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Living life in the nation where nuclear weapons were invented which was the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in war, which still has an arsenal of about 10,000 nuclear weapons, and where the threat of nuclear war has been a Sword of Damacles we were once obsessed with and was then all but forgotten since the end of the cold war gives one a unique perspective I think. With the possibility that terrorists or a rogue nation like Iran will acquire one or more of them and use them, we are again obsessed.

When the atom bomb was invented, humanity entered a different phase of its existance. You could divide all of history into to parts, before the atom bomb and since. Less than twenty years later mankind had it within its power to end all human life on earth forever in a matter of hours and there were political causes on both sides of the cold war adamant that using them on a massive scale would be justified under certain circumstances such as being attacked first. Both Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro urged Nikita Khrushchef to launch a nuclear first strike against the US so that communism would prevail. Call it the balance of terror or as the US government called its policy "MAD" which stands for mutually assured destruction, it made all moralities and religious dogmas moot.

During the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy learned that the US military services had only one nuclear war fighting strategy, burn down everthing from the Danube River to the Pacific Ocean. I read that at that time, the US had about 175 operational nuclear weapons capable of reaching the USSR, the USSR had 4 which could reach the US of which 2 would be expected to reach their targets in America if war came. Even that loss was unacceptable. The weakness of the USSR was a well kept secret by both itself and the US government for different reasons. By the height of the arms race, there were at least 50,000 nuclear weapons in existance mostly with the USSR and US. Computer models later suggested that as few as 75 nuclear explosions in a relatively short time span would put so much ash and debris into the stratosphere that it would trigger a "nuclear winter" which would be like a mini ice age all over the world. In addition to all of the other effects of nuclear war such as massive radioactive fallout, all crops everywhere would fail and if nothing else, humanity would starve to death. It would be expected to last about 10 years until the debris fell back to earth. We don't know how many other times the world nearly fell over the precipice due to miscalculaton or technical fault.

It's a sobering thought that a single Ohio class nuclear submarine could launch its 24 Trident nuclear missiles, each with 8 thermonuclear warheads from a sanctuary deep under the ocean in a matter of minutes and within an hour, burn down an entire continent such as Europe. The US has 12 of them operational and that is only one leg of its "strategic triad" the other two being its land based ICBMs and its long range manned bombers. After Chernobyl, it occurred to me tha it would only take a single nuclear weapon exploding at a nuclear power plant reactor building to send its 100 tons (200,000 pounds) of enriched uranium in its reactor core into the stratosphere causing far more than enough fallout to kill us all. By comparison, a nuclear weapon has about 20 pounds of enriched uranium or plutonium. After a mere few hundred tests, the US and USSR suspended atmospheric testing by treaty in the early 1960s because the fallout was poisioning everyone with alarming rates of bone cancer, leukemia, and other malagnancies and diseases.

Here's a link you might find interesting;

If god exists, he'd better do something soon or he may not get a chance to do anything at all. Don't hold your breath waiting though, so far in over 50 years he hasn't even bothered to pick up the phone once.

Actually, God gave us the power to think for ourselves. We have the power to hold our leaders accountable. Since I live in the American Continent: I hope that when Castro leaves the scene I hope he takes All of the Left and Right [Chavez, Ortega, Morales, Bush, and the Democrats] and replace it with Love and Tolerance and governed by Enrique Santos, Joe Ferrero [two US Latin Talk Show Hosts] with Antana Mockus [Colombian Politician]. In the case of the USA, I hope that would be in the form of a Multiracial Multiethnic Government of Libertarians and Greens.

Robert- I'm a libertarian who couldn't work with the greens. But that's another topic.

Look... mutually assured destruction actually works. I don't want to die, and neither does my neighbour. If we all want to ensure that each of us won't die, then we'll all have nuclear weapons and, simultaneously, we know we'll never use the nuclear weapons. As long as they exist, nuclear weapons need to be owned by all the main powers and need to be ready to roll. To say they don't is to fail to grasp the nuances of human relationships or national security. The arguments of gun control advocates fail on the same grounds (when most home-owners are armed there are fewer home invasions; nobody wants to die). Is it, therefore, a safer or more dangerous world for the fact that powers have nukes?

And the question of whether God is pro-nuke or not is a strange one to ask. Is he anti-nuke?

