Nuclear Arms in 2020: Proliferation By Any Other Name…

it's a pity that men try to hide their
emotions i'm happy when i know a man who lets himself feel the things we do life with such a man can be so spontaneous so much fun i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you you are watching the single most expensive video ever made in the history of active research and informed opinion or about with my two youtube channels because if you were sent in a copy of this book a heavy tome that i now will not have time to read um in exchange for my making this video i have an amazon wishlist where any support of the channel can buy me a book if i have the humility to list books that i can't afford and this one was about a hundred dollars local price so thank you for that long supporter of the channel and as they say i now get to go into a kind of self-loathing cycle because i have a stack of really worthwhile books to read and i don't know how long it's going to be before i get around this one anyway this a long time support of the channel wrote in and said hey how much would i have to pay you for you to do a video talking about a nuclear proliferation nuclear rearmament with a special focus on the strategic situation of australia and thus the whole continent of asia and i said hey you wouldn't have to pay me a dime i'd be happy to do it for free but if you click on this link there is actually a list of books and i i said also i don't know your financial situation it might be that fifteen dollars is a lot of money to you might be thirty dollars a lot of money but there are books there that you can buy to support me and directly or indirectly support the caliber of intellectual content on the channel if if i actually read this whole thing doubtless at least indirectly it would be influencing some of the topics i'd be discussing on camera all right um the first major misconception members of my generation are burdened with about nuclear weapons is the assumption that if someone presses a button it's the end of the world or if a single nuclear bomb is dropped it's going to wipe out a whole country this is not true nuclear weapons can be used on a small scale with tremendous efficacy and with very few further knock-on consequences indeed this makes them kind of more scary in a sense because there isn't this clear line that no one dares to cross let's say there's a fleet of ships in the ocean nuclear weapons can quite effectively wipe out that fleet of ships without permanently poisoning or rendering uninhabitable a large plot of land and indeed the historical reality of what happened in hiroshima and nagasaki in japan hiroshima is a densely populated city today it didn't result in a nuclear wasteland it wasn't the apocalyptic scenario that many people imagine that we've been kind of uh prepared for more by science fiction than by the study of real political history um secondly there is a deep assumption that the possession of nuclear weapons by mutually antagonistic countries will create a situation of um shall we say impossible to violate sovereignty on either side that the possibility of mutually assured destruction to nuclear weapons will lead both parties or all parties in a you know system of many different rival powers to just say look whatever is going on in your country is your problem we're not going to cross the border we're not going to negotiate with you we're not going to try to bully you when we're the other we're we're going to keep our we're going to keep our nose out of your business because you have nuclear weapons and the exact opposite is true nuclear armament leads to mutual intrusion mutual intrusiveness now um currently we have unfolding in belarus a question of the legitimacy of their government they have had illegitimate elections or quashed elections you might say and the leader there is increasingly unpopular and he's regarded as an unjust dictator okay so that's one set of moral considerations in conundra what if he had nuclear weapons right what then how much more interested would other powers be in intruding into the politics of belarus possibly including military intrusion but intervention of of one method or another if whoever rules belarus also had nuclear weapons and again it's you have to remove the first assumption it's not that oh if he had nuclear weapons he could take over the world north korea is not going to take over the world right there's no there's no plausible threat of north korea taking over the world but could north korea wipe out a single american aircraft carrier in the ocean or a cluster of american naval vessels yes something like that is quite attainable for north korea could north korea wipe out one city in south korea yes you know that's quite attainable for north korea so again when you kind of both lower down the the scale of the threat and then understand the instability that comes with each and every change of regime in each and every country that has nuclear weapons even if it's through a legitimate election you realize that nuclear proliferation makes the whole system of mutually invidious even if democratic world government much more mutually intrusive i i'm i'm intentionally not using a word like responsible because it doesn't lead to greater responsibility um people may be reckless and irresponsible but they're intruding into one another's sovereignty great example communism in cyprus do you recall that in the year 2008 the tiny island of cyprus elected a communist government it wasn't a communist revolution they had a democratically elected communist government it was a complete disaster for the people of cyprus it also had tremendous knock-on consequences economically for the people of all of europe what if cyprus had nuclear arms what if there was a threat going far beyond you know the mere question of the welfare or democratic future of cyprus or what's economically advantageous for europe as a [ __ ] the stability of the banking system those questions matter you know those are real problems what if cyprus had nuclear weapons how then you start to draw the line how then do you start drawing treaties when people say look um we can no longer tolerate any of these nations no matter how small like we can't allow luxembourg or cyprus or a country the size of north korea to have a dictator who might be as terrible as joseph stalin or might be as terrible as a fiddler because if they have nuclear weapons we must step in we must snuff that out we must provide them with a government that fits some definition of normalcy reliability and trustworthiness immediately as soon as happens now i have a real question for you to ask yourselves that i can't answer does that lead to the world being more fragile politically or more robust would the government of saudi arabia be allowed to continue being a theocracy and a dictatorship in perpetuity forever if saudi arabia becomes a country that not only has nuclear weapons but that actively uses nuclear weapons let's just suppose hypothetically saudi arabia starts solving its problem in yemen with the small scale effective use of nuclear weapons so again not rendering yemen uninhabitable by human beings for many centuries but let's just say you know they wipe out some boats they wipe out some military bases um with none of the serious long-term consequences we've learned to fear but with some of the serious long-term consequences that the people of hiroshima and nagasaki had in japan if saudi arabia in this in this context were to become a muscular nuclear-armed country what then would be the response of the rest of the world and i think most people are just profoundly uncomfortable with not knowing the answer to that question why are we uncomfortable because it's going to happen anyway israel has nuclear arms japan has nuclear arms the official position of the government of japan is that they have a proximate nuclear deterrent approximate proximate so japan will say that on japanese soil right now there are no assembled