I'm not saying I have beef with it. I would be happier with a world where fewer countries, including Iran and Israel, have nukes. I'm saying legality of nukes seems 100% derived from a calculus of power, not first principles - that includes US, UK, Russia, China, everyone.

If a mafia boss defines anything he gets away with as legal, that's not aligned with what we commonly think of as legal justice and thus a pointless distinction.

There is no justice nor glory to be had in nuclear weapons, but they exist, and need to be contained to as few entities that can use them as possible. Like seriously, the ideal number of nuclear warheads in the world is 0, but that is not the world we were born into.

So I've made peace with mafia boss power politics keeping the number of countries with nuclear weapons on the low end of the spectrum, and for that matter I'd support a much more aggressive approach to that end than we have seen these last 30 years.

I don't think that's sustainable, because it leads to injustice, i.e., countries with nuclear weapons abusing their power, which in the end encourages all countries to get nuclear weapons to protect their own safety and interests.

As challenging as it sounds, we need to develop a strong impartial international institution whose the only mission would be maintaining peace and preventing wars on the planet. This should be the only entity that's approved to have nuclear weapons.

> As challenging as it sounds, we need to develop a strong impartial international institution whose the only mission would be maintaining peace and preventing wars on the planet.

The scenario you concocted here is Disneyland. It’s not just challenging, it’s just an oppressive version of the UN, but it won’t be impartial because it will be the most powerful organization on the planet and a target for every extremist and ideologue that seeks to acquire power. You haven’t changed the game, you’ve temporarily changed the battlefield.

You can ridicule this idea, but we're already having the US (partly through NATO) taking the role of a global sherif, except without aiming for neutrality, accountability, nor justice, so we end up living in a geopolitical world in which "might makes right". If we continue like this, we will have another World War, but learning by mistakes is sometimes the only realistic way forward.

What you are proposing is not a change, it's still might makes right. You're just changing the letterhead.

No. What I'm proposing is to make these processes purposefully and explicitly neutral, accountable, and just. This implies democratic and decentralised governance and decision-making. Clearly this isn't happening now.

As long as you’ve got humans in the mix, it’ll also be political. What you’re describing is a political organization and wishcasting that it’ll be as neutral as you envision according your values of neutrality. It’ll also be the most powerful political and military organization on Earth, so in other words, same shit as we have now, different letterhead. You may as well be describing America, you just don’t want it to be America, and I can respect that perspective even if I don’t agree with it, but your hypothetical organization is not as different as you think it is.

It's 100% different. The institution I envision should represent all countries, or at least member countries, so that it has global democratic legitimacy. Simply put, interests of one country are not equivalent to interests of all countries. If one country tries to take the role of that institution, sooner or later it will run into a conflict of interests.

> This should be the only entity that's approved to have nuclear weapons.

This speaks like someone who has never been outside of a heavily bureaucratized regime. People don't get "approval" for things, they just do them.

The irony of this entire situation is that it actually all but guarantees large scale nuclear proliferation.

It’s not that people were just too dumb or too scared to do something about it.

I think Russia invading Ukraine, after signing a treaty to respect their borders if Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, let this particular cat out of the bag a long time ago.

> There is no justice nor glory to be had in nuclear weapons, but they exist, and need to be contained to as few entities that can use them as possible.

Agreed. Let's start with US and Russia first.

Or more realistically: both war and diplomacy. I don’t know why it’s being framed as one or the other, but the fact is when diplomacy fails, and it is a must-achieve goal, war is an option.

With regard to the "mafia boss power politics" you were talking about, the mafia boss keeps doing things like withdrawing from the JCPOA (back then) and abandoning negotiations to follow Israel's lead in war (today). Maybe approaching things at the mafia boss level isn't the way to go.

Yeah what I was talking about doesn't exclude diplomacy, but at one point or another you've got to be clear that under no circumstances will the development of nukes by $country be tolerated either if you're going to keep the number of nuclear powers tamped down.

Or maybe that is the wrong approach, but the policy we've had that let North Korea develop nukes and Iran at least get very close also isn't working.

North Korea is the place where foreign policy hawks go to die. It's embarrassing to watch. Every now and then over the past seven decades we have had politicians who think they're clever because their trusted advisors told them "we'll find a new way to threaten them," "let's offer them something," "you're really smart, you've got this, and nobody has noticed that you're orange" and so on, and they issue some tough talk about North Korea. It's hard to describe how inadequate their diplomacy has always been to the task. Their diplomacy is like the Visigoths trying to pull down the hated remnants of the Roman Empire, like bridges and aqueducts and so on, using oxen and ropes and inevitably failing. Something like that. North Korea is a tough problem.

Iran is more straightforward. I don't know why we've been so reluctant to make real diplomatic effort, especially after so many of Iran's proxies were significantly weakened in the last year or two, and Iran's sway was at a minimum. There seems to be an unwritten rule that once we've categorized a country as an enemy we're obligated to deal with them in the dumbest ways imaginable.

Everyone will agree with that. It's pretty obvious NK got nukes because they had an ally strong enough to shield them. "Unauthorized" referred to precisely the lack of credible support from a strong ally.

Isr ael is literally involved with bombing Iran right now and this is a post about it. How could you expect them not to be mentioned?

You 100% know why.