Via digby: Jorge Hirsch at UC San Diego has gathered a few of his friends — Nobel Laureates, Boltzmann and Fields Medalists, Medal of Science winners, and past Presidents of the American Physical Society — to write a letter to President Bush, urging him not to use nuclear weapons against Iran. The signatories are:
- Philip Anderson, professor of physics at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate in Physics
- Michael Fisher, professor of physics at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland and Wolf Laureate in Physics
- David Gross, professor of theoretical physics and director of the Kavli Institute of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Nobel Laureate in Physics
- Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego
- Leo Kadanoff, professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Chicago and recipient of the National Medal of Science
- Joel Lebowitz, professor of mathematics and physics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Boltzmann Medalist
- Anthony Leggett, professor of physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Eugen Merzbacher, professor of physics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former president, American Physical Society
- Douglas Osheroff, professor of physics and applied physics, Stanford University and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Andrew Sessler, former director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and former president, American Physical Society
- George Trilling, professor of physics, University of California, Berkeley, and former president, American Physical Society
- Frank Wilczek, professor of physics, MIT and Nobel Laureate, Physics
- Edward Witten, professor of physics, Institute for Advanced Study and Fields Medalist
In reality, winning a Nobel Prize doesn’t make you an informed judge of geopolitical affairs. But anyone in their right mind can see it would be a bad idea to launch a nuclear first strike against Iran or anyone else, and these folks are in their right minds. Hopefully they can lend some heft and gather some publicity for the cause.
Part of me wonders whether the administration understands perfectly well that a nuclear strike would be madness, but they want to give the impression of being reckless cowboys so that Iran will dismantle their nuclear program — that’s a hopeless plan, of course, but at least not wildly irreponsible. Then I remember that they have consistently acted like reckless cowboys in every previous situation, and my heart sinks a little. Remember DeLong’s Law: “The Bush Administration is always worse than one imagines, even when taking into account DeLong’s Law.”
Has anybody else noticed the lack of affect in the military philosophers hereabout who talk about invading or bombing other countries as if it were the merest technical problem to decide whether or not to use nuclear weapons on the people who haven’t attacked anybody? I guess it’s just garden-variety sociopathy, what used to be called moral imbecility, but maybe it deserves its own paragraph in the DSMIV. The lack of insight is striking. The hawks ascribe insane intentions to the Iranians–they’re just itching to nuke Manhattan, don’t you know–but they don’t seem to notice the craziness of their own fantasies of omnipotence and revenge.
Such nonsense. I fail to understand why people are unable to accept the obvious point that it would be in Iran’s security interests NOT to develop the bomb and to instead go the sage route Libya has taken.
They are risking massive retaliation (probably not nuclear, I think thats just a big stick thats being waved around) and possibly war. Worse, even if they developed one, it would cause a regional arms race with Israel and we would likely have a thirty year cold war scenario all over again.
We’ve been hellbent for the last twenty years on global disarmament, people who (for relativism reasons) feel this is no longer applicable, are on the wrong side of history.
You don’t hear anybody saying, “It would be in Israel’s security interests NOT to develop the bomb and to instead go the sage route Libya has taken.” Iran has at least as good a rational for going nuclear as Israel. The alternative for either is to assume the permanent good will of the United States, a pretty dubious proposition.
International law would have undoubtedly sanctioned Hitler’s attacks of London with V2s. I don’t get your point, unless it’s that international law is absurd.
Not quite. Iran’s internal capacity for missile development is modest. They acquire rather than develop. Their No-dong medium range missiles are their only mobile-launchable missiles with any range or accuracy. You can’t launch these without an easily detectable support infrastructure. Iran wants to acquire solid fuel, mobile-launch missiles (M-9/M-11) from China, but these are still of the short range (
Mr. Harrison,
No need to be so melodramatic. A thing can be both horrific and a technical problem. Just because a problem is grotesque (in any sense), should we recoil from a measured analysis of it? I don’t find situational epistemology palatable. Furthermore, this very debate on whether to use nuclear v. conventional is informed by moral parameters. Otherwise, we “military philosophers” would simply assert that a 10 megaton warhead would do the job, and be done with it.
I have no objection to analysis, and I accept that policy makers sometimes have to do terrible things. Indeed, a good part of my objection to the military philosophers is that they don’t have a very firm connection to reality, that they aren’t objective enough. Their activities are more like game playing than adult thinking and feature a heavy component of fantasy.
