alt Hacker News[flagged]
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It is, as so often the case, a classic prisoner's dilemma problem [0]: "no nukes" is pretty clearly superior to "any nukes at all", but "they have nukes but we don't" is game over, so... nukes for all (major world powers)!
It's awful, but that's the prisoner's dilemma for you. I have a hard time respecting any anti-nuclear activist who doesn't at least acknowledge this facet of things, even if "no one has nukes and no one can easily get them" really would be best for the world.
[0]: if anyone hasn't seen it before, the interactive https://ncase.me/trust/ on the iterated prisoner's dilemma is excellent
I kind of agree, but we have way too many bombs just floating around.
How many nukes does a country need to have readied in order for mutually assured destruction to be relevant? I feel like 100 would be enough to deter any aggression, and if two countries unload their full arsenal at each other would not end life on earth.
Russia and US have closer to 10,000 between them which could pretty much end humanity on any day.
Nuclear weapons have not prevented major world powers from engaging in proxy wars. As we can see today in the Middle East, proxy wars can make things dangerous and more likely to lead to an unwanted escalation.
Mutually assured destruction works best when the number of involved parties is limited. If every state were to have a warhead of its own, many risks would increase: those of miscalculation, nuclear proliferation to non-state actors, etc.
That's not applicable to the mullahs in Iran. If they have they'd use it on Day 1.
Just don't use nuclear weapons
What if a fanatical leader has them? Castro said he would have nuked the US if he could and didn't care if Cuba gets destroyed.
I'm also of the opinion that MAD has been the largest single greatest cause of peace in the past 80 years, but I disagree that this award is bad. The reason we haven't seen a single use of nuclear weapons since then, not even relatively small ones, is because of the nuclear taboo that organizations like this have engendered