22nd January 2021: The Day When Nuclear Weapons Are Finally Banned
Alan Cresswell
Admin
Just because in our world of bad news, occasionally some good news is needed.
With Honduras deciding to ratify the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons this will finally come into force in January, with 50 nations ratifying the agreement. This treaty prohibits the development, testing, production, stockpiling, stationing, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons. For those currently with these obscenities in their arsenal it provides a framework for negotiating the verified and irreversible elimination of its nuclear weapons programme.
With Honduras deciding to ratify the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons this will finally come into force in January, with 50 nations ratifying the agreement. This treaty prohibits the development, testing, production, stockpiling, stationing, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons. For those currently with these obscenities in their arsenal it provides a framework for negotiating the verified and irreversible elimination of its nuclear weapons programme.
Comments
We should be ashamed we're neither signatory nor party to this. In being neither we declare our dedication to defence based on threat of mass murder.
It's given an additional impetus to those of us who are calling on our national governments to join the rest of the international community in getting rid of these pointless obscenities from our offensive arsenals.
I don't know the history of this proposition or the ratification process, but it seems to me that a UN declaration excluding the major nuclear powers is a moral position that they can safely ignore.
The nuclear bomb cannot be uninvented
There is not enough trust for true multilateralism?
Multilateralism is people guns at each other and saying "you first".
Someone has to be first.
Correct and the only agreements so far have been agreed reductions.
During the cold war, the USSR had a massive army. I believe it was only nuclear weapons which prevented them from moving west.
They weren't "equally massive" though. NATO conventional forces were massively outnumbered by those of the Warsaw Pact.
Very true.
There could only be one reason for a massive conventional army. NATO was never going to attack the Warsaw Pact with conventional forces.
Sad but probably true
You also need lots of low-ranking officers who can take independent decisions quickly and communicate them to each other directly, which authoritarian governments tend to discourage.
The effectiveness of the Warsaw pact armies was probably not as great as their numbers would suggest.
They'd have had to sort out Afghanistan first.
I have no reason to suppose that the Soviets had any appetite for trying to take over Western Europe. It would have cost them much and given them very little.
And I cannot justify the threat of mass murder of their citizens to prevent it.
MAD was a good policy for both sides to adopt.
Only if you really were willing to press the button. In which case you would be a mass murderer. If you only pretended to be willing, you were a liar.
Neither are good options.
Deterrence wasn't invented with the development of nuclear weapons, it hadn't worked before* and it was just the propaganda of the military-industrial complex that presented it as something that would work with nukes. We got lucky, that's it.
* The two classic examples of deterrence pre-nuclear were the arms races between European powers at the end of the 19th and early 20th century with all sides declaring "go to war with us and the slaughter will be massive" - a warning that was demonstrated in spades between 1914-18. And, then in the 1930s with that slaughter fresh in people's minds the world again started to engage in a renewed arms race, the spectre of another slaughter was used to slow the response of European powers to the growing military power of Germany under Hitler - the appeasement over Czechoslovakia and then Britain and France calling his bluff in September 1939 (except, Hitler wasn't bluffing, he was actually mad enough to believe he could win a quick war against Britain and France with limited losses).
I reckon that's right early on.
Part of the problem with deterrence is that in order for it to be credible you need to maintain not only a sufficiently large and equipped military (at significant cost) you need that to be in a state of readiness such that it can swing into action very quickly. That puts the military powers tottering on a knife edge - sometimes things fall on the peaceful side, sometimes into war, and when that happens it goes disastrously wrong. Deterrence requires military powers to maintain things at a careful balance point - not have enough forces or their state of readiness too low and the deterrent isn't credible (though, that doesn't necessarily lead to war), go a little too far and we've seen what happens. That knife edge in 1914 took one assassin in the Balkans to push things to a point where the massed armies of Europe were marching to war and no one could stop them before anyone knew it. The request from Castro in 1961 for Soviet missiles to deter further American interference in Cuba after the Bay of Pigs very nearly had someone on that knife edge push the wrong button ... and there's been no end of speculation as to where that point of failure could have been significantly below the top brass and politicians on all sides, but there's good evidence that it could have taken something as simple as radar operator misreading his screen or a ships navigator getting their position wrong by a few miles to push things to a point where no one could have stopped an exponential escalation.
Deterrence is a very, very dangerous game to play.
What was scary was wondering at which point the Russians would stop moving westwards...
I've still never seen any evidence of a desire by the Soviet Union to annex any parts of Eastern Europe beyond the areas under their control in 1945 by military force. Yes, the Warsaw Pact was often brutally ruthless in maintaining control within their sphere of influence. Yes, Communists in many parts of the world looked to the Soviet Union for guidance, and some Communist states obtained military aid (including Cuba, facing a real threat of invasion from the US or by US backed rebels). Yes, the Soviets would have probably welcomed any nation in Western Europe where there was a successful Communist revolution (and, would likely have supported that). But, send the whole weight of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces to invade West Germany, Austria or other European nations? It was never going to happen, but made a convenient fiction for arms manufacturers to convince European governments to buy more of their tanks.
So, that was a deterrence against a fiction, so it's not surprising it looked like a success. But, even if there was some reality to the claims about Soviet expansion, that would have been at massive cost for gaining a scorched earth even without nukes. A cost that no sane leader would countenance (and, if the leader's insane then no level of MAD deterrence would make any difference). The 1968 experience where an invasion of Czechoslovakia to restore a loyal Communist government effectively destroyed the entire Soviet inspired Communist movement (the Maoist version of Communism in China being somewhat different) outside the Warsaw Pact showed how little could be gained by military expansion.
