Obama Unveils New Nuclear Doctrine 526
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that under Obama's new 'Nuclear Posture Review,' released today, the US will foreswear the use of the nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries, in contrast to previous administrations, which indicated they might use nuclear arms against nonnuclear states in retaliation for a biological or chemical attack. But the new policy included a major caveat: The countries must be in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations under international treaties. The problem for Iran and North Korea is that the pledge does not cover them because the US regards them as in non-compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The new policy will also describe the purpose of US weapons as being fundamentally for deterrence. Some Democratic legislators had urged Obama to go further and declare that the United States would not use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, but officials worried that such a change could unnerve allies protected by the US nuclear 'umbrella.' The president of the Ploughshares Fund said of the new stance, 'It orients US policy towards dramatically fewer weapons and greatly reduced roles.'"
Good publicity move (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good publicity move (Score:5, Interesting)
If we want to nuke someone, you'd best be sure we'll find a way to show that they're in "non-compliance".
Nuclear weapons have turned into something of a penis waving contest.
The people most likey to use a nuke (small states and non-state actors) are the least likely to have more than one nuclear weapon.
For those people, a US nuclear arsenal of 2,500 is no more intimidating than an arsenal of 25.
More importantly, the USA is easily capable of using amazingly overpowered "conventional" munitions to respond to such threats.
Nowadays, about the only reason we need nuclear weapons is if someone says "Bin Laden is in those mountains" and we decide to level the mountains.
Re:Good publicity move (Score:5, Funny)
Nuclear weapons have turned into something of a penis waving contest.
Hence why we need more women in leadership. Just think what they'd wave.
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Trench warfare? Very ugly...
Absolutely incorrect. (Score:4, Insightful)
>Nuclear weapons have turned into something of a penis waving contest.
It would seem to me that you are completely incorrect. Having nuclear weapons is basically your best way to keep the US from interfering overtly with your country.
Re:Good publicity move (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree strongly with most of what you have said, I think you're a bit mistaken here.
If North Korea were to start shelling Seoul, little in our arsenal short of nuclear weapons would be capable of taking out their heavily entrenched artillery before the south suffered horrific losses. (And I mean horrific. NK is believed to have 10,000 tubes aimed at Seoul. "Optimistic" losses start at numbers never seen before in history.)
Conventional weapons have largely met their match against fixed fortified positions. Pouring another few feet of reinforced concrete is a very cheap countermeasure and will always be so. Many of Iraq's bunkers needed round after round of bunker-busters to penetrate - dropping N+1 down N's hole. This takes a significant amount of time. One needs to wait for the dust to clear, to assess exactly where the penetration took place, and then to attempt the second strike. Time is not on the US's side in most the standing nuclear scenarios.
Re:Good publicity move (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like a Mexican standoff with RPGs at point blank range. Nobody in their right mind is going to shoot so the only sane option is to put them fuck down, but mankind isn't mature enough for this, so everyone wants to keep pointing them and making threats because it makes them feel powerful, and again, because of stupidity, people take the threat seriously.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have a clue about game theory. You know what's worse than a Mexican standoff with RPGs? One person with a RPG and no repercussions for its use.
To be blunt, there's millennia of history where groups take what they want by force of arms. They don't invade a weaker country because it makes them feel powerful. They do it because they are more powerful. As long as you have groups with differ levels of power, you're going to have situations where in the absence of repercussions, it'll be convenient for the stronger group to take by force from the weaker group. Nuclear weapons provide consequences for a variety of really nasty and brutal nation-level actions.
As long as you're dwelling on the psychology of force and reprisal, you're going to miss the fundamental thing, cost versus benefit. As long as war has a big payout for its cost (for the perpetrators, not the masses), it'll continue to occur, no matter how "mature" the involved parties are.
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Re:So, that's why! (Score:5, Funny)
How do you sleep at night?
