1. No countries should own WMD.
2. Some countries can and others can't.
3. All countries should own WMD.
Only agreement 1 can be guaranteed to save humanity. The next best choice is surely 3 - not 2!
Thoughts?
From his conclusion: "Those who dread a world with more nuclear states do little more than assert that more is worse and claim without substantiation that new nuclear states will be less responsible and less capable of self-control than the old ones have been. They express fears that many felt when they imagined how a nuclear China would behave. Such fears have proved un-rounded as nuclear weapons have slowly spread. I have found many reasons for believing that with more nuclear states the world will have a promising future."
The benefit of option 2 over option 3 is that in the case where just enough countries have WMDs so that if anyone drops a WMD someone will respond but no other countries do you also minimize the number of surfaces for mistakes/abuses.
a. have stable and rational governments, now and in perpetuity
b. do a perfect job of securing the weapons
c. can't covertly provide weapons to terrorists willing to use them
I don't think anyone thinks it's a good idea to give say, Somalia (to pick one example), nuclear weapons.
Humanity embarks on a top-down superoptimization campaign to perfect technology to the point that this question can be answered with ever-increasingly-higher levels of detail.
Follow-on: the question of whether the ensuing yak shaving causes us to realize the WMDs are unnecessary, or whether military-driven paperclip maximization accidentally wipes out humanity.
That doesn't work either—some country will defect and develop WMDs in secret and then take over the world. Of the choices you present, the only reasonable option is ubiquitous access to WMDs (option 3), with the understanding that anyone found using them for any purpose other than a proportional response to a existential threat will be ruthlessly annihilated by everyone else.
I don't understand how this outcome results in anything other than the extinction of human life on this planet.
Who says that's everyone's goal? There are plenty of people in the world, and even in this forum, who only care about saving "some" of humanity. And in topics about the environment or population, you'll find people (even on this forum) who aren't interested in saving any of it.
> Can game theory not be of use here?
Probably, but only if you understand the actual rules people are playing.
Should we test option 3, and how do we roll back if it doesn't work out and turns out to be the worst option ?
It’s kind of a cool thought. The current nation state map seems arbitrary for such gravitas.
Which is why we need national action. Criminals in Chicago buy firearms in neighboring Indiana, criminals in New York City buy firearms in neighboring Connecticut.
The parallel to atomic weapons is similar. If many nations own atomic weapons, it's easier for an unstable/untrustworthy state to acquire them.
So this should be a big problem in nations with strict firearm laws, correct?
>Mr Plotecki said that while there was no evidence the homemade guns had been used by local extremists, it was a concern for the future.
The second article is about the seizure of four firearms.
Truly a menace.