Imagine a world where every country has a stockpile of nukes

[Geronimo]

What would happen if every country in the world had a stockpile of nuclear weapons?

Would war cease to occur between states?

Would a global nuclear war become inevitable?

Would war between states continue but somehow no party to any war would ever resort to using the nukes (something like how chem weapons weren't used in the second world war)?

Would limited scale nuclear wars occur from time to time but no major global scale conflicts would occur?

Would an effective SDI technology be made that would make some countries effectively immune against nuclear attacks even if smaller countires simply tried to build more weapons to overwhelm such systems?

In such a world would nukes eventually fall into the hands of non state actors who would use them in a terrorist capacity?

My assumption is that if ever nuclear weapons become relatively ubiquitous they will eventually trigger a large enough nuclear exchange to utterly devastate the global economy and environment if not destroy civilization out right.

However, I get the impression from reading posts from many here that they believe MAD will preclude any real danger of nuclear war regardless of how many actors on the worldstage come to posses them.

What are your thoughts on the dangers if any of unchecked nuclear proliferation?

[lord of the mark]

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=160577&perpage=30&pagenumber=1

see esp my comment number 12.

[PuddlewatchHQ]

It's only a matter of time.

As long as they exist, it's only a matter of time. All efforts attempting to contain them are only delaying tactics.

[Geronimo]

Re: It's only a matter of time.

Originally posted by PuddlewatchHQ
As long as they exist, it's only a matter of time. All efforts attempting to contain them are only delaying tactics.

what will happen when everybody has them? do you think they will still go unused?

[GePap]

Nothing in particular happens.

NUkes are mostly useful strategically, not tactically. So it gives every nation some degree of strategic security, but only if they can have an assured second strike capability. If they can't, anyone who wants to invade would try for a "clean" first strike, take out all their nukes, then take them out. In short all it would do is change the way one attempts to fight war, but I doubt it would make war more likely. If anything, after a few messy exchanges and a few million killed, the current general sidelining of interstate war would increase. Certainly sucks for the few million killed, but short of a complete and total exchange of several thousand hydrogen bombs, the state system that exists today would chug along.

Your example though if fundametally flawed. If we had a world in which fissionable material was that common, and the technology to fashion nukes was that widely available, one has to think the technology is different enough that even worst weapons must by then come along, retai8ning some sort of hierarchy of terror.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by GePap
Nothing in particular happens.

NUkes are mostly useful strategically, not tactically. So it gives every nation some degree of strategic security, but only if they can have an assured second strike capability. If they can't, anyone who wants to invade would try for a "clean" first strike, take out all their nukes, then take them out. In short all it would do is change the way one attempts to fight war, but I doubt it would make war more likely. If anything, after a few messy exchanges and a few million killed, the current general sidelining of interstate war would increase. Certainly sucks for the few million killed, but short of a complete and total exchange of several thousand hydrogen bombs, the state system that exists today would chug along.

I'm pinning my hopes on this sort of analysis. I seriously doubt anybody has the will and means to prevent proliferation so I *hope* that the first few inevitable nuclear wars will scare the surviving states into some sort of action designed to prevent a more general apocolypse. .

Originally posted by GePap
Your example though if fundametally flawed. If we had a world in which fissionable material was that common, and the technology to fashion nukes was that widely available, one has to think the technology is different enough that even worst weapons must by then come along, retai8ning some sort of hierarchy of terror.

as far as the bottleneck of fissionable materials goes does anybody know what fraction was used to produce the tens of thousands of warheads that were deployed in the cold war?

I had assumed there was plenty more were that came from.

[Kuciwalker]

NUkes are mostly useful strategically, not tactically.

Nukes are great tactical weapons. The only problems come in when you take the longer view.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

NUkes are mostly useful strategically, not tactically.

Nukes are great tactical weapons. The only problems come in when you take the longer view.