Re:Good publicity move (Score:5, Interesting)
North Korea withdrew from the NPT, and Iran has been found to be in non-compliance. They both are valid targets. I would agree with saying Iran is 'becoming' a valid target since it is currently in dispute as to what exactly is going on, but all signs point to a genuine nuclear weapons program or the pretense of having one.
North Korea also already has a few neighbors that would strongly object. North Korea also has a southern neighbor which would strongly object to Seoul being turned into a parking lot with trucks full of soldiers waving juche propaganda leaflets.
If North Korean troops start pouring through the DMZ, the US military is going to consider all of its contingency plans to keep its ~150,000+ soldiers from being killed or captured, and there is a 100% chance one of those contingency plans includes using nuclear weapons. In all likelihood it is one of the reasons why it hasn't happened yet.
Actual reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
NK is not even remotely a conventional match for US troops. They cannot keep the lights on at night, let alone maintain air superiority against stealth fighters. Nukes would not be considered if NK attempted a land grab.
They are being held in reserve, to make sure NK knows good and well the consequences of building and employing a few fission weapons. This is a carrot/stick move that might encourage them into non-proliferation compliance. We have all the reason in the world to want this, because we would completely steamroll them in a conventional war, and we wouldn't suffer the negative publicity of a nuclear war.
Re:Actual reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Every aircraft we have, every cruise missile, launched at once, loaded with conventional bunker busters, would not make a dent in the north's 10,000 artillery tubes which are heavily fortified into the hills.
They don't need to "keep the lights on at night" to rain unimaginable hell down on the south.
Artillery is cheap, effective, and when behind three meters of reinforced concrete damn hard to kill.
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>Every aircraft we have, every cruise missile, launched at once, loaded with conventional bunker busters, would not make a dent in the north's 10,000 artillery tubes which are heavily fortified into the hills.
>They don't need to "keep the lights on at night" to rain unimaginable hell down on the south.
>Artillery is cheap, effective, and when behind three meters of reinforced concrete damn hard to kill.
While you have an effective point, nothing you said contradicts what the parent poster said. The
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The artillery would only be effective against civilian targets. In order to fire them on military targets you'd need accurate near-realtime targeting data - which they can't obtain.
Sure, they could turn the South's cities into rubble, but that wouldn't have much of a military impact - only a political one. If they tried it chances are that both the US and China would step in to straighten things out. If anything the powers that be in NK would try desperately to surrender to the US rather than the alterna
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Artillery is surprisingly ineffective when it remains behind heavy fortifications. The gun tubes have to exit the bunker somewhere.
You don't have to destroy the gun, only it's ability to fire.
Re:Actual reasons (Score:5, Informative)
I've read that NK has somewhere on the order of 1,000,000 troops - how true is that? What's the combined number of S.Korean stationed US troops + S. Korean troops? It would appear to me that they have the advantage in a ground war, assuming they have the bullet supplies to maintain a sustained offensive. 100 bullets a month x a million soldiers is a lot of bullets for a country like NK.
North Korea is the most militarized country in the world today, with about 20% of men ages 17–54 in the regular armed forces (at nearly 1.2 million armed personnel), plus about 3 million reserve troops (i.e. past conscripts). Most of the divisions are infantry, mech inf or antiquated artillery, but it's only half a day's marching to Seoul...
South Korea tries to keep step with this: they have about 650k (much better-equipped) active troops due to two years' conscription for all males, and have 3 million reserves as well -- which would make a Northern attack without the support/assistance of China suicidal.
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And since Seoul is "right next to the DMZ", you'd have to drop those nukes right next to the city and the troops you're trying to save.
This plan appears to have a flaw that should be corrected before implementation.
Heres the thing... (Score:2)
The question is, which of the monkeys is the US?
Re:Heres the thing... (Score:5, Funny)
The US is crazy dynamite monkey.
