Another socialist blog

in an interview with the BBC: “Now, I think both sides recognise that the most horrific thing that could happen in the year 2002 is, for the second time in history, a nuclear exchange to take place,” he said (emphasis added). As many others have pointed out, Hiroshima was not a nuclear exchange: it was a one-sided nuclear first strike by the United States. Indeed, since the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal was used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was clearly an all-out nuclear war, albeit a one-sided one.

Note the word “horrific” is absent from all Bush Administration comments on the United States nuclear arsenal. Nuclear war, apparently, is only unthinkable when waged by other nations.

An early casualty of the war between India and Pakistan may be the credibility of nuclear deterrence. If the logic of deterrence were correct, the nuclear arsenals of Pakistan and India would be leading them away from the brink of war right now. Clearly no one thinks we are safer because of the nukes on the subcontinent. Indeed, the U.S. government has advised U.S. citizens in India to get out.

The latest arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia is a very sweet deal for those in the U.S. who oppose any reduction in nuclear arms. Sure, the document calls for big reductions in nuclear warheads, from about 6,000 to between 2,200 and 1,700. But there’s no requirement for either side to make actual reductions until 2012, and either side can legally withdraw from the treaty on three months’ notice.

A lot of men probably wish their marriage contracts read like this.

Nuclear deterrence is once again in the news. I’ve always found the theory behind nuclear weapons a little implausible, for so many reasons. Here are just a few:

1. We can’t win a nuclear war. Once nuclear weapons are used on any significant scale, say 1 percent of the total arsenal, it doesn’t matter whether you were the winner or the loser, because you have to deal with the resulting nuclear winter. Nuclear winter would kill a billion people worldwide, above and beyond the number killed outright during the war.
2. The people we are angry at are few, the innocent victims would be many. After all, what is our beef with North Korea? Among other grievances, North Korea is not democratic. By definition, people who are governed by a dictatorship have no control over their government. If they have no control, then they have no culpability either. Yet we are prepared to kill them for the sins of their dictatorial government. When anyone else threatens to use weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians, we rightly call such threats terrorism.
3. For deterrence to work, we have to believe that our enemies are rational. They must examine the facts, weigh their options, evaluate risks versus benefits, and then decide that the price of attacking the United States is too high to bear. If they aren’t rational, if they get angry or stupid, if they decide that they are willing to die and go to heaven rather than submit, then our nukes are worthless as a deterrent. And, of course, they in turn have to believe that we are out of our fucking minds. They have to be convinced that we are willing to blow up the whole world in a nuclear counterattack, ourselves included, for spite.