As you have probably noticed, policy is based on what a country CAN do not on what we think it WILL do. Not only is it not possible to know how a country will behave, we have found that a country usually does what it CAN do.
The Soviet Union might have started a nuclear war anytime from 1949 to the day of its demise. Many people thought it would; some said it was inevitable. But there was never the slightest chance of that, according to most Russians who were close to power. If the Chinese government were to destroy the US economy, the Chinese government were also be brought down by the ensuing economic upheaval. Nations do not often destroy themselves for no reason. It does happen, I agree. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, after all. The U.S. fought in Vietnam for years and years, long after it was obvious it could not win.
The NK would not use the weapon, they would sell it. That way they get money and they have someone else do the dirty work and get the blame.
If a bomb explodes anywhere in South Korea or Japan, North Korea will be destroyed, regardless of who plants it or who is responsible. Where else would North Korea want to attack?
Cheaper yes, doable no. The oil companies will not give up the power and money they are making. A lot of things would be cheaper, but they are not done because too much pride and ignorance are involved.
The oil companies will not remain powerful forever -- and probably not for long. Political & economic dominance is evanescent. In 1890, many Americans felt that railroads and steel companies had an iron grip on the soul of the nation, and so much political power they would abolish democracy. But technology changed, and people no longer fear railroads. In 1975 IBM dominated the computer industry to such an extent, some experts predicted that all other computer companies would soon go out of business. Most computer purchasers did not even bother to look at equipment from other companies. By 1989, IBM was suffering the biggest losses in the history of commerce and the Wall Street Journal described it as "fading from view."
It is great to believe that mankind would act in an ideal and rational way - it helps a person sleep nights. However, too many examples of opposite behavior are available to count on the ideal occurring . . .
Most people throughout most history have been rational and reasonable. Not ideal, but good enough. If that were not true our species would have gone extinct long ago. We are social animals -- pack hunting carnivores, like wolves. Such animals must to cooperate and protect other members of the pack, or they do not survive. We are only in danger now because our technology has increased our power. But our power has often escalated in the past, and we have usually survived these escalations. As shown in Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," even primitive people had the power to destroy themselves. Occasionally they did destroy themselves, but more often they survived.
We often talk about the "madness of crowds" and the fact that people sometimes collectively go bonkers, in the Wall Street dot-com boom, for example. Yet paradoxically, when you take a large sample of people, you always find they are sane. A "large sample" is not a mob gathered in one place. It is a bunch of people at home or at work. Mobs can be inhumanly irrational, but once the mob scatters, and people go back to their daily lives, they usually recover. When you select 200 individual people at random, and examine their behavior in their normal, settled social context, you will find that on average they are sane, reasonable, and reliable. Most people do their jobs conscientiously. That is why your bread is baked and your telephone line stays connected. That is also why the experimental method works. The other day I wrote to reporter:
"If several hundred researchers could all make large mistakes using 100 and 200-year-old techniques, science would never work in the first place. That is like asserting that you can select 200 carpenters at random, have each of them build a wooden house, and when they finish every single house might collapse because of mistakes the carpenters made. That would not happen in the lifetime of the universe. Of course newly-built houses do collapse from time to time. Individual carpenters do make drastic mistakes, and so do individual electrochemists. But they are never *all* mistaken."
When 200+ physicists got together at the APS to listen to Robert Park the rabble rouser, they became an unruly mob. If you could isolate them in their laboratories and somehow have them to observe a cold fusion experiment, sanity would return and most of them would begin acting like professional scientists again.
- Jed
