Quite a lineup on nuclear weapons in today's @washingtonpost Outlook section!
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They (taboo and deterrence) are unmeasurable, untestable, and not scientific in any serious sense.
The evidence we do have on deterrence is that it is not 100% perfect as a strategy — it can fail for many reasons.
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Was Khrushchev deterred by the danger of nuclear war in Cuba? Or did he just get a deal he liked? We can’t know.
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You've set up a really impossible epistemological bar. We can know some things, there are levels of knowledge & plausibility.
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I think I’m just asking for a certain level of scientific knowledge if we’re all going to be asked to risk being blown up.
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We're in that position regardless.
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But it’s not inevitable that nuclear weapons exist. We choose to allow them to exist. Don’t make me quote JFK at you.
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Question for me is not whether deterrence exists (ideas exist, threats exist) but whether they are adequate given consequences of failure.
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Adequate compared to what?
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Joshua, it can’t be that there are no other possibilities. That is the nuclear advocates talking. “Only a world with nukes is possible!”
End of conversation
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The evidence we have on deterrence is pure speculation. Deterrence happens in a black box we cannot see into.
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Assumptions that we can tie behavior to something that happened in the head may be true but may also be wrong.
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And with millions of lives in the balance, don’t we want a higher standard of certainty?
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