Nuclear Weapons in anarchy

[aeonicentity]

I've been enjoying this podcast, and the general principals outlined in Stephan's thoughts, however I have practical reservations about the idea of anarchism.

 

One of them is the question of what would happen with nuclear weapons in an anarchistic society? While it would be wonderful to see a world without these weapons, that's entirely impossible. And while i know the argument "you need a government to manage nuclear weapons" isn't true, the practical question remains of what do we do with these weapons?

 

While in a stateless society it would be very difficult to build or deploy a large number of thermo-nuclear devices, a small team of scientists, or technicians who don't like the enclave next door, or a mad man (not all mad men are products of their states, i'm sure) gets control of an existing device, this weapon could be utilized as leverage against the perpetuation of a stateless society.

 

In this way, nuclear weapons pose a major threat to a stateless society in that they could end statelessness because some person it holding a nuke, and threatens everyone else to join his government, or die.

[Wesley]

I am pretty sure Stef's position on nukes has changed as it is very likely that the market would not want nukes. Personally, I would not support a DRO that had any WMDs nor any friends who had WMDs.

 

WMDs can never be used defensively (as they collectively kill a civilian population for the "crimes" of their government).

 

However, I think the main point is how easy and cheap defense could be if there were a bunch of nukes out there because no one would do anything stupid. Many think national defense is the one area where anarchy won't work. If instead you view defense as so super easy as the costs of maintaining a few nukes, then it doesn't seem like a massive problem, but rather something that is easily solved for much cheaper than it is currently "solved".

 

No one would use the nuke, for if they did, they would die/ be ostracized, which means that nuking someone would never gain you anything.

[MrCapitalism]

Nuclear weapons shooting ranges in space.

 

Somebody invents a weapon of similar power without emitting radiation. A la Smokeless Gunpowder.

 

Just some crazy suggestions. (like telling Alexander Bell his telephone can be put in a pocket, and be used to check Facebook).

[Daly]

I was thinking about this topic the other day and it seems to me that a stateless society would be much better off not having nuclear weapons for protection.  By having them you would only be incentivizing others to invade and take control of them, where without them there seems to be very little incentive for others to invade a stateless society.

[Wesley]

Nuclear weapons shooting ranges in space.

 

Somebody invents a weapon of similar power without emitting radiation. A la Smokeless Gunpowder.

 

Just some crazy suggestions. (like telling Alexander Bell his telephone can be put in a pocket, and be used to check Facebook).

Ok, touche on that. It is possible to have some sort of nuke-like device in a free society if nukes change to be a weapon of selective punishment or if they are used in harmless sport. However, not how they currently exist as weapons of collective punishment.

[aeonicentity]

I was thinking about this topic the other day and it seems to me that a stateless society would be much better off not having nuclear weapons for protection.  By having them you would only be incentivizing others to invade and take control of them, where without them there seems to be very little incentive for others to invade a stateless society.

But this then comes back around to the initial difficulty with the problem. While a rational actor in a stateless society of course would not own nuclear weapons because their only practical use is for offense against distant targets, this doesn't rule out the following problems:

 

1) Not all actors are rational actors.

2) Nuclear weapons DO exist, meaning that their destruction either must precede a shift to a stateless society, or that a continual program of destruction of nuclear weapons continues.

3) problem 2 could violate the non-aggression principal, unless preemptively striking against nuclear weapons with force could be justified as reasonable self-defense against self-annihilation, even if those weapons are ostensibly being held for defensive reasons.

4) Practical reasons exist for the development and ownership of nuclear weapons (asteroid deflection for example).

 

lastly, to Wesley, while I commend you for your integrity, there are indeed situations where nuking someone might be personally beneficial to you or your DRO. Look at the benefits that came to the united states and Russia from the global arena simply by possessing these weapons. Its kind of like being the big muscle man on the block: no one fucks with you because they know you could break them in half, even though you may not want to. even in a society where the INITIATION of force is immoral, the specter of force will still remain a major reason why people will cooperate with you (this being the primary reasoning behind a DRO).

[Pepin]

Why talk about nukes when there are far more dangerous and less costly weapons of mass destruction? Certainly, anyone who wouldn't mind demolishing a city with a nuke also wouldn't mind launching a chemical bomb that will keep all of the infrastructure and technology intact. Keep in mind that in the future, technology will be far advanced.

 

I think the main question is, what does this question have to do with governments? Let's say that there is no real good answer about the solution to this in a free society, how would it follow that government is preferred to anarchism?

