Re:Noam Chomsky: American Power Under Challenge
by krapp on Monday May 09, 2016 @07:52PM
(#11664235)
Those conflicts would be limited in their scope and their destructive potential, so arguably the world as a whole would be safer. How many cities can one nuclear-armed submarine destroy and how many such submarines do the nuclear powers of the world have? A thousand conventional wars are preferable to one full-scale nuclear war.
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Re:Noam Chomsky: American Power Under Challenge
by greedo on Thursday May 12, 2016 @02:13PM
(#11685524)
A thousand conventional wars? Maybe on the scale of WW1 where an entire generation of men were wiped out in Europe? Or the Franco Prussian wars which convulsed Europe before that? Or maybe something simple like the ethnic cleansing in Uganda that only resulted in a hair under 1 million casualties?
How about the Indian sub-continent? Nuclear weapons have largely been responsible for keeping Pakistan and India from going at each other. Both know that their enemy has the ability to wipe each other out with nukes.
Nuclear weapons should also be credited with keeping Sino-Soviet tempers from flaring too hot before the end of the Cold War. Some of the border incidents would have easily escalated to full war if Beijing hadn't been intimidated by Soviet nukes.