I myself identify myself as a libertarian, although I am extremely anarchist-leaning. The only thing that keeps me from identifying purely as an anarcho-capitalist is the question of private ownership of nukes. I believe in owning weapons for self-defense, but should a line be drawn?
I really would just like to know if there should be private ownership of them, and why. Thanks.
Welcome to the forum. As you might be able to guess, this isn’t a new issue. For a collection of threads on nuclear weapons, see here. For your question of private ownership in particular, see here.
For more topics and forum tips and how to’s be sure to check out The Ultimate Beginner meta-thread. Great to have you!
Well, I think it’d be pretty hard to even conceive the market producing things like nuclear weapons or something like the LHC. The amount of time and resources that need to be poured into them against their relative value in the market seem to point toward, “They don’t get made.”
There is nothing wrong with private ownership of any kind of weapon.
If man X used a nuke, his whole neighborhood would get destroyed, or another neighboorhood, and in turn everyone will raid his house and kill him, because, you know, we hate people that use nukes, because theyre dangerous?? And should a nuclear war ensue, only 2 parties will be drawn into it, instead of government owned nukes which affect the whole territory that the government controls.
He will also suffer from extreme unpopularity and lose profit from his business.
Not to mention that a nuke costs like 1-2 million dollars.
It will also be highly unpopular to just own one, even if youre not going to use it. No one will want to talk to you, or trade with your business.
There isnt much use for a nuke. It is just an invention by the state to put fear into citizens of other states.
You realize that nuclear war effects are uncontainable, right? There isn’t a way to localize the effects of a war like that.
If there is someone willing to kill tens of thousands of strangers, my guess is, they probably don’t care what other people think of them.
As far as nation states go, this is untrue. Most nations covet those who have nuclear weapons. They are signs of respect and nationhood nad maturity in the international realm. Do people trade with China or the U.S.? Yes, of course they do.
This is true.
Don’t try to justify WMD’s with private property man. It makes libertrians look like fools.
If we lived in your world…
…eventually some dumb redneck that wins his state (or a privately run lottery 
) lottery will buy one to show the world how powerful he is, then there is a T.M.I. arms race that ends the world when someone gets mad.
The way I see it is that the ownership of nuclear, chemical, etc. weapons is just however in certain cases it would be justifiable to stop a person from manufacturing them or forcing them to store it in a different location.
For example, I am not a nuclear scientist and am completely unqualified to build a nuclear weapon. Building a nuke in my garage would be a threat to my neighbours because of the possibility of accidents. It is a kind of unintentional threat but aggression does not have to be intentional. Building a nuke under these circumstances is a clear and present danger in my opinion. The magnitude of danger is not the issue, the likelihood of an accident is. It would be up to the court system to decide, with expert testimony, etc, whether the likelihood of an accident is high enough to view it as a threat.
On the other hand, if I do know what I am doing and/or there is no threat to anyone else then I can do whatever I feel like. For example, if I go to my Fortress of Solitude in the Antarctic I could try to build any crazy weapons I want to as long as it doesn’t threaten the research bases there.
Then if nukes arent justified by private property, then what will happen to nukes? Who will seize them? Will it be held collectively? Will it be held by scientific institutes for study?
The reason why it is untrue for nation states, is because people TRUST their nation states governments. People wont trust their neighboor next door that has a nuke.
Yes nuclear war effects are uncontainable i admit, however this just makes waging nuclear battles ever more dangerous; anyone that owns this particular nuke will probably never use it.
By extreme unpopularity, i mean this mans fellow citizens razing his house and killing him because a war just started.
So, where would the nukes go?
The argument could be made that merely assembling a deliverable nuclear warhead is an implicit and credible threat of aggression, like loading a gun and pointing it at someone with your finger on the trigger.
Hmm, this is true. Thanks.
Someone builds a nuke, everyone’s going to be want to be at least one multiple away from it’s effective explosive range (miles to hundreds of miles). Makes it hard to do business with that person for one thing.
Bringing it towards anyone such as to put them in its effective kill range would, I think, constitute imminent threat of harm. Similarly, firing it on a missile constitutes threat.
Beyond that, seeing as how a free society might very well imbibe thinking predicated on the NAP (much as we have) many people may refuse to associate or do business with a person who sponsors or keeps a nuke anywhere on the planet, because a nuke can be used ethically in a vanishingly small number of circumstances, else it constitutes mass-murder.