John you ask a very good question: Is God "anit-nuke"? I'd like to see arguments from those who think God is a pacifist. The Bible doesn't seem to support that assessment. Then there's the claim that God is a nuclear pacifist. Will's right to say that this argument is an assessment of harm caused by war over the problem provoking conflict. To the extent that one can enter a limitied nuclear conflict, one can I think make an argument for restricted nuclear conflict. I also think it is right that those countries with nuclear weapons at present should prevent others obtaining those weapons.

John writes: "Look... mutually assured destruction actually works. I don't want to die, and neither does my neighbour."

John:

Have you met OBL yet? I'm not sure he shares this view. On the other hand maybe a blast of 24 Tridents covering the Pakistan and Afghanistan tribal areas is going to be needed some time in the not too distant future to stop the WWIII in which we are becoming engaged under the fundamentalist islamic 'leadership' coming from that region?

Regards,
Michael

What kind of God would support nuking people? That's sick.

I don't think anyone's arguing for the moral superiority of being able to throw large nuclear devices at anyone we dislike any time we wish.

I share Jane's general approach to this question. Michael: OBL may or may not share the MAD principle but surely in practice he understands it? Incidentally, this is one reason why I'll never understand people who argue against 'star wars' programs and missile defense systems, laser defense etc. whereby we can shoot nuclear weapons out of the sky before they reach our shores... isn't that a remarkably ethical, morally superior and ultimately sensible pursuit?

I'd like to hear what kind of nuclear policies dumbdumb supports.

John Wright #3, the notion that MAD worked and therefore it would be safe for all nations to have nuclear weapons is flawed IMO. First of all, there is the assumption that all sides have as their highest priority their nation's survival. This is not necessarily true, as Michael Hull pointed out in mentioning Osama Bin Laden, a man for whom what he thinks will be existance in the next world is far more important than anyone's continued existance in this world. The same is true of men like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whose life is a messianic mission. How else would terrorists be able to recruit suicide bombers were it not for that mentality? To them, a nuclear weapon is like any other bomb, only more powerful and therefore more desirable to use. Secondly, there is the possibility that some nations like Iran would believe that they could get away with a nuclear first strike either by launching it against a non nuclear nation or because the delivery system is terrorists where the ultimate source of the attack could not be traced. I think in the case of the US being attacked with a nuclear weapon by terrorists, it will launch a nuclear counterstrike against EVERY suspected possible source no matter what the consequences and it won't matter if the President of the US goes along with it. As Kennedy found out in the Cuban missile crisis, the elected president could be brushed aside by the military under such circumstances. Don't expect even the US government to remain rational after a nuclear attack. Third, during the cold war, each side for the most part the US and USSR expected they would have about half an hour to decide whether a major first strike attack was real or it was incorrectly perceived due to a technical glitch. This is why Cuba, the Pershing II missiles, the stealth bomber, and cruise missiles were so destabalizing, they would allow for an attack with little or no warning. In the case of the Pershing IIs the warning time to most Soviet targets would have been reduced to only five or ten minutes. In the case of India and Pakistan, that's all they may have today because they are so geographically close. This could lead nations to institute a hair trigger "launch on warning" policy leading to a mistake. In the case of Israel, they may expect no warning at all and no expectation of surviving an attack and therefore would be highly tempted to launch a pre-emptive nuclear first strike themselves against Iran as it develops its nuclear weapons capability. This should be a real concern right now and I think it is. Given their presumed arsenal and the vast Iranian oil fields, they could create a disaster of worldwide scope which would put all of our lives in grave jeopardy. And of course, the more nukes there are, the greater the risk of a technical failure or miscalculation. They do happen. In a technical accident of this type which the US calls "a broken arrow" in 1968, an incident involving a nuclear armed B52 resulted a hydrogen bomb falling out of the plane. Numerous safety systems engineered in the bomb prevented it from detonating. Had it in fact detonated, it was believed that it would have wiped out up to half of Spain. Here's a web site explaining some accidents involving nuclear weapons. So far we have been very lucky. The design of safety systems in other nations' nuclear weapons may not be so effective.

Nuclear weapons have their own logic. There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle (although the US tried early on to get a total disarmament treaty with manditory intrusive surprise on site inspections but Stalin rejected it.) But every one of these weapons which exists presents a new opportunity for murder and destruction on a scale never seen before in this world.

Here's another website explaining the incident in Palomares Spain which actually occurred in January 1966, not 1968. The B28 hydrogen bomb in the photograph is approximately one hundred times as powerful as the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima. The B52 aircraft in the accident was carrying four of them.

anyone remember Christ commending the faith of the Roman soldier who was occupying his country without even a hint that he should think twice about his profession or deployment?

PB