Senate Israel/Palestine

Its allies have been largely bought by funds and training issued by the Pasdaran, and is mostly centered on like-minded radical shi'a groups than wholesale nation-state diplomacy. Their allies are generally not major players.

 

Iran's "allies" consist of funded proxies and affiliates.

 

I'm not really sure much of our congressional leadership, and certainly much of congress, is entirely rational. Or, to put it differently, I don't know that the United States really has a great claim to be a completely rational actor (unless it's in the pursuit of money, in which case we're terrifically rational).

 

So are most the Gulf's allies.

 

The U.S. actually has used nukes against a civilian(albeit largely militant) population during WW2.

Americans can make arguments why that was indeed rational, but the Iranians might counter that America has used their nukes on innocents before while they would never use it.

We are on very shaky ground historically, but we tend to ignore that.

 

I for one am not going to fault the US' actions in WWII.

Firstly, it was unprecedented so you're judging it retroactively. Secondly, if you lot hadn't bombed Japan, my family and many other PoWs may not have survived, so...

 

I'm not going to fault it either. But there were alternatives. We had a choice.

 

Like invasion, with one million projected American lives lost, and probably many more Japanese civilians?

Or firebombing, like Dresden?

I understand that the use of nuclear weapons represents the crossing of a major psychological barrier, but the argument that the bombs saved more lives than they ended up taking does have merit, and deserves consideration.

And if a nuclear Iran hands off a weapon to a terrorist group and leaves no evidence, are they truly blameless, which they will claim to be?

When dealing with the potential for non-state actors to acquire WMDs through the actions of other states, one could argue it's no less unprecedented than WWII was. How, for example, does one relatiate for a nuclear attack on, say, NYC, or Washington D.C.?

I can tell you this--in the aftermath of such an event, retaliation will come, and it terrifies me more than the act of terrorism itself. The day after a mushroom cloud rises above an American city, the United States will likely become the single most dangerous and irrational actor in the world.

And that, IMHO, is worth preventing.

Peace,

V-03

 

I agree with you completely. There was also the element of time to consider with the known pursuit of nukes by the Reich(not sure but did we know the Soviets were at the time?).

But, we can't say we are this benevolent nuclear power seeing we are the ones to actually use them on civilians.

 

I don't think we would have lost a million people in an invasion-- Norman Scwarzkopf once called both that estimate and the projections for a minimal loss of life to be equally ridiculous. That seems to be accurate, if not particularly helpful (or even relevant).

 

The atomic bombings were the culmination of the "strategic" bombing philosophy of the World Wars. In the minds of planners, it was just a much easier way to level a city than sending hundreds or thousands of planes loaded with TNT and firebombs. The effects of radiation on human physiology were already known, but that somehow escaped to notice of officers who at one point considered bombing a path for Allied invaders from a beachhead to Tokyo. Fat Man and Little Boy may have "saved" more lives than an invasion would have cost (though there's a real chance the casualties were overestimated, as they were based mostly on the Okinawa experience and the likely-exaggerated assumption that every civilian would take up arms), but they were still especially terrible things in a terrible conflict. The fact that the United States looked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thought, "These apocalyptic weapons should be the backbone of our defense strategy-- oh, and let's make them thousands of times bigger" is probably the most indefensible thing about it and a cause of nuclear proliferation today.

 

Yeah, I mean we look at it in retrospect and say "we shouldn't use nuclear weapons!" but... that event is what basically caused us to not want to use nuclear weapons again. And you know how Ender often says in politics threads "a lot of times Eastern methods are not Western methods and we shouldn't necessarily think they think the same way?" This is one of those times.

The US by that point had been fighting, essentially, still a "gentleman's warfare" scenario with the Western Front. The Germans basically ignored Buckingham Palace in the bombing of London (as far as I can tell); everyone took prisoners for the most part (can't say how Jewish troops fared taken by the Germans), etc.

Yet in the Pacific, the US was sneak-attacked by Japanese, who refused to surrender -- either via kamakaze or via (pardon the term) "false white-flags" to kill more soldiers, who participated in the Rape of Nanking a few years earlier, and basically every estimate put casualties and deaths on both sides to be astronomical.

 

Did nuclear weapons being in the hands of friend and foe speed up the desire for world peace and less large-scale conventional conflict or slow it?

 

But I think the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used since WWII is highly telling and ought not be disregarded. Nor should the US' actions be deemed incorrect at the time.

Proliferation could literally have been done with arsenals of dummy warheads, for all the practical effect it had. They became a symbollic policy instrument rather than an actual weapon.

 

Well stated.

In many ways, they were too terrible and too costly(in lives and money).

They also helped push nations into a cold war devoid of global war and instead seated at negotiating tables vying for advantage.

There was nothing to suggest conventional forces would ever cease slugging it out without them.

 

Well, again, we came within a 40 volt switch from having a 2.8 megaton explosion over North Carolina. That would have taken things from symbolic to real in the time it took for the chain reaction to happen.

 

Is that an issue with the previous usage though? I don't think anyone's suggested the development, stockpiling and non-usage of the nuclear bombs was a bad idea? (I mean, how many we have, sure, but still...)...

 

The level of armed conflict among states was already declining long before the advent of nuclear weapons. It's silly to pretend that nuclear weapons had any more to do with the relative peace after the World Wars than the World Wars themselves, moves toward European integration, the decline of traditional colonial empires in favor of indirect political/economic/cultural dominance, German and Japanese disarmament, etc. Despite the idea that nuclear weapons are seen as a "deterrent," the United States came very close to condemning Europe (and a few U.S. cities) to being a radioactive wasteland in 1962, and both sides were generally reckless with their tactics and strategies regarding their arsenals during the era(s) of Cold War brinkmanship.

 

I dont dispute the deadliness and outright total destruction nuclear weapons can cause. But, can we discount conventional warfare ceased in Europe and the west as a whole with the rise of nuclear weapons? I realize that might be a correlation fallacy. But, it's interesting the nearly continuous conventional warfare all but ceased among nuclear powers in the west. One could also attribute the rise of peace to international institutions like the U.N. too as well as pacts like the EEC.

Darth Guy yes war was in decline in Europe but after WW2 it stopped. It literally stopped. Were they just too weak? Did war pacify the populations? Why didn't it do so en masse before?

 

Again, there are many other factors to consider. Germany (the remaining source of European conflict) was partitioned for 45 years, Soviet and Western (mostly American) forces stayed in Europe, the old Great Powers were even more exhausted than in 1918 and trying/failing to hang onto their overseas empires. There was also a lot to lose and nothing to gain for either side even in a conventional Third World War (and there was no marginalized powerhouse to go ahead with it anyway).

 

I read about this and saw a TV program on it.

Scary as hell.

 

What are you talking about? The two major powers had enormous tensions, and engaged in multiple proxy conflicts on every single continent. Except for the expansiveness afforded by the reach of modern transportation, this is how every major empire and polity have clashed against one another, long before explosives were even grasped as a concept, let alone nuclear weapons. Your argument is that nothing changed at all.

 

The no-show count is up to around 50 and perhaps more for tomorrow's speech: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/netanyahu-speech-whip-count

That is a big number, particularly given that I'm sure his last speech was missed only by those who couldn't be there for some reason (wouldn't be surprised if no one missed it).

 

KnightWriter he is not going to say anything new or provide any substantial evidence to support his position. He is going to rehash his speech to AIPAC and give the U.S. congress reasons why we should be involved. Namely, that we should be involved because we should follow what is in the interest of Israel.
Obama is correct on the path he is taking.

 

So it's just under 10% missing it?

Will it be noticed?