Nukes deserve the Nobel

ARTICLE: Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel, By David Von Drehle, Time, Oct. 11, 2009

This one I wholeheartedly endorse: nuclear weapons deserve the Nobel Peace Prize--year after year after year.

(Thanks: Ken Nalaboff)

Comments

[Ellie]

I don't know Tom, singing the bomb's praise is a bit much considering how close we've come to catastrophe. Surely luck's played a significant role in their lack of misuse? I could see Hitler challenging the MAD doctrine, had he the bomb. One grave error places the entire species at risk. Rejoice the bomb hasn't finished us off yet, forget save us. I'd prefer taking my chances with conventional ordinance despite the higher risk of use. Higher recovery factor, too.

Globalization is a far better candidate for the peace prize, no?

[Tom Barnett]

You automatically lose the argument when you invoke either Hitler or the Nazis: you can't cite pre-MAD circumstances and say that makes MAD suspect. That's not a valid counterfactual. For it to work, you'd need a 1970s Hitler, meaning one that arose in a major advanced Western country or one that somehow rises up in the Sov system of that era. We can't run that experiment but the one time, and neither happens.

Most likely outcome with Hitler getting the bomb isn't blow up the world (seriously, if you give Hitler that many bombs, he's unattackable, so he couldn't have lost the war), but rather he replaces the Sovs as the big "other" and we have a Cold War with him just like we did with Moscow.

Yes, early on, he could have easily used several, because nobody knew anything about them, but again, that's pre-MAD. Once he uses a few, we would have returned the favor, and then he's facing the end of his regime unless he submits to a standoff--same path.

Hitler may have survived with an invisible robot friend too, but we'll never know that one either. We can only live in the timeline we have.

[Jeff]

Nukes made globalization possible.

[Ellie]

Thanks for the insight Tom. Point taken.In our current climate nukes are a necessary evil, offering a high risk form of stalemate peace at best, but take into consideration the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world was a hair trigger away from armegeddon. We simply got lucky! The Russian-Cuban stand down is technically a feather in your MAD cap, but the situation was on the verge of escalating out of control.

Thats the problem with nukes as peacemakers. One bad actor or series of mishaps, and fallout rains on everyone's parade, inviting a potentially unrecoverable extinction level event. This should immediately disqualify it from any esteemed position of recognition. That's my only point. Globalization is clearly the superior candidate for your Nobel award, for obvious reasons.

Tom, what's your take on the '83 Stanislav Petrov incident? As close as the press claims, or largely hyperbole?

@Jeff - Nukes may influence globalization, but claiming sole sustenance is a bit of a stretch. Globalization backed by conventional firepower would continue to evolve just fine, despite any bumps on the road, with or without nukes.

[Tom Barnett]

Cuba was the tipping point on learning--definitely.

The Petrov story seems realistic enough. The real lesson? Every time any such mistake happened, the human in the loop naturally stopped the process

[William R. Cumming]

While certainly true from several standpoints, the nuclear overhang that threatens constantly is generating nilistic activity by both nation-states and non-state actors. Better that splitting the atom had waited a few centuries.