Nuclear weapons saved us from ourselves, therefore Barack Obama is wrong.

An essay I wrote last semester for my course was a counter-factual exercise musing on what the Cold War would have been like without nuclear weapons. It got published on www.e-ir.info yesterday for all to see. 


To get the full effect of this blog post, I recommend reading it. However, in a nutshell, I explain and speculate how nuclear weapons prevented a conventional Third World War. The logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and the pressures caused by the nuclear revolution made wars too costly, even suicidal for states to contemplate and the two opposing superpowers were forced to coexist peacefully or not exist at all. 


MAD and both sides' guaranteed second strike capabilities kept the Soviet Union and the USA at bay. Were nuclear weapons and the psychological effect of them taken away, war between them would have remained a means to an end, as opposed to the end of civilisation. War would have been winnable, and a conventional WWIII would have benen ultimately more destructive than the previous one. Either way, Europe would have been reduced to rubble. Again.


By no means do I denigrate the severity of the atomic bombings on Japan in 1945. However, it seems without a nuclear standoff another more destructive war would have taken its place, and as far as academic debate goes, Japan could have faced a much worse conventional land invasion if the US had not used its atomic arsenal. 


My point here is to relate this to Obama's foolhardy nuclear idealism. He's said, as I'm sure you know, that he wants to get rid of nuclear weapons off the face of the Earth. Given that I trust in MAD to prevent any conflict between the USA/NATO, Russia, China, India and Pakistan I dread the day if nukes were abolished.  If Iran were to acquire nukes, I wouldn't be surprised if things would stabilise in the long term between it and Israel. Deterrence and MAD are universal, and Israel and Iran could be forced into an uneasy coexistence, or both sides face eradication.


Obama got a peace prize for his rhetoric. Illogic rhetoric for any calculating statesman. However in the ignorant public's eyes it's an easy card to play. Were the US to get rid of nukes it would enjoy countries without a trump card to match it's clear conventional military advantage. Nuclear zero would make small states or large ones with old technology and hardware feel very insecure and trigger arms races. And who's to say that other states won't renege on past promises to disarm their nukes?


I refuse to believe that Obama or any serious minded politican can really believe in eradicating nuclear weapons. It would make a major interstate war too likely.