Advancing science and business will make nuke detection much better as well, with scanning tech and the like, making nuke-smuggling increasingly impossible.
If a free society did decide that they wanted to sponsor a nuke as a protection measure (they have some utility against incoming ICBMs if exploded in their flight-path, and perhaps one ethical use on transitioning incoming armies where no civvies are nearby), if a free society wanted nukes for w/e reason, they’d probably sponsor a corporation, financed by voluntary subscription, and run by consensus, with all sorts of controls and the like, such that the oversight of such a weapon would rival or exceed the kind of oversight governments have over their own weapons, resulting in equivalent or higher social trust, hopefully.
I am anarcho-capitalist and I think nukes should be illegal
We could start with a more extreme example, like a bio-weapon or something that is extremely unsafe and hard to contain. Seems that everyone else would say “no way” and use force to prevent them from making it or keeping it. It seems justified, since such a thing poses a constant threat to everyone.
Nukes are legal as long as they’re kept outside of blast radius of unwilling individuals who homesteaded their land before you did.
I think there can actually be some other situations where they should be legal as well (a loosening of my previous position), such as in case of attack by another nuclear power.
There’s no such thing as ‘organized societal wide force’ in an ancap society necessary to make the statement you just did. “Illegal” doesn’t exist in that sense. Illegal exists not in the sense of what you think others should be able to do, but only in the sense of what YOU think you should be able to do. So, interpreting that statement in the context of a free society, you’re saying that you personally would never build or own a nuclear weapon. Good to know, we can do business now. And if I find out you’re lying I will have you prosecuted on the basis of your own words and let a court decide what to do with your nuke or attempted nuke 
I think murder of innocents should be illegal. Come at me bro.
What good would having a nuke do you, even if you were allowed to own it, you wouldn’t be allowed to threaten people with it. And that’s pretty much their only use.
You can use a nuke to attack, destroy, threaten, and deter large invasive starfleets with legions of space marines.
Talking to me?
Fine, if you murder any innocents, we will prosecute you under your assumption of that rule which no one forced on you. And if you did not believe murdering innocents was wrong then I would not associate with you nor do business with you nor let you on my property, nor would most rational people.
Done.
Good point. A communicable bioweapon constitues a permanent threat across all human territories. Anyone would be justified in destroying such facilities at any time via defensive coercion. The harder task is to learn of their existence with enough surety to justify such actions as reasonable.
Ideally you’d want a small and highly trained covert unit.
I think future libertarian societies will have such units to accomplish things like this, voluntarily funded, and tasked with freeing slaves, taking out existential threats like bioweapons, and perhaps even being proactive in nuke detection so as to stave off that threat.
I was reading the LIbertarian Forum recently, from way back. The first issue mentions something about ad hoc world-courts in essence, private citizens getting together and passing judgment on the sovereign use of power and the like, as a way of bringing pressure on regimes.
I think if a protective agency discovered someone building bioweapons, they could go public, construct an ad hoc court or contract with an arbitrative court, seek a conviction in absentia, and then take donations to destroy the facility/bioweapon as constituting imminent threat of harm to every human being.
Now, there is a moderating factor. Bioweapons aren’t actually designed to be communicable. Thus I don’t think any exsit that would be deployed that are actually designed to wipe 90% of the human race off the map, such as a weaponized smallpox could do. Rather, when you weaponize a virus you seek to limit its ability to infect, elsewise it would infect your own people.
This is why anthrax was an effective bioweapon, it’s not communicable at all, you have to breath it in. Similarly, I think a weaponized smallpox would likely have any infectability stripped out of it at the genetic level. You breathe it in you’re infected, but you cannot spread it. Dunno if that’s what the Russians were able to do or not, but that’s what would make sense.
At that point, all you have to worry about are nihilistic environmentalist terrorists, ala the 12 Monkeys scenario, where humans create a virus specifically in order to wipe out humanity, out of beliefs stemming from radical environmentalism that values the existence of animals and the planet higher than human lives, people who believe the ideal is to reduce human population to half a million lives or so, and such people might rely on natural resistances to do so.
Another more dangerous form of bioweapon is one that contains triggers in the presence or lack of certain racial alleles. This means scientists would try to make a virus that would only kill certain racial groups, or fail to kill a certain one. This is the holy grail of certain racialist ideologies, such as pan-arabism.
Such a virus is the root conflict of a certain novel I’m working on 
No, I mean everyone can sue a person who holds a nuke.