Back when I was young, daft and exceedingly desirous of going on demo trips and getting photographs for my portfolio of the anarchist ‘Brew Crew’ kicking off at ‘peace’ demonstrations, I was for a short while a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At that time nuclear disarmament seemed like a good idea and it was only later, long after I’d let my CND membership lapse, learned some history and become less naive about politics that I changed my position on nuclear weapons.
Whilst of course not desiring nuclear conflict I came to the conclusion that nuclear weapons far from endangering peace have contributed to keeping the peace. I came to realise that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) probably went a long way towards preventing open and direct conflict between the West and the Soviet Union. Without the doctrine of MAD it is possible that at some point either the Soviet bloc or the West may have seen a hot war conflict between these two entities as winnable and therefore worth chancing. With both sides armed with enough nuclear ordinance to destroy the other, neither side would risk engaging in direct armed conflict, although I have to acknowledge that proxy conflicts during the Cold War did claim a lot of lives although less than would have been the case had the big powers engaged in either a conventional or nuclear exchange.
Another writer who has come to the realisation that nuclear weapons have kept rather than endangered peace is Patrick Porter of The Critic magazine. He has outlined how nuclear weapons have made countries less likely to engage in aggression because there is the danger that a conventional conflict between nuclear armed nations could end up in a nuclear exchange.
Mr Porter is writing in the context of increasing moves by disarmament groups to try to achieve a zero nuclear weapons world. Whilst this sounds like a good idea Mr Porter points out that this is something that should not be achieved as it may make conventional conflicts much more likely as aggressors would have little to fear if nuclear force was taken off of the table.
Mr Porter says that we cannot ‘un-ring a bell’ and we also cannot uninvent nuclear weapons. For good or ill they exist and there’s every incentive for nuclear powers to hang onto such weapons. This is a good point. Would you trust China for example to abide by any worldwide nuclear weapons removal treaty or would it be in China’s interest to keep enough nukes hidden away as a reserve just in case the nation is threatened?
One of the key points for me in Mr Porter’s article concerns the conflict between India and Pakistan. These two nations have fought several wars against each other but since both sides are now armed with nuclear weapons and each side fears a nuclear response from the other, the amount of armed conflict has gone down.
I found Mr Porter’s article fascinating and thought provoking and you may also think so to even if you do not wholly agree with it. You can find Mr Porter’s article via the link below.
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2022/why-nuclear-abolition-should-fail/
I think the west should disarm, you can trust me. spasiba
LOL nice one. Are you an organiser for CND perchance? I’ve definitely heard this ‘the west must disarm first’ argument from CND’ers.
Good article, thank you. With Putin on the war path it’s impossible for the West to disarm, he has lied at every turn in the road and if we were not a nuclear power he would totally dominant us. Interesting to note we don’t hear so much about unilateral disarmament these day thank goodness.
If we were to rid the world of nuclear weapons completely, how long would it take to build a new one from scratch?
American School Kids have built them. The only difficult part is the nuclear material but in a pinch you can use other stuff from older reactors. So the science isn’t difficult not that they would need much science as they would just use a blueprint for an existing one..
Plus they would have all the components, just not have them put together. It’s not like we can uninvent them. They would have a box full of all the bits and just keep refreshing them. Then there would be the assembled ones stored away.
Everyone talks about Putin and Xi. However, from what I can see the West i just as bad. We would have our stocks as well.
I would imagine the only real change if we agreed nuclear disarmament is that would would actually have none on a nice spreadsheet but the only real reduction would be a paltry 10% where the decommissioning was witnessed. The components then going into a nice nuke kit..
I believe that the person you are thinking about didn’t get the sort of stuff that was fissionable but merely dangerously radioactive stuff like Radium for example.
Providing that a nation had the tech capability to build reactors and refine fissionable nuclear material and was able to do this without being caught then I’d guess about five to seven years. The problem is not every country has the ability to manufacture the parts for nuclear installations and some would hve to be procured from overseas and this is where the controls on the export nuclear materials would kick in. Russia, China and the USA could certainly restart a nuclear weapons programme if they needed to and if they wanted to evade a world wide nuclear weapons prohibition.
I think nuclear weapons are harder than LordT thinks Uranium comes in two isotopes 235 and 238.
The level of 235 has to be increased to make a bomb – that is not that easy.
See here for more details
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120607-nuclear-weapons-in-ten-steps
Yes the refining of U235 is incredibly difficult and can involve fast spinning centrifuges the parts for which are heavily export controlled by those nations that already have such tech. There are a whole load of items that require export licences because of their utility in nuclear engineering. See https://www.gov.uk/guidance/export-of-nuclear-equipment-material-and-technology-trigger-list-requirements