During the Cold War, I met some of the Rand people—I once even had a long conversation with Herman Kahn. They were a bunch of permanent adolescents who wanted to play Risk with actual human lives. It’s telling that none of the innumerable scenarios they dreamed up had the remotest resemblance to anything that subsequently happened. The liberal hawks and neocons who talk so blandly about war strike me as similarly facetious characters.
By the way, what the heck is “situational epistemology?”
And the Aryan Nation gang has at least as good a rational for being well armed as the owner of the delicatessen next door, these two being in complete moral equivalence.
[last part of the accidentally truncated post #54: Iran wants to acquire solid fuel, mobile-launch missiles (M-9/M-11) from China, but these are still of the short range (less than 200 miles) of later SCUDs but are probably more accurate. U.S. pressure on China seems to have blocked these sales for now. In short, we need to remove the Iranian tyranny lest it become a lethal threat.]
Belizean wrote:
This is colonial bullshit! There is absolutely no country in the world that wants to be ruled by a foreign power rather than a local despot! (Maybe Americans now, but Americans are in the process of losing their b*lls where they prefer safety and slavery to liberty- but I doubt that too). The whole Iraq mess is because of this very basic human wish. And in Islam, it is even more pronounced, where rule by a Muslim government rather than by infidels is important. A few liberal Iranian blogs, likely written by Iranians in the West doesn’t change that fact.
Haelfix wrote:
Head in the clouds! That statement qualifies as “not even wrong”.
Beats me why anybody thinks it is obviously true that Israel is morally superior to Iran. Calling Iranians skinheads–the implication of Belizean’s analogy– is not much
different than calling Israels kikes. Apparently that sort of rhetoical excess is justified by the old explantion ” we have got/the maxim gun/and they have not.” which, of course, is why they want the maxim gun.
Unlike the “we can’t resort to military action because someone might get hurt” mindset that lead to the totally preventable and completely needless deaths of 1.5 million Armenians, 7 million Ukrainians, 30 million additional Soviet subjects, 6 millions Jews, 40 million Chinese, 1.6 million Cambodians, 900,000 Rwandans, 2 million North Koreans, and 1.3 million (and counting) Sudanese.
Indeed. Who says freedom is superior to oppression.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=32573
“The best bet is to remove it. The U.S. should bribe the Russian and Chinese leaderships and effect Iranian regime change through fomented revolution assisted by and coordinated with American air power, funds, electronic intel, and communications/propaganda assets.”
Belizean, I like your bribery idea.
The problem that I’ve always hadwith the “fomenting revolution” approach is what to do about the Chinese & Russians. You’re bribery idea would solve that. Putin won’t be president forever, and while I’m sure he’s amassed an ample fortune, he doesn’t strike me as the type to turn down a few billion dollars more. Of course we’d probably have to pass out money throughout Russia’s national security apparatus, but I can’t imagine it would cost more that 10 billion. Say another 10 billion for Hu, and we’re all set. 20 billion really isn’t all that much money in the big scheme of things – just a few months of the currently spending in Iraq.
Come to think of it, the current situation in Iraq might make the price much cheaper. Think about it. The US doesn’t exactly have a lot of credibility in the whole “installing a broadly representative democracy” game right now. Putin & Hu will probably think “what a bunch of idiots, they can’t install a friendly govt in Iraq with 150k troops, how the hell are they going to do the same in Iran with no troops?”. They’ll figure there’s no harm in letting us try, so they might as well take our money. But the joke will be on them, of course!
But what about using the 20 billion to bribe Ahmedinejad et al to give up power? That would probably make the revolution itself much cleaner. What do you think about this idea?
Belizean’s “idealism” borders on psychosis if he really thinks that America could have prevented the Armenian and Jewish genocide, overthrew Stalin, occupied Red China, etc. And over and beyond the assumption that one nation has ever had that much power, he has to assume that America is also magically virtuous so that its endless crusades wouldn’t turn out to be pilaging expeditions.
I’ve supported interventions where our national interests are are really at stake or where we can put together a genuine coalition to prevent mischief. I’m not a pacifist. It’s just that I’m also not a war monger who demonizes every potential opponent in order to justify violence. Iran is not the nicest country in the world, but it’s no Nazi Germany either.
The logic here is rather like a James Bond movie. Bond needs impossibly evil enemies to justify his license to kill. Juvenile.