Re:Heres the thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Russia and possibly China are the only countries that could blow America to oblivion and it wouldn't do them much good. Apart from anything else, the US could comfortably scrap 1000 nuclear weapons and still have enough to reduce any and all aggressors to dust. Obama's moves on weapons reduction just take America on it's first steps away from Strangelove country. There's still a hell of a long way to go before you need to start worrying about what the other monkeys are doing*.
*(but, FYI, it rhymes with plaster slating)
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China's arsenal isn't large enough to blow the US to oblivion. Only Russia really has that. China has enough to act as an effective deterrent (that happens somewhere between five and 25 warheads, depending on delivery capability and ease of defense of those warheads), as do India, France, Britain, and Israel.
North Korea is moving in that direction, but because of its significant conventional forces (1.2 million active plus 3.5 million to 4.7 million reserves out of 24 million population), it has a deterre
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there remain many a crazy nation that will gladly blow us to oblivion.
With nukes? That might be why he reserved the right to nuke countries with nukes of their own.
Re:Heres the thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
The world really isn't as evil a place as some think it is. And it's not really the "evil" monkeys we need to be afraid of, it's the fearful ones.
The world would be a less dangerous place if folks could stop being such hair-trigger fearmonkeys.
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The world really isn't as evil a place as some think it is.
For the most part, no, but surely you admit there's a few big exceptions [wikipedia.org]? But on the bright side, maybe the last genocide ended this spring, knock on wood, in which case the greatest evil around is a measly few million women and children enslaved and forced to work as prostitutes. Things are definitely looking up now that only a third of the world is ruled by totalitarianism, but perhaps it's not time to beat all the swords into plowshares yet?
being afraid is not the same as being prepared (Score:3, Insightful)
We can't let ourselves fear. When we do, it exacerbates our tendency towards dividing. Fear causes us to think of people as "other" and to care less for them. When that happens "big exceptions" are more likely. This is the crux -- those big exceptions, those instances of people being evil, they were fostered by the fearfulness of the perpetrators.
There are other factors that promote dividing, but fear is perhaps the biggest.
Sure, I carry a knife, though I expect not to need it. The difference between m
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You are dramatically overestimating the power of nuclear weapons.
Mt St Helens blew with 24 megatons of power. That is close to 2000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb or about 1.8 times more powerful than the biggest bomb the US ever detonated.
Krakatoa blew with close to 200 megatons of power. That is 4 times more than the largest nuke ever blown and about 13000 times more than Hiroshima.
With 100 large nuclear weapons we can devastate 100 major cities or utterly destroy a couple dozen major cities.
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I never said they couldn't devastate cities, just that the fear of nuclear winter, or the idea that "Even with 100 we could completely wipe China off the Earth" is utterly false for a largely rural nation like china. You could barely wipe Delaware off the map with a hundred such bombs.
Cold war is over! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mutually Assured Destruction plans of the Cold War are outdated... we're no longer fighting states with a homeland, we're fighting a mobile group that will go wherever lawlessness is tolerated and don't care what happens to innocents around them. Scorched Earth isn't the idea, it's really just a question of law enforcement. Gotta use different tactics for a different enemy.
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Who are you to say who we're fighting? Maybe we're also in conflict with states that have homelands, and nuclear deterrence is one of the reasons those conflicts have been so undramatic.
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Just because they aren't useful at the moment doesn't they won't be useful again. History Repeats Itself, we will need nukes again.
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We've got the MOAB system of conventional explosives to take out terrorist camps... nukes are much stronger weapons. 2 hits and a promise for more got Japan to surrender.
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blah blah. The gap between the US ability to wage war and other major nations is still very large in a conventional sense. Russia can barely fund their military and China doesn't even have a modern Navy.
You make it seem like conventional weapons are a pointless endeavor. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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.
Hmm, that's tough. Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Tibet, for sure. Possibly Mongolia and the USSR.
And since China hasn't been unified for 3000 years, do we count all the invasions of one country in the area now called China of another country in the area now called China? If so, it would run into the thousands.
