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Comment by amock | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear bombs are neither good nor bad, they're just a tool. Since they're so powerful you should carefully consider the consequences before you use them, but that applies to any powerful tool.

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That's a strange kind of doublespeak. A forklift is "just a tool", a knife is "just a tool", even a hunting rifle is "just a tool". A nuclear bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible. I don't know about you, but I think that's bad. You might argue that it's a necessary evil to stockpile nuclear weapons and maintain the plausible threat that you're going to use them. I can't really argue against that. But calling them "just a tool" is in my opinion trivializing mass murder.

>A nuclear bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible.

Nuclear weapons have a few niche civilian uses. Sealing an underwater oil leak is one such use that is particularly relevant today.

See: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6611RF20100702

Also: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/yourfriendatom/

It is certainly easy to see why the US and Soviets wanted to investigate using nukes for peaceful uses. But claiming that the 250 or so peaceful nuclear explosions (out of a total of more than 2000 nuclear tests over-all) makes the nuclear bomb something other than a weapon of mass destruction seems to me more than a little intellectually dishonest.

If the Orion project had not been killed for political reasons, by now the vast majority of all exploded nuclear devices would likely have been used for transportation.

...the Orion design would have worked by dropping small shaped charge fission or thermonuclear explosives out the rear of a vehicle, detonating them 200 feet (60 m) out, and catching the blast with a thick steel or aluminum pusher plate. [...] The 'base design' consisted of a 4000 ton model planned for ground launch from Jackass Flats, Nevada. Each 0.15 kt of TNT (600 MJ) (sea-level yield) blast would add 30 mph (50 km/h, 13 m/s) to the craft's velocity. A graphite based oil would be sprayed on the pusher plate before each explosion to prevent ablation of the surface. To reach low Earth orbit (300 mi), this sequence would have to be repeated about 800 times, like an atomic pogo stick.

What could possibly go wrong?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...

They're not always used to kill people. There are many uses for that kind of massive power and its multiple effects.

They're a tool. The "mass murder" thing is a human decision.

That seems a strange way to put it, as if these grow on trees or something. They are expressly designed for mass murder.

The wikipedia article for peaceful nuclear explosions didn't show many other successful uses. Are there others I may not be aware of?

Haven't you heard of nuclear fish'n? That's where you detonate a nuke under the ocean and then gather up the dead fish that float to the top.

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