sure, these declarations never stop anybody and it's good that you bring that up. people tend to put too much faith in these. i'm not an idealist who believes that institutions and contracts are the most important thing in geopolitics. but such declarations can still matter a lot in diplomacy and in how other geopolitical actors perceive a nation state. it makes a difference if you've been sitting on a comparatively tiny stockpile for decades, declaring a "no first strike" policy or if you're basically the geopolitical equivalent to somebody who constantly open-carries their dual .50 BMG hand cannons with compensators, reflex sights and underbarrel counterweights while wearing an "An Armed Society Is A Polite Society" shirt, a :fuck-around: pin and a "Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes" hat.

that totally changes how the rest of the world sees you and reacts to you. There's policies of de-escalation and being non-confrontational and limiting arms expenses and preventing arms races and standoffs. and there's policies of constantly telling the world you're ready to snap at any moment and end human civilization as we know it to cause maximum deterrence.

especially important in this regard is Mearsheimer's concept of the power-security dilemma, where increased arms spending and other measures that are supposed to make your position more secure lead to you being perceived as a threat. which leads to those seeing you as a threat to join in on the arms race. which leads to you feeling more threatened and so on and so on. we're in an age of armament spirals and escalating threat displays again and when we want to have other options than fully nukepilled posadism, we need political actors to get back to disarmament treaties, declarations of no first strike etc. etc..

i also think that the MIC will do everything it can to prevent such a change. and given that our next generation of natsec ghoul PMCs is intent on cancelling Mearsheimer and other neo-realist hawks because they do not share their idealist brainworms, we may simultaneously arrive at a point where the basic tools of realpolitik have been replaced with jingoist rage not only among the propagandized populace, but among the propagandizers themselves.

it does make a difference because it's also their policy on who can authorise a launch under what conditions and how primed the things are for launch. American first strike policy has resulted in near misses where downed phone lines meant that they have gone so far as to load bambers with nukes and fly them off to drop them before recalling once they realised it was a mistake

Sam Harris has said many quackish and stupid things in his dubious career as a self described "scientist" that has never published a peer-reviewed scientific paper and used his family fortune to assign himself a PhD that he uses to peddle his books and merch.

One of the worst things he ever said was "there is more scientific advancement in a single New York zip code than in the entirety of Islamic history." One is a location, one is a measure of time. If we're going to combine those, how many seconds of that New York zip code's "scientific advancement?" How many years focused on that location? It's such a remarkably "not even wrong" level of stupid that it hurts thinking about it.

:inshallah: