From: Richard Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Perhaps owning nukes forces governments to grow up a bit because countries with nuclear weapons are forced to enter the highly rational world of mutual deterrence or else face total disaster. (They may not have to enter into an arrangement of mutual deterrence with the big, powerful states but in a highly proliferated world they would certainly have to enter into such relationships with at least some other states.)
Unfortunately, I don't see any mechanism that actually *does* force a government to "grow up" if/when it gains nukes. Certainly I don't think it happened for North Korea. If anything, I think nukes could foster a "you can't touch us" feeling of invulnerablility amongst the world's tyrannies.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how well the idea of MAD would work regionally because there's not so much time to retaliate before the enemy warheads land, which may in turn lead to an unstable situation in which each side can "win" by pre-empting the other.
I don't think MAD can work on this scale, with this amount of nuclear propagation.
It would be too easy to avoid accountability by handing a nuke over to a terrorist
group to do the dirtywork, or even use their own agents to smuggle one in a
truck/freighter over the border to the target. No easily traceable ICBMs.
Lets say Iran has nukes, and two years later, in the midst of some ongoing
US-Iraq strife, Baghdad blows up. Who to blame? We know who Al Jazeera
and the conspiracy buffs would blame. What if it's Tel-Aviv that blows up, or
Los Angeles? - without absolute proof of guilt, it's problematic to retailiate.
Either way, the "Assured" part of MAD flops.
-bryon
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