Theory: The case for nukes. War is a greater threat than proliferation is.

Robert, you and others may or may not remember my father was involved with the Manhattan project and more highly in the Bikini bomb tests, and even now I can get testy on all that, a complicated tale from my childhood, and a matter that I've considered over decades. I do remember, earlier on a2k , saying that I didn't get who we thought we were to have sole claim on who gets to have them. Those weren't my exact words, and their meaning was more about our US arrogance about that than any wish for everybody having them, considering the surplus of fools in the world, but I do nod yes at your points in this thread. I agree with your title premise.

I met Teller in an odd circumstance in the early sixties at whatever it was called then, the catholic student union. I just listened, befuddled, and went home. There were only three or four of us there to listen. Too bad I wasn't tech savvy to record it.

I think he was well established in that neighborhood, with a family. I don't know him, can't judge him. My father knew him from meeting(s), and was the one who clued me in to the meeting there, but I was all busy and we didn't have a deep talk about it.

Just fact.

I asked the proper thing to do if the conditions in my hypothetical situation were true. You have not answered. You have done nothing to discredit anything which I have actually said.

I feel grateful that you are not making our decisions for us.

An ad hominem attack is pretty low on the scale of debating and certainly does nothing to advance your position. I simply asked a question which you have not answered.

It should sanction the nation and use such peaceful disincentives and incentives to join the community of nations. After all, we do not need this to be a hypothetical, North Korea is a despicable dictatorship that we do not need to speculate about, it has nuclear weapons and there have been other such rogue states with nuclear weapons in the past. The boogeyman this scenario refers to has never happened despite the realization of the criteria for the boogeyman several times.

Despite the horrid nature of this regime these weapons are not likely to be used offensively, and a military approach to solving this problem would cost possibly over a million lives while this hypothetical danger represents a much smaller risk.



We should do the same thing that the global communities has generally done in the past in response to such regimes developing nuclear weapons: we should apply economic sanctions and economic incentives to nations with nuclear weapons or who are pursuing nuclear weapons to change course. No regimes who have developed nukes did so in order to use them, but in order to have them as a deterrent. They understand that the response to a nuclear attack that they are responsible for, including proliferation to non-state entities, would result in an overwhelming, and possibly nuclear, response.

Because they are not suicidal the chances of them using nuclear weapons is very very slim.




Well so far the risks you talks about have never materialized while hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost as a result of the approach you seem to favor. It is clear now to me that a military intervention to prevent the specter of death is to trade possible deaths for real ones, and that military intervention should only be used to contain an aggressive state, not to deny the theoretical possibility of a contained state acquiring powerful weapons.

Justifying real lives lost on the remote possibility of lives lost is unethical to me. The imaginary construct of lives lost can always be conjured by fear mongers, the realistic probability of these scenarios is incredibly slim while the prospect of lives lost in military intervention is virtually guaranteed.

So your scenario is something like this to me:

Would you accept a 100% chance you will kill x people to prevent a 0.0001% chance that someone else will kill x*10 people.

My answer is no. I would not trade guaranteed loss of life to prevent an incredibly unlikely hypothetical, an incredibly unlikely hypothetical will always be with us.

You call it an attack; I call it simple statement of fact.

I asked you a hypothetical question and you didn't answer it. You have not in any way interacted with my beliefs or assertions. In an actual formal debate, you would lose points for not responding and also for discussing the qualities of your debating opponent rather than his argument.

Thanks for responding to what I actually said.


North Korea already has nuclear weapons. My hypothetic dealt with a regime that seemed to be in the process of developing them, but probably hadn't already. With North Korea, it's too late. They have the weapons and the weapons make it highly inadvisable to engage them militarily. I am talking about a situation in which the question is whether to allow the country to complete its development and reach the status which North Korea now has.


I explicitly stated as an element of my hypothetical that, "Pretty much everyone agrees that this dictator is evil and willing to hurt a lot of people to advance his agenda, based on his past acts." I don't agree with your confidence that in this situation, the chance of a weapon ever being used is so small. As I asserted, once the dictator has the weapon, several things might happen:

1. He uses it
2. He gives or sells it to terrorists
3. He has his people smuggle the weapon into an enemy country in pieces, reassemble it in that country, detonate it, and then denies responsibility.
4. He uses his neighbors' knowledge of his weapons to force them to make concessiions, give ground, etc., and possibly absorbs them into his own country.
5. He continues to develop amass more and more copies of the weapon(s).

