Fox TV was having a discussion of US nuclear weapons policy yesterday. They had a guy saying that the US ought to get out of the nuke business, reduce our arsenal to zero, make the country nuke free. This was a sacred mission for this guy.
I don't agree. US nuclear superiority kept the cold war cold for fifty years. That's a pretty good track record. Let's not mess it up. The world is OK with the Americans having most of the nukes. They figure we will do the right thing by them.
The anti nuke guy passed out a whopper and no one called him on it. He claimed that the number of nuclear states is smaller today than it was in the past. Not true. The number of nuclear states has been rising slowly since 1945. No nuclear state has ever given up nukes
2 comments:
Well, South Africa gave up their nuclear weapons program, but they're the only ones. Pretty sure they could restart their program pretty easily if they wanted to and it isn't like their neighbors are trying to get nukes.
We should always maintain a nuclear arsenal ready to go. The white elephant that isn't in the news about North Korea is that China still has an alliance with them if they get attacked.
Well, it's a quibble, but I don't remember the South Africans conducting a nuclear test, or even claiming to have nukes.
I do remember a report in Time many years ago that a US early warning satellite detected a nuclear detonation in the southern Indian ocean, far out to sea, way off any sealanes. Time speculated that it was a combined Israeli-South African deal. Israel supplied the physicists, South Africa supplied the yellowcake. That story is from 20-30 years ago. I don't remember ever reading any followup to that story.
Back then the apartheid regime in South Africa had good reason to fear for its life. The ANC regime that took power later didn't feel nearly so threatened, and may well have stopped funding a nuclear weapons program.
China is the only thing keeping the North Koreans running. The Chinese supply food and fuel, without which North Korea would dry up and blow away. That's a defacto alliance, even if nothing is written down.
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