Why Nukes Are One of Our Best Inventions

In general, nuclear weaponry is seen as a terrible, atrocious, cancer-inducing, radiation poisoning, weapon of mass destruction which has the potential to destroy humanity. But in this blog, I'm going to argue why nuclear weapons are one of our best inventions in humankind history👍:)

Nuclear weapons have only ever been used twice - in the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Don't get me wrong, it was a terrible thing to do, killing hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians, but it really wasn't that different to what we had already been doing. The fire-bombings of Tokyo killed anywhere from 80,000-130,000 and left over 1 million homeless. And there were hundreds of other individual bombing raids throughout WW2 alone.

Just compare that to if we had actually invaded the Japanese mainland: 250,000 - 1,000,000 allied and US troops would've died and anywhere from 5-10 million Japanese. So you could argue that using the atomic bombs actually saved more lives than they ended.

The only other damage that nukes have caused were when they were being tested, but even then, they were used in remote parts of Siberia, New Mexico, uninhabited islands of the Pacific, etc.

Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), is the idea that if country A fired nukes towards country B, country B would respond in turn, resulting in both countries being obliterated. For this reason, countries have never really deployed nuclear arms in a conflict. This has actually been a driving factor in why the major world/nuclear powers have never really directly fought each other since WW2.

This has prevented any conflicts like the Russo-Ukrainian War or the Israeli-Palestinian War from going global and starting a 3rd world war. And while this has resulted in dozens of "proxy" wars over influence in certain regions, those would have happened regardless if the atomic bombs had ever been invented.

The strive to create sustainable and environmentally friendly energy has been exploded over the last couple decades, with nuclear energy right in the midst of it. Nuclear energy currently accounts for 10-11% of the world's energy output, and emits 4 times less CO2 than solar power, and 2 times less CO2 than hydroelectricity. This technology wouldn't have been as advanced, without WW2 and the arms race, and our earth would've been worse off because of it.

Another benefit  that goes relatively unnoticed, are the hundreds of movies and books that base large chunks of their storyline around nuclear weaponry and/or nuclear war. Just think about it, how would they have been able to make Oppenheimer without nukes?

Before I end the blog, I want to mention that the chances of a nuclear war any time in the near future are quite low, and often exaggerated by the media.

So to wrap it all up, nuclear weapons have prevented major global conflicts, saved millions of lives in WW2, paved the way for more environmentally friendly energy, and given us some great movies.