Namaste Dream,
thank you for the post.
admittedly, the international situation has changed a great deal and will continue to do so so any response that i make will, necessarily, seem dated or out of synch. nevertheless...
Nuclear weapons are a threat to everything we value.
i'll allow, for the sake of discussion, that we value the same things even though i don't actually hold that view
in any case... let's frame our discussion circa 1986, for just a few moments. during that year, the Soviet Union was convinced that the United States was preparing it's people for a nuclear first strike against the USSR and, to be ready, the USSR sought desperately for intelligence which would show what the West was up to. a military exercise named Able Archer had taken place every year since the mid 1970's and it was an exercise wherein NATO practiced what it would due in event of a USSR first strike. when the West (the British) finally had solid intelligence on what was going on in the Kremlin an extraordinary briefing was given wherein the Joint Chief of Staff of the Pentagon explained that even if the USSR had a successful first strike the US and NATO had a sufficient amount of weapons to ensure a second strike. when Visili Mitrokin was finally exfiltrated to England with all of his information from the KGB archives (where he was the senior archivist) it was revealed that it was only this very fact (a second strike capability) which prevented the USSR from a pre-emptive attack. Oleg Gordievsky made the same claims but had no documentation (he was a GRU colonel not KBG) and it widely disputed until the Mitrokin Archive made it to England.
so, in this narrow and specific instance, nuclear weapons did, indeed, safeguard something that we both value: living
essentially, however, the threat that any weapon poses is directly proportionate to the intention of those that wield them and this concern isn't new by any means. did you know that when the crossbow was invented there was a general outcry that the weapon was so powerful that it would end up killing everybody....turns out.. we got better
I have said and still say that I hope a new technology makes it possible for any nation to completely nullify the capabilities of nukes. That may not seem likely, but to me it still seems possible. I think we had better hope so.
i think that if some nation develops the ability to stop sub atomic reactions we'll see a weapon of such unparralled power that it will ensure the hegemony of whichever nation develops it first. imagine being able simply stop, say, the simple combustion of gasoline in an enemies country?! what nationstate could take the chance? i think that i'm pretty strongly on the other side of that view
Just my opinion, but even though nukes have been a boon to diplomacy they are just too destructive, and it would be better for the world to struggle on without such dangerous items.
therein lies the rub. is it better to have weapons which, if used, kill millions or not have weapons of such a nature which ensures that hundreds of thousands get killed due to a lack of effective deterrents?
given that the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, and isn't likely to go back in i'd say that a political solution to the potential use of nuclear weapons should be sought. i'm singularly unaware of a technology that humans have discovered that was subsequently abandoned without something to take its place and given that nuclear reactions are deal with fairly small bits of fundamental matter i'm betting that we'll have this technology around for the remainder of the human species existence.
if that is so, then it is in everyones best interest to develop a compassionate and easy manner towards others and the world at large so that the causes of disagreement betwixt beings may be decreased to such a time as wars will be unknown. interestingly enough, the Buddha proclaims that just such a time will happen shortly before the arising of the next Buddha in this world system... but that's a subject for another thread
metta,
~v
