The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
> My advice for rulers … hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
Just need one flight from Pyongyang. Why suggest involving a major power given that you’ve just laid out the strategic need for nuclear weapons to deter interference from… major powers? Your post lacks coherency.
opportunity cost-wise, iran could have poured all the money they did in nuclear enrichment instead into missiles, air defense, etc, and they would not be having as much problems as they do now.
nuclear enrichment is extraordinarily expensive and really not all that great of a deterrent when you have them. just look at fairly recent tussels between india, pakistan and china. Russia was invaded and didnt nuke ukraine.
This is wrong. The gotcha underpinning this point denies reality of the situation, that Ukraine had warheads and the technical capability to take control of those warheads. There is no discussion here.
That's an idiosyncratic take on the facts that basically everyone else agrees to interpret otherwise.
Ukraine and weapons of mass destruction
Ukraine, formerly a republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, once hosted Soviet nuclear weapons and delivery systems on its territory.[1] The former Soviet Union had its nuclear program expanded to only four of its republics: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. After its dissolution in 1991, Ukraine inherited about 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each, 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads apiece, as well as 33 heavy bombers, totaling approximately 1,700 nuclear warheads that remained on Ukrainian territory.[2] Thus Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world (possessing 300 more nuclear warheads than Kazakhstan, 6.5 times less than the United States, and ten times less than Russia)[3] and held about one third of the former Soviet nuclear weapons, delivery system, and significant knowledge of its design and production.[4] While all these weapons were located on Ukrainian territory, they were not under Ukraine's control.[5]
In 1994, Ukraine agreed to transfer these weapons to Russia for dismantlement and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders.[6][7] Almost twenty years later, Russia, one of the parties to the agreement, invaded Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently also from 2022 onwards.
Btw, reference [5], used to justify the absurd claim that those weapons were in Ukraine's territory but not under its control, goes like this:
{{cite Hansard |url=https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993... |title=Nuclear Weapons |speaker=[[Jeremy Hanley]] |position=Minister of State for the Armed Forces |house=[[House of Commons (United Kingdom)|House of Commons]] |volume=227 |date=June 22, 1993 |column=154 |access-date=September 9, 2018 |quote=Some weapons are also possessed by Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, but these are controlled by the Commonwealth of Independent States.}}
So it's basically the words of a UK MP assuring his audience that, nooo, don't worry, Ukraine doesn't control its WMD.
If nukes are so good why Israel isn't safe? Or in other words you overestimate how useful nukes are. On contrary for Iran them having nukes mean Israel have to guess if coming missiles contain nukes or not and whatever to strike back with their own nukes where as now they can freely sand missiles without escalation concerns.
Israel isn't safe? They are probably the most well defended country on the earth. A very capable domestic military and the full power of the US as an attack dog willing to do their bidding.
Nukes do not help against guerilla warfare: their destructive power is so big that they are really unreasonable attack weapon, and only a deterring factor instead.
They protect against being "policed" by big world countries.
Eg. if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, Russia would not have been invading them (or are they "protecting" them, as promised when they took their nuclear arsenal for destruction?). If Iran or Iraq had nuclear weapons, they would not have been bombed by US.
Israeli nukes are the main reason we haven't had regime change in Tel Aviv at the hands of a Turkish/Egyptian/Saudi/Iranian coalition. Israeli nukes are why Iran has had to settle into a pattern of slow, distant, annoyance via proxy forces (which lack a capability for existentially challenging the IDF).
Anti-nuclear proliferation should now be treated as crime against humanity. Nuclear proliferation is only way to ensure world peace. Every single country should get nukes and capability to use them against each others. And be fully ready to do it.
I hope you and I never get the opportunity to learn how this would end. We’ve had nukes on Earth for less than 100 years, do you expect the next few thousand to go that well? Do you think in that time, nobody will ever roll a nat 1 on a wisdom check?
Now here's an interesting thought: Would you have deduced that stars are distant suns if you'd lived in the ancient world?
Apparently the only pre-modern people (i.e. pre-Giordano Bruno) recorded as making the claim were Anaxagoras and Aristarchus of Samos [0], but their ideas were completely rejected by contemporaries.
In retrospect, it just seems so blindingly obvious that I'm tempted to believe that I too would have seen through the Aristotelean BS.
But surely there must be aspects of reality that will seem similarly obvious to future generations, and yet I don't feel any insights coming on.
