I don’t have much to add to this:
[C]onsider why the United States, China, and Russia–or any other country for that matter–should fear nuclear proliferation. Of course, there are the concerns of accidental nuclear detonation, nuclear terrorism, or even nuclear war. But these are all extremely low probability events. The primary threat of nuclear proliferation is that it constrains the freedom of powerful states to use or threaten to use force abroad. […]
Some analysts argue that we shouldn’t worry about proliferation in Iran because nuclear deterrence will work, much like it worked during the Cold War. But from Washington’s point of view, this is precisely the problem; it is more often than not the United States that will be deterred. Although Washington might not have immediate plans to use force in the Middle East, it would like to keep the option open.
Of course, as time goes to infinity even “low probability events” become inevitable. So there is also that. But even leaving that aside, the smart move for the US – for the world – in trying to stop proliferation would be to try to make nuclear weapons less important in international relations. Reduce our own stockpiles, for example. Maybe allow Brazil, or some other non-nuclear country, a place on the UN Security Council. Stop bombing fools so they don’t feel such a strong need to deter you. Stuff like that, but especially the first one. Because while I don’t like the idea of North Korea and now Iran having a few rudimentary A-bombs, I’m not sure I like the idea of Ayatollah Starbursts getting her grubby mitts on a few thousand megatons of nukes, and the ability to deliver them anywhere on Earth in 30 minutes, any better. You betcha.
February 10, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Penis enlargement proliferation seriously constrains my ability to be the World’s Sole Super Crotchstuffer.
February 10, 2010 at 7:49 pm
We all know the score with loose Nukes, Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar need to scream and shake people I guess.
Put me down for non-proliferation and arms reductions. Putin is a squirrel monkey, and I don’t know who the Chinese equivalent to Mrs. Palin is, but I know he or she is a stupid fucking, fucktard who will accidently get me eviscerated probably has already “staged” their Diva moment by enacting a live-action sequel to “Red Dawn”.
That Brazil and South Africa want magic wands, is fucking retarded as they have people who are starving to death and illiterate, it’s like Zaire building a Disneyland. These are extra party favors people, you have to want a continent.
God told President Monroe that all this shit is ours and fuck anyone who doesn’t have my copy of the Bible. Bottom line is I need clean water for my workers so they can produce GDP to accumulate interest on the principle that is our rich soil and lovely geysers so China can give us money to give them the money back for tube socks, and I can type this out on my Mac Book, while Rachel Maddow tells me how right I am in 1080dpi while I sit in my beautiful Chicago Leather Chair all of which is from China.
That’s our governing thesis for the last one-hundred years, and as a “winner”, I am so comfortable right now zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
February 11, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Kleber’s dream:
February 11, 2010 at 5:46 pm
I actually have this album…Somewhere…
February 11, 2010 at 6:26 pm
Figured you did. Nice little EP.
February 10, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Here’s a better pitcher of Governor-half-term
February 10, 2010 at 8:50 pm
W T F ?
February 11, 2010 at 7:20 am
Aussie capybara. World’s largest rodent (other than those in the US Congress).
February 11, 2010 at 9:15 am
Is that like a chupacabra?
February 11, 2010 at 11:04 am
Yes, some Congressmen are very much like a bloodsucking creature.
Capybaras are from S America, not Australia (never listen to your coworkers). At first I thought your pic was a nutria, but the snout is wrong. Visit the happy capybara page http://www.rebsig.com/capybara. They look friendly.
February 11, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Is that an Australian or a Brazilian capybara. I knew when I saw it — Juan Capybara… tequila Juan Capybara, yo soy Juan Capybara….
{tume of Juan Tanamera}
February 11, 2010 at 5:43 pm
I always thought it went;
One ton of mariii waaa na.
.
February 11, 2010 at 6:10 am
Well, we tried your idea of giving non-nuclear countries permanent seats on the Security Council back in 1945. Guess what? They all went nuclear! You give a seat to Brazil, they’re gonna want a nuke too.
February 11, 2010 at 6:54 am
Jeez, if everyone has nukes then no one will use them! (logic of MAD, which astonishingly has held up to date)
But there’s one in every crowd, right?
