Acquiring nukes seems like the best way for any country to protect themselves against outside interference.
We know that as soon as Gaddafi decommissioned his nukes, Libya was targeted and invaded. If Iraq actually did have nukes, the USA wouldn’t have been so brazen to invade.
China, Russia, and North Korea’s acquisitions of nukes are also some of the main reasons why they are not easy targets for direct US invasion.
If Iran had nukes, it would drastically limit Israel’s ability to indiscriminately attack Iranian assets.
Western policies against nuclear proliferation always seem to target the countries that need them the most to ensure national sovereignty, and never refer to their own nukes.
For example, they always fearmonger about “rogue states” like North Korea getting nukes, while being perfectly okay with Israel’s own nukes. It might be best if these policies are ignored entirely.
Iran doesn’t need nukes, right now at least. Iran’s missile strike against Israel demonstrated that Iran can hit what it wants when it wants. Israel has a nuclear power plant and (illegal) nuclear facilities, which Iran can hit and turn Israel into a radioactive wasteland, if push comes to shove.
Moreover, Iran is morally opposed to nuclear weapons, so I don’t see them getting them any time soon.
Also, if this story is to be believed, Israel tried to hit Iran with an EMP nuclear device, after Iran’s missile strike, which was shot down by a Russian aircraft.
That is not how nuclear reactors work, they don’t explode and turn the surrounding area into a wasteland.
First, reactors are some of the most impervious buildings in existence. It would be incredibly difficult to significantly damage a reactor in any other way then dozens of large yield bunker buster munitions. It’s to the point where Al Qaeda planned several attacks on US nuclear plants, but had to scrap all the plans as even a jet liner going over a thousand kilometers per hour would barely cause a scratch on the outer reinforced walls.
The fuel in a reactor is also not explosive, and will not meltdown when rendered inert. Further, in the case of an attack, a reactor can be SCRAMed in seconds to kill an ongoing reaction, and fuel rods can be contained. Obliterating a reactor rendered inert would at best leave the site of the reactor room itself moderately radioactive, though cleanup would be easy as the radioactive material would still be in the form of dense fuel grade metals, as they would not have undergone nuclear reaction and been broken down into radionuclide. That is if the reactor room itself could even be breached.
Reactors do not turn into Chernobyl, that was the result of multiple factors all coalescing into a horrific failure due to several protocol and design failures.
Iran has a moral obligation to get nukes
I’m unconvinced.
Sanctions are warfare and nuclear weapons do not deter those at all. In fact, they become justification for even more sanctions! Fortunately this method of warfare is becoming less effective as the global economy dedollarizes and the industrial capacity of the Global South continues to rise, but it’s still devastating to the millions of people who are subjected to what is essentially siege warfare. Do you think Cuba or Venezuela would be helped at all by having a nuclear program? The sanctions would still be there and probably get even worse.
what could cuba or venezeula do that would not have sanctions thrown onto them in a heartbeat? nothing, the sanctions of the capitalist world on these countries are not punishments for specific actions, they are punishments for ideology and for falling out of line with the capitalist world order.
The sanctions can always get worse.
The question is how do nukes help?
By getting nukes, a socialist country can guarantee that any invasion by a capitalist power will result in massive consequences for them, providing massive deterrence power. This allows them to reduce the resources they have to spend on the rest of the military, and instead put that into bettering the lives of the people, thus countering the sanctions.
This is North Korea’s current strat.
This is the correct answer.
Neither Cuba nor Venezuela have large military expenditures nor nukes, whereas the DPRK has a very large military expenditure despite the nukes.
North Korea will always need a sizable military budget until occupied Korea and the USA stopped practicing how to invade their country twice every year. South Korea’s military is also enormous and is the same size as North Korea’s.
My argument is that it lets them spend less human resources on the the military and instead direct it to improve the country.
Also, I don’t trust any Western reports on North Korea supposed military expenditures. They will always try to depict North Korea in the most nonsensical, worst possible light.
Do they actually spend fewer human resources on the military? They have the fourth largest military in the world, so when combined with their very large military budget the nuclear weapons program doesn’t seem to have helped at all. The DPRK needs to show its military strength to the world to discourage Western aggression because nuclear weapons aren’t enough.
To clarify, I don’t think it’s nonsensical for them to put so many resources into their military. I just wonder how much the nukes actually help.
The sanctions are going to be there no matter what, and the more sovereignty and socialism a country strives for the more the imperialists try to pile on the sanctions. A country refraining from acquiring nuclear weapons does nothing to make them impose less sanctions. Your argument essentially amounts to allowing the imperialists intimidate and blackmail a country into foregoing self-defense. Iran has not yet developed nuclear weapons but they have essentially been treated as though they have. Cuba has been living under a crushing blockade, do you think that the US has been holding back because Cuba was nice enough to not have nuclear weapons?
