>>> Brett Knowlton <brettk at unica-usa.com> 12/13/99 07:09PM >>>
This thread is a bit weird. Its always been my view that nukes should be
eliminated, not spread around.
Granted, there is something to be said for MAD and its deterrent effect. I can see how having a single country with nukes could be dicey. Perhaps having opposing nuclear superpowers really has saved lives which would otherwise have been lost in conventional battles. And it is certainly rational for a country to try to acquire nukes if its rival has them.
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Charles: Yes, this is the point. The Soviets had proposed abolishing nucs when the U.S. was the only one with them. The U.S. refused. The Soviets, who had just lost 20 million to war ( we in the U.S. cannot really understand that) , had no choice but to build them truly for defense. The blame for the nuc arms race lies solely on the U.S.
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Still, something can always go wrong, and the odds of somebody, somewhere using nukes again increases with each new country that develops these weapons.
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Charles: Agree. Today's proliferation is arch-dangerous for the human species.
We just stepped back from the eleventh hour with the fall of the Soviet Union. By the way, with respect to lowering the tensions of nuc war, I would say that the fall of the SU is a good thing , in hard pragmatist terms . But now the new danger of proliferation that you mention is very terrible.
CB
At 03:03 PM 12/13/99 -0800, you wrote:
>>
>>Charles: Good thing the Soviets got the bomb when the most the U.S.
>>with its history of genocide against Indigenous peoples, slavery
>>against Africans, Jim Crow, dropping the bomb on the Japanese had
>>it. I trust Stalin more than Harry Truman .
>>
>>CB
>
>How many people would Stalin have to have killed before you would
>trust him *less* than Harry Truman? I mean, if 20 million plus
>doesn't do it, what number would?
>
>
>Brad DeLong, who had thought that there would be general agreement
>that a paranoid tyrant like Stalin shouldn't have the bomb...