations would be able to draw nuclear fuel for the generation of energy
Does this mean President Obama is proposing a new uranium-backed currency?
Technologically speaking, the only way to ban nuclear weapons is to ban nuclear energy.
Ensuring the widespread use of nuclear energy while banning nuclear weapons would effectively arm criminal regimes while leaving everybody else unarmed.
I would feel better if Barack Obama could promote a verifiable agreement to leave the official nuclear powers with up to one hundred nuclear warheads each, leaving open the option of upgrading the technology for each signatory. By demanding complete nuclear disarmament, he is not only letting the “best” become the enemy of the good, but he is also empowering cheats and liars.
“If we want to throw a big wrench into NoKo’s, Beijing’s and even Rusia’s plans, we would offer Japan real statehood.”
Very interesting. I’ve thought likewise in regards to offering U.S. statehood to Iraq. Very messy both (especially in regards to the latter), but definitely mutually beneficial and a big geopolitical wrench, indeed! Then again, something far less creative and ambitious would require far more brains and stones than possessed by Obama & Co.
Anodyne…
Japan and Iraq could never live with our domestic policies.
Japan: open borders ? No way!
Iraq: freedom of religion ? No way!
You’re probably right, Blert, but this thread is titled “You May Say That I’m a Dreamer”, after all! Then again, various folks may someday change their minds.
This is the worst dishonesty on display as yet. Liberals pretend what Obama presented was totally original.
Statehood for Japan is an interesting idea, but Mexico will become a state before Japan does.
In fact, I wonder why the Left has never pushed that concept. What a pile of new voters they’d get! Wards of the nanny state by the millions and millions, and now totally free to spread across the rest of the states, ensuring adequate new D voters in every town and hamlet. And then Obama could wave his magic gypsy wand and stop all the messy oil drilling going on down there and put everyone to work building solar panels.
The collapse of our health care system that would ensue would give O the final push to nationalize the whole shebang.
And best of all, we’d all learn how to cook rice and beans because that’s all we’ll be able to afford when it’s said and done. (Wagyu beef, of course, will continue to be served at White House soirees.)
“in a situation without WMDs, the nation without the greatest conventional warfare capacity and the brutality to use it, would become the dominant power”
I think you meant “WITH the greatest”. Oops.
Ever been to an outdoor shooting range Mike? notice how no grass grows there? The lead in the bullets poisons the soil. Every creature on earth has an adverse effect on nature. It’s called ‘nature.’
The treasury is broke. Does anyone seriously believe we have the capacity to isolate and devastate any other country? If anything, we should take a page from Eisenhower and INCREASE our nuclear weapon inventory and shrink the size of the army. Like others have said, nukes are cheap. We can still use our powerful navy to protect our interests.
peterike,
The Azatlan plan is to return parts of the US to Mexico rather than add them to the Union.
steveaz,
There were solid plans in the 19th century to incorporate both Cuba and the Philippines into the Union. They failed because of competing interests in the North and South and due to old fashioned bigotry. Before 1860 the South wanted Cuba as a slave state, after 1865 the South opposed Cuba as a competitor for local sugar interests. Racial and religious issues also kept both places out. While I think that Japan would make a splendid addition to the United States, so would Taiwan and Korea. One of the nice features in the old Articles of Confederation was that it specifically included an offer of statehood for Canada. Australia could probably become 5 or 6 states any time it wants to. New Zealand on the other hand might be the last redoubt for Obamanauts to retreat to when things get ugly.
As the global economy spins down towards the event horizon some players will uncouple from the center.
This is the law of chaotic momentum: a bigger ‘in-group’ throws out peripheral economies. These then drift slowly around far away from the central driving force of the global economy: the American miracle.
The driving force in Mexican politics is ‘anti-el-norte’. This is the reason for a cap on oil exports to the US becoming Mexican law. This is the reason that gringos are forbidden from purchasing any land too close to the border. This is the reason that PEMEX will not explore near the American border.
Unlimited immigration is toxic to BOTH America and Mexico.