February 11, 2010 at 8:24 am
finally u wrote something i can understand and i agree with it. not a big fan of the swearing but i admit its kind of funny but seriously the r word is pretty low class.
February 11, 2010 at 2:06 am
In that case, I retract everything. Except the r-word.
February 11, 2010 at 7:06 pm
I hope the “r” word is Radish. As in harris is a sentient radish.
February 12, 2010 at 3:07 pm
You gotta problem with rutabagas, you tuber bigot?
February 11, 2010 at 9:12 am
This is a day of days!
February 11, 2010 at 10:28 am
TO paraphrase Bill Hicks, I’m uncomfortable with fundamentalist xians in the white house who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, including that whacky fire n’ brimstone revalations ending. They’ve had their finger on the fucking button for most of my lifetime.
February 11, 2010 at 11:52 am
“if everyone has nukes then no one will use them! (logic of MAD, which astonishingly has held up to date)”
Every culture has its comforting myths by which to avoid unpleasant realities – the quote above is a perfect summary of one such fairytale.
Stanislav Petrov is the only reason any of us are around to make snarky comments on the Interwebs today – & he was severely disciplined for his insubordination after he single-handedly saved humankind from a firy doom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
February 11, 2010 at 2:23 pm
Agreed. Hence “one in every crowd”, both Petrovs and LeMays. Still, I don’t look a gift warhead in the cone if I can help it.
Moral: we need be careful how we rattle sabers and economic sanctions in our efforts to curb nuclear proliferation. More than one way to itch a launch button finger.
February 11, 2010 at 1:28 pm
The Christian religion depends critically on a civilization-ending apocalypse.
Anyone who really believes the pychedelic horseshit in Revelation should, logically, bring about the end times if it is within his or her means. The U.S. nuclear arsenal provides a means.
February 11, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Actually I thinkl this new ‘doo’ of Sarah’s is quite exciting. Makes her look ‘radiant’.
John Trafficant and Don King are fucking retarded jealous.
February 11, 2010 at 2:24 pm
I can’t wait to see her take on The Cure.
February 11, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Just wait 10 years. Sarah will look exactly like Robert Smith does now.
February 11, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Uncanny resemblance.
February 11, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Nice discussion of nuclear winter in last month’s Scientific American; they say the most likely trigger point is an India/Pakistan conflict. While the concept of nuclear winter is a few decades old, the current climate modeling programs and the much higher power computers to do it on reveal that the entire world is fucked no matter who sets off a nuclear conflict; think of it as something along the lines of 10 years with skies so overcast from the resulting soot in the stratosphere that global agriculture collapses and killing frosts hit all summer long. That will pretty much end it, but at least one side will get to claim victory for awhile, and (fill in the blank) will be avenged!
Humans: worst sentinent beings experiment ever.
February 11, 2010 at 10:02 pm
I suspect a nuke or three will be used again this century but will not trigger a massive pissing contest. My rationale (it is more or less also that of the dear departed FZappa) derives from this statement by Saul Alinsky (paraphrased from memory):
“I believe I could get a capitalist to sign a deal today that would make him filthy rich overnight even though he knew it meant it would kill him tomorrow.”
Don’t know that I agree with Saul completely but if we look at it, it implies that no businessman will tolerate so much death if it wipes out so much expensive real estate.
Not that I think we homo saps are particularly rational. The Cold War was such a balanced and massive dual psychotic sociopathy that we would have eventually gone full scale Armageddon if the balance hadn’t grossly imbalanced in the late ’80s.
Don’t know when we might achieve another enormous such mutual standoff. Anywho, the chances of us getting through this century without a major dieoff do seem slim.
February 12, 2010 at 7:41 am
Ever hear of Jonestown? Heaven’s Gate? True believers can and do kill themselves on a large scale. How about 9/11, London, or Bali? True believers can and do kill others on a large scale. Most of the religious freaks we put into office are really just half-assed religious freaks. In the event that we get a serious true believer, we are literally doomed.
Not worried? A double-digit percentage of Americans believe the end of the world will occur within their lifetimes. All it takes is one in the right place to make it happen.
February 12, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Oh, I know all that. I grew up expecting to die young in a nuke standoff. But our rational anticipation of how irrational people will behave is irrational.