Oh, and of course western leaders are entirely venal puppets of the arms industry and couldn't possibly have any real concerns about national security.
2. I think I've been consistent in stating that, certainly after the death of Stalin, there was no indication at all that the USSR was seeking military expansion into western Europe. That is there was nothing to deter in the first place (in relation to the need to station a large military force in western Europe, let alone develop a massive nuclear arsenal to support that deterrence).
3. I have said, maybe not as clearly as necessary, that the aim of deterrence is to make the cost of war exceed the gains from going to war. MAD takes that to an extreme where the cost is effective destruction. Is that a fair summary? In the Cold War scenario, a Soviet attack on western Europe, even without nukes, would have faced a well equipped and trained, though numerically smaller, NATO force with all the benefits of defending which would have inflicted massive casualties on the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces - and the USSR would have gained a scorched earth (very high cost, very small gain), and still have to face the US. If one accepts that deterrence is valid military strategy then that was achieved by the conventional forces that were in Western Europe, those forces were sufficient to prevent a war by deterrence ... but not sufficient to win a war should the dice roll badly (ie: deterrence failed through some accident or insanity), not that I believe 'win' is a word that's applicable to something that would leaves millions dead and millions more as refugees, total war (conventional or nuclear) is something where everyone is a loser it's just that some lose more than others.
4. It's a fact that during the Cold War an all-out shooting match across the European continent didn't happen (we had plenty of other shooting matches elsewhere as the US and USSR, and assorted allies, fought a series of proxy wars which fortunately didn't get too out of hand - though Vietnam and Afghanistan were both disasters for the US and USSR respectively). I don't believe that it can be proved that deterrence succeeded, just that it didn't fail. The additional deterrence from nukes doesn't, on the evidence, appear to have made a lot of difference otherwise the conduct of all those proxy-wars might have gone differently (a bit more attempts at finding a peaceful solution rather than ship in a load more troops, if there was a deterrence from the thought that it could go nuclear).
5. And, yes, western politicians are in the pockets (to varying degrees) of big money businesses. And, the arms industry is certainly part of that. That could be directly through various lobby groups. It could be more subtle by influencing the public into believing there's a problem that can be solved by more guns. Was there a fear among the general public in the 70s and 80s that there would be a Soviet attack through western Europe? Yes, there was. Reinforced by the media (including a variety of movies of the Red Dawn variety, even though they're basically the same genre as Zombie apocalypse movies). And, exploited by the arms industry who were very happy when people elected governments intent on arming to the teeth against an attack that was never going to come. In more recent years the same industries have leapt onto the "war on terrorism" bandwagon to supply the equipment for pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere) even though any rational person should know that those wars were the wrong tactic against the wrong targets. But, aid to lift people out of poverty doesn't line the pockets of gun makers.
The logical form is valid:
(A or not A);
A implies B;
not A implies B;
Therefore B.
It doesn't require agreement on A either way, and works if the person asserting not B shifts from A to not A.
3. Again, you assert that Western conventional forces were obviously sufficient to deter the Soviets (who were no threat anyway.) Why should I, or anyone else, simply accept your assertion?
5. Once again, I think you're vastly underestimating the Soviet threat, and your refusal to accept that Western leaders might really have serious concerns about national security really seems peculiar to me.
It seems like you've convinced yourself that there obviously was never any threat, so people who claimed there was must have been doing so for some dishonest, nefarious reasons. The pattern seems a lot like people who don't want to believe in climate change, so they have to conclude that environmentalists are all Commies or lining their own pockets, or people who don't want to believe in the pandemic so they have to conclude that liberals are all Commies or lining their own pockets.
Parallels aren't exact (the case for nuclear deterrence obviously isn't anything like that for climate change or the pandemic) but your certainty about your own assertions and the moral inferiority of leaders who don't or didn't share them really doesn't help support what I'm sure you think sounds like a well-reasoned argument.
It seems that you really want to believe that the possession of nuclear weapons could never be justified, so you have to believe that the threat they were meant to deter didn't really exist.
Its possession must either indicate a willingness to commit mass murder, or basically lying. Which was it?
Not half as dangerous as maintaining no deterrence at all, leaving yourself completely exposed to the first foreign power that decides you've got something it wants.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
(if you want peace, prepare for war)
We condemn terrorists and yet maintain a fleet of submarines ready to unleash horror on innocents orders of magnitude worse.
Like in business, truth is flexible. Lawyers usually understand this too. (sorry if that is too much of a jab)
There's not much I'm definitive on, but the horror and mass death, destruction and infliction of lasting and ongoing suffering that nuclear weapons involve makes me absolutely horrified that anyone could ever threaten their use. It's beyond my comprehension.
If you're willing to countenance war in your own defence then you're prepared to countenance millions of deaths. I'm not convinced the method by which those corpses are created makes all that much difference. The victims of Dresden or Tokyo are no better off because their deaths were caused by good old-fashioned incendiary bombs rather than nuclear ones.
Indeed. And I've always considered those to be war crimes as well.
Unless you think civilians are morally acceptable targets, nukes are useless. That's what they do. But then you have to explain why terrorism is so evil, because that's what they do too. And of course why the rules of war, which outlaw civilian targets, are also wrong.
The other side had to be convinced you were willing. That's why it actually worked
Exactly. So were we liars or genocidal psychopaths?
Both (albeit not necessarily at the same time)?