I'm not sure the analogy with mustard gas holds. Mustard gas may be repulsive but it's not particularly destructive or militarily effective in modern war. The unique thing about nuclear weapons is their level of destructiveness and military effectiveness. Their gruesomeness is a side-effect by comparison. We don't need a like-for-like deterrent against mustard gas or other such weapons because we have more effective options to counteract them. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are of such devastating power that they give the holders of them a massive amount of leverage in war. It is certainly inhumane to use them but if unilateral disarmament leaves open the risk of complete destruction of your citizenry by an adversary who isn't as morally sensitive as you then that decision could be considered inhumane too.

Obviously, the ideal that we should aim for is no country to have nuclear weapons. But it's better to have nuclear weapons if major adversaries retain them. The difficulty lies in choreographing the former situation in order to avoid the latter. You could make an analogy with guns or other weapons. It's safest on the whole for none of a group of adversaries sitting in a room to have guns. However, it's safer for each member to have a gun if any of the other members has one.

...do you think there's good reason to keep them on as a deterrent and therefore implicitly believe there are circumstances that their use would be justified? — Benkei

I would feel safer in a world where America, Britain and France had nuclear weapons than one in which only China and Russia retained them (I've left out a few countries here but you get the idea). I can also imagine circumstances where their use could be justified. But whether their actual use is justified or not, or whether they would ever be employed or not, keeping them on is likely to act as a deterrent as the dialogue above suggests.

It won't do at all to end a Nuclear war by starting a lengthy court proceeding. Other weapons can be handled that way because there will be that way to handle them later on, but Nuclear weapons threaten to level everything quickly, completely and without response.

Clearly nuclear weapons should be outlawed. They are a menace to all creatures great and small. Maybe nuclear war is survivable. Whether one would want to survive it is another matter.

Consider Pakistan and India, two nuclear armed states. Pakistan has 100 +/- bombs, ready to go, and India has more than that. India has satellite-orbiting capacity (so a guided missile is no problem) and Pakistan is working on extending the range of their missiles. We are obsessed with Iran's development of a nuclear weapons capacity, but are apparently only mildly disturbed with Pakistan's and India's arsenal.

Don't we assume that India has a stable government? Can we say that about Pakistan with much confidence? India and Pakistan could, if worse comes to worse, start a cascade of international nuclear exchanges -- so I've heard.

What leverage exists to force, coax, or entice either India or Pakistan to give up so much as 1 bomb, let alone all of them? The Soviet Union and the United States retreated, but we didn't actually give up our nuclear arsenals either. We dismantled warheads, shut down missile sites, some of which were obsolete anyway. It's not all that easy to rid one's military of all those grapefruit sized balls of plutonium. And both the USA and Russia still have working weapons on line. Then there is China, France, England, North Korea, Israel... There are several more countries that could succeed in building nuclear weapons if they were bent on it.

Who, what, how, when, where would a world-wide suppression of the technology be accomplished? Chemical / biological warfare may have been outlawed but I for one am not at all sure that the issue is settled. Maybe among the major powers it is. The rest? Not so sure.

Do you think nuclear weapons should be outlawed as well because, like mustard gas and other outlawed weapons, their use would be inhumane or do you think there's good reason to keep them on as a deterrent and therefore implicitly believe there are circumstances that their use would be justified? — Benkei

Isn't war outlawed? I guess somebody like the UN has outlawed it.

Seriously, nuclear weapons are here to stay. Unfortunately some might say.

The idea that you can outlaw them is simply a sign of legal hubris, a sign of total ignorance to reality military doctrines of the nuclear states and assumes some kind the omnipotence of lawyers, lawmakers and international treaties. You can just "outlaw" some aspects... like deployment of nukes into space or some kind of nuclear warheads perhaps, but the idea you can ban them altogether isn't realistic.

First and foremost, for a country like Russia the bedrock of it's defence is it's nuclear weapons. It's the single most important aspect in the defence of the country and something that it has never forgotten even in the most weak state of it's armed forces in the 1990's during the Yeltsin years. What Russia, especially under Putin, views as it's biggest threat is the US. Not terrorism or islamists. And the only deterrence against the US is it's nuclear arsenal. Hence Russia has kept on modernizing it's nuclear forces and has deployed brand new nuclear weapon systems well after the end of the Cold War.