I like they way you carefully picked a time per
Try harder (Score:3, Insightful)
In the last 40 years, that would be Iraq, twice, and Afghanistan
Not counting airlifts and small skirmishes:
1970s
operations in Cambodia
the Vietnam War
1980s
El Salvador
Columbia
Nicaragua
Panama
Lebanon
Grenada
Honduras
1990s
Persian Gulf War
Yogoslav Wars
Haiti
2000s
Afghanistan
Iraq
This list does not include foreign intervention by way of arms sales, CIA coups, or trade embargoes. And does not including the permanent deployment of 250,000 troops around the globe in over 130 countries with over 700 military bases.
The point being, you can stop and start the dates any time you like. The
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"Balance of power" during the Cold War consisted of the Soviet Union arming and funding communist insurgencies, coups and outright invasions, and the US desperately trying to contain the spread, until around 1980.
Oooh! Scarrry communists! They're teaching children to read in Nicaragua and kicking out our corporations in El Salvador! Quick, someone rape and kill some nuns! [wikipedia.org] For freedom!
By the way, if you're afraid of the Nicaraguan Army, you're a coward. [chron.com]
Negotiation with a sovereign nation with an elected government is quite different from dictating to a puppet regime that came to power in a coup.
Is it different from overthrowing a democracy in Iran in 1953 [wikipedia.org] and installing the Shah? Or funding coups throughout central and south America and in fact, all over the world? [wikipedia.org] Is it different from hand-picking Saddam Hussein to rule the Ba'ath Party [wikipedia.org], support his rise to
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Did you seriously just put North Korea in the same category as Russia and China?
Russia and China are major world powers; NK is a poverty-stricken shithole. If it wasn't within firing distance of Seoul, nobody in the world would even know who the hell they were. North Korea is the worlds largest municipal disturbance.
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I am getting sick and tired of the "war between nations is obsolete" rhetoric. It makes no fucking sense,
It makes perfect sense. It moves war into the territory of police, giving you a reason to militarize the police. You can then use military equipment and tactics against your own people more easily. As a ruler you would want to do this because the greatest threat any government faces is its own people. (and vice versa)
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but when you talk about retaliation with nukes you are not saying lets destroy their armies or their military bases.
Nukes are for indiscriminate killing, destroying hole cities of civilians or entire nations or complete genocide.
What the POTUS is saying is, even you indiscriminately kill our civilians we may not wipe out your entire race or country.
That does not mean that the US could not retaliate by destroying the opposing country's ability to ware war on the US and neutralize the government that ordered
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A British chemical company invented (discovered?) VX in 1954. Check out VX here [wikipedia.org]
No, I don't think the US has much in the way of VX and VX-class "weapons" left. And biological stuff is pretty much non-existent, although the facilities to make lots and lots of stuff like smallpox does exist and one would just have to have the will to actually start growing the stuff.
Which I doubt exists today in the US.
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Yes, that's why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never rebuilt...Oh, wait....
Note that neither city was depopulated by the atomic bombing, and both were rebuilt at about the same rate as the rest of Japan.
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The terrorist threats are not just lives lost, but also WHICH lives they went after. 9/11 knocked a few stock trading firms out of existence by killing all of their staff. The physical Wall Street was hard to access knocking NYSE offline for days, and NASDAQ went offline despite having their physical trading computer in Connecticut just because they didn't want to be swamped with their stocks trading while nobody could trade NYSE stocks. CNBC also was a simulcast of NBC's coverage for days... and the market
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Those people - insurgents, terrorists, whatever you would call them - pose absolutely no existential threat to the United States.
Their threat directly corresponds to their capabilities. If they just have explosives or guns, then they're very limited in what damage they can do. If they have highly lethal versions of the flu, then well, they're more dangerous. If you say terrorists can't be existential threats because they only kill a few thousand people a year, I agree, as long as those conditions remain that way. If if they can kill a few billion people a year, then that's a different level of threat.
