BESIDES possibly selling them to terrorist organizations, what's wrong

[Guaranteed]

with any other country having nuclear weapons?

I don't get it. If any *country* ever nuked us, and you know they wouldn't have nearly as many as we do, we'd just flatten them. And they don't want that.

So, other than them possibly selling them to terrorist organizations, what's the problem?

[lastknowngood]

1. If you have nukes the the BFEE can't threaten you and intimidate

you into giving up your natural resources for chump change.

[Guaranteed]

3. That's right.

That's exactly fucking it.

[benddem]

4. what does BFEE mean

I have tried every iteration I can think of and cannot figure it out.

[Guaranteed]

6. Bush Family Evil Empire. nt

[havocmom]

8. So BFEE is actually in the business of promoting more nuclear weapons

Hmmmm, business must be good for some of their cronies.

I personally think any leader of any country would be remiss in portecting his/her people if they did not arm up. There is a big bad bully running lose and who can blame them from wanting insurance against invasion for trumped up reasons.

[Child_Of_Isis]

2. Because we say they can't.

And we are the "Boss of the World", you know.

[ThoughtCriminal]

5. Poor command and control of the nukes

Safe and reliable Permissive Action Links (aka "Fail Safe") are not as easy to develop as the nuclear devices themselves.

[Guaranteed]

10. Even so, who would be so stupid?

The only thing we would ever have to watch out for is someone with a deathwish. If someone ever hit us, there would be nothing left of their country.

And we're having problems with powerful crazy people ourselves, with the people we have in power. Who are we to judge?

[ThoughtCriminal]

15. If an un-secure nuke falls into the hands

of a criminal, terrorist organization or renegade General, or is simply accidentally launched what good is our deterent? We would simply be adding to the carange by retaliating and murdering millions of innocents.

[Guaranteed]

16. Right, I already put aside the terrorists...

A renegade General wants to see his country get blown to smithereens?

And an accidental launch- well, of course we don't want that happening.

[ThoughtCriminal]

18. Renegade generals and terrorists

1. The renegade general - Tell me there aren't any crazy generals out there

2. They may chose to attack a non-nuclear country. Who retaliates?

3. With poor command and contol, unauthorized or accidental use are more likely

3. If the bomb(s) is/are delivered by shipping container, 55-gallon drum in a pickup, or Ryder(tm) rental truck, how do we know who to retaliate against? The usual suspects?

[wli]

7. it foils the "economic hitman" strategy

[Silverhair]

9. Increased instability.

As the number of countries with them increases, the probability of somebody actually using them increases.

So far, they have added stability to tense situations and have actually prevented some wars, but if more countries get them, sooner or later some nutball will have his finger on the trigger.

No, I am not worried about W doing it. The USA procedure for firing one is pretty complex with lots of people involved. He can't just get out of bed in a really bad mood and blow Iran off the map. It doesn't work that way.

[AlGore-08.com]

11. Imagine Adolf Hitler having nuclear weapons

Or some other lunatic who really thinks that the world should be destroyed as soon as he/she falls from power. That's one part of the nightmare scenario.

The other part of the nightmare scenario is that many other countries have either no history or a very short history of peaceful transfer of power from one government to the next. If a country is so politically unstable that there's a revolution or a military coup every few years, there is no way to be certain who will end up with their finger on the button a little further down the line - - whether you'll end up with a Nelson Mandela or an Osama bin Laden.

Whether that's outrageous euro-centric biogtry or just common sense is a matter for debate.

[Guaranteed]

12. With that reasoning, it almost seems like everyone should have them.

Like with your Hitler reference, the worry would be someone obtaining them and invading those that don't have them.

[AlGore-08.com]

19. But mutually assured destruction would not have deterred Hitler

It's well documented that during his final days in power, Hitler ordered the complete destruction of all Germany's surviving infrastructure. His subordinates refused to carry out this order, at the risk of their own lives. But it had to get to the final days of the 3rd Reich before most of them would risk refusing one of his insane, destructive orders.

