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Do you not think that nuclear weapons were a significant net gain for conflict avoidance (keeping the cold war cold)? Nuclear power also arguably saved lots of

Do you not think that nuclear weapons were a significant net gain for conflict avoidance (keeping the cold war cold)? Nuclear power also arguably saved lots of lives by avoiding fossil emissions/air pollution (probably significantly more than were killed in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and all nuclear accidents combined; https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html estimates ~2M). Personally, I'll gladly take a small risk of global nuclear war over a larger risk increase for a conventional WW3, but this might be a matter of taste...

voidUpdate 7mo ago
Wasn't the cold war caused by both the US and the USSR stockpiling nuclear weapons, aggravated by the USSR putting nuclear weapons in cuba, etc? If there were no nuclear weapons, I think the cold war might have been even colder, since there was no threat of nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear power doesn't rely on nuclear weapons. Sure, the chicago pile came out of the manhattan project, but nazi germany had already been experimenting with nuclear power, and Fermi had split the atom too. He didnt necessarily recognise what he had done correctly, but work into nuclear research was going on at the time, and I think nuclear power would have been invented without nuclear weapons
- myrmidon 7mo ago
  If there is no threat of nuclear escalation then Russian expansionism towards central and western Europe looks much more likely to me; basically a repeat of WW2, but starting with post-war Germany being annexed (like Czechoslovakia in WW2) and things continuing from there. It is unclear that the US would have been willing to sacrifice enough conventional materiel and soldiers to prevent this (stationing some nuclear missiles is very cheap by comparison). The history of nuclear power was dominated by nation-states (instead of private investment). If the big incentive of enrichment ("supply chain safety for nuclear weapons") is taken away, I'm skeptical that enough capital flows into the whole technology to ever really make it worthwhile. It seems pretty likely to me that nuclear power in 1980 ends up in a similar position as fusion power today, instead: Looking somewhat promising but very expensive and no one really wants to invest enough.

voidUpdate 7mo ago

Wasn't the cold war caused by both the US and the USSR stockpiling nuclear weapons, aggravated by the USSR putting nuclear weapons in cuba, etc? If there were no nuclear weapons, I think the cold war might have been even colder, since there was no threat of nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear power doesn't rely on nuclear weapons. Sure, the chicago pile came out of the manhattan project, but nazi germany had already been experimenting with nuclear power, and Fermi had split the atom too. He didnt necessarily recognise what he had done correctly, but work into nuclear research was going on at the time, and I think nuclear power would have been invented without nuclear weapons

myrmidon 7mo ago
If there is no threat of nuclear escalation then Russian expansionism towards central and western Europe looks much more likely to me; basically a repeat of WW2, but starting with post-war Germany being annexed (like Czechoslovakia in WW2) and things continuing from there. It is unclear that the US would have been willing to sacrifice enough conventional materiel and soldiers to prevent this (stationing some nuclear missiles is very cheap by comparison). The history of nuclear power was dominated by nation-states (instead of private investment). If the big incentive of enrichment ("supply chain safety for nuclear weapons") is taken away, I'm skeptical that enough capital flows into the whole technology to ever really make it worthwhile. It seems pretty likely to me that nuclear power in 1980 ends up in a similar position as fusion power today, instead: Looking somewhat promising but very expensive and no one really wants to invest enough.