For Mexico it means that the heart of her productive youth departs. Pimping their labor becomes a fount of gangland profit. Her politics relapse into a corrupt toxic stasis.
For America it means that blue collar and retail trades chronically lose ground economically. Our politics becomes pimped and corrupted by La Raza and it’s fellow travelers.
This unstable situation cannot hold.
@ 30. Eggplant
Can you imagine the frustration of walking across the continent for several years and not finding another living human soul?
The designer virus of the kind you outlined is an ELC (extinction level critter). Only VHEM (www dot vhemt dot org) dreams about it, because once that sh!t is outta bag, there is no way to put it back. Only a handful of survivors–question is whether enough to reboot and resilient enough to fend off any possible mutations recurrences.
Mars… yea, damn shame.
#63, Twobyfour: “Earth Abides” by George R. Stewart. It’s that precise scenario.
@ 64. Norm
Thanks, will check.
Al Qaeda proved it could raid the US via low-tech means, introducing enormous disruption into the US economic and social operations.
The US responded with expensive, unwieldy, but thus-far effective countermeasures.
All AQ needs is one opening for a low-tech delivery of a nuclear device or dirty device. ICBM’s are not the main problem at this point, given our anti-missile capabilities (if developed fully), and for Obama to pretend that missiles are the immediate problem is misleading the American public. I don’t particularly mind if my neighbor has a gun or if the Brits have SLBN’s.
For a description of the effects of an atomic bomb see Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima;’ for a description of the impact of a hydrogen bomb on NYC, see Schell’s ‘Fate of the Earth.’
blert/62; GE is one of La Raz’s sponsors. Look it up.
This proposal betrays an assumption that peace is the natural state of human behavior. Take the weapons away, and just think of the peace.
There are major failings of thought involved, that anyone who has read a newspaper during the last decade or so would recognize.
1. An international body would require power to enforce, otherwise it becomes ‘if nukes are criminalized, only criminals have nukes’. Will the US put it’s military muscle behind enforcement of the rules? Will the international body be bereft of political considerations, or will they focus exclusively as the UN has on Israel, for example? If someone is nuked, will there be an effective counter? How will that be maintained and administered?
2. The last 60 years has been incredibly peaceful only as a result of the nuclear threat. Any other age would have seen the US and Russia go hammer and tong at each other in hot war. Vast economies have been able to do without effective militaries. How would removing nuclear weapons make it better?
Derek
Derek, I think you have it nailed (perhaps without realizing it). With nuclear weapons, the US and NATO have kept the peace on the cheap, so to speak. The whole continent of Europe was not devastated again as in WWII.
The absence of nuclear weapons is not the absence of war, but the absence of the threat of massive retaliation. Suddenly, the world is safe for conventional warfare. Who has lots of young people with little or nothing to do? China? The Arab states?
The eternal Marxist dream; perpetual war-footing of a country. Constantly keeping the people on edge and mobilized. It will work better as collectivization than global warming, socialized medicine, or sugar free gum (scratch that one!).
Remember, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
“Laws that forbid the carrying of (nuclear) arms..disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes (WMD acts of war). Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent (mass) homicides, for an unarmed man (nation) may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one.” Thomas Jefferson
nukes are peacekeepers –O has to understand that –how can anybody not?
mark, i have a copy of the Hersey book. It’s indescribable, it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever read. poor simple people with with no idea what was going on with Tojo –the right thing to do in the big picture, but good lord almighty damn.
Buddy (may I call you Buddy?)
What he understands and what the truth is should not be confused. He may indeed understand, but like much that Obama does, it’s about implementing the agenda of the left. Of course,the instrumentality is evil. Get rid of the instrumentality, get rid of evil. We can fix it. Yes we can! Is it Bob the Builder or Obama the Simpleton?
We are going to get the attempt at the full implementation of every leftist dream of the last century. Talk about reactionary.
2×4 @ 19,
Make it a Guinness. I don’t drink beer.
Cheers.
L3
Eliminate nuclear weapons?
What about planetary defense?
Isn’t that a good enough reason to not only keep them, but further develope them and the delivery systems?