Blithely assuming that no dictator of the type I have described will ever use such a weapon once he has developed it seems unrealistic to me.


First of all, he might use the weapons against small countries which wouldn't be in much of a position to fight back, especially after absorbing such an attack. As for attacking larger countries, e.g. France, the US, England, etc., I stated that he might detonate such a weapon (nuke or plague) from within the target country and then deny responsibility. He might be willing to take the chance that no one could really prove who had committed the act. Furthermore, if he gave/sold the weapons to terrorists, they often do not even have much of a return address to direct retribution to and also often to do not exhibit risk averse behavior. They may view the attack as a holy war and have religious/mythical beliefs connected with it which aren't very realistic.


Actually, responsible governments do consider what might happen and seek to avert realistically possible catastrophes. You seem to be asserting that a less than 100% chance of a hideous fate should be counted as insignificant against the losses likely in a military action. I don't believe this is very good analysis. I don't agree with your analysis that in my hypothetical scenario, the realistic probability of fatal consequences would be "incredibly slim." Monsters with super-weapons might use them. As for fear mongering, you know there really are things in the world which do merit fear. Not all discussion of danger is fear mongering.

No, I certainly would not, but we aren't discussing a 0.0001% chance.

I agree.

The idea of 'sanctions' is purely political and used mostly to appease the masses. President Lincoln faced a tough decision on tightening the blockade-if he did it might shorten the war-however cutting off food and medical supplies to the Confederates would also mean depriving the 40,000 or so prisoners of war the food and medical supplies they needed as well. The south was holding them in Alabama and the President choose the wrong course as he tightened the blockade but in the end all it did was cause massive death to typhus in out breaks among Union prisoners.
Using 'sanctions' to starve millions of non combatants on the whim that they 'might' have first strike capability is never considered-except to appease the media and make them think they are doing something.

If you're telling me that illegal invasions and collective punishment are illegal, you're preaching to the choir. And I agree with edgar's statement about the hype that led to the invasion of Iraq.

North Korea developed them recently, we went thorugh this process and at no point during the build up was an invasion advisable.



Before NK developed nukes the same cost calculus existed, Seoul is in range of their conventional artillery and war with North Korea is too costly with or without nuclear weapons.

As long as they are contained they should not be invaded.



And my point is that in all such situations so far invading has been the wrong choice.



This describes North Korea's leaders, and pretty much anyone who has been willing to use military means to one's ends.

Thing is, what these leaders are not is suicidal, and despite their willingness to use violence to forward their goals using nuclear weapons would not do so.



I am not dong as much any more than you are "blithely assuming" that a dictator will use it in order to justify killing people preemptively. We merely have vastly different reads on the probability of a suicidal dictator.



The US has spent decades to project its power and say that they reserve the right to respond, nearly any nation that uses nukes on another nation is going to be responded to by the community of nations.



The US reserves the right to retaliate, including with nuclear weapons, if we are attacked by non-state actors who gained their nuclear technology from a state.

Any such act would be suicidal to the regime that took it.



This is not a court of law, the US did not have a court case to invade Afghanistan, as soon as the evidence pointed at Osama the troops were moving that way. In Afghanistan's case they didn't even participate in the attack and the attack was not close to nuclear scale and the whole regime was targeted.

If the US is attacked by nuclear weapons it would be similarly suicidal for any regime behind it.



It is relatively easy to trace where the nuclear fuel came from and the regime would be committing suicide. There are plenty of small suicidal entities but state-level regimes have not traditionally been and the bottom line is that the odds of a regime gaining statehood and then being suicidal are slim, the much greater risk is that they miscalculate the risks and overstep their boundaries, but it's clear to everyone that a nuclear attack would be, that is why nobody uses them even when they are already at war. The boundary is well understood, anyone who is involved in a nuclear attack would be retaliated against severely.




Sure, but for the most part they are not going to misread the probabilities to the point that they invade nations over slim possibilities either. Even Iraq wasn't really about WMDs, despite that being used as its legal justification. The architects of that war laid out their reasoning many times, and they wanted to project American military power and gain a "footprint" in the region.




