Do You Support Nuclear Weapons?

[jezic]

[quote name='Socrates' date='Jan 26 2005, 11:47 AM']

War is never "nice." It's not a nice world. The Commies were certainly not "nice."! Ask anyone who's ever had to live in under Communist tyranny!
The U.S. was not "nice" when fighting the Nazis and Japanese in WWII.
This "Communists will be nice if we just be nice to them" is the stupidest load of liberal horse dung!

Your assertion that Reagan might have started a nuclear holocaust is baseless and meaningless. Only a monster or madman would do such a thing. It would be utterly contrary to Reagan's character. He was not the monster the Left made him out to be.

If you really think you'd be better off in a repressed or Communist country, go move to one! Otherwise, cut out such foolish and nonsensical talk! (Yeah, I'd like to be sent to the Gulag! I'm packing my bags right now.)

I guarantee, if you knew half the history of Communism, you would not be taking this way at all! [/quote]
i did not make him out to be a monster. I only wondered what he would have done there. He might not have he might we can't sit here now and change anything about it. It was simply a thought.

i wouldn't call myself a leftist but i know that i don't have the whole story.



i also never said be nice to the communists. I was simply trying to point out that it was not completely horrible in every facet. There were some good things, very few but some.

About being sent to a communist country, i didn't say that i meant sometimes i wonder if i would rather be repressed then free. That doesn't always mean i want to leave. I just don't always want to stay.

anyway that is sidetracked. I still don't support nukes. Maybe we can make a non-nuclear thing that fixes stuff ......

[Socrates]

[quote name='jezic' date='Jan 26 2005, 05:37 PM'] i did not make him out to be a monster. I only wondered what he would have done there. He might not have he might we can't sit here now and change anything about it. It was simply a thought.

i wouldn't call myself a leftist but i know that i don't have the whole story.



i also never said be nice to the communists. I was simply trying to point out that it was not completely horrible in every facet. There were some good things, very few but some.

About being sent to a communist country, i didn't say that i meant sometimes i wonder if i would rather be repressed then free. That doesn't always mean i want to leave. I just don't always want to stay.

anyway that is sidetracked. I still don't support nukes. Maybe we can make a non-nuclear thing that fixes stuff ...... [/quote]
Jezic, I don't know if you personally are a Leftist or not, but it seems you are getting your story of Communism, Reagan, etc. from left-leaning sources. It is their typical version of the story, which is very distorted. I am actually more angry at their twisting of history than I am at you personally. Sorry if I may have sounded excessively harsh.

I really do not see much good in Communism, though. If Communism is not evil, then nothing is. Gorbachev was not as bad as his predecessors, though I do not consider him a hero. He basically inherited an evil and failing system.

[jimbo]

Anyone who thinks that nuclear weapons provide any sort of a deterent needs to watch Dr. Strangelove...

As for Reagan increasing the "national debt," it needs to be pointed out that the majority of this debt is owed to US Citizens.

[Socrates]

[quote name='jimbo' date='Jan 29 2005, 03:25 AM'] Anyone who thinks that nuclear weapons provide any sort of a deterent needs to watch Dr. Strangelove...

As for Reagan increasing the "national debt," it needs to be pointed out that the majority of this debt is owed to US Citizens. [/quote]
Yes, we need to watch a fictional movie to get our facts straight.

(Just ask Michael Moore!)

[crusader1234]

at least a movie that is admittedly fiction is better than o'reilly, hannity, or rather.

[argent_paladin]

First, my creds: BA, International Relations, Stanford University (studied Central and Eastern Europe)
Stanford-in-Moscow 1995 and Independent Study in Krakow, Poland 1997-1998. Currently, I am writing a masters thesis on Just War and wrote a paper on just war and nuclear deterrence.
So, I came to the conclusion that deterrence is intrinsically immoral. Actually, I came to the conclusion that the use of ALL counter-population weapons are intrinsically immoral and therefore threatening their use is also immoral. But, the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons is not terribly important. The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo were as bad in terms of casualties and damage as was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is always immoral to directly intend to kill civilians.
However, that doesn't rule out COUNTERFORCE nuclear weapons, such as small nuclear devices to destroy underground bunkers or missle silos. It would not be immoral (as one commentator said) to use nuclear weapons to destroy other nuclear weapons (or, say, NORAD).
A anti-missile shield is also morally acceptable.
Now, for the related questions. Did deterrence work? Definitely. Both the US and the USSR were rational actorsThe policy of engagement, containment and deterrence worked and it is unlikely that the other option, unilateral disarmament would have worked. At best, it would have resigned 300 million people to slavery under communism for another generation. At worst, more and more of the world would have been engulfed in communism. Which was worse, Naziism or Communism? I don't think the question can be reduced to which killed more. If the question is "Which is more dangerous" then the answer is undoubtably Communism, because its ideas still have a great deal of force in Europe and the Americas. We are in no danger of facism coming back (despite what the left say about Bush) but the communists are still very dangerous. And their danger comes from the seductiveness of the communist ideal. Who doesn't like sharing? Who doesn't want equality, an end to poverty and unemployment, etc? They are very attractive ideas. Not many college students become Nazis but far too many become Marxists.
Capitalism is far better at creating weath than Communism. The US was in no danger of economic collapse in 1989. In fact, as the graph indicated, the debt doubled again and we still didn't collapse. Reagan, in my opinion, hastened the collapse of the USSR by a decade. Of course most of the credit goes to Gorbachev and then to PJ2. But Reagan was important, especially because of his moral support of dissidents behind the Wall, like Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa.
On a personal note, having lived in the former East bloc for years, it was a horrible, horrible nightmare and it does no good to emphasize the "good facets" or the positive things. Hitler liked animals and was an art lover. Does that make him less evil? Perhaps but those are not important and distract us from the true horror. Read "The Black Book of Communism". Jezic is right that we don't have the whole story. The whole story is far more terrible and horrible than we have heard, not better. Communism is truly diabolical and destroys the human spirit. It is based on atheism and completely incompatible with Christianity. The danger is not that we think to badly of Communism, but too well. Of course, I live in Berkeley, so that is the danger I see.

[Socrates]

Excellent post, Argent Paladin!