Its a first step (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, the idea is, don't let your guard down against those countries that are obviously against your ideologies. However, for everyone else who has sworn the non-proliferation, this would help diplomatic relations. Perhaps when the rest of the world starts seeing the U.S. in better light, countries like Iran and North Korea will be a little more amicable to joining these kinds of treaties proposed by the U.N.
In the event that they are stubborn about nuclear domination, the U.S. can still be the standing p
But, But.... (Score:2)
Pledge does cover Iran... (Score:2, Interesting)
since Iran is in fact fully in compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the NPT, regardless of what the US tries to say. NPT signatories have full right to develop and implement the complete nuclear fuel cycle for the purposes of generating power. NPT signatories are not obligated to submit to inspection of their nuclear facilities at the whim of anyone else. The fact that Iran has repeatedly done so demonstrates a remarkable tolerance on their part.
Re:Pledge does cover Iran... (Score:5, Informative)
Signatories to the NPT are required to sign a "safeguards agreement" with the IAEA, which lays out how the IAEA will monitor the country's compliance with the NPT. Iran did so, and then in 2005 the IAEA, after several warnings, concluded [iaea.org] that Iran was not in compliance with its safeguards agreement.
According [dfat.gov.au] to the Chairman of IAEA Standing Advisory Group on Safeguards Implementation, this is in effect a declaration of NPT violation:
Iran was then referred to the UN Security Council for the violation, as provided for in the NPT. Incidentally, as a signatory of the UN Charter, Iran also agrees to abide by all decisions of the UN Security Council. Security Council resolution 1696 demanded that Iran halt its uranium enrichment program; resolutions 1737 and 1747 have followed up and imposed sanctions for noncompliance (the two follow-up resolutions passed unanimously). Iran has so far violated all three resolutions.
It's a false "news" (Score:3, Informative)
So what's new here?
Irrelevant words (Score:4, Insightful)
The US won't nuke you unless you aren't in compliance with nuclear agreements. How many of our enemies *are* in compliance? Is the US in compliance? Who gets to determine who is in non-compliance anyway? Why should anyone believe the US wouldn't nuke someone it that it really wanted to anyway?
These are meaningless words from a belligerent rogue state.
Re:Good and Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with putting conventional warheads on an ICBM is that no one would know for sure that it isn't a nuke until much too late. Technologically, it's possible to launch a missile from the continental US and have it hit a specific house halfway around the world within 3 hours. But if the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans/Iranians think you've just launched a nuke against someone, things could get very dicey, very fast.
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More like 15 minutes. Well thats what Open Skies is for
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies [wikipedia.org]
So the US puts all its nukes on B-52s/B-1Bs/B-2/Next Gen Bomber and the signatories like Russia, Ukraine, UK, France, PRC can verify that the nukes are there. So when the SSBN fires an SLBM with 12 convention MIRVs from the middle of the Indian Ocean the Russians don't get too freaked out about it.
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So when the SSBN fires an SLBM with 12 convention MIRVs
I think you should use more acronyms next time.
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We are talking about nuclear weapons. Acronyms are part of the business, its like computers and networking with RAM, CPU, NIC, Eth0, SATA, IDE, RAID-0...
OK. So, when the Nuclear Powered Strategic Missile Submarine fires a Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile with 12 conventional Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicles...
Re:Good and Bad (Score:5, Funny)
OK. So, when the Strategic Submersible Booming Nuker fires a Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile with 12 conventional Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicles...
Fixed that for you.
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I read the wiki article before I posted, Mr. No Sense Of Humor. I even called it a Boomer, sheesh. I'm not the one who shit in your cereal this morning, I promise.
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Well then it's a good thing you're here to let us know what is and isn't funny. The world is a better place because of people like you.
