I wrote an article for for my site about getting rid of nukes. I was curious to know what the people here thought about having so many nukes. I mean...We have 5400 nukes that aren't used and cost us $31 billion to maintain last year. Why not reduce that number? What do you think?
I think it is a great idea. Of course, it will be delicate operation to reduce arms while maintaining parity. We can't ignore the political realities and delusions that place enormous stock in WMDs. Not to mention disposing safely of all those weapons without them "disappearing" along the way.
As far as I see it.. We need to seriously question our future war strategies. Bombing civilians into ash like we did in Japan in this era is unnecessary, imo. Back then technology was limited and we had to do whatever we could to win (which is why we went through with the bombs right?), that excuse shouldn't slide these days. We have the technology to isolate attacks on government and military targets all around the world. Do those hypothetical isolated attacks require nukes? Aren't nukes for mass impact, destroying large numbers of innocent people? That's my inflated 2 cents anyhow, I'm no war strategist and don't support war either. But I hope people can use at least half or a quarter of their brain when we go to war next to think about the obvious since we can't count on it from government..
I thought it was more about mine's bigger than yours and they're used more for show. I don't imagine anyone will actually use them, not without dooming the world anyhow. If one nation decides to use them then others might give them a surprise back so I don't think they'll get used. I'm all for getting rid of ALL weapons that are made specifically to kill but how would we know who kept theirs? It's like our gun laws (Australia has anti-gun laws where you must jump through many hoops to own a gun), once you get rid of the guns from the general populace, only the criminals were left armed. Having said that I think we are safer without them, until we get attacked that is.
In my opinion, nukes prevented a full-scale war between USA & USSR. Nukes prevented a full scale war between India & Pakistan in 1999 Nukes could have prevented the Iraqi invasion, had Saddam managed to get his hands of a couple of them. So, I conclude that nukes are important to maintain peace in the world. We should go further had help all countries acquire nukes, so that we never go to war again...
I actually read an article somewhere, ncz_nate, that said that Japan was pretty much defeated by the time we had to make the decision to bomb them. Their navy was obliterated, they had no pilots anymore, they had no planes anymore, their tanks and all of that were destroyed, and they had lost millions of lives. So, in actuality, Japan was near crumbling. If we had invaded Japan, I don't think we would have lost nearly as many lives as the 'reports' suggested.