I should say, Aristarchus is the ideal of maximizing information from minimal data:
>Aristarchus of Samos (Samos is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea) lived from about 310 to 230 BC, about 2250 years ago. He measured the size and distance of the Sun and, though his observations were inaccurate, found that the Sun is much larger than the Earth. Aristarchus then suggested that the small Earth orbits around the big Sun rather than the other way around, and he also suspected that stars were nothing but distant suns, but his ideas were rejected and later forgotten, and he, too, was threatened for suggesting such things
In science being right is nowhere close to enough, otherwise it's speculative fiction, a fairy tale, you have to provide convincing reasons, you have to demonstrate that you have considered alternative explanations (hypotheses) and after this process there remains one standing.
Sadly, Aristarchus's hunch was way ahead of his times and one could not convincingly explain the absence of screaming winds, absence of stellar paradox, could not convincingly explain why weights dropped from a height were not left behind as the Earth below spun away at fantastic speed.
In this duel of ideas I think the critics of Aristarchus's idea's were great scientists as measured by current standards, although they were wrong, they were wrong for the right reasons.
To add to this: I think that what appears to us to be stagnation in scientific interest was due to the fact that Ptolemaios was so brilliant. Contrary to popular belief, the empirical quality of his cosmology in terms of predictability was not surpassed by Copernicus, but only by Kepler about 100 years later.
There were some minor discrepancies, that bothered experts in the late middle ages, which let to Copernicus. But even he could not convincingly solve them. (In his theory the Sun is not at the center, but the mean Sun, as is the center of Ptolemaios deferent not exactly the Earth.)
With Ptolemaios, however, cosmology had stabilised to such an extent that the fundamental questions had found their answers and astronomers turned their attention to practical issues and refinements, such as calendars and the related problem of the very odd movements of the moon. (You need Newton and gravitation to solves this, more or less.)
The Ptolemaic system is an adhoc form of Fourier analysis (circles upon circles). These are universal approximators (another universal class are the neural networks) of (preferably smooth) periodic functions. So with enough epicycles one can fit any complicated periodic motion. But it will not help extrapolate the motion of Pluto from the motion of Jupiter, it's a data fit description, not a causal description.
This is also why I worry about the recent trend of using DNNs in astronomy. We may go Ptolemaic with them.
Yes I have wondered about that. I feel the same about Attention based networks, may be we are not using the most befitting coordinate system to understand them.
So first of all, I believe that St. Katherine of Alexandria's hagiographies are the personification of the mythical Library, especially because her monastery now boasts the largest collection of ancient papyrus and codices ever assembled. It is rather clear to me that the Sinai monastery is the actual successor, and that the vast majority of Alexandria's collection never burned at all. (The monastery also hosts Moses' burning bush and famously, a fire extinguisher is mounted next to it.) Muhammad himself ordered the sparing of the community during seige times.
That being said, I also believe that the ancients were well-aware that our Sun is a local star. And by extension, that stars are distant suns. I have been doing research on the Star of Bethlehem, and it is painfully, obviously clear that the Star sought by the Magi is the Sun itself, since when they met with Herod, they first described Springtime (late April through June) and then the Winter Solstice as they pursued the Sun to Bethlehem. Furthermore, anyone traveling for seven months, and only at night, in the ancient world, while bearing priceless treasures, would have been fools, unless they also carried torches, weapons, mercenaries, and medical supplies. Furthermore, any Hellenistic pagan reading the New Testament would've clearly discerned the identification of Jesus with the divine aspects of Phoebus Apollo (among other Olympians); the Sun metaphors continue to the present day. The Star of Bethlehem simply cannot be distant, dim, or anything but our own Sol.
Anyway, yeah, recently the descriptions of the large-scale copying at the Port of Alexandria has convinced me that the Library amassed a gigantic collection of knowledge and texts, and those were, for the most part, safely transferred "by angels" to Sinai when the time was right. And palimpsests notwithstanding, there are still tons of texts still unread, unindexed, and undiscovered in there.
I don't think it should be obvious. If you could measure spectra, that would tell you that starlight and sunlight are the same, but you could still think they were very tiny suns that were near. You would need to measure parallax to know they were far away. Neither of these are possible without precision technology, though you could probably argue that it could have been done in ancient times with enough effort.
Maybe if the solar system had more than one star, or there were other stars very close, people would have caught on a lot quicker.
This is so true. There is an awesome Terry Tao / 3blue1brown collaboration that explicates the epistemological basis: Terence Tao on the cosmic distance ladder
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.