To believe that if a socialist or anti-imperialist country just “plays by the rules” and bows down to imperialist diktat about not having nuclear weapons they will somehow be treated more nicely is incredibly naive. Not having the capability to defend yourself just puts you at risk, it emboldens the imperialists to more regime change attempts, more color revolutions, more aggression. Acquiring any and all necessary and available means for self-defense is a strategic and imo moral imperative for anti-imperialists. Whether that means nuclear weapons or more conventional assymetric armaments depends on the economic and military capabilities of a country, but nothing should be excluded.
Sanctions can always get worse.
My argument is that nuclear weapons don’t help and might invite greater sanctions. At best it doesn’t change anything.
And I’d rather a sanctioned country have nuclear weapons always available rather than be a sitting duck.
Plenty of so-called sitting ducks have avoided getting invaded for decades, it doesn’t seem like nuclear deterrence is either necessary or helpful. If the DPRK had slashed their military budget after getting nukes I could see the appeal, but they still spend more as a percentage of GDP than any of the other sanctioned nations. Having nuclear weapons hasn’t stopped the West from waging proxy war either.
You can’t be this willfully ignorant and naive
I want you to imagine Cuba having its own nuclear program and nuclear arsenal. Would that change anything for the better for Cuba? I certainly don’t think it would change anything about Cuba’s current situation, but maybe it would hold off potential future US aggression.
I’m not convinced, I think the US would become even more aggressive if there was a nuclear rival in the Western hemisphere.
Now I want you to imagine the DPRK not having a nuclear program. Would they actually be vulnerable to Western aggression? They have the fourth largest military in the world, with or without nuclear weapons they could flatten Seoul. Do the nukes actually help? Maybe.
Again, I’m not convinced. I don’t think nuclear weapons are as powerful a deterrent to be worth bothering with. I’m not even against enemies of the US/NATO suicide pact having nuclear weapons, I just question if they’re really the best use of resources or worth the consequences.
The DPRK having nuclear weapons is unarguably the reason they haven’t been attacked yet. That and China’s help, of course, but with how often U.S. politicians have suggested nuking the DPRK, I can’t not take them at their word.
That’s a fair point and I didn’t mean to be too dickish. I think Cuba is the exception to the rule though.
I don’t think so, although I can see the arguments for both sides.
I just bought a book on Disarmament published by the USSR, once I get a chance to read some of it I may loop back to this.
I think the biggest reason why all countries should have nukes is that there is no way to guarantee that any one country doesn’t have nukes, and just isn’t telling anyone else.
For instance, there is no way in all hell the US will ever give up its nukes, unless the leadership gets blown to kingdom come first or they get overthrown.
If no one had nukes, all would be well and good. But if one country has nukes, everyone should have them as deterrence.
That makes sense, I just think about all the times nuclear war was accidentally started when effectively only two countries had nukes. The risk of an accident or a lapse of judgment happening when some two hundred countries have nuclear weapons is magnified significantly.
Yes.
Yes.
Indeed.
Yes.
Yes
nuclear weapons are horrible tools of mass destruction that should not have been created in the first place.
but that doesn’t change the material reality, which is that the western capitalist world holds onto these weapons of mass destruction. just as its necessary to have an existing opposition to western hegemony, its necessary to have an opposition to the monopoly they hold on the nuclear arsenal.
It might be best if these policies are ignored entirely.
You just answered your own question. Fuck the imperialists and fuck their “non-proliferation” hypocrisy. Why are they allowed nukes while other smaller countries are not? It’s time to start ignoring them and their attempts to impose rules on the rest of the world that they themselves don’t abide by.
The world can possibly only deescalate its nuclear arsenal under communism. As terrible as nukes are, anti-imperialist countries having nukes makes it less likely that the imperialists will use theirs.
I’m split on nukes. On one hand yea, pretty much the only way to ensure you won’t be invaded/bombed by America is to have a credible nuclear program and the ability to strike American targets.
On the other hand, I really hate the existence of nukes and the threat of nuclear war, and more nukes is only going to make that more likely.
But at the end of the day I support countries like Iran aquiring nukes to ensure their security. As long as one country has nukes then every other country has a right to their own for sake of deterrence.
me too, i not sure. a great army sure, all remaining socialists country are military power, not all have nukes tho.
We know that as soon as Gaddafi decommissioned his nukes, Libya was targeted and invaded.
