Is there any real reason to retaliate when you’re about to be wiped off the face of the earth in a nuclear attack?
Could “Virtual Deterrence” Actually Increase the Chances of Nuclear War?
“Virtual deterrence” — demobilizing nuclear weapons but retaining production capacity — could backfire on the disarmament advocates who think it’s a step in the right direction and lead to nuclear war.
Hatoyama’s Confession
Nine months after stepping down as Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama conceded that he had just given “deterrence” as the factor necessitating retention of the US Marine Corps on Okinawa because he needed a pretext.
Loose Nuclear Ends
Nuclear miscellany.
Nuclear Disarmament Would Make U.S. Undisputed Arms Champ
Is overwhelming superiority in conventional weapons the main reason for the apparent interest of the United States in nuclear disarmament?
Nuclear Weapons Are a Gift From God
The Cold War was like two winos who’d dragged themselves from the gutter and stopped drinking. But, hedging their bets on sobriety, they carried around pints of Everclear 190 proof grain alcohol.
The Death of Deterrence, Part 55
Maybe not as much fun to speculate about as the DYI garage shop cruise missile, but a potential game changer.
Averting Civil War in Thailand
As an individual concerned with events in Thailand, I am not sure if a plague-on-both-your-houses stance toward the Red Shirts (who support ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra) and the Yellow Shirts (who oppose him) is enough.
Empire and Nuclear Weapons
Over the past six decades, the United States has used its nuclear arsenal in five often inter-related ways. The first was, obviously, battlefield use, with the “battlefield” writ large to include the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The long -held consensus among scholars has been that these first atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war against Japan, and that they were designed to serve a second function of the U.S. nuclear arsenal: dictating the parameters of the global (dis)order by implicitly terrorizing U.S. enemies and allies (“vassal states” in the words of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.) The third function, first practiced by Harry Truman during the 1946 crisis over Azerbaijan in northern Iran and relied on repeatedly in U.S. wars in Asia and the Middle East, as well as during crises over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis, has been to threaten opponents with first strike nuclear attacks in order to terrorize them into negotiating on terms acceptable to the United States or, as in the Bush wars against Iraq, to ensure that desperate governments do not defend themselves with chemical or biological weapons. Once the Soviet Union joined the nuclear club, the U.S. arsenal began to play a fourth role, making U.S. conventional forces, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, “meaningful instruments of military and political power.” As Noam Chomsky explains, Brown was saying that implicit and explicit U.S. nuclear threats were repeatedly used to intimidate those who might consider intervening militarily to assist those we are determined to attack.