Nuclear Free Globe

God bless Obama. Taking his lead from Gordon Brown, he seems dead set on saving the world as well. However, he is planning to do this through getting rid of nuclear weapons rather than solely through dubious economics.

Which sounds pretty fucking dandy. In theory. A nuclear free world has been the chant of so many for so long that it is almost a given. We should all be aspiring to ridding this world of nuclear weapons – they are a source of nothing but grief and potential catastrophe.

Yet things may not be as simple as that.

Even within the article above, there are some of the reasons why it might be so difficult to rid this planet from the blight of nuclear weapons. First of all, it requires rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea to decide to get on board with what the rest of the world is doing. And whilst you might make some headway with the former (particularly if the next elections don’t go the way of the incumbent) I doubt you’re really going to have too much luck with the latter. Note Obama’s refusal to give up on the missile defence system until Iran starts to play ball; he knows that the nuclear free utopia he proposes is not going to happen any time soon.

Then there is the wild card – the nuclear material that has gone missing. It is likely to be in the hands of some extremely dodgy people (if it isn’t already in the hands of international terrorists) and historically those people just don’t play ball. Even if you managed to persuade every country in the world – no matter how loopy the leadership of those countries – then you are still going to have x amount of nuclear material AWOL in the black market. And my understanding is it will be difficult to properly combat that problem, not least because no-one has any idea of how much is out there and where it is.

There is a further point to make here. Nuclear weapons are, arguably, a force for peace. No, really, they are. Had it not been for nuclear weapons, then I think we would have seen world wars over Korea, the Berlin Blockade, and Vietnam to name but a few. India and Pakistan would probably be locked in perpetual conflict as well. Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the devastating potential of atomic weapons – since then world leaders have been extremely reluctant to engage in all out conflict and risk global annihilation. Nuclear weapons have not stopped wars; however they may have limited the scope of those wars.

And finally, even if all countries and all rogue agents do agree to get rid of nuclear weapons, you can’t unlearn the knowledge of how to create them. And you cannot stop other nations or other players, such as international terrorists, gaining or using that knowledge again in the future. The knowledge of how to create nuclear weapons would still exist, even if the weapons themselves did not.

So a world free of nuclear weapons sounds like a grand idea. But the reality and desirability of this ever happening is very much open to debate.