{"id":4289,"date":"2010-12-07T16:57:15","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T15:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=4289"},"modified":"2010-12-07T16:59:24","modified_gmt":"2010-12-07T15:59:24","slug":"how-many-nuclear-weapons-do-we-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=4289","title":{"rendered":"How many nuclear weapons do we need?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve now had 10 weeks of\u00a0 my 12-week course at the<a href=\"http:\/\/www.citylit.ac.uk\/\"> City Lit<\/a> in central London entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citylit.ac.uk\/courses\/Humanities\/History_and_politics\/International_relations_and_world_conflict%3A_part_1\">&#8220;International Relations And World Conflict&#8221;<\/a>. The latest session was devoted to nuclear disarmament.<\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia provides an estimate of the number of nuclear weapons possessed the USA, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. You can check out the statistics <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Although the total numbers are down from the time of the Cold War, there are still more than enough to wipe out humankind. Of course, it would be literally suicidal for any nuclear state to provoke such an all-out conflict, so why do we have nuclear weapons if in practicee they cannot be used?<\/p>\n<p>The only rational argument is deterrence:\u00a0 if you think you might be attacked by a nuclear weapon, you want to be able to threaten a nuclear reaction that will deter the intended attacker from so acting. How many warheads does one need for such a deterrence?<\/p>\n<p>One or two modern-sized nuclear weapons should take out the capital city of an aggressor and take the nation back to pre-industrial times. Let&#8217;s say that you need one or two more in case there are maintenance or renewal issues. So around five should do it.<\/p>\n<p>But the UK alone has 160 active warheads. The USA has around 2,500 and Russia has more than 4,500.\u00a0 As Spock would say, it&#8217;s illogical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve now had 10 weeks of\u00a0 my 12-week course at the City Lit in central London entitled &#8220;International Relations And World Conflict&#8221;. The latest session was devoted to nuclear disarmament. Wikipedia provides an estimate of the number of nuclear weapons possessed the USA, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. You can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4289"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4296,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4289\/revisions\/4296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}