Some low budget movie on the other night, they needed to go seal a crack in the world under the ocean, or some nonsense like that. What do they use, a nuclear weapon of course! But of course they had to get the warhead there.
One of the actors said, “Mr President (played by a black actor), we need a submarine to deliver the warhead”.
The President’s reply, “we don’t have any”.
It was truly a classic moment.
e nigma/72; no please, i prefer ‘count otto von buddy’ –no really, what you describe is the classic Hellenic meaning of ‘tragedy’ –everyone on the stage knows full well he or she is in the process of creating a disaster, but for one reason or another something in his or her character is rendering them helpless to take the action that will avoid the disaster.
Biological weapons tend to be contagious and therefore self-defeating. Bio-toxins are not as powerful, as they don’t multiply. A good bio-agent can kill a person from an infection starting from a few cells or so. And spread from there.
The interesting exception is anthrax, which multiplies in it’s host, so micrograms can kill, but is not contagious from person to person. Also, anthrax is easily dried and stored, where other bacteria die from drying.
Nukes can never be uninvented.
What has happened is that we live in a multipolar asymmetric world. Any such war would lead to the destruction of both parties but unlike the height of the cold war there are no perceived to be only 2 parties. Wiping out Russia/America will not make you top nation if you are on your knees & China is standing there.
The only way they could be used is if destruction is inevitable anyway (the Masada or North Korea options) or by a terrorist who has no home base to be destroyed (most actually have) or where the user thinks it can be done without identification (I suspect this is pretty difficult because isotope ratios would say what technology was used or even where the stuff was mined).
On the other hand it only takes one.
There is a persistent story that the story told by several Soviet officials that “during the Chechen Revolt, the rebel jihadists came into possession of some number of the Soviet “suitcase” bombs stored at a captured Soviet military base” is untrue, that the theft is a Kremlin operation to break its custody link to the bombs, so that should any country suffer a Soviet-signatured detonation, the “stolen suitcase bombs” predicate is ready-made, Kremlin “deniability” is already in place.
Whatever credibility this story has rests NOT on some dubious witnesses but on the circumstantial that Russia is extremely unlikely to’ve been so careless as to’ve allowed deadly-enemy Chechens to gain control of such weapons.
If only the United States would wither away everything would be peachy keen. That’s what the resentment filled creature, who grotesquely is our president, really believes.
Sorry boys & girls, I didn’t have time to read all the latest Belmont Club updates, but I had to butt in here. Nuclear warfare, indeed all weapons, exist for only two reasons, to scare or destroy. My humble opinion is that the world has forgotten Nagasaki & Hiroshima. Nuclear WMD’s are just “stuff in the news”. A major American nuclear first strike on N. Korea to eliminate troops, nuclear facilities, command and control assets, and defensive capabilities, (after all it is the only way we could punish DPRK w/o losing our out troops in S. Korea and invasion of Seoul),would be a much needed reminder of the need for nations to cooperate and taunt each other. While China & Russia would be angry, the message would insure at least another 25 years of peace.
OOPS, I meant NOT TAUNT EACH OTHER.
While people seem quite exercised about Iran’s quest for nukes, I’d point out that no one’s talking about Iran’s other laboratories.
They apparently bought up all of Russia’s unemployed bio/chemical weapons scientists about a decade back. At the time I believe there were something like 7,000 of these scientists recruited.
@60. Captain Ramen: I’ve been at hundreds of outdoor shooting ranges over the past fifty years, civilian and military. Never seen one where the growing grass wasn’t the problem, making it hard to find one’s brass; except for ones that were all gravel or concrete and too hot. What are you talking about? I’m distinguished in both rifle and pistol, BTW.
Mike Sylwester said:
A nuclear free USA will be crushed by any random nuclear armed opponent. Aircraft carrier battlegroups are no match against nuclear weapons. Your post has been easily refuted.
Mike Sylwester said:
The rise of decentralized manufacturing and the future universal assembler makes this post a complete fantasy. Any enforcer who attempts to enforce these laws will be easily destroyed by anyone armed with such weapons.
It appears that you deny the fact that humans are just animals and are subject to the rules of predator and prey.