No they are not. Their effects on the modern battlefield are either too limited, not causing sufficient damage to the enemy, or too widespread, hurting your own forces or degrading your own capabilities and damaging what you seek to gain.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by GePap


No they are not. Their effects on the modern battlefield are either too limited, not causing sufficient damage to the enemy, or too widespread, hurting your own forces or degrading your own capabilities and damaging what you seek to gain.

which is wonderful if it's a theatre where you would otherwise simply lose.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by GePap


No they are not. Their effects on the modern battlefield are either too limited, not causing sufficient damage to the enemy, or too widespread, hurting your own forces or degrading your own capabilities and damaging what you seek to gain.

Nukes are very good naval weapons. And they really aren't that bad at killing soldiers either.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Nukes are very good naval weapons. And they really aren't that bad at killing soldiers either.

Biological weapons are great at killing soldiers too. The issue is not lethality, is how that lethality is applied to a battlefield. If the point is to take a town, a nuke is uselss, since it negates the tactical objective.

In terms of a war of mobility, modern mechanized forces have been "hardened" against nuclear attack and these forces always occupy large amounts of real estate, so except in a relatively narrow area one nukes is not going to open some huge hole in a line you can exploit. You would have to apply very big bombs, and the ecological effects would slow your advance through the breach, or several bombs to a line with the same ecological effects. You could use nukes to deny enemy infrastructure, like bridges, to slow and advance, but then it that regard they are overkill.

As for Naval combat, they are great one shot ship killers, and would disrupt any battlegroup, but then the same is true for all sides, making Naval war nothing more than an exchange of nuclear ordenance to see who can sink all the enemy first, which might negate the use of most ships anyways.

And in the end the political considerations of using any nuke make them more trouble than they are worth, unless you are ready to turn a limited war into an all out war.

[Kuciwalker]

Biological weapons are great at killing soldiers too.

How many biological weapons have actually been tested? Particularly in combat? I don't know of any current biological weapons that would be all that useful, really. In the extreme, an NBC suit will do just fine against bio or chemical weapons but be fairly useless against an actual nuke.

If the point is to take a town, a nuke is uselss, since it negates the tactical objective.

If the point is to destroy enemy forces and/or deny them ground it's quite useful.

In terms of a war of mobility, modern mechanized forces have been "hardened" against nuclear attack and these forces always occupy large amounts of real estate, so except in a relatively narrow area one nukes is not going to open some huge hole in a line you can exploit.

There is only so much you can do to harden a tank or APC against the blast or the radiation. Or the heat. The people inside would be cooked.

As for Naval combat, they are great one shot ship killers, and would disrupt any battlegroup, but then the same is true for all sides, making Naval war nothing more than an exchange of nuclear ordenance to see who can sink all the enemy first, which might negate the use of most ships anyways.

which means they're actually tactically important weapons in naval combat, hmmm?

(Aside, not a contradiction) and subs would still be effective. An underwater nuclear explosion would **** up a sub something fierce, but you have to detect it first. And since your own launching platform is likely to be a submarine (as we've established, surface ships are much less viable), it's exposed itself the moment it fires a (nuclear) torpedo, which has to be from decent range. I don't know the numbers but it may even be enough to let the other ship get a shot off in return.

As another aside, airplanes would be royally owned if nukes were used freely.

And in the end the political considerations of using any nuke make them more trouble than they are worth, unless you are ready to turn a limited war into an all out war.

So you agree with the following comment?

Nukes are great tactical weapons. The only problems come in when you take the longer view.

[realpolitic]

Methinks you've played too much civ.

[Sandman]

What would happen if every country in the world had a stockpile of nuclear weapons?

Most of the world would cluster into regional blocs. It's doing this already, it would just take on a more ominous form.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Sandman


Most of the world would cluster into regional blocs. It's doing this already, it would just take on a more ominous form.

I hadn't considered this. What do you think would be the reasoning? Would it be to try to make MAD more robust?