Nonsense, I am asserting that this is less than a 1% chance and you are deliberately misconstruing my position.




It's easy to make up a position for your interlocutor and then take issue with it.




This is the core of our disagreement and there's not much more to say about this, it's not like you can come up with any kind of evidence to support the danger you see, and that the danger you see has never been realized is also not fundamentally evidence of the absence of danger.




I agree that not all discussion of danger is fear mongering, and this is one of the cases where you think it is not and I think it is. The danger exists but does not rise to the level of your support for the war in Iraq, that is a significant misread of the danger that has caused you to support loss of life on a tremendous scale.



The rates for suicide are far closer to this number than the numbers you toss around. This is a suicidal act, and self-preservation is largely what keeps you safe in any case.

It is perfectly easy to kill many people, our police do not prevent crime so much as catch people after the fact and rely on the desire for self-preservation for people to refrain from crime.

Your security already rests with trusting that you live in a world where suicidal madmen are exceedingly rare. It is trivial to commit mass murder, it is getting away with it that is harder.

Thankfully so far the technology for nuclear weapons is such that entities who are able to develop it have only occurred at at scale that makes them incredibly unlikely to be suicidal, even "suicidal" groups take advantage of low-level actors to commit the suicide and are not suicidal as a group either.

So far the technological cost for nuclear weapons is beyond what suicidal or rogue entities are able to achieve, and it is leaps in technology that you should fear more than regimes. If the barrier to entry is dramatically lowered, by a new technological process that allows easier enrichment etc, this would represent a much greater danger than a state entity deciding to commit suicide.

I don't understand your reply. What illegal invasions are you describing? The Congress authorized the Iraq invasion, along with the United Nations, to stop Saddam Hussein from using poisonous gas on Kurdish civilians.
Saddam had already admitted the genocide and was prepared to do it again.

How do you know that North Korea has nuclear weapons when the US State Department doesn't know one way or the other.

The illegal invasion of Iraq.

When did I say that North Korea has nuclear weapons?

Stephen Pelletiere was the CIA senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. He was a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000.

He says: This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

He goes on to say: Immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

He also said: The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
___________________________________________

The invasion of Iraq was illegal. The reason for the invasion of Iraq, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and the creation of four million refugees was to find and remove WMDs. Here is a chronological sequence of events concerning that:

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

~Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002

“Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.”

~George W. Bush, September 12, 2002

“Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons...We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.”

~George W. Bush, October 5, 2002



“The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas.

“We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States. The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahideen” - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.”

~George W. Bush, October 7, 2002

“If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again...”

~Ari Fleischer, December 2, 2002

“The president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it.”

~Ari Fleischer December 6, 2002

“We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”

~Ari Fleischer January 9, 2003

“It appears to be a re-run of a bad movie. [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] is delaying. He's deceiving. He's asking for time. He's playing hide-and-seek with inspectors. One thing is for certain -- he's not disarming.”

~George W. Bush, January 21, 2003

“Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.”

~George W. Bush, January 28, 2003



“We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.”

~Colin Powell, February 5, 2003

“We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.”

~George W. Bush, February 8, 2003

“So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad?... I think our judgment has to be clearly not.”

~Colin Powell, March 7, 2003

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

~George W. Bush, March 17, 2003

“Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes.”

~Ari Fleisher, March 21, 2003

“There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And . . . as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them.

~Gen. Tommy Franks, March 22, 2003

“One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites.”

~Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark, March 22, 2003

“We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

~Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003

“We are in the process of trying to liberate that country. And at the moment where the war ends and the coalition forces occupy the areas where those capabilities -- chemical and biological weapons -- are likely to be, to the extent they haven't been moved out of the country, it obviously is important to find them.”

~Donald Rumsfeld, April 9, 2003

“We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about.”

~Ari Fleischer, April 10, 2003

After the “fall” on April 10, 2003

“When there happens to be a weapon of mass destruction suspect site in an area that we occupy and if people have time, they'll look at it.”

~Donald Rumsfeld, April 11, 2003

“I don't think we'll discover anything, myself. I think what will happen is we'll discover people who will tell us where to go find it. It is not like a treasure hunt where you just runaround looking everywhere hoping you find something. I just don't think that's going to happen. The inspectors didn't find anything, and I doubt that we will. What we will do is find the people who will tell us.”

