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Should the [nuclear] deterrent be dismantled..if so why?

Please attach my name to what others here have said about MAD. We can shake our heads knowingly at the irony of the acronym... but the bottom line is that it worked.

What I'd like to add is a footnote about the future. In a sense, a number of otherwise sensible nations have already decided to dismantle their nuclear deterrents--it's a little something called the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, the point of which is to cease physical development and testing of new nuclear weapons. While I applaud the peaceful motivations behind this idea, I think its ratification would be a Bad Idea.

For one thing, how could any of us ever be sure the other wasn't running a nuke research program on the sly? Sure, verification is part of the treaty. But look at all the trouble the U.N. has been having trying to find war-making materiel in a run-down country like Iraq. What person not blinded by good intentions really believes that Russia or the U.S. couldn't do an even better job of hiding a nuclear R&D lab if either chose to do so?

What kind of "deterrent" is unilateral disarmament?

Furthermore, there are the smaller nations, some of whom may not even sign a NTBT. While there is reason to question the specifics of what Gen. Aleksandr Lebed has claimed about Russian nuclear material (and nuclear scientists) being exported all over the world by now, there does seem to be some evidence that this has in fact happened. OK, we may not want to nuke Luxembourg... but if they can research new nuclear technology and we can't, how will we even be able to detect the next generation of bombs by the middle of the next century?

"Oh, don't worry," we're told, "our scientists at Sandia National Laboratory with their wonderful new computers [over 4,000 Pentiums connected to each other] will be able to simulate nuclear explosions. Not only can we can do research into new explosive technologies, we can test our existing stockpiles without ever actually, physically exploding anything! Isn't that wonderful?"

Speaking as a computer scientist, I have to say... baloney.

I'm told that nurses (good ones, anyway) have a saying: "The chart is not the patient." Likewise, a simulation of a bomb--no matter how superb its fidelity--is not a real bomb. A simulation is a collection of guesses about the current state of numerous features of a real thing, projected into the future. If a relevant feature is excluded, the simulation will be wrong. If an inappropriate feature is included, the simulation will be wrong. If an appropriate feature is included but is assigned an unrealistic value, the simulation will be wrong. If the assumptions concerning projected dynamic behavior are invalid, the simulation will be wrong. Bluntly, there's no such thing as a perfect simulation. They're all wrong; it's just a question of degree.

Is a simulation of a nuclear bomb faithful enough to the reality to eliminate our need for quality control testing of real bombs?

I give the software developers at Sandia all the credit in the world, but all software has bugs. Do we really want to trust the efficacy of our nuclear deterrent to software developers?

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