Poul Anderson, Shield, VII.
There have been two atomic wars (!) and the "Protectorate" means that the US monopolizes:
"...arms or armed forces beyond what is needed for internal policing." (p. 54)
Also, the US alone judges whether internal changes in any other country are:
"...consonant with its own security..." (p. 55)
If these measures prevent a third atomic war, then so far, so good. However:
the US could set a moral and political example by dismantling its own nuclear arsenal and redirecting resources toward, e.g., (genuinely) "no-strings-attached" foreign aid?;
"...its own security..." almost certainly means not only strategic but also economic interests.
I foresee that there would be much for other governments and their populations to protest about. However, secretly planning a Fifth World War would not be the way to go.
Ways To Die In An Atomic War (p. 59)
blast
immediate radiation
fire-storms
fall-out
anarchy
disease
"Anarchy," literally meaning "no rule," is also used to mean "lawless." Thus, a group of friends meeting to share a meal or other social activity is "without rule" whereas a gang of thugs harassing them breaks the law. Some people might be surprised to learn how many of their own activities are "anarchist" in the literal sense.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I have to disagree, it would be hopelessly UNREALISTIC of the US in Anderson's novel SHIELD to dismantle it's nuclear weapons and expect the Protectorate to not immediately collapse. Only the superior force held by the US could make the Protectorate work. Without that force rival powers like China would immediately strive to advance their own ambitions (and probably attack the US).
Sean
Sean,
Dicey. I assume, of course, continued American superiority in "conventional" weapons and the ability to inspect other countries' weapons development. But someone has to make a start on dismantling instruments of genocide.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Because the US had survived the previous atomic wars in better condition than its enemies in SHIELD, I'm assuming it held a greater superiority in conventional weapons as well. But, the advantage in having a monopoly in nukes is that it gave the US the means to use less drastic means of enforcing the Protectorate.
And one way of "dismantling" nuclear weapons would be if only one Power held them. Making it, whichever nation it was, de facto dominant in the world.
Sean
Actually, there's a strong argument that nuclear weapons promote peace.
We haven't had a third world war; plenty of wars in the third world, but the industrialized Great Powers have avoided fighting each other straight-up for a very long time now, not because they've become meek and mild, but because their leaders were afraid of the consequences of nuclear war.
There are two things it's important to remember.
First, how terrible high-intensity industrialized warfare was.
100,000 people died on March 9-10 of 1945 in LeMay's firestorm raid on Tokyo; boiling human fat ran in the gutters.
300,000 Red Army men died in the Battle of Berlin in a couple of weeks -- many thousands per day -- and that's not counting German military and civilian losses.
Take a look at a contemporary phoot of a Central European city that had been fought over hard in 1945, and you'll see why they called it the "year zero". Just a sea of rubble, very much like Hiroshima.
Second, people engage in war for understandable reasons.
It's not some natural catastrophe, though it can seem like it to ordinary people caught up in the gears, and it's not a "primal upwelling" of vast impersonal forces either.
Individual human beings, usually a fairly limited number (about 20, for WW1) decide to have a war as a means of accomplishing political goals. They often don't get the war, or the political results, they wanted, but they make the decision after weighing the various factors and possibilities.
That's why we didn't have WW2.
Even with incomplete information, wishful thinking, ideological bias, motivated reasoning, etc., nobody could look at the obvious consequences and say "yeah, pretty good chance of an acceptable outcome, or at least it'll be better than the alternatives if we don't fight".
The Peace of the Mushroom Cloud.
Ooops, that should read: "That's why we didn't have WW3."
The 20th century:
two World Wars;
then nuclear deterrence, therefore Cold War;
then only one super-power, therefore War on Terror.
It seems that "War" has to continue.
Paul: only in the sense that politics has to continue; war is simply a form of political action. Or as Max Weber put it, the ultimately decisive means of political action is violence.
You can ignore persuasion or turn down a bribe, but it's very difficult to ignore a knife to the throat.
The Cold War didn't end with a head-on confrontation between the blocs, because that would have been too destructive to risk. That -type- of war, "total war" between developed nation-states, is obsolete because such a nation-state can access weapons that make it a matter of Mutual Assured Destruction... and nobody is interested in a war that destroys -them-.
But other forms of violent political coercion will continue as long as anyone thinks they can gain by them. It's like crime -- nobody's ever been able to eliminate crime. At most you can keep it manageable.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: your comments have fleshed out and made explicit what I have been trying to say. I think Poul Anderson made basically the same argument in his book THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE on why, so far, the nuclear powers have avoided a head on clash with similarly armed rivals.
Paul: I disagree that the misnamed War on Terror was a necessary consequence of the Cold War. What we are seeing is a RESURGENCE of jihadism from within Islam. There are times when Islamic fanaticism is damped down or forced back (as it was for nearly three centuries after the Ottoman defeat at the Siege of Vienna in 1683). But the potentiality remains within Islam, based as it is on Muslim DOCTRINE that Muslims believe is permanently normative. The collapse of the USSR removed a factor compelling some Muslims to a mere alliance of convenience with the West.
And it does not matter if Muslims you personally happen to know don't believe in jihadism, they can only speak for themselves, not Islam as a whole.
Sean
Sean
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