what's special about Reagan is that he was the beginning of it.
What's Zig Forums opinion on denuclearization?
Austin Adams
Jace Howard
Democracy is a nuke for every family.
Connor Nelson
Denuclearization is very important. Nuclear weapons are a weapon the few use to control the many. No people can ever claim their nation for their own when capitalist states can destroy them with their weapons. The weapons industry should be disbanded as soon as possible.
Cooper King
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Jackson Perry
Absolutely not, I mean come on guys.
In saying that, there is nothing wrong with North Korea building nukes.
Jace Gonzalez
This is correct. There's nothing more powerful than nuclear weapons. The U.S. openly planned to "rollback" (read: invade) Soviet bloc territory and was much more successful with its first-use threats in the 50s / early 60s when the US had a massive thermonuclear advantage. After the USSR developed a credible second strike capability, the US of course didn't want to give up its first use threat - hence, a new focus on "flexible response", "limited" nuclear war, "decapitation strikes" with 10 minute flight time missiles, etc.
ellsberg.net
Read this essay by former nuclear war strategist Daniel Ellsberg, US nuclear posture has never been about "deterrence", it's always been built on the threat of first-strike - and with it, the threat of "preemptive" retaliation from an enemy that believes the US will actually do it. Look at the Able Archer 83 war scare for instance.
I think the nuclear issue is a good wakeup call to get people to realize the true nature of war and imperialism. You could easily, drastically reduce the risk of nuclear war by declaring a No First Use policy (and destroying unilaterally first-strike weapons like ICBMs to make it credible). But the thing is, Porky will never, ever let that happen, because nuclear brinkmanship is a lot cheaper to guard his interests than conventional troops. Generation after generation of cold warriors, Kennan, Kissinger, Schultz, etc. look back at the risks of nuclear war decades later and back No First Use anyway, but every new administration continues to roll the dice with nuclear armageddon. Look at Trump and his INF withdrawal and sub-launched cruise missiles, for instance. There's no draft, but you realize you could still die as a result of these wars. From there, you start to realize that the capitalist system is inherently in conflict with nuclear disarmament.
William Johnson
You're assuming correlation = causation. Thing is, other factors also correlate with this unprecedented time of interstate peace, such as the stability and predictability resulting from the bipolar international system which characterized the Cold War, compared to the chaos and unpredictability in the multipolar international system we were in before both world wars and which we're increasingly living in today. Not saying that nuclear proliferation isn't a large factor, but only that it's fortunately for us impossible to isolate it as the principal factor.
The bets are still on, mind you. As the other user noted, we were still dangerously close to nuclear annihilation even in a relatively stable bipolar Cold War setting. Now that we're entering a more chaotic multipolar era in the international system, we're charting unknown ground when it comes to the MAD principle. The possibility for fatal misunderstandings and miscalculations increase as the number of bickering great powers increase. My point is that we're all still pretty much canaries in the coal mine on this one.
Jeremiah Carter
Who would go to war with each other. China and America have poor relations, but it’s who gets the right to sell lead toys to each other. China and India hate each other, and have land disputes, but nothing that would justify a nuclear war. No who has nukes hates Russia enough to nuke them. The only countries that might nuke each other are India and Pakistan, but their nuclear arsenals are pretty small, and their missiles are of a poor quality. However this isn’t entirely true as they haven’t gone to war when they were booth nuclear powers. Them both having nukes has probably made it the reason why they aren’t at war now. They have to much to lose and to little to gain from a nuclear war.