Ymir wrote:
The Iraqi state violated the terms of a cease-fire? What terms was that? They was in the middle of the process of destroying weapons that they for some reason wasen't allowed to have, when nations* that represent a much greater threath to worldwide peace have them in uncountable numbers.
*Do you really have to guess which one of those nations are?
- Ymir, seem to miss the logic in weapon allowances
Nuclear weapons are not a threat to worldwide peace necessarily - They kept the cold war Cold for fifty years because of Strategic Paralysis, for example. You could argue they're even a Good Thing in that vein. The problem is when someone
irrational has them.
Strategic Paralysis is the idea that nuclear weapons
are so destructive that the rational ruler of a country will, on realizing their potential, do his best to avoid their getting used on his nation. Stalin and Mao saned up nice and good when they got the bomb. We seen other examples of this in the foreign policy of other states - Two wars between India and Pakistan were probably averted because of their nuclear arsenals, for example. So once you have the bomb you're
not going to use it against a nation which also has it - Not first, anyway, and not if you're
rational.
That's part of why NMD is so important - It could take out an accidental launch, give people time to think (The Russians mistook a Norweigan research rocket launch for a nuclear missile in the 90s, but didn't begin launching their arsenal because they thought the ABM system* around Moscow could handle a single strike, for example) - give some leeway into the system for things like that.
The bigger problem is that someone who is irrational might start running a country with nukes. Then the system goes out the window. What if they don't care? What if they think they can get away with a launch at an ally, or at troops? What if they have some group ideology which will make their commanders obey an obvious suicide order even under circumstances where it's avoidable? All sorts of things like that. And Saddam's regime has demonstrated irrational behaviour of that sort.
This makes his efforts to gain nuclear devices very worrying. Once he already has them it is to late - strategic paralysis is in place, and if he proves himself irrational the Mid-East gets
hot. Now, on to lesser WMDs - Chem and Bio and radiological weaponry. We need to clean these out of Saddam's possession because, in principle, they are part of the same arsenal. The response by the USA to that sort of thing is a nuke; they're counted as the same. I'd argue a bio-weapon is
worse than a nuke, for that matter - Which
could kill more people, an atomic bomb or a vial of smallpox? And he already has those weapons and the same irrational mindset that makes us worrying about him getting the Bomb.
So of
course we wanted him disarmed in '91 and of
course we viewed his failure to disarm as a serious thing - Which, considering it violated the terms of a
cease-fire, had
serious consequences.
