Someone should explain the point of the US Nuclear Arsenal to me. Why are we spending billions of dollars maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal? Who are we deterring with it?
The countries in the world with nuclear weapons (I might miss a few) are: The US, UK, China, Israel, France, Germany, Russia (sort of), North Korea, India and Pakistan. Of all of these, the only one we could be deterring is China. The rest of them are either our allies, or too small to pose the kind of threat that requires a massive nuclear arsenal.
The United States is afraid of proliferation. We should unilaterally disarm. Bush should get up and say, "by 2015 the US will dismantle all of it's nuclear weapons. (and only 2015 because it will take us that long to dismantle all the weapons)" Seriously, what do we have to loose? We aren't going to use them first, and we aren't going to use them in a retaliatory strike. In fact, we should go to NATO and get all NATO countries to disarm, I bet it would be easier to talk them into joining us if we committed to doing it first.
Look, it's a good position to take when trying to convince other countries that they don't need nuclear weapons. When we go to India and Iran and say they should give up their weapons, aren't we in a stronger position if we've already given up ours?
On a related note, I went to a panel discussion on Nuclear Energy last night. Basically, it proved everything I've said before plus some. I was worried about reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel because of the proliferation problem. Previous reprocessing solutions yielded pure plutonium, so called PUREX reprocessing. This is bad because we can't let "unstable" countries have plutonium. The new process, "UREX" only produces Uranium, which is much less or a risk. Still, we'd want to do the reprocessing in safe/stable countries, but it's a lot safer.
There's a lot more to write about Nuclear Energy, but I'm going to leave it there for tonight.
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