The hippies were right! Ban the bomb!

[bananas]

http://www.economist.com/node/18836134?story_id=18836134

The growing appeal of zero
Banning the bomb will be hard, but not impossible

Jun 16th 2011 | from the print edition

RIDDING the world of nuclear weapons has long been a cause of the pacifist left. But in the past few years mainstream politicians, retired military leaders and academic strategists have begun to share the same goal, albeit with a very different idea of how to get there. That is partly thanks to a campaigning body called Global Zero, which is holding its third annual “summit” in London next week.

Global Zero got going in late 2006. Its two founders were Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman ballistic-missile launch-control officer and fellow of Brookings Institution who had set up the World Security Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, a few years earlier and Matt Brown, who had served as a youthful secretary of state for Rhode Island. They set about creating from scratch a global movement that would be very different from previous nuclear-disarmament efforts. But they might not have got far had it not been for a stroke of luck.

In January 2007 a seminal article appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The authors, who became known as the “four horsemen of the apocalypse”, were Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, George Shultz and Sam Nunn. All were veterans of America’s cold-war security establishment with impeccable credentials as believers in nuclear deterrence. They now asserted that far from making the world safer, nuclear weapons had become a source of intolerable risk.

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Suddenly, Global Zero was able to recruit people who were a far cry from the old “ban the bomb” crowd. Taking his cue from the “four horsemen”, Mr Blair emphasised that Global Zero had to advocate the kind of pragmatic actions that mainstream politicians and foreign-policy experts could endorse, while preserving, as a destination, a goal that seemed inspiring. “Zero” was a catchier slogan than the arcane incrementalism that had come to characterise old-time arms control. By putting the dangers of proliferation and nuclear-armed terrorism at the forefront of its concerns, Global Zero would puncture the public’s post-cold-war complacency over nuclear weapons. Above all, Global Zero had to stand for a realistic process that was phased, multilateral, universal and backed by hard-nosed verification.

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This Saturday is Nuclear Abolition Day: www.nuclearabolition.org
Global Zero: www.globalzero.org

[Leftist Agitator]

1. Unrec.

Give the bomb to every nation on Earth, and war will end forever.

Ban the bomb, and the one who defies the ban will lord over us all.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Isn't it funny how so many people with 'leftist' handles

say so many un-leftist things?

[AndyTiedye]

3. Giving Every Nation the Bomb Will Only Make All Wars Nuclear

and it won't take very much of that to make the planet uninhabitable.

[Renew Deal]

4. Do you agree that every person should carry a gun?

For the same reason?

[bananas]

5. That's not true at all.

You should read "How Risky Is Nuclear Optimism" by Martin Hellman,
and some of his other writings: http://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/how-risky-is-nuclear-optimism/
He's applied probabilistic risk analysis to nuclear deterrence and estimates a failure rate of 1% per year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Hellman

Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is an American cryptologist, and is best known for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a long-time contributor to the computer privacy debate and is more recently known for promoting risk analysis studies on nuclear threats, including the NuclearRisk.org website.

Contents
1 Public Key Cryptography
2 Computer Privacy Debate
3 Defusing the Nuclear Threat
4 Timeline
5 References
6 External links

Public Key Cryptography

Hellman and Whitfield Diffie's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976. It introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, which went far toward solving one of the fundamental problems of cryptography, key distribution. It has become known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article also seems to have stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms. Hellman and Whitfield Diffie were awarded the Marconi Fellowship and accompanying prize in 2000 for work on public-key cryptography and for helping make cryptography a legitimate area of academic research.<1>

Computer Privacy Debate

Hellman has been a long-time contributor to the computer privacy debate, starting with the issue of DES key size in 1975 and culminating with service (1994-96) on the National Research Council's Committee to Study National Cryptographic Policy, whose main recommendations have since been implemented.

Defusing the Nuclear Threat

Hellman has been active in researching international security since 1985. His current project in this area is to defuse the Nuclear threat. In particular, Hellman is studying the probabilities and risks associated with nuclear weapons and encouraging further international research in this area. His website NuclearRisk.org has been endorsed by a number of prominent individuals including a former Director of the National Security Agency, Stanford's President Emeritus, and two Nobel Laureates.<2>

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