Would they have had similar scruples about nuking France, or Russia, or the US? In the bunker, when they were finally all convinced that there was no way to win the war and wondering how to save their own skins, probably. Before that, almost certainly not. After all, we did not hesitate to use nuclear weapons on Japan, in order to avoid the loss of life that would have occurred on our side if we invaded them.

Carl Sagan described mutually assured destruction as two men standing waist high in a pool of gasoline, one holding two matches and the other holding three. If you imagine that one of the two is mentally ill like Hitler, or religiously insane like the folks who believe that "Jesus has a plan" to stop global warming so we don't have to lift a finger to stop it... it's that much more likely that one of the two will strike the match and blow us all up.

[Silverhair]

20. Actually, MAD did deter Hitler.

The MAD agent was Gas, not bombs, but the logic was the same. Everybody had lots of gas, but nobody wanted to unlease that horror again.

[AlGore-08.com]

21. Hitler may not have used mustard gas on opposing armies but he did use

Poison gas during the T-4 euthanasia program and later in the death camps to kill at least 11 million people. So I'm not sure you can really say Hitler was affectively deterred by MAD.

As far as radiation and atomic weapons go, the Nazi Death Camps experimented with using radiation to sterilize inmates. Additionally, according to a June article in physicsweb, the Nazis continued nuclear weapons experiments up until nearly the end of the war. They tested a nuclear device in Thueringia two months before Germany's surrender - - which supposedly caused the deaths of "several hundred" prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. (It's not clear if the device worked as intended.)

Edited to make it clear that the atomic bomb experiments were not made inside the death camps.

[Guaranteed]

24. Unless the people he used them against had them-

civilians that he was killing in a non-battle setting- I don't think MAD applies.

[AlGore-08.com]

27. This is the most bizarre discussion I've ever had on DU

The Nazis killed millions of people with poison gas, but because the victims were transported across Europe in cattle cars and the killings took place inside concentration camps instead of on battlefields, and because the Allies did not use poison gas in retaliation, that "proves" MAD deterred Hitler from the use of poison gas? :wtf:

The Nazis diverted valuable resources away from the military in order to transport and murder over 11 million people, because they believed that the ethnic cleansing of Germany was a vital military objective. So saying they didn't use poison gas in military situations is only true from our perspective, not from the Nazi perspective.

[Silverhair]

28. Correct, but he wasn't worried about MAD from the inmates. NT

[ironman202]

13. do you really want any half-assed banana republic

wielding a nuke?

[Guaranteed]

14. They probably wouldn't be a banana republic for long. nt

[Beaver Tail]

17. No banana republic

would have the money to develop or buy a nuke

[Geoff R. Casavant]

22. I'm sorry, but that's like saying

"besides the possibility of your child getting hold of it and accidentally shooting his little brother, what's wrong with owning a gun?"

IMHO

[Guaranteed]

23. Countries without serious economic problems can be well-

deterred from selling nuclear weapons to terrorists. A move like that is fairly desperate, and would probably even earn a couple of nukes down their own throats if the weapon was ever delivered to our soil.

In other words- let's work on the assumption that the gun can be safely locked up.

[LoZoccolo]

25. Non-proliferation is a goal in and of itself.

We just don't want the game becoming more complicated than it did with the two players who pretty much controlled all of them during the cold war.

[welshTerrier2]

26. non-proliferation depends on disarmament

the recent nuclear conference went absolutely nowhere ... talks collapsed ...

Iran and several other countries walked out ... there was nothing left to discuss ...

why? what was the reason given?

they argued that the US refused to honor its past commitments to disarm some (all?) of its nukes ... one might think of the US position as just a wee bit hypocritical ... "we can have them because everyone trusts us but you can't have them because we don't trust you" ... well, that pitch is going nowhere in a hurry ...

it might be fair to say that non-proliferation is a goal in and of itself ... but the reality is that the goal of non-proliferation has zero chance of being achieved without progress towards disarmament ...

we may not "want the game to become more complicated" but we wan't make any progress peddling the hypocrisy we currently are ...