It seems a lot of security/stability depends on countries/factions not being advanced enough to make nuclear weapons (N. Korea). Are we fortunate that U238 is more abundant than U235, and both are hard to separate? Is it a good thing that Pu isn’t really found in nature?
I’m wondering what would happen if anyone with enough money could make nuclear weapons. Would we have blown ourselves to extinction? Would countries be more equal economically/technologically?
Considering the proliferation and casual use of small arms, I think the answer is that nuclear weapons would rapidly get into hands willing to use them casually and civilization would have fallen into a pretty dysfunctional state. Only a barrier to acquisition keeps those who use small arms from using larger arms, or weapons of mass destruction. Even simple things like policing would no longer be asymmetric.
We may find out.
It would glow in the dark, is what it would be like.
When the air becomes uranious…
We will all go simultaneous…
Yes we will all go together when we go
We might well have gone to a highly decentralized society, giving up the efficiency of big, centralized cities and such in return for spreading things out so a single nuke can’t do as much damage. That was suggested by some people early in the nuclear age, but there was never enough of an impetus for such a major socioeconomic change; if the usage of nukes were to become relatively common though it might well happen. People might decide big cities are convenient targets & deathtraps and relocate.
I think a side effect of fissile material being more common would be energy would be much easier to store and obtain. We’d probably have nuclear powered vehicles. We’d also be more resistant to radiation, due to higher background radiation levels.
Actually, this is exactly the reason that the United States has such a large and well-developed interstate system; to permit dispersal of the population and allow for mobility of military forces.
Oneof the handicaps to effective use of weapons is delivery; the great fear of the Soviet Union during the 'Sixties was their apparent advantage in strategic delivery systems, i.e. ICBMs and intercontinental bombers. (The reality is that while the Soviet were ahead in the development of rocket technology, their manufacutirng and infrastructure left them unable to compete until the late 'Sixties, and the supposed missile gap that Kennedy campaigned to the presidency on was actually in favor of the US. In terms of bombers, they never rivaled the US capability of the B-52 and B-58 systms.) In a world in which proliferation of nuclear weapons was easier, but strategic delivery systems were as difficult to field, the delivery would be via cargo container or commerical aircraft, and so entry by those methods would be restricted with the attendant reduction in shipping and commerce.
“Nuclear powered vehicles” are improbably given scaling problems, e.g. nuclear sources provide either too much (thermal) energy for effective transportation in a car-sized vehicle. As for being “more resistant to radiation”, there is no basis for the expectation that there would be any evolutionary adaptation to radiation resistance; the energy and penetrating ability fo gamma and especailly neutron is such that no biological adaptations would provide resistance to radiation damage.
Stranger
Bless You!
I’d never heard that little ditty
(Tom Lehrer We’ll All Go Together When We Go 1959
Now I’ll have to find it
Damn! I’m trying to SHORTEN the bucket list, not add to it!
http://www.atomicplatters.com/more.php?id=70_0_1_0_M
All it would take is 1 well-financed (Osama, you blew it) operation to produce the material with a rouge hand on the button - if the responsible parties won’t sell you the stuff, well, maybe the mafia could.
This was/is the worry about Pakistan - the “Muslim Bomb”. Then there’s North Korea - if they would just shut up and produce, instead of detonating every molecule they can scrape together, they could have at last enough income to feed its people.
Except for the fact that radiation resistance among different creatures varies enormously. If there was more natural radiation, it seems likely that we and other Earth life would have evolved to be more towards the resistant end of natural variation.
Nuclear weapons are unlikely to be the end-all of destructive power. We may yet invent things that are even more destructive, whether it’s new types of bombs, biological weapons, gray goo or something we haven’t even imagined yet.
Future weapons may be as hard or harder to build than nukes, or require exotic materials that aren’t readily available. They may also end up being significantly easier to build or replicate, and harder to control. In the future it may be possible for private rich individuals, corporations or movements to afford to build massively destructive weapons.
You’d have family atomics.
Michael Bay movies would be much more noisy.
The real question is - can you make them in a 3-D printer…
Gotta love Tom Lehrer.
You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas
Go directly, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollahs
I suspect you wouldn’t be here to ask the question nor me to answer.
Quantam Peter
Awesome.