Posted on 11/13/2009 12:42:24 PM PST by backtothestreets
President Barack Obama was surprisingly given the Nobel Peace Prize "primarily for his work on and commitment to nuclear disarmament," according to Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician who served on the award committee. Valle told the Wall Street Journal that the stewards of the prize wanted to "support" Obama's goal, as expressed recently at the U.N., "of a world without nuclear weapons."
It's tough to think of a goal more widely espoused than the dream of an H-bomb-free planet. President Ronald Reagan and activist Jane Fonda, political opposites, came together on this one — in his second term, Reagan stunned his advisers and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by suggesting a treaty that would take nuclear arsenals down to "zero."
As long as a nukeless world remains wishful thinking and pastoral rhetoric, we'll be all right. But if the Nobel Committee truly cares about peace, its members will think a little harder about trying to make it a reality. Open a history book and you'll see what the modern world looks like without nuclear weapons. It is horrible beyond description.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1929553,00.html#ixzz0Wm3M5BQt
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
This is from Time?!
Must be stopped clock syndrome.
I was literally just thinking about this very thing as I went to bed last night. MAD, IMHO, LITERALLY kept us out of WWIII. And with general economic prosperity it would have been stupid for anybody to start something.
Both barriers to a big war have been eliminated...
What on earth is this doing in Time magazine?
I guess, given long enough, some truths are too obvious to be ignored. All those comedians like George Carlin who think it’s funny to note that lately we’ve only been waring with “brown people”? They’re missing the fact that the big, bad white guys have nukes, which takes some of the edge off their observations. Much better to drop ordinance on people crawling through the jungle with AK-47s than risk Total Global Nuclear Holocaust.
I have absolutely no doubt the U.S. and the Soviet Union would have gone to all-out war without nukes.
As others have noted, odd to see in Time.
Another even longer period of general peace between major powers was from 1815 to 1914. Very unusual when compared to previous centuries.
IMO the primary thing in common is the dominance of a single power. 1815 to 1914 this power was Britain. Their power was naval, so no direct threat to European nations. But it limited conflicts to the Continent.
The US has similarly dominated the world since 1945. Those who want to end US dominance on the theory that doing so will bring “whirled peas” really need to reexamine their theory.
I agree 100%. I've said this sort of thing for years. Nukes deserve all the credit for ending wars between the most industrialized nations. Anyone who loves peace should put little shrines to nuclear weapons in their homes, and big posts of mushrooms clouds on their walls.
Several industrialized nations were engaged in civil wars and internal revolutions during that time. And there was the Franco-German war of 1870, and the Japanese-Russian war of 1904. And the Crimean War of 1853. And probably others I'm not remembering.
I don't think 1818 - 1914 meets the criteria you think it does.
General peace. Compared to the 18th, 17th and 16th centuries. Look it up.
You need to look it up. There were several wars between major powers which I named. And we had the US-Mexico war and the US civil war, and the Boer war in South Africa for a little sideshow action. Hardly a time of peace from 1818 - 1914.
The number of annual casualties due to war was steadily increasing over time - until Hiroshima, at which point the numbers immediately levels out.
Here’s link to a timeline of (some) European wars from 1521 to 1659. Almost continuous warfare.
The 17th and 18th centuries aren’t much different.
I suspect if we added up the number of war/years for major powers in these centuries, then compared them to the 19th, the 19th would be somewhere around 10% to 20%, which is what I meant by a period of “general peace.”
Comparatively speaking, that is.
And, this thread is about the absence of wars since WWII and the introduction of nukes. And the point of the thread and the Time article is that there have been NO wars between major powers since the development of nuclear weapons.
The point you are trying to make is really irrelevant to this thread. If there were fewer wars during the period you mention, it had nothing do with the major powers having lost their appetite for warfare, but just a little breather until they fought the most destructive wars in history.
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