(RS-24 Yars mobile ICBM. First tested in 2007, service deployment in 2010, hence it's not a relic of the Cold War...)


Now when you think about it, nukes are also important for the other states too, even if they don't make a great fuss about them. It's just not a thing that is talked about in the Western media as especially the nuclear states of NATO (US, UK, France) or those NATO countries that now storage the old tactical nukes of the US want any talk about. Feels too much like something out from the Cold War era. Yet for example Israel surely values it's nuclear deterrence. India and Pakistan view their deterrence as something extremely important.

And let's continue with the two countries Bitter Crank came up with: India and Pakistan. To understand how nuclear doctrines and deterrence works (and thus how integral part they are in the military thinking of a nuclear armed country), I recommend to view (or listen) to the following video lecture by retired Indian Vice Admiral Vijay Shankar in "Challenges to India's Nuclear Doctrine", (assuming one has the time or interest as it is long). Now Shankar isn't an academic researcher or a defence analyst, but a high ranking officer that has commanded the nuclear forces of one country, hence what he openly says in the seminar does show the insight of a general that has commanded nuclear weapons. Usually generals utter the familiar mantra when it comes to nuclear weapons and their use, but Shankar here ponders the issues quite openly, the absurdity of the arsenal also. He also gives reasons why tactical use of nuclear weapons is a really, really bad idea. Furthermore, as it's about the India-Pakistan nuclear deterrence game, it's not something that has been inherited from the old US-Soviet Cold War arms race.

To me it's more interesting though that the legality of the use of nuclear weapons isn't questioned, whereas it does highlight that all weapons act as a deterrent. Yet, in that sense mustard gas would work as a deterrent too but we outlawed that; just like ordnances designed to maim instead of kill. Outlawed. Biological weapons. Outlawed. — Benkei

Well, mustard gas doesn't lead to a Cold War and MAD.

It seems rather counter-intuitive to "allow" nuclear weapons as an option on the table, as the most gruesome, where it concerns the fall-out, and deadliest and most destructive weapon when lesser weapons were banned for, well, less. — Benkei

It has to do with the magnitude of destruction. Mustard gas does a lot of damage, but pales in comparison to a nuclear bomb. To put complete faith in international accords to not use certain weapons is naive: why don't we just outlaw war itself?! These weapons are necessary to keep enemies from using these same weapons on ourselves. It's unfortunate, unstable, and scary, but ultimately necessary. Using mustard gas to keep others from using mustard gas won't work; the destruction is not great enough. Having the ability to nuke a country the size of Russia off the face of the Earth is enough incentive to not launch nukes at us.

all weapons act as a deterrent. — Benkei

I'm not sure about that.

The last war that anyone in the United States could have been satisfied with was the first Gulf War. Our tanks, rifles, and uniforms against theirs. Big open country, similar technology, little collateral damage to address, in and out quick, all provided a rare clarity of what and how we were doing.
This seems to be the only way we know of to fight a "winnable war" and we haven't seen it since. We may never see it again. We have driven around Iraq and Afghanistan with million dollar convoys waiting to be blown up by improvised explosive devices by a generation whose parents made their living with a hoe. People who didn't know how to land planes flew them into our buildings.

If I wanted to actually defeat a greater power I would not run around trying to enrich plutonium, I would wait for the inevitable reveal of vulnerability and get the IED of the moment.

Well, mustard gas doesn't lead to a Cold War and MAD. — darthbarracuda

But even the assumption of the other side having a mass of chemical weapons has acted as a deterrent.

Adolf Hitler never used Germany's vast arsenal of chemical weapons.

During the war, Germany stockpiled tabun, sarin, and soman but refrained from their use on the battlefield. In total, Germany produced about 78,000 tons of chemical weapons.[4] By 1945 the nation produced about 12,000 tons of tabun and 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of sarin.[4] Delivery systems for the nerve agents included 105 mm and 150 mm artillery shells, a 250 kg bomb and a 150 mm rocket.

