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It's not over atomic energy. It's that it's no coincidence that all 5 members of the UN security council have nuclear weapons. The threat of their use gets thin

It's not over atomic energy. It's that it's no coincidence that all 5 members of the UN security council have nuclear weapons. The threat of their use gets things done, and that fades the more countries have nuclear weapons. So, insofar as there is a sinister motive to Hiroshima drumbeating, it's specifically to preserve the viability of the nuclear threat. Consider how different the current war in Ukraine would look if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons. How different would the situation in Gaza look if any of Israel's immediate neighbors also had nuclear weapons? I'd also argue that the correct emotional response to the destruction rendered by a single airplane (vs. the 325 used for the Tokyo Firebombing) is abject horror, and that should cause any person to seriously question their use. I'm not here to dispute that nuclear power is good or that the alternative to bombing Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki was worse than the bombings. It's that while Truman et al may have understood the extrema situation the Allies were in, that's no guarantee that future users of atomic weapons would be so deliberate.

PaulHoule 1y ago
The current situation might not be stable in the long term. Ukraine now regrets giving up their nuclear weapons. The "red line" of Ukraine attacking either Crimea or internationally recognized Russia was crossed and revealed to be a bluff. The wall against proliferation will eventually break. For the life of me I can't figure out how Iran had a much harder time refining U235 with centrifuges than Pakistan did in the 1970s; I mean, I can understand how the US has been unable to deploy centrifuges to make enriched uranium for reactors (the same reason we can't have so many other nice things) but why Iran? The lesson of Gaza may be that a people in a similar situation might want to have nuclear weapons at all costs. There definitely are paths left out of the conventional analysis of proliferation paths (accelerator-based methods, AVLIS) and even though they could reduce the footprint of producing the fuel they are also all super-high tech.)
- petsfed 1y ago
  Its definitely not stable, because the nuclear-armed countries' only arguments against nuclear proliferation are "trust us, you don't want this" and (said quietly) "if everybody has these, we'd lose a lot of power". So non-profileration efforts are a game of cat-and-mouse. We needed to have an ironclad "we are demonstrating that nobody needs nuclear weapons by doing x,y and z", and instead, Russia and NATO both said exactly that, then kept provoking each other to see who would flinch first over Ukraine. And I agree, nuclear power is a ridiculous casualty of that scramble for power.

PaulHoule 1y ago

The current situation might not be stable in the long term. Ukraine now regrets giving up their nuclear weapons. The "red line" of Ukraine attacking either Crimea or internationally recognized Russia was crossed and revealed to be a bluff. The wall against proliferation will eventually break. For the life of me I can't figure out how Iran had a much harder time refining U235 with centrifuges than Pakistan did in the 1970s; I mean, I can understand how the US has been unable to deploy centrifuges to make enriched uranium for reactors (the same reason we can't have so many other nice things) but why Iran? The lesson of Gaza may be that a people in a similar situation might want to have nuclear weapons at all costs. There definitely are paths left out of the conventional analysis of proliferation paths (accelerator-based methods, AVLIS) and even though they could reduce the footprint of producing the fuel they are also all super-high tech.)

petsfed 1y ago
Its definitely not stable, because the nuclear-armed countries' only arguments against nuclear proliferation are "trust us, you don't want this" and (said quietly) "if everybody has these, we'd lose a lot of power". So non-profileration efforts are a game of cat-and-mouse. We needed to have an ironclad "we are demonstrating that nobody needs nuclear weapons by doing x,y and z", and instead, Russia and NATO both said exactly that, then kept provoking each other to see who would flinch first over Ukraine. And I agree, nuclear power is a ridiculous casualty of that scramble for power.