laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (04/04/85)
Like thousands of other people, I have thought about this a lot. I would like to see nuclear weapons done away with. Here is all that I have come up with. Historically, I have only found 3 reason why people *start* wars. reason 1 is because God/manifest destiny/history has *demanded* that the belligerant nation take over some territory. this reason is irrational. I don't know what to do about this reason. I think that the super powers are not run by people who believe this one. This may be wishful thinking. In any case, I don't know how to defend against this one. reason 2 is because the billigerant nation thinks that some other nation will take them over unless they do the taking over first. reason 3 is because there are economic, political or social gains which the belligerant nation thinks that makes a war worthwhile. these reasons may be *wrong*, but they are not irrational. there *have* been successful wars in the past. I am not very sanguine about the hopes of getting the superpowers to abandon nuclear weapons due to increased trust. I only trust people whom I feel are fundamentally rational. I do not think that there is any way to guarantee that political leaders are rational. In democratic countries the person with the support of the most people is supposed to be the elected leader. Most people appear to vote for reasons which are not rational, or only partly rational. Charismatic irrational people do very well in democratic politics. In non-democratic countries the situation may be even worse. To stay in power, even more than in democratic countries, you have to watch your back from attacks from your contempoararies. Paranoid irrational people do very well in non-democratic politics. None of this implies that either democratic or non-democratic countries *can't* have rational leadership -- just that it cannot be guaranteed. So it seems foolish to trust *anybody*. Therefore, we need a solution whereby nuclear weapons are obsolete. Nobody fights wars with pikes and swords and cavalry these days. It would be preferable if war itself was obsolete. People who claim that war is *already* obselete miss the point. They are already more rational than most of their fellow men. It is not the rational men who are the problem -- war will be started by someone who is more irrational if it is ever started at all. The only solution I have found viable is to move a significant portion of the population of all the planet into space. Pioneers generally have more challenging and intersting things to do than fight wars. they are also involved in an expanding economy, which makes them less likely to believe that resources are finite and that they should annex their neighbours to control the resources which are there. There are also proposals which claim that, after the initial work is done, it is *cheaper* to live in space than on a planet, and cheaper to run heavy industry there. When things are cheaper then the standard of living goes up. When you already are wealthy there is less of an incentive to make a perspective war seem worthwhile. Also, it is the ultimate in decentrallisation. Despite space opera science fiction stories I think that defeating a space dwelling nation in *any* war would be difficult once the space dwellings are reasonably self-sufficient. I am interested in better ideas. With this in mind, space weapons are good in that they preserve an interest in space, but bad in that the encourage a militarisation of space. I do not know how to estimate the effect of either. I wish I knew how close we are to having private enterprise in space. Laura Creighton utzoo!laura