Now to put this arsenal into perspective, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a country that used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and the Kurds, produced during 1980-1991 less than 4 000 tons of chemical weapons; sarin, tabun and mustard gas. Just the amount of tabun nerve gas held by Germany is tripple the amount that Iraq produced.

The allies duringWW2 had nothing like this. But the possibility of them having a similar arsenal acted as a deterrent.

One major threat from nuclear weapons that isn't talked about much is the "nothing can go wrong" problem. Actually, things did go wrong fairly often. Currently the US and Spain are negotiating the details of cleaning up after the January 17, 1966 (!) B-52 crash of the coast of Palomares.

A B52 SAC bomber carrying 4 hydrogen bombs collided with an air-refueling tanker at 31,000 feet. The tanker exploded and the B52 broke up. 3 of the bombs landed on the ground, one in the ocean. The one in the ocean was eventually recovered, intact. 1 of the three that hit the ground did not explode. The non-nuclear explosives in the other 2 did explode, but didn't set off a thermonuclear blast. (H Bombs can be quite fussy about how they become critical masses and produce a fusion reaction.) The explosion did, however scatter the nuclear fuel which was not thoroughly cleaned up 50 years ago. Hence, the current negotiations.

On a few occasions SAC workers in missile silos accidentally dropped tools. The silos are quite deep and the missiles are quite tall, and the fuel tanks are quite thin. A dropped wrench can poke a hole in a fuel tank. Fuel leaks out, ignites, and the explosion blasts away the heavy protective doors on top, throws the missile and payload up into the air, and scatters bombs or bomb parts, depending.

The factories that made plutonium amaze balls (about the size of a grapefruit) had all sorts of contamination problems, and so did the communities near by--like Denver. On one occasion the plant caught fire and burnt off a good share of the roof, and incinerated the plutonium filters mounted on the roof. Plus there was an explosion. A plutonium cloud blew across Denver (and where it landed it remains, like as not). The plant, Rocky Flats, closed in 1992. It was was very dirty (in terms of radioactivity). Some areas of the plant were just filled with cement, because they were too hot to handle. The radioactive soil was covered up (not very deeply). The dump is now a "nature reserve". Cute.

The fires in the plant were difficult to suppress. Throwing water on a plutonium fire is a very, very bad idea. Water can facilitate even plutonium crumbs in going critical. Very bad outcome. Dry sand works better.

The US and the USSR have not solved the problem of how, exactly, to clean up the hundreds of serious messes that nuclear bombs left behind, never mind civilian reactor waste. As far as I know, nobody else has either.

Bitter, I think a far worse threat is simply accidental or unintentional nuclear war.

There have been many cases were if common sense wouldn't have prevailed, but the actors would have acted by the book and followed proceducers, there would have been a nuclear exchange. False alarms did happen on both sides. What people don't perhaps understand, but a sudden surprise nuclear attack is something that the Soviet Union and the US believed that the other side could do. NATO exercise Able Archer '83 is a good example of this, where the Soviet Union really had fears that a nuclear war was going to be started by the West. But there have been other occasions also. Last time it was Boris Yeltsin who was given the launch keys and make the decision to attack the US or not... all because of a research sounding rocket. And when Yeltsin was in power, the Cold War ought to have been over.

During the Cuban crisis, if the US had attacked Cuba it would have surely become a nuclear war: the US didn't even know that Russia had deployed tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba (and hence they wouldn't have been targeted by the USAF), which Russia then would have used against US landing sites. Castro would have allowed the use of nuclear weapons in Cuba.

Now if you assume that is something past, you are wrong. Russia still sees the threat of US nuclear attack as something totally possible and the way US would attack Russia. Basically that the US would do this huge all-out attack on Russian military targets, be it nuclear or non-nuclear, from the Continental US and the North Atlantic. Hence the snap excersizes in Russia: quickly get the troops out with their equipment from the military bases. I think also in the video above the Indian vice-admiral talked about the problem of tactical nuclear weapons. If a military commander has tactical nuclear weapons at his disposal and he is going to be lose totally, one answer would be to fight with all the weapons that you have. And tactical nuclear war can easily get out of hand.

