But as far as I can tell, your argument for why this is so amounts to your view that one scenario -- total abolition -- is impractical or impossible.
As I've said above I think the 'practicality' argument has a different cogency in the case of a moral absolute like slavery than it does in the very different case of nuclear weapons - in the former it's an unacceptable cop-out, in the latter it's a rational reason to accept a less pure but still morally tolerable position.
But since you raise the point I think I can go further. Would a world without nuclear weapons be necessarily 'better' than the one we have? Frightening as the implications of MAD may be, it is arguable that the risk of truly catastrophic retaliation has proven rather more successful in keeping the Great Powers in check than the much lower risk of conventional retaliation ever did. If the A-Bomb had never been invented would the US and the USSR have been as likely to refrain from open warfare during the late 1940s onwards? One might not look back on the Cold War that we actually got with unalloyed nostalgia, yet still accept that there were much less desirable alternative outcomes.
If it is true that the best we can hope for is to live perpetually with someone's hand resting on the red button, why does it have to be our hand?
This seems to beckon a much wider argument, but it's not, to be honest, one I'm much interested in having. If you think that (for example) it makes little difference to the safety of the world whether we trust an unstable theocratic autocracy with ownership of a nuclear weapon, compared to whether we trust (for all its flaws) a Western liberal democracy, then I think our outlooks are too different for anything very productive to come out of this.
by Alan Allport on April 25, 2006 at 11:54 AM