On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 09:33:28AM -0800, Chris Olson - SunPS <Chrisf.Olson at Sun.COM> wrote: > John D. Barbato, wrote: > > I like the idea of nuclear weapons when we are the only ones to have them. > Heh. Every other country feels the same way, I'm > sure. As long as *you're* the only one with a > gun (sword, WMD, etc.) you're going to feel fine. > > I can see two viable options: give everyone one (and > wouldn't it be great to have your own nuclear weapon?;) > or get rid of them all. This is the doctrine of moral equivilence, and it is invalid. There are objective differences between nations that indicate how trustworthy they are with nuclear weaponry. Eliminating all nuclear weapons is not possible (since we would retain the knowledge to produce more). Giving every nation-state a nuclear weapon would result in annihilation, since inevitably those weapons would be used. The only possible strategy is to minimize the number of discrete actors who possess nuclear weapons, and to explicitly act against those who seek to obtain them. Those who obtain them in secret need to face an evaluation process once the weapon is revealed: can they be trusted not to use the weapon? What are the costs and risks involved in destroying the weapon along with any additional manufacturing capability, and enforcing that with regime change if necessary? > As a member of the one country which has used nuclear > weapons on another, I don't trust us or anyone who has > them. We've learned from that, and we've proven for 60 years that we can be trusted. The Soviet Union proved that they could be trusted, surprising as that seems (and as close as it came at some times), for nearly as long. The genie can't go back into the bottle. Inevitably, the knowledge and capability will spread. Our only hope is to slow that spread. If we give in to nuclear blackmail by nation-states, we only encourage others to play that game. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/weblog/index.jsp