On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 10:39:00AM -0800, Steve Brust <skzb at dreamcafe.com> wrote: > On Fri, 2005-02-11 at 11:46, Howard Brazee wrote: > > There's a real difference between fission bombs and fusion bombs as far as > > physicists are concerned - but the social-political difference is > > neglible. We treat them the same when found in a third world country. > I think that's the heart of the matter. Everyone gets nervous when > weapons of terror are in the hands of "backward" nations, just because > of the obvious conflict between the nation being backward in so many > ways, and the weapon being advanced. > > What constitutes a "backward" nation? That's harder to say. Here are a > few general guidelines, however: > > 1. Backward nations have not yet abandoned the barbaric practice of > capital punishment. There's nothing barbaric about executing people who have committed sufficiently dire crimes. Society has no obligation to support them once they have proven themselves unwilling to live by even the most basic rules of society. To be honest, it's an option that should be a lot *easier* than it is presently. For example, I think it would be reasonable to apply the death penalty to any case of deliberate, premeditated murder. Now, making sure the person to be executed it actually guilty is another matter. > 2. Backward nations are still unable to provide their own citizens with > health care. Gee, people who can pay for the health care they desire get the best health care in the world here in the USA. Do you perhaps mean that a nation is backward if it doesn't force doctors to treat patients regardless of their ability to pay? > 3. Backward nations usually have an enormous percentage of the wealth > concentrated in the hands of very few, which few exercise more and more > direct political power in defense of that wealth (usually under the > cover some sort of religious doctrine combined with blatant militarism). You mean like the Saudi royal family, or the Iranian "Death to America!" legislature? Of course Saddam was a marvel of secular humanism... > 4. Backward nations generally keep an unreasonable number of their own > citizens in prison. No argument there. > There are others, of course. But I think most people would agree that a > nation that displays those characteristics ought not to trusted with > weapons of terror. No nation can be trusted with "weapons of terror", because such weapons are inherently evil. Nuclear weapons are not inherently evil. They are merely inherently very, very destructive and include nasty side effects. I don't think that I would pick any nation as being "trustable" with nuclear weapons. No government can be trusted with that amount of power. Unfortunately, waving the magic wand won't make the missiles go away. I can, however, easily separate out a list of nations that I would not under any circumstances trust with nuclear weapons. I can make an even shorter list of nations for which I would put my life on the line in a military action to prevent their acquisition of a nuclear weapon, or to destroy such capability already in existance. -- Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/weblog/index.jsp