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Obama seeks to ban nuclear weapons

S

Shevek

bldg cstles in the sky
www.guardian.co.uk

Apparently Obama is seeking a world free of nuclear weapons. This is quite a ground breaking move for a US president. It received scant coverage in the national press today. One paragraph in The Times one paragraph in The Mail. Why is no one taking him seriously? On BBC news last night it came behind a 10 a penny shooting in upstate New York. Why? They didn't even mention the banning of nuclear weapons part!
 
At the most it will end up with an agreed cut which amounts to the big names retiring the older and near obsolescent weapons.
 
It's also all coming along with his stuff about how everyone needs to put more troops into Afghanistan (well, everyone in NATO - not, say, Iran, obviously) which is a bit more immediate and draws more attention.
 
Bloody hell - a world with no nuclear deterrent? I honestly thought this was an April fool when I saw the OP. I can't wait to see what the pundits and the generals have to say about this. What would Michael Quinlan's view have been? Has anybody read his books?

e2a: Read this - it says Obama and many other Americans are sincere about 'global zero' - no nukes at all, not even the US: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hTI9LCYRaFYqQspPybJjHEGdvKlAD97B9FIO0
 
Provided nuclear disarmament is multilateral, only doomsday merchants should be against it. Pres. Obama says, "We can't reduce the threat of a nuclear weapon going off unless those that possess the most nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia, take serious steps to reduce our stockpiles", so it seems he's including his own nation.

A sensible and bold idea. Now let's see how it's put into practise.
 
DotCommunist said:
At the most it will end up with an agreed cut which amounts to the big names retiring the older and near obsolescent weapons.
Click to expand...

^^^^^^^^^^^^

This.

All the major nuclear powers are likely to do, even if this scheme goes through, is go through their inventories and dispose of as many obsolete nukes as possible while throwing in the absolute minimum of modern nukes to make up their quota.

As I've said before, a revolver holds six rounds. If I point on at you, remove three rounds leaving the other three in the chamber and then cock it and point it at you again, do you feel any safer?
 
If I have a revolver with one round in it, and yours is loaded with six, and you say "let's all remove one round from our revolvers", does that make me feel safer?

If I have no ammunition and you have boxes of it, and you say "let's close the ammunition shops", does that make me feel safer?

and so on
 
So they'll only be left with enough explosive force to blow the earth's crust off 5 instead of 7 times. Comforting.
 
Part of the motivation for the nuclear powers to reduce their arsenal, is that its part of the non-proliferation treaty. And they like to use that treaty to prevent new nuclear powers emerging, so they better make sure they dont 100% fail to live up to their side of the bargain, lest they end up with no legs to stand on.
 
In Prague, I will lay out an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons," Obama said yesterday
Click to expand...

He wants to follow up saving the world economy from disaster with ridding the world of nuclear weapons? I'm glad the guy won the election and he's definitely a big improvement on his predecessor, but I think the Obama Show has now jumped the shark.
 
If we're doing the gun analogy: man has sub-machinegun with twenty clips. He's sat opposite a man with 45 clips. Each agree to cut it to 15 clips. They then remove one clip at a time until they have none.

The two men can now beat each other silly if they want, but they don't take a neighbourhood with them.
 
Azrael said:
If we're doing the gun analogy: man has sub-machinegun with twenty clips. He's sat opposite a man with 45 clips. Each agree to cut it to 15 clips. They then remove one clip at a time until they have none.

The two men can now beat each other silly if they want, but they don't take a neighbourhood with them.
Click to expand...

Nine or ten people are sat around a table with sub-machine guns with unknown number of clips. They agree to remove one clip at a time until each has none, and the person who lies about having no clips becomes the most powerful person at the table.
 
Yes, well, that's why it's important to disarm to a point of parity, and then take it step-by-step. Balance of terror is the key. Working out how a treaty is to be enforced and inspections made is, obviously, the hard part.
 
Azrael said:
Working out how a treaty is to be enforced and inspections made is, obviously, the hard part.
Click to expand...

It's not just the hard part, it's the diamond-hard, impenetrably hard part.

True nuclear disarmament is going to mean the Americans completely trusting the Russians, the Indians completely trusting the Pakistanis, anybody completely trusting the Israelis - and that's just not going to happen in anybody's lifetime, and it's why I think Obama's full of crap and is rapidly blowing his credibility by over-reaching in an effort to have a historic first 100 days as president.
 
They all want to ban them when other people have or are getting them.

If he truly wanted rid of nuclear weapons he could set an example and rid the world of all the American ones. In one stroke that would remove the motivation for Russia and Iran to have nuclear weapons and possibly also China.

Don't hold your breath.

This statement of his was "window dressing"!
 
Azrael said:
Yes, well, that's why it's important to disarm to a point of parity, and then take it step-by-step. Balance of terror is the key. Working out how a treaty is to be enforced and inspections made is, obviously, the hard part.
Click to expand...

Except that's not what is being analogously proposed.
 
weltweit said:
If he truly wanted rid of nuclear weapons he could set an example and rid the world of all the American ones. In one stroke that would remove the motivation for Russia and Iran to have nuclear weapons and possibly also China.
Click to expand...
How does that work? Unilateral disarmament has never made sense. It the USA removes all its nukes, Russia, Iran, China, and any other country that fancies its chances has a motive to tool up and threaten the weakened US. Who knows, some nut could be crazy enough to launch a strike without the threat of retaliation. Balance of power is gone.

"If you want peace, prepare for war," to quote Vegetius.
FridgeMagnet said:
Except that's not what is being analogously proposed.
Click to expand...
Just offering a small-arms analogy of my own as to how multilateral disarmament could work.
 
The context for this is not just weapons. The Americans want to take advantage of peak oil and global warming. Developing countries are desperate for nuclear power, so the Americans intend to help build power stations in exchange for tighter controls on military use of nuclear technology. It might work.
 
There are some 250 nations in the world. If all the current nuclear powers really were to eliminate their entire arsenals and nobody had nukes any more, the temptation by some governments to try to build some on the quiet (or for some of the current powers to keep a few stashed away secretly for a rainy day) would simply be too great. You'd be talking of being able to destroy a rival nation with impunity at the least or dreams of world domination and bullying at worst.

Sadly I don't see nukes ever disappearing for as long as man does not change his nature. So, not for a long time...
 
Obama says something people might like to hear * shocker ..

Except that it is almost too obvious and therefore perhaps too dishonest for us .. he is naughty with this.

There is absolutely no chance, zero, that the USA will be without nuclear weapons within the lifetime of Obama's children let alone his own. The USA will retain its nuclear arms come what may because that and its enormous conventional military is what makes it superpower no 1 .
 
Frankie-Goes-To-Hollywoo-Two-Tribes---Carn-7897.jpg

"We can't reduce the threat of a nuclear weapon going off unless those that possess the most nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia, take serious steps to reduce our stockpiles," Obama said. "So we want to pursue that vigorously in the years ahead."

At Obama's first meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, in London on Wednesday, both agreed on fast-track negotiations to slash their nuclear stockpiles by about a third from the end of this year. Robert Gibbs, Obama's spokesman, said the president believed "loose nukes", stolen nuclear materials or the acquisition by terrorists of weapons-grade fissile material, were among the gravest risks to the US."
 
while a massive cut in weapons would be a good step and would mean aldermaston becomes irrelevant:D.
good news
 
It's been suggested in the past that the first thing you'd do once you were able to make reasonably-sized nukes would be to lead-line a few shipping containers, and send them to various major port cities of your potential enemies.

Query - how would stockpile monitoring detect this?
 
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