Alex WellersteinVerified account

Obviously, I don't go into these discussions thinking that I am going to convince you or others committed to the deterrence position to get behind preventive war. But these discussions can nonetheless be clarifying for people who are more open to persuasion (either way).https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1015044576485232640 …

North Korea's nuke program is placing the lives of millions of Americans at risk. If one thinks that deterrence is the right response, there are two ways to go. A) deterrence will work almost perfectly, so there is no risk. I don't think that an open-minded person would agree.

Look, I don't love nuclear deterrence. But if your options are "kill hundreds of thousands/millions because you fear it might fail in the future" or "find other ways to create as much stability as you can while you diplomacy it out" — only one of those doesn't lead to Nuremberg.

If you can't see that the risk of deterrence failing is not constant, but contextual... then you're gonna have a hard time understanding history. Both Cuban Missile Crisis and the War Scare of '83 were a result of bad policies. There are better and worse ways to do deterrence.

And I guess what I'm saying is, if you're going to say, "oh, the people in favor of deterrence rather than preventative war aren't stating how much they don't think deterrence is a permanently stable solution," fine, BUT —

you've also gotta admit, straight up, that your own "rational" approach would have led to a slaughter that would have made WWII look tame, and possibly (depends on the megatonnage) put much of the world at risk anyway from the knock-off effects.