Like my old man used to say:
“Ain’t no use worrying about how things won’t work out because nothing won’t work out the way you thought it wouldn’t.”
Here’s another worry: as we continue suppressing nuclear development, bootleg hackers may devise simpler, cheaper ways of devising nuclear weapons capacity.
My point, primarily, is that our current attempts to deter nuclear proliferation are only attempts to buy time to find a saner human population in generations to come, and meanwhile, the adversarial stress of suppressing nuke arms capacity creates unintended and unwanted consequences.
As for the argument that it only takes one nutcase to end the world: the same is theoretically true of the disease vaults in the CDC (and Russia, and who knows where else?).
The very knowledge that we now have the power whereby one nut can trigger Armageddon should tend to create ever more de facto safeguards in those areas where a nutcase could deliberately push the wrong button.
Jonestown and heaven’s Gate are poor comparisons, being decidedly fringe groups. We realistically worry about: mainstream Xtian fundies, mainstream Muslim fundies, and mainstream Jewish fundies. (Asians are blessedly spare on apocalyptic prophecies, it seems.)
Their very mainstreamdom tends to vet out from these coalitions the true psychotics who would take God’s Will into their own hands, and it is very difficult for a true fringe-freak to achieve such high office.
It happens, though. Hitler comes to mind. Such occurrences are born of extremely weird and difficult times (like the 1920s/30s).
Meanwhile, though, each generation, of children who grow up reading/viewing the library of now increasingly cliched apocalyptic books/movies, is more indoctrinated in the idea that nukes are necessary, alas, but only as a porcupine’s quills: not something you attack with but something that prevents other porcupines from attacking.
We are busily concocting more doomsday technologies every year, and cannot escape our need to develop a globally cooperative homo species or else we die.
Summary: ultimately, it’s all hand-wringing evasion of the major problem combined with some attempt to buy us time.
I worry FAR more about providing enough energy for the growing Terran population than Iran getting nukes. Insanely megalomaniacal behavior should intensify drastically under extreme survival stress, I think. But that again is irrationally using rationality to comprehend potential irrationality.
February 13, 2010 at 8:27 am
True enough Kenmeer. It would seem to make ‘sense’ to prevent the kind of apocalyptic failures of social systems if we want to prevent apocalyptic leaders. But none of those calculations are sensible.
Anyhoo, it is not really the p[roliferation of Uranium bnmbs that shoudl worry us. Yeah, they hurt if they hit you. But no worse than a good ol fashion incendiary bomb attack (cf. Dresden). And nobody can make too many of them. The Plutonium weapons and esp the H-bomb (Three Orders of Magnitude more destructive) are the only real worries, and they are not so easy to procure, or detonate.
By the end of the century, maybe a lot of people will have sinple, gun design, Uranium weapons. If need be just using the Uranium obtained from desalination of sea water.
Then nobody will want to invade anybody. But everybody will go ‘guerilla’.
February 13, 2010 at 9:15 pm
kenmeer,
Thanks for the excellent reply, but I do have one paragraph I would like to chew on for a moment:
1) It is true that these are fringe groups, but I would argue that they only differ from mainstream religions in degree.
2) While murdering abortion doctors, flying airplanes into buildings, and beating women for not sitting in the back of the bus may be extreme behaviors, each is applauded by the client religion in the form of “I don’t approve of the method, but…”
3) Aum Shinrikyo + Sarin gas + Tokyo subway = ?
BTW, I had to read that “Ain’t no use worrying about how things won’t work out because nothing won’t work out the way you thought it wouldn’t.” twice before I understood. Wise man, your old man.
February 14, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Thanks for linking to my site but you totally effed up my analytics numbers…
February 14, 2010 at 5:33 pm
Jesse, dude, you have a bitchn’ blog. Can I say that? Can I tell you that? I will. I don’t care. Jesse, you have a bitch’ blog. See I did it, and I feel better.
February 14, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Prepare to have your analytics scrambled beyond comprehension when I link to your blog.
Yes! You did it! Drop the balloons!
February 17, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Fucking retarded van der Walls potential
as I always say.
http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v6/i3/p1232_1