[thechat] Your Opinion is Required

John Handelaar john at userfrenzy.com
Tue May 28 21:27:00 CDT 2002


[bugger, truncated post, please discard the last one]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thechat-admin at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:thechat-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Syed Zeeshan Haider
> Sent: 28 May 2002 21:50
> To: Evolt TheChat
> Subject: [thechat] Your Opinion is Required

OK, I'll bite.

Declaration in advance:  I spent nearly seven years working
for an organisation whose sole purpose was total opposition
to nuclear weaponry.

> Q 1.        What do you think about thousands of ballistic missiles and
> nuclear weapons which are in possession of USA, UK, France, Russia and
> China?

I think they're a bad thing, not least because they have
no military value of any kind.

> Q 2.        Are these powers of the world justified to possess such
> amount of such destructive weapons?

Leading question, and ultimately identical to Q1 anyway.

> Q 3.        Why do these countries prohibit other countries to have
> these weapons when they have these with their own-selves?

Bluntly, they attempted to prevent those programmes from occurring
in India and Pakistan in order to avoid a future hypothetical
situation where those two countries would start seriously considering
using nuclear weapons as part of an armed conflict, the external
consequences of which would be astonishingly profound.

> Q 4.        If these powers think that other countries are non-sense to
> have such weapons then do these powers have any sense; if we observe
> their character in world community?

See answer to Q3 above.

> Q 5.        Will there be any threat to world peace if small countries
> start their own space program for scientific researches?

In and of itself, no.

On the other hand,  deliberately provocative ballistic missile
testing on the part of a military junta which possesses nuclear
warheads, during a time of international crisis... ain't a
"space programme".

> I realize that Q 4 is a little bitter but there are many
> opposing voices for these powers and their destructive weapons. Fourth
> question represents some of those voices.

Fine.  So long as it cuts both ways :-)

The reason I think those voices are a crock of crap is that
it assumes 'moral equivalency' between nation states which
possess nuclear weapons (even if they should not), and nation
states which possess nuclear weapons and actually start deploying
them in a theatre of conflict, which is quite another thing.

There is no such moral equivalence, and please understand me
when I stress something that strongly... my own views and deeds
on the subject within the UK basically made me an 'enemy of the
state' to the extent that I still can't get through an EU
passport gate in under an hour.

I wonder whether what most of us 'in the field' in the UK
know about just how much danger Pakistan is in right now (and
I don't mean from India), has filtered through the army-controlled
censors there yet.

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John Handelaar

T +44 20 8933 1494       M +44 7930 681789
F +44 870 169 7657   E john at userfrenzy.com
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