Belizean = John Bolton in real life? 🙂
Changing how you think about situations based on your emotional reactions to them. (Which, of course, should not be confused with optimizing situations in accord with your values.)
Belizean, assuming you are correct about the Iranian missiles, they could still defend them using this system that Russia is going to sell them despite US presure. 🙂
I read Hersh’s article twice, and I don’t see his main point being discussed here- the attack would begin with 400 airstrikes, and continue with two air campaigns, one to unmask and destroy Iranian defenses, and the other to “degrade” infrastructure- to destroy powerplants, communications etc.
There is not going to be one explosion that solves a problem. The people talking to Hersh were discussing a major war, and one that we could very well lose.
If there is any Hitler analogy to be made here, it might very well be that Hitler never expected the invasion of Poland to spark a major war. That’s not a comment on the nature of good and evil, it’s a comment on the nature of war.
“During the Cold War, I met some of the Rand people—I once even had a long conversation with Herman Kahn. They were a bunch of permanent adolescents who wanted to play Risk with actual human lives. It’s telling that none of the innumerable scenarios they dreamed up had the remotest resemblance to anything that subsequently happened.” – Jim Harrison comment #56
My dad was a civil defence instructor in the UK. Before WWII, they predicted that London would be totally ruined by air bombardment (conventional weapons) and fallout (actually they assumed mustard gas, but both have a cancer risk). So you can say that civil defence is always wrong.
However, Hitler didn’t use gas because it wouldn’t do much – because everyone in Britain had a gas mask!
Herman Kahn took on the unenviable task of telling the truth, and playing public benefactor is a thankless task.
Any fool can come up with calculations showing that any type of weapon can kill everyone, but what Kahn did was to show that civil defence is valuable in most practical situations. If you do that, it deters attacks.
Boy, this thread has really taken a few twists and bent them into some convenient directions. I have relatives who lived in Iran during both the Shah and Khomeni’s regimes. My nephew served in the Iranian army in the war against Iraq. The age is not the biggest factor but behavior is. Just as the Soviet Union’s Red Army would take their youth gangs and jail birds and send them to the front lines (mostly with empty weapons) at gun point to draw fire and see where mines may lie ahead, so did the Iranian army do the same as other armies have done in history.
Right now former eastern Europeans cannot believe that while America’s Clark Kents are being sent to the front lines to die, back home the likes of Charles Manson remains protected. The very fact that our armies and allies armies had killed off many of their child molesters gave them an incentive to shake hands with us and forgive us and move right into our country after any battled conflicts.
I see more and more Americans in the inner city and in the gang neighborhoods wishing we would adopt the same policy..12 olds are picking up weapons and using them right here and there is now a culture that worships male macho dominance throughout the United States more than ever.
I wrote this not because I think it is the road that we must necessarily follow. When we bully bullies we become bullies ourselves.
I wrote this in response to a few here who might need to take a second look at the false halo they may have over their heads and to realize that the desire to bring the same pains to our own citizens harbors within all of our reactionary emotions. I take gang bangers to school each day on a bus and there are times when I feel there is a way out for them and other times when I feel that they are better off dead. Within them are seeds that can send them either way. In that respect they are no different than the rest of us.
Doesn’t look like this system would be effective against F-117As or Raptors. If it would be, however, this is another argument for accelerating attack plans and increasing bribes to Russian officials.
Amen, brother! After all, who wouldn’t prefer abject oppression by locals to freedom fostered by foreigners? We have, of course, the well known example of black slaves in the American south invariably siding with their local plantation owners against their Yankee liberators, and Jewish concentration camp residents repeatedly urging allied forces to leave them to the mercies of their fellow Germans.
The TOR-M1 is capable of taking out bombs and missiles fired from aircraft. Stealth aircraft like F-117A have a much larger radar signature than typical bombs, so they should pose no problems (if they come close enough). Anything larger than 0.1 square meters radar cross section can be engaged up to a distance of 12 km. This system is ideal to protect your longer range missile/air defense systems.
Belizean:
Suppose that there existed some African superpower in the early 1800s and that they had invaded the US to liberate the slaves and install a new democratic system that would allow the African Americans to participate in elections etc.
I’m 100% sure that this could never have worked. You would have had a strong insurgency and you would also have a lot of terrorists attacks against African American and against American who collaborated with the occupation forces.