Congress's Choice

I'm really happy about the Iran deal, and looking at the international politics makes it really clear this is the right decision. 1. We are strengthening the President of Iran relative to the Supreme Leader, strengthening Iranian democracy. 2. The government which gave birth to al Qaeda with probably the worst women's rights record in the world which is openly led by the radical perversion of Islam called Wahabbism, this of course being Saudi Arabia, is unhappy. 3. Liberals in Israel are happy and Netanyahu is furious. 4. We are going to have more oil in the market, pushing down prices further hurting the government of the world's largest petrostate, which is Russia. 5. Increasing trade with Iran is going to open economic opportunities for the average Iranian people. (all of the evidence in IPE points in this direction) 6. We are going to have a more open dialogue with Iran, whose President is the only leader in the Muslim world who I have seen consistently uphold values of tolerance and seeking peace over the last decade.

For these reasons, this was definitely the right decision and this will help make the world a safer place where we will have less religious extremism and a more tolerant planet. Sanctions only increase violence and discontent. A basic message of international relations research is that trade and communication are the major bringers of peace in the world, and this decision is going to increase both.

Now it is time for Congress to choose between peace and war, tolerance and intolerance, dialogue and distrust. I hope that enough members of congress will see what is really happening.

The international lobby as well is going to be very stark with Sweden lobbying for increasing trade while the Wahabbi state of Saudi Arabia is going to be lobbying for increasing sanctions. The government of Israel is going to be lobbying against the deal while liberal Israelis are going to be lobbying in favor of the deal. They have a choice between increasing the oil market share of Putin or decreasing the oil market share of Putin. The right answer should be obvious to anyone who looks at the international consequences of this decision. At the bare minimum Iran will open to Europe which will severely hurt the political elite of Russia.

The real cost of the Cold War's nuclear weapons

The United States currently has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. It has been estimated that if we used them all we could destroy the world multiple times over. Annually we spend $35 billion maintaining our nuclear weapons supply. We currently maintain 5113 nuclear warheads, enough for 26 nukes per country (imagine 26 nukes descending on Monaco, 26 nukes descending on Canada, etc.) or one per 1.4 million people. If we (hypothetically) descended one nuke on the world's cities over 2,000,000 people we would have over 4800 nukes left. That would decrease the world's population by roughly 20%, and would kill roughly 1,400,000,000 people. Since there are 234 cities larger than 2 million people, this is a kill rate of about 6,000,000 people per nuke. (Based off of Wikipedia's list of urban areas by population) To kill everyone in the world, each American nuke would have to kill 1,400,000 people. I would say this is doable.

How is it worth spending $35 billion on an arsenal that is large enough to kill over 20% of the global population? I always compare government spending by how many people could be sent through college for one year with the same amount of money, and assuming $20,000 per person, we could send 1,750,000 students to college tuition and fees free. If we only paid tuition (assume $6000 per person, a state school) that would pay for tuition for about 5,833,333 students, or 2% of the population of the United States. For comparison, there were 4,136,000 births in 2009.

The message of this post is, next time you hear the Republicans speak about how much we spend on education and health care and how wasteful it is, ask how it is so wasteful to teach people how to be doctors, programmers, businessmen, teachers, any profession you an think of, yet it is a good use of funds to spend $30 billion on nuclear weapons, more than is required to kill every person on earth.