WMD'sFollow

Sounds like you were the kind of guy that would have liked Kucinich. Much like he will never be President, though, pacifism would never work. There's always someone with a chip on their shoulder, propaganda, and an itchy trigger finger.

Edited, Wed Mar 3 16:41:43 2004 by Atomicflea

Also. What exactly do you mean by "producing them"?

To my knowledge, we have been decreasing and dismantling the number of nuclear weapons in our ******* steadily since the 80s. Certainly, there are far fewer weapons ready to deploy today then there were then. I'd be surprised if we're building more at all. Why do that? We've got a ton (literally) of weapons grade material.sitting around in storage from all the weapons we've dismatled as part of various treaties. We have no need at all to produce more.

This actually highlights one of the reasons we *really* don't like folks building more WMD (especially nuclear). We've got all this potentially very dangerous stuff lying around. We spend quite a bit of money securing it and storing it. We will have to continue to do so for the forseable future (a very very very long time). That's a huge burden. Once you've refined uranium or plutonium to weapons grade, you kinda can't do anything else with it (except detonate it, or commit to storing it for an extremely long time and hoping no one steals it - ever ).

There's already a huge problem with Russia right ow (and other former Soviet states). They're having economic problems, and the security of their nuclear materials is a concern. Even if we're pretty sure a nation isn't going to do something crazy today with nukes (or other WMD), we don't know what's going to happen in 50 years, or 100, or 200, or 1000... This stuff lasts a loooooong time.

The biggest threat today of the use of WMD don't come from governments. While there may be a few who might use them (and a few have used some of the lesser ones, like Iraq with its chemical weapons), most nations today wont, even if just for the political fallout from the act. However, the very fact that the weapons are built means that they can be stolen. So we have to trust that not only will a government not use them, but they wont allow them to fall into any other less politically minded group (whether intentionally or not).

Libya is a great example. The government itself might be trusted not to use them (probably), but that nation is rife with terrorist organizations (and just extremist sympathisers). There is no way the Libyan government, no matter how hard they tried, could guaraantee that any WMD they built wouldn't wind up in some terrorist organization's hands. There's just no way.

I've always said that the biggest win we get out of the "war on terror" is the effect it'll have on nations at least now making an attempt to police themselves a bit. Iraq was just a convenient example. Convenient because it was in the region we wanted to most target the message, and its leadership wasn't particularly liked by either the hardcore Muslim's in the region, or the western leaning nations (or much of anyone in between).

I'd say that Libya is a good indicator that we're succeeding at least to some degree.

I'm of the oppinion that the U.S. nuclear stockpile represents the ultimate "or else". If someone has to have nukes, I would much rather that it be the U.S. than some other country. Sure, you could make a pretty good arguemnt that there are cultures out there older, wiser, and perhaps under certain measures better than that of the U.S., but I don't think they have the same group mindset as the U.S. as a whole to make them good custodains of the nuke genie. With the U.S., they will never again be an acceptable first strike weapon, but were someone to hit us or our allies first, there would be no question that we would respond. That's probably one of the only things that kept India and Pakistan from obliterating each other back in the 80's, or Israel from obliterating their neighbors (that and the whole soviet protectorate state mutually assured distruction issue).

I firmly belive that despite the recently uncovered nuke tech smuggling operations, the main reason no terrorist has a nuke yet (to our knowledge) is that the countries of the world know that if we traced the bomb back to them, we would retaliate. Had one of the 9-11 planes been carrying a nuke, I garuntee you Afghanistan would no longer exist. A nuclear bomb, despite the relitivly straightforward principles in building one, is a complex device that requires precise machineing to build. Even if you have the plans and the refined material for the simplest device (a Uranium core device where a polonium enriched uranium central core slightly smaller than critical mass has a slug of uranium 235 large enough to make up the difference fired in by a device similar to a shotgun Sabot shell) the machining and construction materials required to build said device are only available at a limited number of fairly high tech facilities, that you generally couldn't use long enough to build a bomb without getting officially noticed.

At the end of the day, Large scale WMD terrorism can only exist if a sponsor country wants it to, and with the U.S. nuke arsinal, no country really wants to. Sure, some isolated group could make a chemical bomb, or boil several trillion castor beans to make some ricin, but not on a large enough scale to get us all.

The U.S. is actually reducing the overall number of available weapons. Sure, the ones we dismantle are done so very carfully, with all the parts stored in easilly acessable parts bins, and the nuke cores stored in pre-machined forms that just happen to be the right shape to be placed back into a bomb housing should the need arise, but they are not immidiatly available. The new devices we have built in the last 20 years have been mostly replacements for older 1960's era bombs, making them smaller, lighter, and slightly less long term radioactivity (eco-friendly bombs yay!). Someone finally wised up and realised that the public as a whole would rather see a nuke go off than chemical weapons, so they have been getting rid of many of those (but not the research to build them again if necessary)

I do find the plans to research much smaller nukes somewaht disturbing to a certain degree. The end result of that research would result in a nuke about the size of a hand grenade. If nothing else, wayyy to easy to sneak past security and radiation detectors for my comfort.

I know I'm rambling, but anyways the point I was going for is that despite the worldwide perception of Americans as arrogent cowboys with itchy trigger fingers (probably accurate as far as it goes), If you had to choose who to give the nukes too, we're the ones you want to give them to.

Besides, didn't you see armageddon? you never know when we might need to nuke the killer asteroid.

nowadays we don't, but back in the Cold war era it was a numbers game with the Soviets. Had stalin felt he had enough of an edge in nuclear capability over the U.S., he would have undoubtably launched. It was a case of, well, they have 30,000, so we'll build 40,000, etc.

If detonated simultaneously, there is enough nuke power to vaporize the outer several hundred miles of the earths surface. the inner core probably wouldn't even notice, being a solid glob of lava or a big iron ball depending on which theory you beleive.



Our most powerful publicly aknowledged Hydrogen bombs are theoretically capable of a 200 mile explosion radius. Fallout would of course cover several states, but the blast itself would probably "only" destroy a very large city outright.

That's simply not true on a lot of levels. You or I could easily and anonmously buy all of the machining tools required to build a physics package sucessfully in about an hour.

It's not difficult. That's the whole point. It's difficult to build a levitated core radiation implosion thermonuclear lithium deturide device...but that's not what you're talking about.

Absolutely the only thing preventing anyone or their brother from building a kiliton range fission only device is [b]lack of material[b].

That's it. That's all. That's the only problem.

Oh Smash, that made me laugh.