On nuclear arms reduction

Since the late 1960s, the U.S. has reduced its nuclear weapons from 31,000 to 4,000. The theologian Charles Hartshorne wrote in 1984: "A nuclear freeze would be better than nothing. But the only significant aim is reduction. We should try to lead the world in this, without looking over our shoulder too anxiously to see what others are doing.
" In The Economist: "Even George Bush, no dewy-eyed disarmer, negotiated [nuclear] cuts down to 1,700-2,200 apiece by 2012 (from the 6,000 agreed upon after the cold war had ended) and was ready to go lower." Andrew Bacevich wrote in 2008: "Even if one assumes that nuclear weapons possess any real utility, what conceivable target set would require more than 100 warheads to destroy? Far more severe cuts in the U.S. arsenal, shrinking the total to a couple hundred at most, are in order."

Furthermore, the condition of the existing weapons remains a concern. As reported in The Week in January 2015: "The Pentagon recently admitted there are 'systemic problems across the nuclear enterprise'...as fears of nuclear war eased, the government failed to adequately maintain and update this immensely dangerous arsenal, which still contains enough collective destructive force to lay waste to every country on Earth." The president in 2017 has pushed for a trillion-dollar modernization.

This is a large request for someone who, a year previously, did not recognize the notion of a "triad" of air, land, and sea weapons. George F. Will wrote in May 2017:

"As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad is. Asked about it, he said: 'We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame.' Invited to elaborate, he said: 'I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.' Someone Trump deemed fit to be a spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her employer’s word salad: 'What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?' To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same program replied with amazed asperity: 'The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing.'"

Javier Solana wrote on Nov. 24, 2017:

"Trump’s foreign policy is adding to a long list of perverse incentives in the area of nuclear proliferation. Consider the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, which was launched on the pretext that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. He wasn’t. And when he was brought down, the other two members of US President George W. Bush’s so-called axis of evil, Iran and North Korea, concluded that not having nuclear arms made them vulnerable to American attempts at regime change. This conclusion was further reinforced in 2011, with the US-assisted overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, who had abandoned his nuclear program eight years earlier.

...Trump’s threats of “fire and fury” have further convinced the North Korean leader that his survival and that of the Kim dynasty depend on nuclear weapons. Punishingly tight sanctions alone will not change his mind. Kim seems perfectly willing to subject the North Korean people to privations of every kind in order to remain in power.

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Finding a strategy that credibly contains the North Korean threat is the only way to ensure that South Korea and Japan do not make the regrettable choice of joining the nuclear club....International security depends on preserving diplomatic success stories such as the JCPOA, which are crucial to avoid contagion and to put an end, once and for all, to dangerous spirals of antagonism and polarization."

Jeffrey Feltman, UN under-secretary-general for political affairs, met Ri Yong Ho, North Korean minister for foreign affairs, during the first week in December 2017. It was "the first trip there by a top UN official in six years," according to CNN. The UN released a statement saying that Ri and Feltman "agreed that the current situation was the most tense and dangerous peace and security issue in the world today."

In the film The Fog of War (2003), former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said, "At the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear wars.... The major lesson of the Cuban Crisis is this: The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations." (video clip)

Ira Helfand wrote on Dec. 9, 2017 that "the belief that we can possess thousands of nuclear weapons forever, that our luck will never run out and they will never be used" is "magical thinking [that] belongs in children's books." If Russia were to use a mere 300 weapons against the US, it "would kill more than 75 million people in the first half hour, and destroy the entire economic infrastructure on which the rest of the population relies to sustain themselves." Depending on how many weapons were used, the global temperature would drop enough "to trigger a global famine that would put some 2 billion people at risk" or possibly make humans extinct. Helfand, a member of the group that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, says that the only possible solution is the abolishment of nuclear weapons and that all nuclear weapons states should sign on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that 122 nations voted in favor of on July 7.

People are talking about this article from the Wilson Center:

French provided a turnkey plutonium factory. USA, under JFK, made some efforts to monitor & delay & prevent Israeli nuclear weapon acquisition. No other USA president did shit until Nixon cut a deal with Golda Meir that USA would ignore Israel’s nukes if Israel kept somewhat quiet about them.

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— 🇵🇸Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer🏳️‍🌈 (@nuclearanthro.bsky.social) May 20, 2024 at 9:06 AM

To which someone else commented on Bluesky that the French provided the plutonium reactor, not finished bombs, and that the US knowlege of this transaction was later documented.

Evil is mindless

Martin Edic, 2024:

"The events of D-Day and beyond are almost unimaginable today. The world literally stood on the edge of total destruction, not just in Europe but across the globe. Today we face a very different kind of world but one that could equally blaze out of control, this time fired by the glow of nuclear weapons in the control of fanatics.

Putin, Xi, and Bibi all have them. North Korea likely has them and Iran grows very close, aided by Donald Trump’s idiotic decision to abandon our nuclear treaty with them, based on personal lack of interest in anything that did not boost his standing or that reflected well on his predessors.

In some ways, that action alone illustrates how one stupid man, nearly illiterate and mindless, could make a decision that years later causes mass destruction. Add in his appeasement of Vladimir Putin that it could be argued empowered him to attack Ukraine, and you start to see how bad decisions can escalate into global conflicts."

Sources

“Our aging nuclear arsenal.” The Week, Jan. 23, 2015. p 11.

Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1984. p 133.

"Safe without the bomb?" The Economist. April 11-17, 2009. p. 11.

”Trump has a dangerous disability,” George F. Will, Washington Post, May 3, 2017.

Andrew J. Bacevich. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. p. 179.

"The Dangers of Nuclear Bombast," by Javier Solana, Project Syndicate, Nov. 24, 2017.

Martin Edic, "Reflecting on the Eightieth Anniversary of D-Day in the Light of Our World Now," The Witness Chronicles, June 5, 2024

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