Re:When Carl Sagan Warned the World About Nuclear Winter (2017)
by tehjoker on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @02:53PM
(#23849906)
There have been so many accidents. Does anyone else remember when a satellite launch in the 90's from Scandinavia followed exactly the trajectory of a "blinding" shot to Russian radar and only their willingness to wait and see prevented retaliation?
If America was not a military empire, we could try downsizing our nuclear forces to a so called minimal deterrent of a few hundred nukes and then negotiate with other countries to progressively downsize. We won't though because nuclear diplomacy is how we convince other countries to submit. It's not outright threats, but the quiet knowledge that we could incinerate them if we wanted. Plans were laid for doing so during the Vietnam War. To our planners, the non-offensive use of nuclear weapons is not absolute like we would like to imagine it is. America still has a first strike policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
If America was not a military empire, we could try downsizing our nuclear forces to a so called minimal deterrent of a few hundred nukes and then negotiate with other countries to progressively downsize. We won't though because nuclear diplomacy is how we convince other countries to submit. It's not outright threats, but the quiet knowledge that we could incinerate them if we wanted. Plans were laid for doing so during the Vietnam War. To our planners, the non-offensive use of nuclear weapons is not absolute like we would like to imagine it is. America still has a first strike policy.