Thomas Schelling has a sobering article explaining why nuclear disarmament could make the world a more dangerous place:
In summary, a “world without nuclear weapons” would be a world in which the United States, Russia, Israel, China, and half a dozen or a dozen other countries would have hair-trigger mobilization plans to rebuild nuclear weapons and mobilize or commandeer delivery systems, and would have prepared targets to preempt other nations’ nuclear facilities, all in a high-alert status, with practice drills and secure emergency communications. Every crisis would be a nuclear crisis, any war could become a nuclear war. The urge to preempt would dominate; whoever gets the first few weapons will coerce or preempt. It would be a nervous world.
(Via: Marginal Revolution)
December 30th, 2009 | 11:25 am
The only sure thing right now is that the US is on track to unilaterally disarm while Russia and China continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems.
Case in point: we de-commissioned the MX and are slowly de-commissioning the remaining Minuteman III missiles and not replacing them. Their warheads are getting old…. if we don’t build new ones, the old ones will have to be decommisioned too.
But we’ve ceased building new warheads. The factory has been shut down. The engineers who built these bombs have all retired and many have died, taking many secrets and techniques of manufacturing with them.
So…. if Obama wins in 2012 it’s entirely possible that we’ll be faced with a nuclear force that’s half the size of current and on fast track to be mothballed after 2020 while everyone else has a brand new arsenal with brand new delivery systems.