It is not a good thing or a bad thing, but a logical thing. Morality is an evolved trait that exists because it promoted our survival at a time when we existed as small communities of hunter/gatherers. Attempts to apply it to the nuclear weapons debate are logically absurd. The basic issue here is very simple. Is it desirable to survive? If so, how should we deal with nuclear weapons? That is generally how the issue is currently discussed (see the earlier posts in this thread) and that is the correct way to discuss it.

NMD which was successful at intercepting a limited strike (say, NK firing up to 10 ICBMs at us) would enable us to chose a retaliation level rather than having us essentially forced by circumstances to nuke the northern half of that peninsula into the ocean.

I believe that it’s unlikely that we would not respond forcefully and militarily to any attempted nuclear strike on the US, and don’t have any personal moral objection to doing so – I think it’s pretty much required, in order to protect us going forwards if someone does launch such an attack.

But if our retaliation can be conventional, then that’s much better for world stability moving forwards. We have to wipe NK’s government and military capacity out under those circumstances, but we’d certainly have US civilian populace and international support for a massive conventional war, if we chose such a response.

We could also chose a limited nuclear strike, which carefully avoided any strikes near NK population centers. Bad for those downwind in SK and Japan, but not as bad for the NK population as an all out, flatten-everything-of-military-value-regardless-of-population attack.

If one of those ICBMs lands in Seattle and detonates a nuclear warhead, or Anchorage or Honolulu, then it’s a lot harder to justify anything short of an overwhelming counterattack.

US civilian casualties of less than 4,000 people got us Afghanistan’s war, and were the underlying shift that got us directly acting against Iraq as well. Ten, a hundred, a thousand times more would be much worse. Against high population cities, even a 10-20 kt atomic weapon could have casualties in the 40-400,000 people range.

NMD good enough to stop Russia from being able to ever nuke any US city would be prohibitive and would have to be either quantitatively much bigger or qualitatively much better than what we have now. But what we have now, perhaps somewhat enhanced, could give us the option to not kill 10-20 million people in NK or Iran if their leaders move ICBM and atomic weapon programs to completion and then in some future crisis fire them.

If you place no value on those foreign civilians, then this isn’t that big a deal, but even if their governments go insane I don’t personally have a willingness to just write them off as humans with individual rights and value. Deterrence – and the willingness to use it in retaliation – is what you have and use if everything else fails. NMD is the last step in the escalation chain before one is forced to call it a failure, and retaliate. The moral value to NOT retaliating with WMD in the face of a small WMD attack on us, if NMD allows us not to do so, is high. The moral value to the world of our moving away from a retaliation-only response posture is high.

The added value in terms of avoided US casualties is high, as well. A 20 kT atomic weapon detonated over Seattle, with a 3.3 M person metro area population, could result in 100-400,000 casualties. A the usual minimum $1 million value per life lost, that’s $100-400 billion dollars in damage, plus the property, disruption effects on survivors, etc.

I disagree.

You fail to consider deterrence failure. Accidental, inadvertent or mistaken use.

Read Martin Hellman’s work, for example.

Further a static risk upper limit is extremely useful in countering the argument that nuclear weapons have kept us safe. They have, but with a not insubstantial amount of luck, roughly codified by the static risk limits.

Plus, you cannot deny or wish away the close calls such as the Cuban Missile crisis and the near-mistaken use of nukes.

There is a very real risk to deterrence, and to deterrence failure.

No I did not imply that — you said I implied that.

My sentence above is rather clear and it said: “a 60-year timebase of no nuclear war only implies that the there is roughly 95% confidence that the chance of nuclear war is within 0-6% per year.”

Consistent with 0% and w/ 6% at 95% confidence. Also consistent with 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% and 5%. Any of those numbers are too high: a 1% probability of nuclear war per year would mean we can expect a nuclear war within the next few decades.

The fact that nuclear war did not occur despite hot “proxy wars” in which US and Soviet agents and pilots shot at each other, despite military confrontation and shots traded during the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite Chinese-Soviet and India-Pakistan border wars, suggests that nuclear deterrence is a very real phenomenon, one that may push the actual probability of nuclear war very low, if one may even speak of such a quantity.

Indeed, this picture of a static risk of nuclear war per year, per decade, per century, may be a completely useless way of thinking. The real risk of nuclear war, or holocaust, is a dynamic process which may at times steer into very dangerous confrontations but which is strongly constrained to avoid the line of no return and ultimately to seek stable resolutions.

Alex W – The fact that US policy is not often decided on morality is related to the fact that our policy is so often immoral, and this is why we should evaluate our policies more on moral criteria, which many of us think will turn out to lead also to effective policies, ones which are viewed as just and win the support of people.

That said, there is something fishy about priests and philosophers weighing in on the morality of nuclear weapons, deterrence, etc. Weapons have always been instruments of necessity, war an exigecy of survival. Deterrence is best understood as a fact stemming from the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons. We did not choose this condition. The United States first tried to use its nuclear “monopoly” to have its way, and soon found itself confronting an enemy who could lob nuclear warheads across the globe. MAD as a doctrine simply codified a fact that may have surprised the soldiers and airmen manning nuclear guns and missiles for years of cold war. The world stood poised at brink, but there it stood, and nobody wanted to push it any harder.

It seems to me that the most important reason why there has not been a nuclear war in all these years is just that it is never a good time to destroy civilization and die a horrible death along with millions or billions of others. Today’s not a good day for it, and tomorrow isn’t going to be any better. Maybe you think in about five years, if China does this or that, but I’ll venture that when the time comes, it still won’t seem like a great idea.

Problem is, we tackle others with our offesive military, contrary to what the founding fathers intended for this country.

We need a Red Team vs. Blue Team test of the system to really bring out the “Fallacy of the Last Move”.

It is also hugely expensive.

“An ineffective defense against a non-existent threat”
-Former Defense Secretary Perry

For more info see:
http://docs.ewi.info/JTA.pdf

4.7 Effective missile defense has proved an elusive goal since the development of ballistic missiles. Nuclear warheads make the requirements for defense especially
stringent because a defense that is even ninety percent effective could hardly be judged satisfactory by the defending country, even though the attacker might
well consider this to be a serious threat to his offensive capabilities. Missile defense is by its nature a competition
between the offense and the defense, and to date the advantage has lain with the offense.

Because it is a competition, the offense can be expected to take measures
to destroy, overcome, or outwit the defense. One of the obvious ways to do that is to find alternative means of
delivery for nuclear warheads: aircraft, cruise missiles, or less conventional means such as freighters entering
a port. Here we consider some of the specific challenges facing the proposed European missile defense system.

4.6 By contrast, the X-band EMR can observe warheads
and decoys with a range resolution of roughly 15 cm.
Such high-resolution data does not guarantee the ability
to conclude whether an object is a warhead, decoy, piece
of wire, or yet another object, but without this radar the
system would have no chance of discerning possible
diff erences in the signals from the many objects that
could accompany warheads during an attack. The EMR
is intended to perform the critical function of tracking
enemy targets for the defense not only of Europe, but
also of the United States.

Technical details on the so-called missile “defense”:

http://docs.ewi.info/JTA_TA_Defense.pdf

The “discrimination” process thus has two steps – using the X-band groundbased
radar to identify which cluster contains the warhead, and then using the
separate and independent infrared sensor in the kill vehicle to identify the warhead
within the cluster. If either completely independent process fails, the system will
fail to intercept the warhead.