USA Russia Nuclear Arms Reduction

From what seemed like centuries in blogosphere, today I suddenly had impulse to write again.

So the headline today is that USA and Russia decided to reduce their nuclear stockpiles. Both the powers still have enough firepower to burn down the entire globe several times over. So the world is not fully out of the shadow of nuclear annihilation possibility. Nonetheless reading news about reduction of nuclear weapons feels better than reading news about more weapons and missiles.

However the prospectus of the nuclear arms free world remain as dim as always. Let me allow to explain why. Just like the nuclear explosion is a chain reaction, nuclear proliferation is a chain reaction as well. Since USA had nuclear bomb, Russia and China got one. Since China had nuclear weapons, India got them. Since India had them, Pakistan felt it was necessary to have nuclear weapons.

If two nations have had some kind of serious animosity between them, and if one nation gets nuclear weapons, another nation feels utterly exposed without them and feels compelled to go nuclear. So we can be pretty much sure that this reaction will continue downstream.

If we ever have to achieve nuclear disarmament, someone has to come up with a foolproof defense to nuclear attack, that will reduce the value of nuclear weapons as strategic counter-measure to nuclear attack. Or someone has to come up with an attack as harmful as nuclear one.

Biological weapons immediately come to mind. And they can be far more dangerous.

Without these two, there is no hope for nuclear free world. Tomorrow, even if USA drops all the N weapons it has, still Russia might decide to keep them. So the reverse of the proliferation  might not be a chain reaction.