As speculation mounts that Kim Jong-un and Trump could meet this month, analysts say Pyongyang will continue to see nuclear weapons as a matter of survival
North Korea’s launch last week of a missile from a naval destroyer elicited an uncharacteristically prosaic analysis from the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. The launch was proof, he said, that arming ships with nuclear weapons was “making satisfactory progress”.
But the test, and Kim’s mildly upbeat appraisal, were designed to reverberate well beyond the deck of the 5,000-tonne destroyer-class vessel the Choe Hyon – the biggest warship in the North Korean fleet.
His pointed reference to nuclear weapons was made as the US and Israel continued their air bombardment of Iran – a regime Donald Trump had warned, without offering evidence, was only weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.
If they have a bigger brain they would make a bigger stockpile with more capable strike capability. Having global nuclear reach is the only way to have sovereignty in 2026.
Instead of using our combined resources to elect, better governments, and what not we could just make nukes. The poor will be starving still but we will have nukes.
Idealism vs Realism in International Relations:
Of course it would be preferable that we all realise just how much money and resources are being wasted on war that could do more good for eveyone when invested in constructive measures such as infrastructure and trade.
Unfortunately, enough awful people exist to make that idea (currently) unfeasible. We will have nukes, but at least we might still live.
(That’s not to endorse the status quo, and we absolutely should change it. We need to acknowledge where we stand in order to plan how we get where we want to go, but go we should.)
Realism = looking at your neighboring countries and wondering if it’s worth turning them into a toxic wasteland because you felt a little scared. The repercussions of nuclear armament in these psychotic times will be all consuming.
It’s just a really funny thing to see casually thrown around with the context of the last hundred years. I can’t imagine any of you guys have looked into the Cold War nuclear policies.
Realism in this case is one approach to examining international relations, which models states as self-interested actors in an anarchic global system. It assumes that there are no other rules than reasonable self-interest constraining decisions. In essence, it takes a “worst case” approach to human decency, but also a “best case” approach to rational government.
It’s not a “perfect” model, because no model is, but it can offer explanations and predictions for some decisions, which makes it a useful tool in talking about national security.
Not quite.
The objective of a defender is self-preservation. The way they achieve that is typically to make attacking them unattractive by raising the cost of the attack and eroding the will of the attacker. If they can no longer afford to keep pushing, or if their own people are rebelling against the austerity of wartime measures, they will eventually either have to negotiate or collapse.
The sooner the enemy comes to the conclusion that they won’t get a favourable result, the sooner they’ll want to cut their losses. Ideally, they will come to that conclusion even before attacking at all. That is where nuclear deterrence comes into play: Not to be used (lightly), but to communicate “A war with me may become so horribly expensive that the risk isn’t worth whatever you stand to gain.”
You don’t nuke your neighbour because you feel a little scared. You build nukes because you’re no longer sure that conventional weaponry is enough to deter a potential attacker. Your rival isn’t sure whether you’ll use them offensively, accordingly unsettled by the possibility of getting nuked and starts building their own.
And then we arrive at the principle of MAD and the cold war: if either attacks the other, they risk getting destroyed as well, but if either disarms, they risk losing that deterrence that keeps the other from attacking first.
To make all of this worse, I’ll return to my introductory note: This line of reasoning is built on the premise that all involved parties are rational. We can safely say that this doesn’t hold up to reality.
On one hand, a state is larger than its leader, and a lunatic in charge can’t launch the first strike without the cooperation of his people. If they act rationally and refuse to carry out the order, that might prevent the irrationality of individuals from fucking up everyone.
On the other, deception or error may lead to the launch of a “second” strike where no first one has taken place, fucking up everyone.
The Cuba crisis stands as an example for both of those “deviations” from the rational premise of Realism. Fortunately, one ended up compensating for the other, but the idea that it took two “wrongs” at once to make a right is scary.
There is also another premise that doesn’t entirely hold, one that can break the dilemma and led to the disarmament: having faith that the other will take the same risk to break out of the stalemate isn’t strictly self-interested, but humans aren’t all evil and paranoid. Human decency can help us build a better world.
We “just” need to get the pricks out of the way…
There’s also that pesky calculation of how many nukes can I deliver effectively. I believe you pointed out that Russia wants to protect its main cities. The scale of your arsenal would have to be able to overwhelm counter missiles for a small nation to get to MAD scale would cost a fortune.
You can look at it from an IR perspective. You can look at it by game theory we can look at the historical context. It’s all quite frightening to me.
I personally believe we should be disarming the things. I liked growing up in that period of history where there wasn’t a constant threat of nuclear extinction. Hate to see us go back in that direction.
Realism is more nukes = more chances for an all out nuclear war that wipes out 80% of humanity. Probably more like the 99% that don’t own bunkers
Realism as a framework for studying International Relations models states as rational actors in a global system without rules.
Under that framework, more nukes should mean less war because the risk of MAD raises the potential cost of aggression past the primary objective of the state: self-preservation. A rational actor won’t start a war that might see the enemy pressed to the point where they decide that the risk of using nukes is acceptable.
Of course, that framework fails to account for irrational behaviour. The problem isn’t (strictly) nukes, but unchecked megalomaniacs and growing nationalist hatred.
Yes, more nukes means that a potential devastation might be much worse, but if you wonder what less nukes means, ask Ukraine how that turned out for them.
It’s the mentality of “the other guy bad” we need to tackle. That’s the fuel that feeds populist warmongers and the glue that sustains fascism.
I agree fully. I wish we could go back to 2022 and give Ukraine the full support of the US military and honored our treaty. Wish they got let into NATO. Hate that we gotta talk about nukes. Don’t think 20 nukes would deter Russia or USA from belligerent aggression, considering the regimes in charge.
Ya and I don’t think getting every country a nuke is realistic. There’s a reason why we started disarming the nukes and getting rid of them. And like the reason is now they are not OK to have around unstable government. The US is an unstable government with the most advanced nukes in the world. And more of them than most countries combined. It’s just not really a sane move to be trying to arm yourself with weapons of mass destruction in the face of an unstable country willing to use them.
You’ll never build enough nukes before we come bomb you for trying to build nukes you know? That’s what’s happening in Iran. You screech about getting a nuke and bombing America for 30 years and you kind of don’t get any sympathy when the insane government comes to bomb your ass. These people would love to nuke Iran they just know they couldn’t survive it poltivally yet…
Maybe the lesson to be learned is that publicly calling for a nuclear weapon to use against a nuclear power is probably not a good political stance. You should try to keep it hush-hush.
Yes, sir, when I look around and see a deteriorating global peace, the first thing I think is nuclear proliferation. It’s like clearly humans can handle more destructive power and need to be threatening each other on a more existential scale.