ready-to-launch nuclear warheads but if they ever need them they can press a button or make a phone call and all the pieces that are needed to assemble a working nuclear warhead can be assembled in a very short span of time and put into a nuclear missile so japan in reality has nuclear weapons right um i don't recall any pressure from the united states or europe or anyone else to disarm japan and indeed i don't even think china is uncomfortable with i don't think china minds japan has new weapons and who could the japanese possibly use nuclear weapons against most likely china yes also theoretically uh russia but you know the the possibilities are are very slim and and very few now i've been asked and indeed i've been bribed to talk about the circumstance of australia in the world but if we're being honest the situation of australia is typical it's not really special probably what i would say about australia is what i would say about every other country in the world big and small australia historically has seen it as being in its self-interest to refuse to have nuclear weapons and to try to bully other nations especially poorer nations like indonesia into signing up to non-proliferation treaties in plain english australia would sign a treaty and make a solemn moral declaration that australia itself would never have nuclear weapons and then ask poorer countries like indonesia to also vow that they will not have nuclear weapons and this is all unfolding hypocritically under so-called nuclear umbrella agreements with the united states of america that term is used especially by the japanese the idea that if some other country allied with the united states really had a problem the united states would be the one providing the nuclear weapons that's the other reality another way to have a proximate nuclear weapon is oh well we don't have any nuclear weapons however there's a submarine just a few meters off of our capital city with the run by the united states military that has a nuclear missile on it that can launch at any time if you this is the height of hypocrisy but both japan and australia are capable of calling in american uh nuclear weapons and submarines are one of many mobile platforms them to be delivered and deployed from australian territory or from japanese areas so uh you know this was a cold war approach where the treaty itself would become a sort of fig leaf over the reality of the proliferation of nuclear arms on all sides and meanwhile in case you didn't you know here the other big dominoes have already fallen india pakistan israel you know many people speculate aloud that in reality iran secretly may have nuclear weapons or like japan may have a proximate nuclear threat they may have everything they need to assemble a nuclear weapon in a jiffy um you know if and when they they feel the need to so uh is it the question to ask is is it in australia's interest to be a country like japan that plays both sides of the fence or is it in australia's interest to be a country like the united states of america india and so on that openly um possesses nuclear weapons well in australia's case um there is not much of a disadvantage to openly possessing nuclear weapons because i think australia would be willing to sign a treaty that says hey if we ever have an illegitimate election if we ever have a dictator take over if we have some kind of collapse in government we're going to sign this treaty and we're going to invite the international community to use the uh parliamentary times we're going to invite other countries to intervene and then hold proper elections and get rid of the government that has taken over we australia do not want to descend into the kind of situation that has just happened in belarus we do not want to descend into the kind of situation that happened in germany in the years leading up to world war ii we do not want to decay from a legitimate democracy to an illegitimate one um you know no matter how temporarily popular in the short term such a regime might be so they it is quite possible for australia to both accept the responsibility of having nuclear weapons and to accept this much much higher level of mutual intrusion that comes when every country has to scrutinize every other country to make sure that the people in charge of of sane rational responsible mind that they are not going to use nuclear weapons in a way that will have devastating consequences for their neighbors or for the world now would i prefer to live in a world in which greece has nuclear weapons and turkey has nuclear weapons okay right now if you don't know the ancient animosity between greece and turkey is resuming once again well greece would prefer that turkey whether or not i would prefer that you know who would prefer that neither greece nor turkey have nuclear weapons france france right now is in north africa i can't even say rebuilding the french empire they're building a new french empire in north africa the whole western world is just kind of sleepwalking through this and doesn't care guess who cares turkey cares egypt cares greece has its own battles with the turks for unrelated reasons basically you know uh you know as long as neither greece nor turkey has nuclear weapons france feels disproportionately powerful in tromping around that whole part of the world did you notice that the prime minister of france flew in to uh lebanon after the uh massive explosion in beirut destroyed the harbor there and so on this is only a couple weeks ago now did you notice that why do you think he did that do you think he just felt like taking a vacation in the middle of corona virus do you think that was for no reason at all france has um shall we say very muscular diplomacy in the region france has nuclear weapons right so you know i might prefer to live in a world where none of these powers have nuclear weapons even the current circumstances 2020 the scale of this conflict is is moderate to small um you know all these countries are capable of sorting out their differences in libya sorting out their differences in syria sorting out who controls what with lebanon this is certainly not you know the brink of world war iv or anything of the kind but um you have to recognize that you know it is in the self-interest of the people of turkey to have nuclear weapons and is then in the interest of the people of greece to nuclear weapons and so on and so forth for every invidious division all around the world so what is the what is the real solution it's probably going to be treaties that define minimum standards for democracy minimum standards for a legitimate legitimacy of government that would not merely have consequences for a place like belarus right now like say hey if you don't meet these minimum standards what we consider a real election and a real government would have also very serious consequences for a country like the united states i'm old enough to remember the year 2000 when a guy called george w bush was illegitimately elected president united states in rigged elections that nobody did anything about that the international community in quotation marks didn't intervene in any way you could start signing really binding treaties that require the competence and responsibility and democracy and transparency of governments and you know if you become a nuclear power where you're willing to hold yourself as a country to that higher standard and where you accept that if the quality of democracy falters in your country that can happen it can happen due to an earthquake uh it can happen due to a plague and you know what can happen because the whole population is swept up in a passion for a short time and they push a dictator into power or you know for some other reason democracy falls apart we say okay look we understand that other countries can't allow us to go through a period of chaos and anarchy or dictatorship or communism or fascism they're not going to tolerate that because we have made the decision to have a stockpile of nuclear weapons a