Small Fish, Big Pond

There is a great article by John Mueller over at “Foreign Policy” debunking 7 major myths regarding nuclear weapons. Definitely worth the read.

Most people I know of are the “watched too much 24″ group and fear that Iran will sell nuke to a terrorist who will hide it in their shoe and will use to blow up the Sam’s Club where they shop. So to protect ourselves from this threat we should all carry firearms. Which is funny, their criminal deterrent using the THREAT of civilians having a concealed weapon is the exact same idea that makes the possibility of a country using a nuke in anger almost an impossibility.

Moreover, Iran will most likely “use” any nuclear capability in the same way all other nuclear states have: for prestige (or ego-stoking) and deterrence. Indeed, as strategist and Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling suggests, deterrence is about the only value the weapons might have for Iran. Such devices, he points out, “should be too precious to give away or to sell” and “too precious to ‘waste’ killing people” when they could make other countries “hesitant to consider military action.”

I’ve got kind of an obsession in Nuclear weapons and cold war policies and technologies. And the more you know about nukes and global politics the more you realize that their power is stronger when they’re not used. The controlling factor in our globalized world is interaction with foreign economies; by using a nuke against another country you’d simultaneously bring down the wrath and sanctions of every other country on the planet. Using a nuke against others is suicide for garnering the power anybody developing nukes wants.

The only people that may use them are people with nothing else to lose, like terrorists. Luckily you can’t just buy a nuke in a public square, stick it on a bottle-rocket at the mouth of your afghan cave, and launch it at a target.

The basic idea of how a nuclear weapon works is pretty simple in theory, but nearly impossible to easily create in reality; the Manhattan Project didn’t cost billions of dollars for no reason. North Korea has the third largest military budget in the world and in decades or development they still can’t pull of a working nuke or way to deliver it with any accuracy.

The world would be better without nukes but the reality is they will never go away. Luckily for all the worry they cause, nuclear weapons will never be the biggest threat to your life. Much like terrorism there are millions of of other things that are millions of times more likely to be what gets you in the end. And unlike nuclear weapons most of those things more likely to kill you are things you actually have control of and can avoid.

Maybe instead of worrying about the bomb you should worry about your health and diet, wash you hands before you eat, try not to spew quite as many toxins into the air you breath, and make nice with your neighbors so they don’t feel the need to drop a bomb on you in the first place.