[aeonicentity]

well governments certainly aren't the organizations to turn to when solving this problem. In the last 100 years governments have failed an average of at least 1 time per year to prevent these weapons from being used. This problem may in fact be unsolvable, but I'm interested in hearing theories, methods, and ideas the community has.

[STer]

I think you're asking about a very important topic in this thread. I've seen lots of debates about anarchism revolve around not specifically the issue of nukes, but the larger but key issue of how you deal with malicious actors, especially irrational ones. We even know there are people willing and even happy to die for their beliefs, so appeals to their self-interest alone isn't enough security.

 

I wrote this piece a while back because I kept seeing debates that seemed to hinge on this question of the implications of malicious people for this discussion, but not really end up focusing on it openly.

 

You might find it interesting.

 

Some Thoughts on Anarchism & Psychopathy

 

Some people seem to dodge this question altogether or claim that without a state, such people wouldn't exist. I think that's hard to believe.

 

Among people who are willing to concede that we would still have to address this issue, it seems to come down to a question of whether the state is more likely to protect us from such people or more likely to become controlled by them. It would be interesting to see how people's views on that question link up to the type of parenting figures they had.

[aFireInside]

Anarchy is only possible if the majority children are raised peacefully.

 

Would a society of mostly peacefully people want nuclear weapons ?

...

 

Would evil people be able to create nuclear weapons by taxing the population?

....

 

 

Mostly likely no... Its hard to tell if the market will demand them....

Maybe as a defense towards other states....

But if the whole world is peaceful i doubt they will be necessary

[Zimobog]

Something else to consider is how much do nukes cost? What level of coercion, organization, and taxation are required for one to exist?

 

How about the means to deliver them from a distance that will also not destroy one's own friends and holdings?

 

What keeps nukes from deployment in today's statist wars?

 

Are nukes currently available in today's black market? Does the cost of them keep them out the hands of all but those but the states with the best tax-farms?

 

Does cost of a nuke, the security to protect it from theft, and it's delivery system make it unlikely that they will ever be widespread in a stateless future?

 

Is the possibility of nuclear devises in a stateless future a deterrent to a stateless future?

[aeonicentity]

Zimo, you make good points on the issue of affordability and deployment. Two points:

 

1) The entire nuclear warfare program of the US costs less than a trillion dollars. Assuming that the money that is currently going to government goes to the free market economy, it would be entirely plausable that coalitions of voulenteerists, or even a small group of extremely wealthy people could afford to build or maintain atleast a small quantity of these weapons

 

2) These weapons already exist. Without some kind of pre-anarchy solution, or post anarchy destruction agreement these weapons could be simply maintained at much lower costs than building new ones.

 

My concern with these weapons isn't that they would be used, but rather that the threat of them being used could be utilized to simply end any anarchistic society before it began, or to consolidate new governments around these threats.

 

It is a deterrent to a stateless future, because it could possibly be the end of a stateless future, possibly before it even begins. I think the biggest concern isn't actually widespread distribution of these weapons (this actually might be the next most ideal stage after non-existence) but rather single consolidation.

[tasmlab]

I presume the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima weren't too happy to have a government in charge of nuclear weapons.

 

Since they exists, maybe somebody nice like Bill Gates can buy them and hold on to them as a deterrent. 

 

Or what if they were owned and managed by a charity?  Would you donate to a charity that hosted deterrent nukes for your geography?

 

Or similarly, in the future, could a company or charity develop an anti-nuclear device and offer it as a protection service?  Similar to the vision for Reagan's star wars?

[Omegahero09]

Guys you are missing the big picture.Clearly there would be a demand for a "nuke-proof" environment across the board of our anarchistic society."Nuke-proof" could be covered by a variety of organizations, community contributions, churches, universities, companies etc. There are numerous anti-nuclear systems that have been outlawed in the past by our own American gov't in order to prevent war with other countries. With the state dissolved, many peaceful, efficient and cost-effective technologies would be developed to meet the demand for a "nuke-proof" society. Imagine the billboards: "THE GREATER EAST COAST NUKE-FREE, COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO NUKE WATCH"

[ILO]

I'm sure it would be better than socialisms nuclear paradigm where every man, woman, and child gets a free nuke.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

Reading this topic reminded me of what I've read from Carroll Quigley. I don't know if he's popular reading around these boards, but I would recommend picking up a copy of Tragedy and Hope and The Evolution of Civilizations from Quigley ASAP. I have never read more fascinating history books.

