h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks Zagreb No, I do see that as you've just expressed it, I see the logic too.

>>(it's almost certainly no coincidence that the one time they have been used, it's when no other country possessed them)<<

Absolutely - as I said earlier, in terms of any meaningful stability either no one has them or everyone has them.

Surely there's an argument for the status quo though? In general, the existence of nukes has led to 60 years of relative peace. Every new state that acquires nuclear weapons adds another imponderable into the equation. Iran currently seeks to acquire such weapons. If they are physically stopped by one or more countries, what can they do about it?

Sixty years of relative peace among the nuclear nations and those under the various umbrellas (NATO, Warsaw Pact). A desire for such a peace - at the end of the threat of nuclear annihilation - presumably drives other countries to wish to acquire them, for the reasons Zagreb just gave.

Would a nuclear Iran be such a terrible thing? If you follow the logic of deterrence, the Middle East has been battered about by more or less constant warfare because there is only one nuclear power in the region. If they were all armed ...

Personally, I still think that would make it more dangerous rather than less. But there is a clear counterargument, that if everyone has the bomb, it makes conventional warfare between two nuclear powers impossible, because the risks of escalation are too great. A perpetually enforced peace, in other words.

And the problem with the UK attempting to influence anything on this issue is I don't see how it can presume to tell any other nation they shouldn't have the bomb when its own reasons for possessing it are so shaky - or are simply those of 'self-protection' (at a pinch). If it's all right for us ...

It doesn't actually stop nuclear powers fighting conventional wars. The US & USSR tended to fight their wars by proxy. Also, Pakistan & India seem to be constantly fighting a low-level war in Kashmir.

My point was, the current balance has worked. Every new player jumping on the see-saw introduces a degree of unpredictability.

Right - fighting by proxy in non-nuclear countries. Which, presumably, have the right to desire not to be used as someone else's cockpit - and if they see the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a way of securing that, then who can blame them?

(With India and Pakistan, you can argue that the situation has actually improved since the latter went nuclear - the stakes are so much higher now: it's certainly made negotiations between the two over Kashmir much more earnest, the idea of all-out war between the two being now unthinkable).

"(With India and Pakistan, you can argue that the situation has actually improved since the latter went nuclear - the stakes are so much higher now: it's certainly made negotiations between the two over Kashmir much more earnest, the idea of all-out war between the two being now unthinkable)."

This tends to be the outcome. When nuclear weapons were created and the world's major powers started stockpiling them people, understandably, thought that it was the beginning of the end.

There was a reason for this. World War I utterly changed warfare. When it started there were still cavalry on horseback and a Belgium general actually surrendered to his German counterpart by handing over his sword. By the end of the war the application of modern ideas and technology had utterly changed warfare - armoured fighting vehicles, aerial fighting and bombing, the philosophy of "total war" whereby the whole country and not just its armies becomes the enemy. After World War I people felt that war had changed so drastically and changed so much from the "adventure" of the previous century and it was felt that any future war would be so devastating as to be not worth prosecuting.

So, when the atom bomb was invented and people said "well this will make future wars not worth fighting" people understandably thought they'd heard this all before and that the "balance of power" approach to peace was as false as last time. The thing was they were proved wrong - the atomic bomb did stop war between East and West breaking out (which would have been pretty much certain otherwise). As a result, thinking on nuclear weapons changed and the "deterrent" philosophy is now the most common one. We've had these weapons for six decades, we're still the same species as before and we've not used them because it's essentially suicide. But as soon as you remove them from the equation the likelihood of the great powers fighting each other via conventional war increases dramatically.

What's happening now is that minor countries are obtaining them as a way of defending themselves from superpower or great power intervention against them. The likelihood of Iran or North Korea actually using them first is highly unlikely.

"The likelihood of Iran or North Korea actually using them first is highly unlikely"

But surely that's dependant on their being a 'raving lunatic' in the Whitehouse?

Would Iran have nuked Iraq 20 years ago if they'd had nukes and they weren't held in check by an external superpower?

Would Iraq have attacked Iran 20 yrs ago if Iran had nukes?

Well, considering the Israelis - who did have nukes - bombed the Iraqi's only reactor as they were building it, they obviously thought so.

"Would Iran have nuked Iraq 20 years ago if they'd had nukes and they weren't held in check by an external superpower?"

No, because they were held in check by political realities. During the 1980s, Iraq had a strong relationship with the USSR and was seen as a regional ally of sorts. An Iranian atomic attack on Iraq would almost certainly have brought either a conventional invasion of Iran by the USSR backed by the threat of atomic attacks or a Soviet atomic-bombing of Iran which would have been explained as supressing a rogue-state that had demonsratively used atomics against a non-atomic neighbour and that had to be stopped.