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Whenever I see something like this, I ask myself: "should we have banned the use of fossil fuel when it was first being harnessed?" The answer to myself is alw

• ericd 16y ago
  I think the more apt question is: "should we have banned the use of nuclear tech when it was first being harnessed". Also no, at least for me, since I think it's one of the few viable alternative energy sources, but we wouldn't have needed a doomsday clock if we hadn't.
  • jrockway 16y ago
    I'm pretty sure that we could kill off the human race with plenty of other weapons. Conventional explosives are not too nice to the human body. Neither are swords or pointy sticks, for that matter. (The problem is not nuclear weapons, the problem is people that want to kill other people.)
    • electromagnetic 16y ago
      Nuclear weapons are simply a shortcut, genocide and scorched earth tactics have always been prevalent in warfare - you just couldn't do both at once on such a grand scale. The game changer that was nuclear weapons likely saved the planet. Instead of dropping real bombs, causing real fires, spreading real land mines and chemical agents, etc, that we had been building for a half-century . . . suddenly we stopped. There weren't any grand wars and there hasn't been since the end of WW2, the planet is truly quiet. Nuclear weapons was almost like someone pulling a knife in a brawl and everyone backing away. We saw what the end result was and we didn't want it. I love all the doomsday stuff, but really nuclear weapons are the greatest invention because by and large they ended warfare on the global scale.
      • jrockway 16y ago
        For rational actors, nuclear weapons are great. The problem is, the irrational actors are starting to get them, and then mutually assured destruction doesn't buy us anything. There is no enemy to destroy.
        • barrkel 16y ago
          I guess I'll believe that when we have evidence of irrational actors.
          • ericd 16y ago
            Do religious fanatics/suicide attackers not fall under that definition? (Serious question, I'm not sure how they're classified in that whole discussion)
            • barrkel 16y ago
              Seems to me that fanatics usually serve their organization's rational purposes. Anger and rage are also rational, even when they result in self-harm; their perceived "irrationality" is the reason why it's not good to provoke someone. Such emotions are like a kind of mutually assured destruction, on a small scale. Terrorist organizations etc. use such actors rationally, in order to generate fear, reaction, power by radicalizing their host societies, etc. They are rational actors, and are susceptible to MAD logic. When we are at risk of colossal attack by insane individuals, we'll be in a much worse place.
              • electromagnetic 16y ago
                Agreed, no Al Qaeda leader is going to deploy a single nuclear weapon on the US or other nuclear power without full and implicit knowledge that our nations opposition to this war will flip 100%. I'm sorry, the reaction after 9/11 lead to a full blown invasion of two countries (regardless of any other motives behind the actions, it was the public opinion that allowed it to happen) and that was just a couple of buildings disappearing. If a nuke had been deployed in New York, the populace would only have been happy to let the government turn Afghanistan or Iraq into a few million square miles of radioactive desert glass. The terrorist organizations themselves are acting logically by using illogical agents. The men who killed themselves on 9/11 weren't logical, but their actions were considering the masterminds behind the scheme. Right now if Al Qaeda got a nuclear weapon, they're still at a losing ratio of >1000:1. I'm sorry, but the reason the USSR went nuts building nukes was because the US already had hundreds developed by the time the USSR only had a dozen and it wasn't MAD logic it was suicide logic. Any deployment of nukes in the early stages of the cold war would have wiped them out. Similarly, a terrorist organization is only ever going to get its hands on a handful of nukes, it'll never have the 1000's required to destroy western civilization, so the deployment of a nuke only guarantees the destruction of their own. I'm sorry, but Islamic Terrorism really doesn't instill fear if every Muslim just bit the atomic dust. I'd hate to see a world where we wiped out countless countries mainly because of religious association, but I really don't see anything else happening if a terrorist organization detonated a nuke in NYC or any other city.