Yup. Here's another near-armageddon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

This seems to be the only way we know of to fight a "winnable war" and we haven't seen it since. — Monitor

The reason for this is political, not military. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are all winnable if you don't care about casualties. World War 1 & 2 were viewed differently (win at all cost), and thus the military machine of the US was not hampered.

The reason for this is political, not military. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are all winnable if you don't care about casualties. — Marchesk

A bit off the topic, but I disagree here, because of the objectives, really:

Korean war:

The defence of South Korea. Was successful. Uniting the Korean peninsula was unsuccessfull (as the Chinese intervened), but the objective of the defence of South Korea was met. South Korea is now an industrialized country and has good relations with the US, hence this war was a success.

Winnable with more resources? Might be, perhaps "South" Korea might have a border with China on the Yalu-river, but surely then the relationship with China would be far more worse. And US troops would be then next to the Soviet/Russian border also, which would make the Russians like Putin extremely worried.

Vietnam war:

US had a similar objective as above with South Korea and "the prevention of Southeast Asia falling like dominoes to Communism". Was totally unsuccessfull. Vietnam now a unified country, yet the Domino effect didn't happen (actually Vietnam fought a war with China and overthrew a Communist dictatorship in Cambodia). Communism didn't overtake Southeast Asia.

Winnable with more resources? Might be. South Vietnam was no South Korea and a country with far less cohesion and ability. Yet South Vietnam was a weak country right from the start and partly a French creation. Now the situation would likely have lead to a similar situation as in the Korean Peninsula, and thus US troops would be even now stationed in South Vietnam.

Afghan war:

Objective??? Because of a terrorist strike done by a few Saudi nationals, the country was occupied because the regime in the country had harboured the financier of the terrorist strike. Hence the objective "was to prevent the country to become a harbour for terrorists", which basically means the occupation of the country to the undetermined future. The US occupation itself created the opposition which now is in the form of the Taleban. US bombing campaign in Pakistan has broken the alliance and any friendly relations the US had with Pakistan. The US also lost support from the surrounding "Stans", which all have now closed the US bases that supported the occupation. Now the US is fighting the war with a scaled down force that is supplied from Romania.

Winnable with more resources? No. The US occupation itself and the war against terrorism is the main reason why Afghanis are joining the side of the Taleban. Hence former US allies during the Soviet war are now fighting the US and classified as terrorists. The US created regime is very corrupt and very weak and basically made of the ethnic minority in the country. And many times has been against the US on the issues on how to handle the situation. How this would be "winnable" is beyond me.

Iraqi war:

Again objective??? To eradicate non-existent WMD's and "bring democracy to the Middle East". What it brought was the dissolution of Iraq into a civil war and it becoming basically a failed state. With totally unrealistic and illogical objectives this has to be the worst US foreign policy disaster ever. Especially when Saddam Hussein didn't present any kind of real danger to US allies and hence US objectives in the area.

Winnable with more resources? Again no. Again an occupation of one country with a lot of problems and no reasonable or logical US policy. The US installed regime is neither democratic or capable to unite the country, hence this is an abject failure that cannot be countered by just more troops on the ground.

↪ssu Yup. Here's another near-armageddon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov — Arkady

I think here the most startling thing is how the late Robert McNamara wrote about the dangers of nuclear weapons in his last years. Robert McNamara is a crucial figure here, because he was a person that actually had made the decision to go to WW3 during the Cuban Missile Crisis (which at the last moment was avoided). During the Cuban Missile crisis WW3 was truly on the table. Furthermore, it was viewed for example by general Curtis LeMay as winnable because the amount of nuclear weapons Soviet Union had were still few: there was no MAD yet.

I'd recommend everybody to read McNamara's articles and/or to watch Fog of War, which is a sobering interview about just how close nuclear war was.



And now the perspective from the Soviets. Sergei Khrushchev explains:

Yes, they should be outlawed. They should be safely gotten rid of. And they should be prevented from being made. There are no realistic circumstances in which their use would be justified.

However, I don't agree that if you believe that there's good reason to keep them on as a deterrent, then you implicitly believe that there are circumstances in which their use as a weapon would be justified. Although, if, in your conclusion, you meant their use as a deterrent, then of course I agree.