The+Eleventh+Week+-+Turkey+Day+Approaches

Historically, the argument can easily be made that there’s no reason why developed nations shouldn’t have nuclear weapons. Fire bombing killed more people than atomic bombs in World War 2, and the argument could be made that everything atomic weapons did for our war effort could have been done through conventionally methods given more time and resources.

So where do the criticisms with nuclear weapons lie? Balance. Through the black arms market and readily available scientific knowledge, it is now unrealistically cheap to build a weapon of mass destruction. Not proportional to the cost it would take to build a military force with the same destructive power. This gives small countries with no economical, industrial or military power in the world the ability to keep larger countries on their toes. I cite Iran and North Korea as examples of this, and the conflict in Iraq as a situation that represents a larger world power’s response to this situation.

Reading Truman’s statement on the hydrogen bomb forces one to weigh the pros and cons of the United States having nuclear weapons. The crucial effect of the US developing atomic and hydrogen bombs is not an effect on our country, but an effect on the rest of the world. Every dictator and terrorist group that has a comparatively paltry sum of money can hold the world at hostage. No country truly integrated into the world economy (read: ‘first world’) will ever use a nuclear weapon again. The lines have grown too fuzzy, and countries do not war against each other the way they use to. But there are still radicals, people that hate blindly based on geographic proximity, allowing them to wipe out entire nations. When Truman gave the go-ahead on the development of bigger and badder nuclear he gave the rest of the world a weapon that can only be used against countries like us.