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[ChairmanPoo]

That's the point in having nukes: enough (500+) of them coupled with intercontinental ballistic missiles as the delivery method make you a superpower by definition (a better definition of superpower would be a country which can destroy all other countries simultaneously).

Nuclear weapons are only meaningful as a deterrent for attack. And even then they're not absolutely necessary. I mean, many smaller nations make asymmetrical warfare a touchstone of their grand strategy precisely because the prospect of an unprofitable, expensive war is a fairly good deterrent too.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan... Would have these countries been invaded as they did in RL if they have had a nuclear deterrent? Hell no.

Remind me, how did those wars turn out? Because my impression is that they've been so useless and expensive as to make the parties involved regret the experience.

Also, as a side comment: Israel, India, and Pakistan, are all nuclear powers and all are involved in conflicts of varying intensity
(DISCLAIMER: This line is NOT intended to bring forth into this thread the legitimacy or lack of thereof of the legitimacy of the grievances of the countries involved in those disputes).

Also, the main point is that nuclear weapons are a (fairly decent) deterrent. As a weapon of aggression they're not that good. There's not much point in being the king of ashes, if you catch my drift.

[Helgoland]

MAD works even when conventional war is already being waged. It's when one side starts losing that things start to get hot.

MAD even works when nuclear weapons are being used in a limited fashion, i.e. on the battlefield.

[Sergarr]

The USA has regretted invading Vietnam so hard that 30 years later they invade Iraq.

They regret this, but it doesn't stop the invasions from happening.

[MonkeyHead]

The USA has regretted invading Vietnam so hard that 30 years later they invade Iraq.

They regret this, but it doesn't stop the invasions from happening.

The only lesson that I have learnt from history is that people never learn from history. It will be different this time!

[mainiac]

The only lesson I learned from history is that people highlight the similarities while brushing aside the differences so that they can feel smug and inflate their own egos.

[Reelya]

The USA has regretted invading Vietnam so hard that 30 years later they invade Iraq.

They regret this, but it doesn't stop the invasions from happening.

They don't regret going, they regret losing, and the US Conservatives thoroughly blame Liberalism for losing the Vietnam War. If only USA had been more NAZI-like in blind obedience to the war effort, and not all squeamish about civilian casualities, rape and torture, the argument goes, they would have crushed those evil Vietnamese easily.

In fact, the real reason USA pull out of the war wasn't public opinion, or military deaths, or human rights, it was after the US corporate class started reading articles about the tax burden for the war. And if there's one thing that US Corporations don't like, it's paying taxes. As soon as the financial costs were published in one article, then every other corporate media outlet - quite suddenly - was against the war. The hippies were just a convenient scapegoat and were basically ignored by the media until the corporations wanted out of the war. They then jumped on the anti-war protests and said "look, the people have risen up!" rather than admit "look, our corporate owners are just too miserly to properly back the war".

Saving the World, or Saving a Buck. We know which one corporations always side with...

[mainiac]

[citation needed]

[Reelya]

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/198210--.htm

Johnson had to fight the war with deficit spending. He had to fight a "guns and butter" war to show it was no big war.

And this policy just collapsed. And it collapsed totally with the Tet Offensive in 1968 [the National Liberation Front's surprise temporary takeover of virtually all of South Vietnam's cities overnight --Ed.] which led major sectors of American power -- corporate power and other centers of power -- to realize we could nor carry it off at this level.

http://www.chomsky.info/books/dissent02.htm

The Vietnam War is a classic example. In the major media, the New York Times or CBS or whatever -- in fact, all across the spectrum except at the very far-out periphery which reaches almost no one -- in the major media which reach the overwhelming majority of the population, there was a lively debate. It was between people called "doves" and people called "hawks". The people called hawks said, "If we keep at it we can win." The people called doves said, "Even if we keep at it we probably can't win, and besides, it would probably be too costly for us, and besides maybe we're killing too many people," something like that. Both sides, the doves and the hawks, agreed on something: we have a right to carry out aggression against South Vietnam. In fact, they didn't even admit that it was taking place. They called it the "defense" of South Vietnam, using "defense" for "aggression" in the standard Orwellian manner. We were in fact attacking South Vietnam, just as much as the Russians are attacking Afghanistan. Like them, we first established a government that invited us in, and until we found one we had to overturn government after government. Finally we got one that invited us in, after we'd been there for years, attacking the countryside and the population. That's aggression. Nobody thought it was wrong, or rather, anyone who thought that was wrong was not admitted to the discussion. If you're a dove, you're in favor of aggression, if you're a hawk you're in favor of aggression. The debate between the hawks and the doves, then, is purely tactical: "Can we get away with it? Is it too bloody or too costly?"

There's a few other sources I've read which state it more clearly, but you can piece it together from these. But the tipping point was an article in one of the papers which spelt out how much money the war was costing, and the Tet Offensive hammered home that it wasn't working. After that, the corporate class stopped supporting the war, and only then the media - which is almost entirely privately owned in the USA, followed suit. It was NOT the Peace Movement hippie protests that stopped the war. That's a myth to blame the subculture for "losing" the war for those hardworking tax-paying Americans, it also draws attention away from the fact of how many mistakes were made.

Before the corporate class came to oppose the war, the entire media "debate" was whether USA was killing Vietnamese quick enough to win, rather than whether it was right or wrong to kill them.

[ChairmanPoo]

MAD works even when conventional war is already being waged. It's when one side starts losing that things start to get hot.

MAD even works when nuclear weapons are being used in a limited fashion, i.e. on the battlefield.

It doesn't. In fact, the reason tactical nukes are not in us is fears of making a conflict escalate quickly into an allout nuclear war

[Helgoland]

Sure, escalation becomes much more likely, but conventional war and even tactical nuclear war are at least meta-stable states.

Reelya, chomsky.info does not exactly sound like a good source - do you have any others?

[mainiac]

And this policy just collapsed. And it collapsed totally with the Tet Offensive in 1968

So the corporate overlords bailed on it and with their ironclad control of the political process they let the US stay in the war for another 5 years, longer than we were in WWII, Korea or the Civil War?

Chomsky is great, like the Ayn Rand of the left.  Once you have intellectual purity than any event in history is proof that you are right.

[martinuzz]

Reelya, chomsky.info does not exactly sound like a good source - do you have any others?

You could buy the books, if you are not convinced the text in the link is authentic.

[Helgoland]

I don't doubt the website, I doubt Chomsky.

[burningpet]

I think he meant that Chomsky himself is not a good enough source.

Edit: Ninja'd

[martinuzz]

I don't doubt the website, I doubt Chomsky.

Well, that's just your opinion.
Are you a Nobel prize winner, and honorary emeritus professor at a renowned science institute, regarded by many academics as one of the most prominent intellectuals presently alive?