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Alright - I hate pedantic clods - but, where did you get "submersible ship"? Subs aren't ships, they are boats. No one in the US Navy has ever referred to a sub as a ship, that I'm aware of. I've done a few googles now, and I can't find any reference to "submersible ship". I find no readily available definition of "SS" as used by the Navy, and most other sources say that a ship designated as "SS" is a steam ship. Obviously, that doesn't apply to the Navy. DD's and FF's were almost exclusively steam po
Re:Good and Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats what Google, FAS.org, Wikipedia or the dictionary are for.
Many /.ers are also into science fiction, gaming or were military and those abbreviations have been common in those genres and sectors of society for decades.
The abbreviations MIRV, SSBN, SLBM are not obscure and have not been obscure for at least 35 years. One doesn't have to be a "nuclear weapon fetishists" to be literate in the terminology of the devices that have been waiting to kill us for the last 50 years.
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And its called a "Nuclear Triad" for a reason. Aircraft, sub, missile. Rendering any one leg inoperative still leaves two viable launch platforms. Each delivery mode has its own strengths and weaknesses. Aircraft can be recalled. ICBM's can't be stopped. Subs can't be found.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
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So - how exactly are Russia and all the rest going to verify that all our nukes are in one place or another? Seems to me the whole thing is based on trust, right? And, if you trust the other parties, you have no need to verify. Little catch 22 here, don't you think? Or, is it just propaganda, playing on people's naivete?
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While I was Stationed at Ramstein AFB, Germany - Once a year a Russian Nuclear inspection team came by to verify that there were no Nukes on base. It was something of a big deal because we had to open up all our facilities to the inspectors if they wanted to come in and snoop around.
Dudes always seemed to just do a once-over with what I assume was a radiation detector in a van driving around base, and then break for vodka around noon.
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and what about India, Pakistan, Israel and N. Korea?
Re:Good and Bad (Score:4, Informative)
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Israel, as per their usual policy, has never admitted nor denied to have nuclear weapons.
They certainly have the technology, so it would be foolish to assume that they don't have them. The USA didn't talk about the Manhatten Project until much later on as well.
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Re:Good and Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
ICMBs are not accurate enough to deliver a conventional explosive payload. (if you are off by half a mile, it doesn't matter if you're delivering a nuke). Thats why we have cruise missiles.
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True, perhaps - who knows how accurate ICBMs really are nowadays, with modern electronics and guidance? The ones in the know aren't telling, and for good reason. I'd bet a nice sum that modern ICBMs are a lot more accurate than the data anyone in the public has, given the advances in electronics and guidance. I wouldn't be surprised if modern tech has given the ability for 10m accuracy. After all, if we could guide a Apollo capsule returning from the moon to within 10km or so of it's recovery fle
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No (Score:4, Insightful)
If you (my next door neighbor) kill my family by purposefully spreading rat poison in our fresh vegetable garden, I promise to only shoot back at you with my pellet gun. But only if you don't own a gun.
We're talking about nuclear weapons. We're talking about whether we encourage or discourage the proliferation and use of weapons that can kill tens of thousands of people in an instant. I don't think it requires a cute analogy for the average person to understand.
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Come on, it just wouldn't be Slashdot if people didn't use childish analogies as an excuse for holding reprehensible opinions.
What "reprehensible opinions" are you referring to? Enumerate them.
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1. Retribution is a good way to do things
2. Retribution against non-military is acceptable
3. The acts of states can be trivially compared to the acts of individuals
4. The reader is too dumb to understand the situation without an analogy
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No need for you to shoot back with anything, just prove your case in the justice system, and your neighbor gets their choice of lethal injection or the electric chair.
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There is no justice system in international relations.
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Yes there is, The Hague, The UN, and NATO. When 9/11 happened, we had the whole world willing to help us clean up Afghanistan. When Bush 2.0 said "Now let's go after Iraq!" without a sufficient case, they started looking at him funny.
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...and when he actually did invade Iraq, the exact same crime that the Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg, they did jack shit.
The US is impervious to international law because it is the strongest.
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The Nazis in 1939 were enforcing UN sanctions against the German-Jewish nuclear weapons program? The ever-wily Jews were hiding said nuclear development programs in squalid concentration camps with funny names like "Auschwitz"?
