What is the difference?
Sure, just bomb an army, moving across a field.
Whose field?
And why is that? Because someone lunging at you with a knife must be considered a threat to your life.
In a state-less society, someone owning or building an atomic weapon is the same; they are up to no good and you’re justified in intervening.
Yes, and someone deploying a nuke would also be considered a threat to my life. What does this have to do with owning one?
Snipping the part of my post that draws the parallel and then raising the question what my post has to do with anything?
Uncool bro.
This isn’t an appeal to popular opinion. I urge you to open the article I linked and read it. I believe that right at the top it says “a geo-spatial analysis”.
I quoted the part of your post that I thought addressed my post. No foul play intended.
Owning or building an atomic weapon is the same, I agree. Either way you end up having one.
Look, I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but I don’t get it. I honestly don’t see how owning something and using it are the same. One is a state and the other is an action. I’m not an argumentative person but I don’t want to be wrong about this.
I read it a few weeks ago. I thought the reasoning was sound and made sense. I understand that because of the spacial considerations a nuke is a different type of threat than a grenade, gun, or even a fist. But…
I’m going to read it one more time. I’ll check back in when I’m done.
I already entirely explained it, but I’ll put all together.
If you own a nuke, the overwhelming likeliness is that you intend to deploy it or threaten to deploy it. It is conceivable that you might use it as a souvenir.
If you own a knife, there is not overwhelming likeliness that you will use it criminally as knives have a clear historical use other than criminal use.
If you lunge at someone with a knife, the overwhelming likeliness is that you intend to kill him. It is conceivable that you veer off and miss.
Lunging with a knife per se is no more theoretically criminal than owning a nuke. You own your body and the knife. However, the theory is put into practice by judgement in real situations, including judgement of likeliness of outcomes.
Who it is, possible motives and any other clues all have to be considered. Ghandi collecting dangerous items is less risky than Stalin collecting dangerous items.
That depends on how powerful the nuke is and how much land one is defending. For an example scenario, read The Ungoverned, a short story by Vernor Vinge.
-=Steve=-
You don’t see what’s wrong with building a device that has an extremely high likelihood of killing many tens of thousands of peaceful people if used, in a world where coercive monopolies have already been broken down through the intellectual growing up of society?
Let’s make it more extreme: your neighbor is building a device that will blow up our galaxy if deployed. Do you have the right to stop him?
PS I think it’s important to get the previous part but the following is true as well: if you never intend to use it then you’ve abandoned it and you also have no reason to prevent others from destroying it.
I see no place for it in a state-less society.
Yes, we can envision some situations where it could reasonably be used for self-defense but those won’t be world state-less situations. For example if the American continent goes state-less but the rest of the world does not, maybe a nuke could be used at sea to destroy enemy ships.
As far as size, well yeah obviously if it’s much weaker than the WWII ones then it’s built-in murder aspect become smaller. But that’s just changing the question at hand. Also, it seems like the ones after WWII only got more powerful (much more).
By 1000 times.
Ok, owning a nuke but not using it is a threat to the people around you because it has only one overwhelmingly probable use: blowing stuff (and people) up.
So, if you owned a device that could cure all disease within say, a 100 mile radius at the push of a button, but not using it deserves praise because it has only one overwhelmingly probable use: curing a butt-load (is that a word?) of people?
Why would not using it deserve praise?
Yes.
wut?
Pathological hypotheticals aren’t very useful, see.
I don’t mind hypotheticals. I mind coherent reasoning though.
Ok, ok, cut me some slack here. That was the last gasp of air from a drowning belief. Its almost gone.