Nuclear disarmament

Poll to see where people stand on this.

Does anyone out there believe nuclear disarmament is a possibility or a sensible option? There are lots of groups out there attempting to bring about the complete disarmament of nuclear weapons, world leaders tend to make noises about it but this seems more to be PR than anything else.

But personally I think these movements are doomed to fail. The technology is out of the bag so say you do eventually convince every nation to disarm, what is to stop X country building a nuke and invading it's neighbour or some version of this? For a nuclear free world to work there would have to be an agreement that any nation that attempted to build weapons would face sanctions and the credible threat of invasion if they did not cease production. Which is never really going to happen.

Personally I am an advocate of the status quo, stop other nations gaining nuclear weapons but also take weapons off hair trigger, and see limited disarmament with weapons being brought down into the hundreds rather than the thousands. Even this seems unlikely with nations like Pakistan building nukes as quickly as possible which naturally adds to global insecurity.

Anyway poll and thoughts.

It's an interesting issue to raise.

Obviously in an ideal world, it would be best not to have nuclear weapons. They are incredibly expensive and a vast diversion of skilled talent and resources into completely unproductive and potentially horribly damaging devices that should never have been used and should not be used.

I am sceptical that the West could not stop Pakistan and India, Israel and other 'new nuclear powers' from having weapons if they really wanted to - to some extent, there appear to be vested interests in some of these developments. Keeping India and Pakistan at loggerheads has been tremendously profitable to the global arms industries.

I don't really agree that the big powers haven't been serious about disarmament - in past decades, a great many people and a number of big governments, including some US and Soviet ones, tried terribly hard against enormous internal and external opposition to bring an end to such weapons. They did achieve a lot, but not final abolition, although this seems to have reached the table a few times.

It could still be done and it should be done - despite increased relaxation on this topic since the 80s and 90s, the world is still under threat from the use of nuclear weapons.

I am sceptical that the West could not stop Pakistan and India, Israel and other 'new nuclear powers' from having weapons if they really wanted to.

I like the idea of disarmament, but like you I believe that it is an impossibility. Un-inventing the weapons is the ideal scenario.

Something needs to be made that would render nuclear weapons obsolete, so that nations already possessing them would admit their futility and get rid and that nations in pursuit of them would realise there's no point as they'd be ineffective.

What that something is I have no idea, though.

So, in lieu, status quo but with warheads being reduced (both in quantity and 'quality') all the time.

Oh please do elaborate.

You don't think that great pressure could be brought on these countries by their main donor, the United States? By Europe, on which they rely for large amounts of remittance earnings and financial aid?

One must be suspicious when one views the apparent ease with which these countries broke through anti-proliferation in the last 20 years and without serious objections from the big powers. There must be a perceived interest in various capitals in maintaining and increasing tension in these areas.

Disarmament if impossible. Nobody would sign up to it and if everybody did, who's going to say there won't be a day when nukes are needed?

If noone has them then that day ain't coming.

You don't think that great pressure could be brought on these countries by their main donor, the United States? By Europe, on which they rely for large amounts of remittance earnings and financial aid?

One must be suspicious when one views the apparent ease with which these countries broke through anti-proliferation in the last 20 years and without serious objections from the big powers. There must be a perceived interest in various capitals in maintaining and increasing tension in these areas.

Pressure? Sure. 'Great' pressure? No, not at all. From a game theory point of view the importance of nuclear weapons to these countries far outweighs the minor punitive financial cost of sanctions or withheld aid from the West, and as Iran and North Korea have shown there's ultimately very little we can do diplomatically to stop a determined state getting nuclear weapons, short of regime change or warfare, two methods which are apparently not in fashion anymore with the public.