[Lerkfish]

ok, another brain-tickler thread. If possible, I'd like to veer away from current politics per se and concentrate on man as a species and WMD.

Up until recently, the idea that it was possible to foment war of unimaginable proportions easily, instantly, or even accidentally was remote.

Now, any madman/country with access to weapons of mass destruction can instantly create a cyclone of chaos that would take decades or longer to undo.

And, of course, the possibility exists of an even larger interchange exterminating life as we know it.

So, is this the end of the line? have we evolved to this point, only to shoot ourselves in the foot, or always waiting for the other shoe to drop? What can we do to ensure that doesn't happen?

how can or should we use diplomacy, and other things at our disposal to stave off eventual extinction?

thoughts?

[nonhuman]

Kill everyone else before they have a chance to kill us.

Systematically search out and exterminate any government/military body that has controll of such weapons.

Renounce those weapons and trust in the good will of others.

Form an international body that has weapons of mass destruction at its disposal so that it can stand in check against any other body that would try to use them.

Disseminate the information and technology for building and using them so that everyone is on equal footing and trust in the MAD philosophy to prevent any major hostilities.

[Nicko]

Well if the US is right, one answer is to have preemptive strikes. Strike before the enemy is able to attack - it makes a certain amount of sense.

Of course this is a last resort option, a more pragmatic approach would be to reduce the conditions which foster the proliferation of WMD's in the first place.
These conditions are of course, unstable; corrupt governments, poverty, war, ect...

By promoting stable governments, reducing poverty, promoting social justice, and involve all countries in the global community, threats such as terrorism disappear. Globalization is a reality, no longer can countries choose to be isolationist and expect others to ignore them.

Actually, the solutions are quite strait forward.

[thunderous_funker]

So far non-proliferation has meant that some states can have them and some states cannot and the states who have them get to decide.

This is why states want them.

It's time for ALL states to take drastic measures to eradicate them completely and to stop R&D into development of these weapons.

It's time to take a moral stand on WMD's too. If it's wrong for a private company to do experiments on human cloning, it should be wrong to be building the next generation of chemical/biological weapons.

Of course, it could be argued that the cat is already out of the bag and this current arms race will have to run it's course. Perhaps various states will rise up to balance things out and create another statemate (like the Cold War). Perhaps that kind of stability and parity is a thing of the past and only devastation awaits us.

Between WMD and the ecological distasters lurking in our future, I think evolution is about to hand humans their biggest test yet.

[Nicko]

Originally posted by nonhuman:
snip

....little pessimistic are we?

[nonhuman]

Originally posted by Nicko:
....little pessimistic are we?

I tried to come up with a happy utopian solution that didn't involve massive delusion, but I just couldn't think of any. The genie's out of the bottle, and I'm not sure there's anything we can do to stop someone from making a wish eventually.

[thePurpleGiant]

Zero contact. I'll try to explain.

A perfect solution would be for all countries join an international comittee and sign to say that they will not blow each other up (basically). This is not going to happen. The only countries who sign, will all be on the one side.

It seems we must acknowledge that certain countries/regions/continents would not like to make friendly with certain other countries/regions/continents. This we have to accept. Otherwise it is like making the bully at school hang out with the kids who hate him, and vice versa. What the school would normally do in this instance, is to try to make them 'get along'. But if this did not work in any way, it would make sense to separate them.

So:

My idea (of course there will be shortcomngs like any other idea) is that all countries should state which other countries they would like to have dealings with. Import/export, travel, any kind of contact.

This gives these countires a sense of power. Thus once all the countries have agreed on which countries they want contact with, the rest will have no contact. If Iraq doesn't want contact with US, and vice versa, then there should be no war. What happens in their country should be of zero effect to anyone else not on their 'contact list'.

i realise this is rather simplified, surely there's some kind of potential there though.

[vmpaul]

Could be a depressing topic to discuss but funny enough there has been a number of nations that have backed down from developing nuclear weapons in the past decade.

A number of South American countries, a few of the Baltic's after the breakup of the USSR even dismantled their nukes.

Calmer and wiser heads have prevailed in a number of places so I don't think you can be entirely pessimistic.

On the other hand, when you're dealing with mankind things usually have to get worse before they get better. Our actions are very reactive and not so preemptive. So I do think it's likely we'll see a nuclear exchange sometime in the future. At that point more people will take it seriously but unfortunately it'll come at the cost of many lives.

[zigzag]

FWIW, I think that the self-preservation principle has proven to be a deterrent of sorts. Growing up, I lived through the "Duck and Cover" Cold War stuff, and there was this omnipresent fear that the Russkies might attack at any given moment (a friend of mine's family had one of those underground survival bunkers). I perceived Russians in general as Scary Monsters - I had never met one and didn't know any better.

But as I got older and became more aware of Russians, and even Russian leaders, as human beings, I came to believe that people in general, even evil Russkies, don't want war or destruction if they can avoid it. "Mutual Assured Destruction" is a factor, but even in the absence of MAD, I think people are inclined to avoid large-scale conflict, especially having seen what happened at Hiroshima. You can see this playing out in India and Pakistan - there are the occasional shows of force but then everybody backs off, just like at a playground. I suspect that this will go on indefinitely.

There are exceptions, obviously, and we have to guard against them, as Bush claims to be doing re: Saddam Hussein. But I no longer fear the WMD scenario like I did as a kid. I think that for most people, there's too much at stake, too much to lose. Of course, I could be wrong - only time will tell.