Unlike many other weapons, there is no peaceful use for them. You can cut vegetables with a knife, hunt with a gun, and use chemical explosives in mining.The nukes could be dismantled for nuclear power plant fuel, but they are incredibly expensive. It must be cheaper to mine uranium and put it in a powerplant then to build a bomb, then take it apart for the fuel.
They just seem too powerful to ever be used again. Even ignoring the scenario of MAD, launching a nuke will pretty much guarantee hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. What, if anything, is the point in having thousands of them?
the overall point was to prevent another culture taking over yours. It worked well
To blow shit up, of course.
To blow shit up and scare people.
Counter-force targeting. This is pretty close to a distinction without a difference, since any counter-strike against nuclear missiles is going to kill a whole whack of civilians, but that can’t be helped.
Regards,
Shodan
Blow shit up real good.
What is the peaceful use of an air-launched cruise missile?
You’ve started with a bad assumption that there is an intrinsic connection between peaceful uses of a particular tool or technology and the legitimacy of using a similar technology for war. The lack of a legitimate peaceful use of a technology – whether it is a cruise missile, a GPS-guided bomb, or whatever – does not make the weapon illegitimate under any of the laws of armed conflict; and the fact that there is a legitimate peaceful use of a technology – such as nerve gasses that could also be used as pesticides – does not make them legitimate weapons.
Plus, you’ll probably find that your definition of “peaceful use” is inevitably going to be distorted to make the point that you’re trying to make. Explosives, as they are used in war, don’t actually relate that much to how explosives are employed in mining. It’s far more common for the explosives to be delivered in some manner that is totally inconsistent with peaceful uses – such as being encased in a grenade or bomb – than troops throwing sticks of dynamite at each other. Yet, you count explosives to be peaceful, which seems like you’ve made an opinion and you’re backing in facts to fit your theory.
The point I was trying to make is that nuclear weapons haven’t been used in war for 70 years, and that there really isn’t anything else you can do with them.
They are part of the “Mutually Assured Destruction” defensive strategy … before the enemy’s nukes can reach us, we’ve already launched ours … argo, the enemy will not launch theirs …
Seems to be working …
Not true, they have been used a deterrent to further escalation. Many of the wars fought over the past 70 years could have easily escalated into world wide conflicts under the old rules of war.
National defense. . . yeah, what’s the point. :smack:
Have we totally forgotten WW II. Basically, I think we had to develop nuclear weapons before the Nazis and the Japs did.
But, your right, they’re terribly wasteful and it’s hard to slice veggies with one.
So what? They’re weapons. By definition they don’t require a peaceful use.
Nevertheless they have served a peaceful use as described by Si Amigo.
There are peaceful uses of nukes.
But the likely spread of atmospheric radiation prevents any from being carried out under old nuclear test ban treaties except deep underground. And even then, the lingering radiation on the site limited the application very much. So the economics just weren’t there.
First, anything can be weaponized. Take the chlorine from salt and you have deadly chlorine gas, used in WWI. Electricity can be built into taser, which often kill. Nuclear power can be contained to make electricity or not contained to make a bomb. The distinction between peace and war is wholly imaginary, and utterly disproven by history.
Second, our society has mostly forgotten what total war looks like. We have countless atrocities and horrors to contemplate every day but that’s still not of the magnitude of the most advanced and populous countries in the world devoting every minute of their existence to trying to kill one another off. WWII traumatized every leader of every country for the next generation. Total war - a war involving and possibly risking the entire civilian population, not just the soldiers - no longer *could *happen, it *had *happened. It seemed entirely likely to happen again.
Only one thing in the history of mankind had to ability to deter a country bent on total war. Getting attacked by nuclear weapons was too big a price to pay for aggression. Mutually assured destruction (and the mythical but never entirely ruled out doomsday bomb) was the ultimate price that no one, not even madmen, were willing to pay. Nuclear bombs ensured survival, or at least kept warfare down to acceptable, localized levels.
Insane as it might seem, it has worked to perfection. Nukes have never been used since their first demonstration.
The flaw in the system is that madmen running large countries have too many layers of protection to launch a rogue attack. We may be at a point where madmen running unaffiliated groups or isolated nations could order a launch without being instantly deposed. We simply don’t know whether that is a realistic possibility. Most everyone else is working to keep this possibility low. That’s a form of deterrence too.
Deterrence is the purpose of nuclear weapons. Period.
Cite that we have defended the nation with nukes at any time after August 9, 1945?
Blow up asteroids on a collision course with Earth. In a Hollywood movie, anyway, but I think this has also been discussed by scientists, at least tongue-in-cheek.
It may or may not be a stretch to say we “defended” the nation with them up to Dec. 26, 1991 simply by their existence.
Let’s say you leave your college dorm and wander down to a pool hall. You’re having a beer and you notice a guy giving you the stink-eye. You make some comment, he makes a comment, and you get off of your barstool to go confront the guy.
As you approach, you see he has a large handgun in a clearly visible holster. You decide it isn’t worth it to pick a fight, and you leave the bar.
In this scenario, the other guy didn’t use his gun. Or did he? He didn’t FIRE his gun, but the existence of the gun altered your behavior, because you knew that if you taunted him further, he might hurt you real bad.
This is known on his part as deterrence. He had the capability to harm you in an overwhelming way, you understood the risks, and decided not to pursue further confrontation.
Nuclear weapons have been providing deterrence for a select number of countries since 1945. That’s a fact.
Aug 29th, 1949
Since the OP seems to want to debate the issue rather than just looking for factual information, let’s move this over to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
First of all, they don’t have to have a peaceful purpose.
Second, nuclear weapons can indeed be used for excavation (Edward Teller once suggested it for a harbor in Alaska,) and could be used to blow up asteroids (although that might be worse than just steering the asteroids away.)
There is this myth that nuclear weapons are only good for either sitting in a silo, or all-out MAD warfare, but nothing in between. In reality, a nuclear weapons can be used for tactical purposes. A country like Israel, for instance, could use tactical nuclear weapons to defend itself against an invading Arab enemy if the situation needed it (since none of its Arab rivals have nukes right now, Israel wouldn’t get nuclear retaliation.)
Finally, of course, deterrence. There’s a reason the Cold War never turned hot.
Lastly, boffking, what is your purpose with all of these threads?