With Obama coming into power, it seems that Russia wishes for a new treaty with nuclear weapons. The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty is to expire in a year and Gen. Nikolai Makarov has presented a list of things that they wish to negotiate on. Russia wishes for the new treaty with the US to:
- specify limits for all kinds of nuclear weapons
- outline control and verification procedures
- Guarantee that stockpiled nuclear warheads cannot be returned to combat duty quickly
It's always good though, when these sorts of things happen though because under the current treaty (Treaty of Moscow ), the restrictions are to cut down to 1,700-2,200 warheads by 2012 which obviously, is still a crap-load of firepower. Ultimately though, I am still kind of worried given that no matter how many disarm, there are still going to be a lot of nukes and if a war does start, will both sides be willing to ban all nukes from being used? After all with statements like "The domination of one state, even the biggest, most powerful or most successful one, is unacceptable in any case", and given Russia recent actions (such as Georgia conflict), it seems like things could get volatile and if violence breaks out, the world will see whether or not these treaties mean anything because after all, the reason there are still nukes is become people think they might use them. Personally, I think that having even 50 or so nukes in the whole world is far too deadly so yeah, these treaties don't seem to do enough.
http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2008/12/10/2198543-russia-argentina-tout-world-without-us-domination
3 comments:
You can't possibly force countries to give up all of their weaponry...that's just unrealistic and impractical. So, the treaty, in my opinion, is doing its job. It's curbing the weapons to some degree, but isn't outlawing them completely. It seems reasonable in my mind. As for a possible WWIII between the US and Russia, that's unlikely; I doubt that some sort of violence will break out in the near future between them because neither country is stupid enough to provoke the other. The US doesn't want to fund another war, and Russia doesn't want to lose any more lives (WWII cost the USSR 23 million people and 14% of its total population). I think we are pretty safe with the current treaty, but if both countries decide to decrease their amunition supplies, I'm all for that as well.
i personally think countries should ban nuclear weapons, but i doubt they ever will. However, the treaty that is currently in place has worked so far. I also think it's a good idea to meet in order to compromse on the new treaty.
Maybe the treaties don't do enough, but having the treaties is better than no treaties at all--how many warheads would there be then? So I definitely think these meetings are good.
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