This is historically inaccurate and disrespectful of the memory of the madlad Gaddafi: Gaddafi never had nukes. He was accused of having a nuclear weapons program but that was highly doubtful because it was coming from the Bush admin in 2003. Regardless Gaddafi claimed to have decommissioned the WMD program that probably never existed. It was also a decade later that he was targeted by the Obama admin in 2013.
Strategic alliances are much more important. When the imperialists come and prod, who will have your back?
If your strategic alliances are good you will acquire nukes as needed and weather imperialist sanctions.
Any historical examples of this actually working? Especially since the break-up of the USSR? China’s strategy directly precludes them ever coming to save your ass against the US for example. That strategy could change but I don’t see that happening before the 2030s at the earliest.
It takes more than just being on the same side to launch into a direct war with the US over some friendship. The USSR never did it, they at most offered support, weapons, some pilots and aircraft and turned things into wars where the US directly fought their proxies but they avoided direct conflict with the US because of the risk of escalation to immediate nuclear war. In the case of Korea with China’s help they eked out a stalemate and denied them a victory. In the case of Vietnam they won, but at a terrible cost, the US invaded and did atrocities and butchered and dumped toxic forever chemicals all over their country in addition to traditional munitions and mines which kill people to this day.
Nukes aren’t about just winning, you can win without nukes, they’re about dissuading the invaders from coming and butchering your people in the first place, from subjecting your people to years, decades of hardship, to destroying your means of production and plunging your people into misery, disease, starvation, poverty, etc.
It’s all well and good to have friends who will give you some weapons and maybe lend you some pilots, doesn’t save your people from starving when the Americans take out your crop production. Doesn’t save them from misery and poverty and deprivation during the war and for years after because they’ve destroyed all your industry and infrastructure and killed and maimed so many young people.
Also nukes are not an “acquire as needed” thing as very few countries have done so successfully. It’s not like China just handed the DPRK some nuclear weapons or the complete schematics, they had to build them themselves and it took many years. If the day comes when you need nukes fast because the US is saber-rattling and talking of an invasion, you won’t have the time to get them. You’ll either already have them and they’ll do no more than rattle the saber or you won’t have them and they’ll bomb the shit out of you and take away your ability to get them. Once the US eye of Sauron is on your country, if you try to get nukes and they notice (they will), they have a strong incentive to bomb the shit out of you to prevent it and punish you as an example to others.
Sanctions are a separate topic in defense. Yes you need alliances to weather them, no such alliances had no real possibility of existing before the present escalation against Russia and before that increasing escalation against China with sanctions. And such alliances again do not protect against direct intervention if the US wishes to go there. Increasingly they may find themselves unable to do that with any luck but in the past it was not the case and there is no guarantee they won’t be able to again in future. Nukes and alliances are shields against two separate things IMO. Both have a role to play if you want to guarantee the US can’t attack you successfully.
DPRK is actually a pretty good example because without the alliances and trading partnerships they provide it would have been stuck in the post-Soviet shock much longer and have basically no chance of developing a nuke. The DPRK exists only because China and Russia trade with it and implicitly provide associated military protection. It would most likely have been fully destabilized and color revolution’d in the 90s/early 2000s otherwise. The line on Korean unification shifted once the DPRK was in the back foot. SK and their imperialist masters have been pushing pro-reunification propaganda hard since the 90s. It’s comically absurd propaganda that is paired with painting NK as a militaristic threat at the same time. The propaganda is built on the premise that reunification would favor SK and amount to the end of the DPRK entirely, seeing the SK regime take over the whole peninsula.
The opposite situation is also true - you can have nukes and the US will contol you. Pakistan has nukes but is forced into compliance with US interests on a regular basis. This is because the primary weapon of imperialists is not their militaries (though they do use them) but their financial interventions and intelligence ops and funding of NGOs and lawfare etc etc. Constant pressure from all angles. The US just soft coup’d Pakistan’s leadership and were not deterred by the nukes. The fall of anti-imperialist, or even just slightly less imperialist states requires a pre-existing instability, otherwise there would be no coup government, it would be deposed by the military and the people. It is necessary, but insufficient, to create an economic base through alliances and trade in order to build a stable ruling order.
Of course you’re making a fine point that nukes deter an invasion and are complementary to other anti-imperialist actions. I just think the nukes are a lesser tool than strong ties. The latter is usually a prerequisite for the former, even. The ties ensure trade and more stability, the stability needed to organize and pay a military. The US has often thought so as well, a lot (most?) of its fucking around can be interpreted as a divide and conquer strategy.
