[MT2008]

Originally Posted by Ace Oliveira

MT2008, i don't know if nukes would actually work as deterrants. We don't know if they are good or bad. We don't know if Nukes are what made NATO and the Soviet Union not go to war. We don't know enough about Nuclear Weapons. We also don't know if any country would be insane enough to use Nukes. Kim Jong-il seems to be crazy enough to do that. I really don't know.

You are WAY behind the times, bro. People have been studying and debating this question for decades, and there is almost nobody in academic or military circles that believes state actors will use nukes.

We do know this for sure, and we've known for a very long time now. Eisenhower is the only U.S. President who ever considered the possibility of using nuclear weapons in warfare. That's why he put together Project Solarium in the early-50s to study the possibility that the U.S. could ever deploy its nukes against the USSR in any situations. And the answer basically turned out to be, NEVER, not in a million years, because there was simply no benefit whatsoever. One of the teams involved in the exercise did recommend threatening to use nukes if the USSR acted aggressively outside its sphere of influence (this is what then-Secretary of State Dulles called "massive retaliation"), but in practice, this meant that it was all talk, no walk. This was also a result of ICBMs coming into usage (which made spheres of influence obsolete on the tactical level), but it pretty much clarified what everyone already knew about using nukes.

What's more is that we know that the USSR also conducted similar studies at about the same time, and reached the exact same conclusion. And so did the Israelis in the 1960s - during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, they loaded nukes onto their fighter-bombers and intentionally let USSR satellites photograph them. Why? Because they wanted the Russians' Arab allies to think they'd use nukes even though they had no such intention.

Right now, Kim Jong Il and the Iranian clerics are doing the exact same thing - they're trying to act as deranged as possible and make idiot American neo-conservatives think that they'll nuke South Korea/Israel (respectively) at the soonest possible opportunity. But they won't. Bush knew this, Obama knows it, and the North Koreans and Iranians know that they know. But they also know that they can scare the shit of civilians around the world so that they demand their governments do something, and then those governments are forced to act in some way, which usually means concessions of various sorts. It's all smoke and mirrors.

Do you really think it's just a coincidence that, 64 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there hasn't been a nuclear weapon used in combat yet? That is quite a long time, don't you think? We've seen this question come up time and again with the rise of new nuclear states - first the Chinese, then Israelis, then the Indians, then the South Africans, and then the Pakistanis. Now yet again with the DPRK and Iran. Every time a new state gets nukes, their enemies (and everyone else) wonder if that state is going to be crazy enough to use them, and the answer always turns out to be no.

Rant off.