Nuclear Weapons Accidents, Volume II

[Aramike]

Umm... "existential", as in pertaining to the existence of humanity? How on earth could conventional wars like WW2 ever threaten the existence of the entire species? The stockpiles of nukes which have supposedly prevented a repeat of conventional wars (which never threatened our existence), are ironically some of the few things which do threaten our species' existence.

Yeah, I was wondering about that too...

And I'm sure everyone would still be loving the bomb's peace keeping abilities if the Cuban Missile Crisis went hot. At least those who survived it, that is.

Aren't you creating a fallacy argument? You're suggesting that nuclear weapons would be a poor deterrent if they hadn't actually deterred. That makes no sense.

It's like saying "I'm sure everyone would love their eye-glasses if they didn't cause blindness". Well they didn't cause blindness.

Let's use the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example: say the Russians put nukes in Cuba and we had no nukes in Turkey. What would our bargaining chip have been? Or are we to assume that the USSR would have just played nice and stayed away from nuclear weapons if we did the same? Okay, I'll bite - what precedence gives you the belief that the Russians have such a stronger moral basis that they would have done just that?

Or do you concede that they would have likely built nukes anyway? In which case, what response would you believe appropriate?