~Donald Rumsfeld, April 17, 2003

“We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them.”

~George W. Bush, April 24, 2003

“There are people who in large measure have information that we need . . . so that we can track down the weapons of mass destruction in that country.”

~Donald Rumsfeld, April 25, 2003

“He tried to fool the United Nations and did for 12 years by hiding these weapons. And so, it's going to take time to find them. But we know he had them, and whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth.”

~George W. Bush April 25, 2003

“We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so.”

~George W. Bush, May 3, 2003

“I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now.”

~Colin Powell, May 4, 2003

“We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country.”

~Donald Rumsfeld, May 4, 2003

“I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program.”

~George W. Bush, May 6, 2003

“U.S. officials never expected that 'we were going to open garages and find' weapons of mass destruction.”

~Condoleeza Rice, May 12, 2003

“I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden.

~Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne, May 13, 2003

“Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction.”

~Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 26, 2003

“They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer.”

~Donald Rumsfeld, May 27, 2003

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

~Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003

“It was a surprise to me then -- it remains a surprise to me now -- that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites. Believe me, it's not for lack of trying. We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there.”

~Lt. Gen. James Conway, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, May 30, 2003

“The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit. We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light -- through the prism of our experience on 9/11.”

~Donald Rumsfeld, June, 2003

The CIA gave us bad intelligence.

~George W. Bush, July 11, 2003



“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unkowns. That is to say, there are things we know we don't know. But, there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don't know we don't know.”

~Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Because the CIA said they have set off several a bombs. Google it.

It is absolutely false that the United Nations "authorized" the invasion of Iraq. The line of bullsh*t used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with gassing Kurds. The Bush administration claimed that Iraq had programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and was stockpiling such weapons. Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was requested by the Secretary General of the United Nations to monitor reports of the two agencies which had conducted the inspection regime to assure that Iraq complied with UN resolutions to disarm and destroy or turn over all weapons of mass destruction, and to end any programs to develop and make weapons of mass destruction. In 2004, Blix stated that: "There were about 700 inspections, and in no case did we find weapons of mass destruction," referring to his brief tenure in that role, which ended just before the invasion. Do you just make this sh*t up as you go along?

Excellent summation of the timeline. Thankyou.

Resolution 1441 The intelligence was faulty and the CIA was embarrassed and suffered it worst breakdown in history. Only to redeem it's self in Abbottabad years later.
The second gas attack at Kîmyabarana Helebce took the lives of 16,000 Kurdish women, children and old men. Saddam called it an accident and forbid any disaster relief and had his troops fire upon the Red Cross and other UN teams sent to assist in burying the dead-he ordered them to be left to rot-that changed everything in the minds of the world. Saddam had to go.

I got involved when about 5000 of the well educated and wealthy Kurds came to America and were given citizenship and many settled in this area. ONI sent teams to the area to train select Americans (I was one) in the Kurdish language and customs. Several purchased land that my family owned in the 1950's and began building vast orchards and vineyards-which are still here and going strong today. The stories they told were as bad as anything the Nazi's or the Red Army ever did. Saddam's two sons were ravaging rapist and murders who killed young girls as they moved from village to village and were number 1 on the kill list when the invasion began. Both were executed(after trying to surrender) by hanging just as their Father would be later for war crimes against humanity. The only head of state ever convicted and executed for genocide.

The US led coalition inadvertently gave rise to former members of the Baath party as they preyed on secular violence to enlist a civil war to further their goals of topping the Saudi Kingdom. Their wanton violence, along with beheading and torture of Muslims who opposed them, was their downfall as a CIA sponsored program to gather tribal leaders and underscore their opposition to the senseless violence, the remits of the AL-qeida in Iraq, laid down their weapons and surrendered to the 6th Marine expeditionary force in May of 2007.

Against the recommendation of the CIA, a program by the UN led to the release of more than 14,000 prisoners of war which today, are the core of the Islamic state or Daesh'. They still have many of the original weapons that the coalition sought and one of the reasons they may never be defeated.

This illustrates your problem again as you have copied/cut and pasted word for word wikipedia which is not a source because it is politically edited. You need to get some real experience in these matters because it is so oblivious that all you have is google, and it's bizarre editing to the far left, or even weirder to the far right.

Where is Halabja in relation to Kimyabarana Helebce?