> Its difficult enough for a super power to safely store and control its WMD.
There has never been an accidental detonation of a nuclear device. The problem this article describes was one in rocketry, insulation, and adherence to protocols.
Nuclear non-proliferation is important, but this article is not the reason why. The reason non-proliferation is important is because of the ramifications of using the devices, not challenges in storing them.
It is easy to become prone to a sort of survivorship bias. But nuclear proliferation guarantees that we will have more and more opportunities to test that safety. It only needs to fail once to be catastrophic at which point your argument would seem a little flawed.
A weapon detonating by accident is terrible. Thousands of weapons on hair-trigger alert is civilization-ending. It's absolutely insane that we're conditioned to believe that this is not only normal - but the best possible state of affairs.
I absolutely would not. Those 2 countries know far more about the process then those other countries, and they have the budget to do it right. You would have to duplicate labs, and computers, and other efforts 20 times in your scenario, and each of those labs will not be as good as the 2 higher funded ones.
> A weapon detonating by accident is terrible. Thousands of weapons on hair-trigger alert is civilization-ending.
Look at it from a fear point of view: No one will detonate a thousand weapons unless they are declaring total war. So all one needs to do is read global moods and see if total war is likely (it's not). (i.e. war might happen, but not total war)
An accident on the other hand can happen randomly, you would be permanently and constantly worried about one.
Or if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that the other nuclear power has declared total war. There's been a number of false alarms that have been successfully ignored, but what if one of those false alarms came during the Cuban missile crisis or immediately after the invasion of Afghanistan?
US dropped depth charges on a USSR submarine and the latter thought WWIII had begun. Three people had to agree to use nuclear weapons and two did.
In this vein, Politico noted six years ago:
>I talked with the president at one of those fundraisers some months back, and I asked him, "What keeps you up at night?" > And he said, "Everything. Everything that gets to my desk is a critical mass. If it gets to my desk, then no one else could have handled it." So I said, "So what's the one that keeps you up at night?" > He goes, "There are quite a few." > So I go, "What's the one? Period." > And he says, "Pakistan." > I get that: There's the question of whether Zardari's government is actually in control, or whether the military is. And how close the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or whoever else is to having their hands on real weapons of mass destruction. It's the closest government there is to allowing those weapons to either be used or sold to places that we really wouldn't like to have those weapons. That's a concern for all of us.
One bad actor ruins the game.
If your goal is maintaining an arsenal of world-ending weapons cheaply, sure. I am not trying to optimize for that use case.
> No one will detonate a thousand weapons unless they are declaring total war.
Or they think that the other side declared total war. Or they are engaged in a small-scale conventional war, and are afraid the other side will escalate. Or they are escalating, by using tactical weapons, and the other side retaliates with strategical weapons. (Spoilers: Russia has made it very clear that it will use tactical nuclear weapons, against military targets, in an otherwise conventional conflict.) Or there's an intelligence failure, and they believe that they are the target of a sneak attack.
All of these are incredibly plausible ways for a nuclear war to start.
That is to say, we're in the arms race because each country did have N each. But then one country had N+1, and so the others raced for N+2, and so on. If we hoped for 50 each, wouldn't it drop back to the same pattern, and someone would become 50+1?
Note that 4,000 of course doesn't solve the N+1 issue, but my point is if you're going to aim for 50 - I'm not sure what problems it solves. May as well shoot for 0, no? 0 seems equally impossible to me as 50, but at least it solves a single problem.. nukes, in general.
The OP's solution seemed to be making everyone have 50 instead of 4,000. That seemed both impossible, and a weird goal. If you're going to try for the impossible, shouldn't we aim for 0?
I don't ever see us stopping N+1 nukes though.
Now instead of two political leaders to worry about, you have 20. Not sure if that's what you really want.
But all that aside, 20 countries each having 50 warheads seems a lot likelier to end up with 20 countries each having thousands of warheads than 2 countries having thousands of warheads and everyone else none does, no?
A nuclear bomb serves no other purpose than killing huge numbers of civilians in a short period of time. Shouldn't we strive for a world where nobody has that capability? Not to mention that in the United States, one man has unilateral and final authority to launch a nuclear first strike.
Edit: countries -> governments
If all countries claim to destroy their nuclear bombs and never ever make a new one, would you trust all of them?
Why is a handful of countries having nuclear bombs the best way to ensure that? Why not two dozen countries having nuclear bombs? Neither Ukraine nor Iraq would have been invaded if they were nuclear-armed.
It's incredibly self-serving of nuclear powers to claim that they can have these weapons, because they will be responsible with them, but nobody else can. (And then they go ahead and start wars.)
The reality is that if a superpower wanted to launch a sneak nuclear attack on another superpower, it could be done to great effect without missiles or bombers, and without necessarily giving away the identity of the aggressor.
The fact that it hasn't been done either suggests lack of imagination or lack of willingness - or perhaps both.
As for small countries - it's debatable if nukes would have saved Iraq or the Ukraine, because any small country using nukes on a superpower is likely to do more damage to itself than the superpower.
But this is largely a sideshow in 2017. As we're currently discovering, infowar and weaponised social media are a much cheaper and more efficient way to wage proxy war than nukes or terrorism are.
Nukes are almost obsolete now that it's so ridiculously easy to persuade a country to destroy its own political stability and self-confidence with covert funding of fringe extremism, supported by weaponised social media.
And if that's not enough to do the job, direct hacking of infrastructure remains an option.
The West is well behind the curve on defending against both. As and when the next war starts - if it hasn't already - the reliance on nukes as a deterrent is going to become one of those "And this is what they were doing on until the new reality hit" chapters in future history books.
It'd be definitely interesting to see Ukraine and Iraq conflicts unfold while they had nuclear weapons. I'd be all for giving nuclear weapons to every single country if that'd stop wars in the future. But I'm afraid some asshats would start blackmailing others and those would bend over. And we'd be back at square 1.
Until it isn't. But then it's too late to try anything different.
> If all [governments] claim to destroy their nuclear bombs and never ever make a new one, would you trust all of them?
I don't trust statements from governments, as a general rule.
We had that for a brief period of time. US was the only one with the nuclear bomb. Would they have used it on Japan if they had a chance to retaliate?
> I don't trust statements from governments, as a general rule.
I guess we agree governmental disarmament agreements wouldn't work..
Of course. Japan's army was bent on total annihilation. If Japan had a chance to retaliate, they would have struck first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
artifical lakes, mining, terraforming, diverting asteroids, propulsion for extremely large spaceships, fighting intergalactic invaders etc.