Interesting. How much is your newsletter, I'd like to subscribe.
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The UN weapons inspectors didn't find anything in Iraq. The USA kicked them out before they were finished inspecting. Then the UK and USA "sexed up" their intelligence dossiers to make it look like Saddam was a threat when he was not.
The comparison the GP made to the Nazis is wrong - they were hanged for war crimes. However the Iraq war was still unjustified and illegal and based on a lie. These are the facts and they were at the time for those who didn't get swept up in the jingoism, drum beating and "Bagh
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Hmmmm, then maybe the cute analogy was nothing more than a flaming turd after all.
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If you (my next door neighbor) kill my family by purposefully spreading rat poison in our fresh vegetable garden
Why do I get the feeling that in your head, this is more than just a hypothetical scenario?
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More accurately, if you poison my family I promise to only shoot you yourself. I won't blow up your house, rape your wife, and burn your children alive. Unless it looks like there's plutonium in the cupboard, then all bets are off.
Re:Weak on National Defense (Score:4, Informative)
If Venezuela launches a biological attack (remember that chemical and biological attacks are a whole lot harder than they sound), they're in a world of hurt by conventional means. We wouldn't have nuked them under any President since, maybe, Eisenhower, more likely Truman, but have you looked at what the US spends on its military compared to any other country (or, for that matter, all other countries)?
Obama's promising the US won't do something that almost everybody was confident the US wouldn't do anyway. It's good PR but that's about it.
The cat has been out of the bag since at least 1982, when Britain did not nuke Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas war. No nuclear power will nuke a non-nuclear power except out of dire necessity.
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(remember that chemical and biological attacks are a whole lot harder than they sound)
Really? See, most people have heard the name Haile Selassie I. Let your post serve as a reminder that most people don't know why they know his name.
Allow me to enlighten you: He was Emperor of Ethiopia when Italy invaded and attacked with chemical weapons. He made an passionate speech at the League of Nations condemning the use of chemical weapons.
If Italy, using 1930's technology, was capable of developing, delivering, and deploying chemical weapons in Ethiopia, I will go on record and make the claim th
Re:Weak on National Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because Venezuela is the country we need to worry about. Riiiiiiight.
First off, these pronouncements aren't worth the paper they're written on- they can be changed at a whim.
Secondly, this is just an announcement to the world of the administration's view of nuclear weapons. Which is unchanged in reality from our stance since the Russians got the bomb. We aren't going to start a nuclear war because someone could retaliate, and noone would win that fight. Not to mention the morality of indisciminately slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent non-combatants.
So don't worry- you're no safer or less safe than you were 12 hours ago. If you feel differently I suggest you consult the nearest psychiatrist about your paranoia.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, because Venezuela is the country we need to worry about.
Indeed. One wonders why some people are still so irrationally afraid of communists, real or imagined. I don't think much of Chavez, but he's not stupid or comic-book evil, the threat of being nuked was probably never on his top ten reasons not to attack the US.
Re:Weak on National Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Rule #1 of tyrannical dictators (which Chavez qualifies for these days, although I didn't think so 5 or so years ago)- tyrannical dictators want power. They want to maintain or increase their power. So they may do some sabre rattling, but they aren't going to seriously fuck with anyone who can really hurt them. If they have a small weak neighbor without defensive alliances they may attack their neighbor, but they won't do jack shit against a country many times their size, wealth, and military might. So let them rattle to their heart's content and otherwise ignore them. Just don't let them start snatching small countries, or you risk them thinking they can beat you.
This rule applies to all 3 big crazies at the moment- Venezuela, Iran, and N Korea. None of them are doing more than appealing to their support base. Think of it as the foreign equivalent of a Sarah Palin rally. Of the three Iran is the biggest threat because their is the religious fundamentalism aspect, but the drive for power far outweighs that.
