Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (65516)	1/12/2003 12:49:31 AM
From: kumar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<The India/Pakistan war threat a few months ago certainly highlighted that> The "seeming threat of nuclear war" between India/Pakistan, was a result of media/political hype. Go, talk to some of the people that live in both countries, and you would soon recognize that its a bunch of politicians on both sides blowing hot air, with no real intention of making such an event happen. BTW : Cuba, Israel, India, Pakistan have not signed on to NPT. cheers, kumar@barkingdogsdontbite.pov

To: greenspirit who wrote (65516)	1/12/2003 1:00:09 AM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

the basic nut of the proliferation problem is that it is relatively (and increasingly) cheap and easy for nations to acquire WMD--and difficult and expensive for others to prevent them from doing so. Some people feel that the only stable long-term way around this problem is to move towards some kind of general WMD disarmament combined with strict policing mechanisms. Others feel that the logic of deterrence is so powerful, and so inherent in the weapons themselves, that more people getting them doesn't really matter, and might actually end up stabilizing everything quite nicely. Most people are somewhere in between those two extremes, which seems quite sensible. Unfortunately, there's very little reason to believe that the status quo--a few major responsible countries have them and others don't--is maintainable for all that long. The older scary predictions about how many countries would go nuclear have proven unreliable--very few have, compared to what people expected in, say, the 60s--but so have the hopes that arms control treaties and related diplomatic measures can deal adequately with the problem by themselves. Thus we now have 5 legal nuclear powers, 3 extra-legal ones, and a few countries with illegal programs. We don't really have good generalizable answers for how to deal with countries in the last two categories, whose numbers may well grow in years to come no matter what. So we handle each case in an ad hoc way (compare Iraq, NK, and Iran, for example), avoiding confronting the larger question squarely. There are very few foreign policy or national security issue that combine such great importance with such intellectual challenge. It will be extremely interesting to watch how all of this plays out in the next several decades. tb@makesawonk'sheartbeatfaster.com