<<<The problem with nuclear weapons is that you can’t use them. Using them involves a Masada complex, ..... For the most part, no survivors. No one wins.>>>
Certainly, this is the 'man on the street' view.
You can't use them? Who is "you"?
The stark lesson we are now learning is that the only way to deter aggression from a nuclear power is to have them yourself. Kim Jung Un is exhibit A. Iran's Mullahs learned that lesson and I suspect Taiwan, Japan,
South Korea, Saudi Arabia are not far behind .....planning for their people's survival.
Just today you wrote, "But human passions are still exactly the same. Bad combo." Very wise words!!
Yesterday I was listening to a lecture on Egyptian history. There were once more than 100 city-state polities up and down the Nile....before they were forcibly "consolidated" by the first Pharoh in 3100BC. Probably not kingdoms but some form of oligarical republic. Same situation in early Mesopotamia. In adding these polities to their empires, little consideration was given 'to cost-benefit analysis' or relative GDP.
Democratic Athens converted the Dalian league of some 50 or more semi-republican Greek polities into an empire. When one of these polities tried to remove themselves from the alliance, their men were butchered and their women and children enslaved. When they wanted to forcibly add the poor Melians to this Empire - which funded the incredibly expensive building of the Parthenon, etc. - Thucydides recorded the exchange, its essence is as follows:
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question
between equals in power, while the strong do
what they can and the weak suffer what they
must"
The full dialogue is worth reading. The Melian Dialogue (mtholyoke.edu)
I think there is a bipartisan taboo on discussing the effects of nuclear war....other than an insistence that it be considered inconceivable. But can you, wise doctor, articulate that thought in a non-conclusionary way?
Isn't it a fact that the grotesque swellings -from radiation - of the Hiroshima victims all resolved?
For me, it's easy to imagine a scenario with Taiwan where Xi starts his cross-channel invasion. Taiwan, whose people want no more part of the Chinese Empire than Hong Kongers, fires a nuke as a warning into the Chinese staging area. Does Xi meekly back down? I don't know. It would be a huge humiliation. Might he not escalate with a "small" nuke of his own? |
