It surely begs the question as to whether responsible people would want to own nuclear weapons? I don’t think they would.
Here is an issue. Of what USE would a nuclear weapon be to a privet citizen?
Seriously, it’s the most wasteful investment imaginable. They had to build a small city to construct the first three nuclear bombs, and all that invested capital was good for what? Destroying capital. Short of bloody politics, that’s all you can do with a nuclear weapon. Kill hundreds of thousands of people, and destroy all of there property. In short, if you break it, you buy it-- but in reverse.
Lets assume that Bill Gates had a free hand to throw every last cent he had into a nuclear program. If he managed to drop one on people, we probably wouldn’t have time to debate the legalistic issues. He, and those who helped him would probably be hanging from a tree.
I’ll put this another way: Why a nuclear weapon? Why not just buy ten thousand steak knives and give them to ten thousand maniacs, and air drop them into town? How is that less practical? How is that a less ludicrous scenario?
If we want to worry about something improbable, lets worry about something MORE probable, such as an asteroid impact.
IMO.
Yeah, WMDs would be naturally deterred by the total cost to do a single act of mass destruction when you could have out competed your opponent by creation alone (exhausting the same resources, but have something to utilize/show for it). The only real purpose of an WMD in any possible set of cases is when your opponent is so dangerous that any part of it should not survive, thus the investment in WMDs would be extremely rare as much human beings are not bent on genocide and hopefully non-human persons elsewhere in the Universe are not bent on xenocide in kind.
Nah. Fuel-air bombs would work just as well, without the radioactive consequences.
Or bat-brone naplem bomb..(The US did research on bat-brone bombs in WW2 but it was never used because they have the atom bomb)