To be fair, that obscurity is partially what keeps the balance of power intact.

More states with nuclear weapons = safer planet with less war.

Prove me wrong.

In principle I am against nuclear weapons. In practice I believe a deterrent state (at least two adversarial countries maintaining an active nuclear stockpile) is probably better than just one country maintaining an active stockpile.

I always wonder what would have happened if it had taken the Soviets longer to develop atomic weapons (or never did). Would a hawkish US president be more likely to use nuclear weapons to assert foreign policy than they are now?

If the Incheon landings [0] had been a failure during the Korean War in 1950, it's hard to see how nuclear weapons wouldn't have been employed, especially as China was neither involved nor had their own.

And if they'd been normalized in a second war, even at tactical scale, it makes you wonder how the rest of nuclear history would have unfolded.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Inchon

Eventually some idiot in some small country with nukes gets pissed and fires, and we have this generations Franz Ferdinand - except none of us live long enough to pick up a rifle.

How about no.

> Eventually some idiot in some small country with nukes gets pissed and fires,

Some idiot in a big country can do the same.

Thank you Stanislav Petrov.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

But if everyone has nukes it's a lot more likely - and wouldn't a smaller country be less likely to have processes in place to stop it from happening?

Roll a six-sided die. If it lands on a one everyone dies. Now give everyone in the room a six sided die. If anyone rolls a one everyone dies.

Well, as that number goes up at a certain point it cannot invrease anymore without including:

- Iran

- Lebanon (ubstable)

- North Korea (they already have the tech even if they don't have proper ICBMs yet)

q.e.d?

You can be proven wrong distressingly easily. Hopefully nobody does.

The US has had quite a few proxy wars with nuclear armed countries. I think it prevents an all our war like WWI and WWII, but not war in general. Less war? Perhaps. We seem to be doing our damndest to have at least one going on at all times though.

Presumably the nuclear arms would be the reason they were proxy wars.

If Assad had had a nuclear weapon most probably it would have fallen in the hands os Islamists (ISIS, more likely) during the recent civil war in Syria, not a very bright perspective.

It's easy to prove you wrong, but doing so requires accepting that MAD is a fool's errand.

Except when the crazies arrive. Then you get all the wars at once.

This is also relevant because the need for Atomic Energy Intelligence was a major factor in the formation of the CIA. This is mentioned in e.g. https://foia.state.gov/DOCUMENTS/cia/3f0c.PDF#page=6

"The Atomic Energy Commission is in a unique position in that it is perhaps the only permanent agency of the Government which has operational intelligence responsibilities comparable to that of the State, War, or Navy Departments. It is difficult at times to distinguish operational intelligence from actual operations and it is found that the Commission, without recognizing it as such, -----------------------------------------------------------------------"

so everything that should not show up later will be put as "nuclear secret": e.g. bulk collection of telephone data for nuclear safety, financial data bulk collection for nucear safety, etc. ;-)