 

In Evolution, Quigley has a quick part near the beginning about military history to give some examples of a point he makes. To oversimplify a bit, his point was that any instrument of society, an organization that achieves some practical purpose (like an army being created for defense), inevitably degenerates into an institution in the society, an organization that has the same structure as the original instrument, but no longer fulfills its practical purpose and exists solely as a means unto itself (basically, it becomes bureaucratic).

 

Some of the examples I remember off the top of my head are:

• Roman legionnaires who were smashed by German invaders because they refused to adapt their military strategy to accommodate for enemies on horseback.
• French knights who refused to prepare for English peasant-archers, mostly because it was inconceivable that "high-born peoples could be killed by low-born peoples at a distance". Doh.
• The entirety of the cavalry units of Europe up until the very end of WWI who insisted under chemical gas, tanks, barbed wire, and machine-gun fire that 25% of cargo space transporting supplies should be filled with feed for horses. I can't make up my mind whether this or the French knights is more of a forehead-slapper.

 

There was another example in there about Swiss pikemen, but I forgot the specifics of it. The point of these examples is that each of the mentioned militaries became so institutionalized and addicted to their blood money/subsidies, that they actively resisted any change whatsoever even if it meant their obvious defeat.

 

To take that to the next level, in Tragedy and Hope Quigley extensively goes over the in-fighting that went on with the US military after WWII. The Airforce, being the droppers of the bombs on Japan, decided that they were the end-all to all war and that no other money needed to be spend on any other branch of military, because any war could now be stopped with the perfect weapon. However, as was mentioned previously in the thread, nuclear bombs aren't very useful for military targets, especially during the time right after WWII when the rocket technology was inadequate to even remotely suggest successful delivery to a target (interesting point: Americans solved this "problem" by making smaller bombs. Russians made bigger rockets). It's been over a year since I read the book, but from what I remember, the Airforce was pretty successful in claiming a large part of the military spending pie which went to non-effective military spending.

 

So the point I wanted to make regarding the topic of this thread: I think a free society would handle nukes by first figuring out if they're even worth a damn. The official numbers may be less than a trillion to uphold the nuclear warfare program, but how many radiation- and chemical-related lawsuits were swept and continue to be swept under the rug because the government decided it was better that way? The Manhattan Project was on the verge of being shutdown due to lawsuits from the horrible effects of the fluorine factories on workers and neighbors (fluorine was needed to enrich the uranium), until the government came up with the idea to call fluoride "medicine" and thus nullify future lawsuits in the pursuit of national security (read The Fluoride Deception if you want to know more about that story). Without the institutionalization of taxation to guarantee the extraction of blood money and a government to nullify any non-consenters, any organization that starts becoming "institutionalized", a la Quigley, would quickly find itself with a bunch of unhappy and thus non-paying customers.

 

I think a free society would find more useful things to do with uranium.

[zg7666]

The Launch Code for U.S. Nukes Was 00000000 for 20 Years

 

http://mashable.com/2013/12/04/us-nukes-launch-code/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-tech-link

[Robert Stempien]

I have this thought experiment of something that might develop in a free society, nuke and anti-nuke insurance(Not very good names I guess). Nuke insurance would be a large company with nuclear weapons to use to deter other countries from attacking the property owners in a stateless society, and anti-nuke insurance would provide some kind of nuclear shut down protocal or some way of stop the nukes dead in their tracks.(I don't know enough about nuclear weapons to know if such a thing is even possible.) I would think the two different companies would cooperate for this so the nuke insurance company would not get a bad reputation. I think the nuke insurance company would also try and focus on making the weapons damage as small as possible and mainly trying to get them set up to hit the capital of each country, and they would probably carry liability insurance to pay restitution to any "citizen" of any country they nuke. All of this is just a thought experiment though, and its important to keep in mind that no one will exactly know what kinds of markets will be popular in a free society.

[LanceD]

Wouldn't the potential solution be nuclear proliferation? Seems to me nukes are only a real problem when one group has them and another doesn't.

 

If everyone has nukes then any use of such a weapon will most likely guarantee many uses of the weapons and after enough of them go off we will ruin our atmosphere and make Earth uninhabitable by us. That is pretty good incentive to not actually go use them.

 

After that its just a matter of allowing the markets to guide people towards producing goods that benefit people and not pouring countless resources into arms races and I think we will all be okay.

[Aikenrooster]

Unless the entire world shifted to a stateless society, the anarchist society will have to be able to defend itself from armed states and other armed individuals and entities.  The anarchist society is going to have to have enough weaponry to convince any other entities on the globe not to screw with it.  It's why Iran wants a nuke, and why the US doesn't want Iran to have a nuke.