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.)
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.
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.
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.