You know, this is what I keep asking myself about all the fine folks in defense, developing the newest fucking weapons/plane/gun/drone/whatever which _will_ be used people in other countries.
We should introduce a "walk away from your job"-kickstarter thing to encourage leaving those positions.
There's a wide range of moral gray area there. Imagine, e.g., a US contractor who builds converters that make dumb bombs into smart bombs. The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.
> The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.
This has been used as a talking point pro smart bombs for some time now - and yet we have still bombings of weddings with a civilian hit rate of nearly 100%.
Killing is is still killing, no matter how smart the weapon is.
I think you should check out how bombing was conducted before the introduction of the smart bomb. We used to intentionally and systematically destroy entire civilian populations.
I'll let the people bombing you know that you are unhappy they have bombs and refuse to make your own to deter them from bombing you because you don't support the use of bombs.
Would you like your message to include the sound of the bomb explosion that killed your brother or should we leave that out?
The point people are trying to get you to understand is that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of years of human history that has shown that when two groups of people disagree and cannot come to an agreement: they war.
Even when they reach an agreement, it's possible that one group will backstab the other group. Or perhaps they interpreted a given part of an agreement in different ways and are now arguing over which is the proper interpretation (a naive understanding of the Shia-Sunni relations)?
So Group A decides they are correct and will force Group B to agree by force. They approach Group B with their army armed with bows and swords. Group B has to submit to Group A, die, or fight back. To fight back they need a better trained army with superior bows and superior swords.
Group A is fearful that Group B now has a superior army with superior weaponry. So Group A invents guns. The sword-armed troops of Group B no longer stand a fighting chance against Group A. Fearing they will have to submit to Group A or die - Group B invents explosives... and so on and so on.
Now we have nuclear weapons that devastate miles of land and kill anyone caught in the blast. Fearing that a war between Group A and Group B would kill both sides and a Group C might enforce their ways, Group A and Group B have decided against using such powerful weapons against each other.
Now imagine you have 250 groups.
248 don't believe in using bombs.
Which 2 groups are in power? Hint: it's not one of the 248 "peaceful" groups.
A nation's strong defensive capabilities deter action. If Ukraine had NATO level arms that could counter Russia's weapons, there would be no war in Ukraine right now. Instead, their military is all Soviet relics that current-gen and even most last-gen Russian arms can easily overrun; thus the Russian led artillery, Russian led AA, Russian led forces, and Russian special ops making mincemeat of their military.
Its incredible how people pretend deterrence isn't real or a social benefit. Nation state warfare follows pretty simple game theory rules. You'd think techies would understand this. We're living under the most peaceful time in human history thanks to major deterrence, including but not limited to nuclear arms.
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Dr. Steven Pinker, Pulitzer prize-winning author and Harvard psychology professor, writes, “Today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.” Pinker points out, wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and wars don’t kill as many people as they did in the Middle Ages, for instance. Also, global rates of violent crime have plummeted in the last few decades. Pinker notes that the reason for these advances are complex but certainly the rise of education, and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others has played its part.
The alternative to cold wars is hot wars. Do you really want another WWII (60 million dead)? The idea that peace will happen if we make shitty arms is historically untrue. The idea that peace happens when we make cutting-edge arms is historically true.
There is very little difference between arms and modern industrial chemicals. Without arms, we can still kill large populations by destroying their water supplies and crops. Even if you managed to rid the world of every weapon more advanced than a knife, if/when conflict arises, we can kill populations at a grander scale than ever before.
He is is making the correct assumption that even if some people want peace others will be more than happy to kill you and rationalise that it was actually a good thing. So you are both right: the alternative is peace or war. I would definitely prepare for war though. To do otherwise is naive and gratuitously stupid.
Si vis pacem, para bellum may be a practical advice, but the outcome of it is an arms race. Which is a big problem, because that feedback loop ties up resources and manpower that could be better used elsewhere. So even if it is the most practical option now (since we don't have a single global government), we need to recognize how shitty it is and maybe figure out how to reduce its impact.
But the nuclear game theorist's argument has always been that while functionally more dangerous (i.e. life on this planet could be obliterated at any moment), a nuclear-tipped détente has greater stability than any alternative (i.e. it is least likely to lead to hostilities).
I see the argument for nuclear de-foresting a lot like the argument against nuclear power. Yes, at face value it seems an obvious best option. However, when compared to the realistic alternatives, other approaches may be preferable.
It also allows both sides to maintain a minimal standing army while maximizing the cost of an opponent initiating hostilities. Most of the West's strategic nuclear position has historically been to counter an overwhelming Warsaw Pact numerical advantage in European conventional forces.
Deterrence indeed; the nations keenest right now on developing their own nuclear weapons (DPRK and Iran, I'm looking at you) are doing it because they know damn well it's the only way to be safe from the world's current invasion-happy globe-trotting nation and favoured sidekick (who, to be fair, do seem a lot less keen to invade other countries after the long series of monumental clusterfucks in Iraq and Afghanistan). The question is can they develop them before said warstarters decide to invade anyway?
China remembers what the US was thinking the last time it was yomping about near the Yalu River and certainly won't put up with anyone invading the DPRK, so they're safe at least from that quarter, but if I was Iran, having watched Iraq get invaded and then screwed over for a decade for essentially no reason whatsoever, I'd be really keen to have some kind of deterrence before the US decided to invade.
We should introduce a "walk away from your job"-kickstarter thing to encourage leaving those positions.