Nations to be worried about are places like China. But its quite obvious the current rule of China is taking a long term view and is more interested in ruling through finance than arms- the fact they haven't invaded Taiwan is proof of that. We should be very concerned about the amount of money we borrow from them, but I don't see war in the next decade. Russia's another worry, but Putin for all his evil falls under rule #1- he likes ruling Russia and is more interested in holding power than anything else.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because if we default the economy will make the Great Depression look like the good old days.
*The dollar would immediately crash to record lows as no foreign investors would trust US assets.
*The US would be unable to borrow additional money, probably at any rate. Who would trust us? Even if we offered up the white house as collateral we could just reneg again
*Banks, companies, and individual investors hold billions in US savings bonds as long term safe investments. They're considered as good as cash- yo
Re:Weak on National Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, this is just an announcement to the world of the administration's view of nuclear weapons. Which is unchanged in reality from our stance since the Russians got the bomb. We aren't going to start a nuclear war because someone could retaliate, and noone would win that fight. Not to mention the morality of indisciminately slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent non-combatants.
Yes, it matches U.S. policy going back to the 1950s... with the exception of an 8-year gap from 2002 to 2010.
The Bush administration's version of this document specifically declared that the U.S. should be prepared to use nuclear weapons on a first-strike basis, and even against non-nuclear states.
You're right, a pronouncement that "we're not gonna nuke ya" isn't worth the paper that it's printed on. But it's a big concrete improvement over a previous pronouncement that "we might nuke ya."
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nwgs/npr_review.pdf [ucsusa.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, the Venezuelans are so brilliant that they leave him in charge of the country. Obviously it's Americans who are dumb.
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Catrina did a great number on the US
There's a meaningful difference between Catrina and Katrina.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Really? The Battle of Midway was won with nukes?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Nucular" is the vernacular in half the country. I'm sorry you don't understand the concept of dialects, and you can go to hell if you want to judge me based on my accent.
Re:It's a good sign (Score:4, Informative)
All I can say is that this fits in with that rightwing extremist shop ad you have in your sig. It reinforces the stereotype. Would you walk around in a t-shirt reading something along the lines you just uttered?
" Nucular or go to hell "?
"Praise the lord and pass the nucular bombs"?
"Nucular Choctaw Bingo"?
Of course nucular is just plain wrong no matter which dialect you speak or accent you have. At least that is what I learned at school...
Re:So, India + N Korea, but not Israel.. (Score:4, Informative)
I'll tell you what doesn't go down well in America: lack of reading comprehension. Israel is not "exempted" -- they are a nuclear state. Iraq is not exempted either, as, having no nuclear weapons, they don't need an exemption. The "exemptions" you are worried about are for non-nuclear states that are considered (by the US) to be in non-compliance with NPT requirements. You're free to disagree with the policy, but at this point it doesn't seem as if you have any idea what you're disagreeing with.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Citation please, since that is obviously not true.
The US sends about $3 billion Israel's way. Which is clearly not larger than the $1.4 trillion the US spends on just Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
So are you an idiot? Or are you really claiming that the US spends three as much money on the Israeli military than it spends on its own military?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some rouge nation meeting their nonproliferation obligations hits the US with a chemical attack in a major city. Say, one million dead... and we won't nuke them back?
No. We tickle them mercilessly until they mess up their makeup.
But more seriously, no. If they truly are a rogue state, killing their civilians won't do any good against the leadership, and more than likely would give them propaganda fodder for continuing to fight against the "enemy of the people." The only way to deal with a serious attack is to use overwhelming conventional force to take out their military in the most precise way possible. We know how to do that, right?
Re:What we need more of is brinkmanship (Score:5, Insightful)
...and THIS is average American's understanding of international conflict -- an equivalent of schoolyard brawl.
This is why everyone treats you like a bunch of retards with bombs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only place in Europe that still acts like this after WWII is former Yugoslavia+Albania.
And only when Americans are helping.
Everyone else grew up.