Free Republic

I have to take issue with the nuclear strategy stuff; there's really no need for the United States to have as large a stockpile as it has.

Classic deterrence theory says you need to be able to kill 25% of the enemy's population and destroy 50% of its industrial base to prevent him from even thinking about bombing you. Going off that standard, we can deter even Russia, who has thousands of missiles, with only one of our submarines.

Bush is right to get rid of land-based ICBMs like the Peacekeepers; there's no reason to make our land a nuclear target unnecessarily when we can maintain our deterrent force in easily hidden (and almost completely undetectable) submarines.

Running a capital account deficit isn't a problem in itself. The problem is that as more countries use dollars in their central bank reserves, general trust in the value of the dollar has to go down given its increased supply. At that point, the dollar becomes vulnerable to speculation on the foreign exchange markets, leading to possible devaluation. Irrational psychology can have just as big an effect in this situation as well-considered economic logic.

This isn't cluelessness; this is what happened to the United States in January-March 1968, and is one of the reasons LBJ decided to stop escalation in Vietnam as well as Great Society social spending.

I'm confused -- the existence of God poses a specifically mathematical problem to the Big Bang theory?

You can find the cosmic microwave background yourself with an antenna and some trig to cancel out the effects of the atmosphere; this isn't exactly occult knowledge. The CMB was actually discovered accidentally by two people at Bell Labs working on something completely different, then only gradually incorporated into astrophysics.

Besides, the Big Bang theory says light didn't appear until 300,000 years after the creation of the universe, when there was enough space for photons to escape solid matter.

As far as I understand it, space-time is filled with a range of potential and real particles, so that there's a certain amount of uncertainty about how much mass is in each unit of area. Heisenberg's principle says that with the smaller area you're looking at, the uncertainty over either the amount of mass you have or over that mass' velocity has to go up. So the possibility is that with enough time, it's possible for an amount of mass the size of the universe to just appear into existence. And -- this last part, I have to admit, sounds like one of Kant's antimonies -- before space-time existed, there was an infinite amount of time in which that probability could occur, so it did occur.

It's been two years since I took this stuff, though, so I could very well have got the details wrong.

Nuclear programs are much harder to hide because they require large, complicated, and delicate industrial equipment.

It is theoretically possible that Iran would be getting HEU from another source. Two things, though: (1) if they could buy HEU, why go to the trouble of making it? and (2) if there's someone out there selling weapons-grade uranium, we have a much bigger situation on our hands.

I have a hunch that this might form part of our missile defense program; the US has talked before about actually shooting down ballistic missiles in space.

They have a strong motive to oppose the deal: the US will tolerate the fact that India hasn't signed the Nonproliferation Treaty, which the IAEA is supposed to police.

I don't like this deal because it makes us look inconsistent: Iran now has an excuse not to comply with the IAEA since we just rewarded India for doing the same.

Even if Iran got the bomb, we could still deter them with our own nuclear forces. We could deploy theater missile defense for Iraq and Afghanistan, and make very clear that we have no problem with either massively retaliating against them or even preemptively destroying their nuclear forces if they threaten our interests. Even Ahmadinejad may think twice if he knows we can and will destroy not just him, but the entirety of his country.

To be fair, they're only running 20-30 centrifuges. With Iran's level of technology, it'll take them about 1500 centrifuges running for one year to get enough HEU for one crude atomic bomb.

Iran may or may not want the bomb -- I don't know. We can be sure, though, that there's no way in hell they'll have one in six months. Even if they have the proper designs, they just don't have the uranium.

A good rule of thumb is that about 1500 centrifuges running for a year will give you enough U-238 to build a nuclear bomb. Iran is currently running 20 to 30 centrifuges. Plus, I've heard several reports that they're having technical problems with their enrichment: the Pakistanis sold them the blueprints to an enrichment method twice as fast, but the Iranians don't know how to use it.

The tricky part is that with only 20-30 centrifuges running, Iran's program does look more like a energy program than a weapons program. That causes problems for the US on both ends. On one hand, we could overreact and get ourselves into an unnecessary war with a non-nuclear Iran; on the other hand, if we're complacent, they may be able to quickly "breakout" to a weapons program if the IAEA isn't watching.

Not only would no one group have the incentive or the resources to buy a nuclear submarine, but no one group has the incentive to spend its time and effort enlisting others in buying a nuclear submarine.

Not to mention having nuclear weapons being shared among a possibly unstable coalition of private companies...

In the vast majority of interactions, nobody sues anybody. Why does a monopoly make the thing more efficient? In any example ever found in history, a monopoly has resulted in worse services at higher prices. Being subject to a single legal system makes people's promises credible, because you can sue them in the courts. Whether you actually sue them or not is not so important. It would be much harder, take more time, and thus be less efficient if you had to try and figure out which court among any will make your promises the most credible, especially over international borders.

Rational-choice theory shows exactly why defense can't be privatized; in a market of many private companies, no particular company will gain more then it'd have to spend on a strategic nuclear deterrent, nor will any company be willing to spend the costs of organizing everybody else. Nuclear submarines are very expensive and not very profitable...

The thing is that in the sort of capitalism today, where an individual interacts on a daily basis with such a huge variety of people, transaction costs mount so quickly that a state that can monopolize the policing business will be more efficient than a market of competing police and courts systems. Case in point: What about international business transactions? How would you get a foreign client to pick, let alone trust, one of many private court systems?

With SWAT teams and the like, it really is amazing just how much force the state could theoretically use against its citizens. One could argue that great force is necessary to combat new threats like terrorists. But even if so, we need to think carefully about how we use this massive police power we have.

I don't think my argument would justify Kelo; in that case, the structure of legal rights was interfering with someone's natural rights, and so the legal right of the state should have lost.

Certainly you have to agree there's a difference between a natural right like "the right to property" and a civil right like having X number of people in your jury. Civil rights just flesh out the details of natural rights; but that doesn't give them the, er, right to trump natural rights.

I thought that the Founders' biggest worry about a standing army was that it might interfere in politics. But with a professional army, we haven't had any problem at all, especially seeing how many problems France and Germany had because of it.

Teddy Kennedy doesn't create your rights. But the framework of government laid down in the Constitution does create legal rights for you -- it gives you an equal and free place in a political structure where you can vote, get a free trial, etc. That structure is supposed to defend your pre-state rights like to life and property; of course, you have the right to change that framework if you so choose...