Believe it or not, there are people who think that a world without nuclear warheads and the MAD equilibrium [1] would be safer. This is despite the documented history of several millennia of such world existing, and being plagued with constant wars fought with conventional weapons.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

There are nuclear weapons and then there is nuclear power. I think fear over nuclear weapons is weaponized to keep us dependent on fossil fuels. People weren't so worried about "world wars" prior to 1900 or so because they didn't have fossil fuels to drive/sail/fly around.

>People

Politicians/intellectuals have a (unifying) front on nuclear, voters care more about fossil vs solar

Mirrors the diverging reception of Abundance?

I’m a bit confused by your phrasing. Isn’t our world also plagued by constant wars fought with conventional weapons?

It is, but these are much smaller-scale. The border between France and Germany has seen full eighty years of peace, which that land probably did not see since the time German and French nations formed. It's hard to imagine a full-on war between two countries possessing nuclear weapons, because it would be suicidal for the attacking party, so e.g. India and Pakistan remain at peace.

Even a war at the scale of WWII every half-century is far better than a nuclear exchange.

MAD works until it doesn’t. It’s almost inevitable that some cretin will hit the shiny red button at some point.

It's not over atomic energy. It's that it's no coincidence that all 5 members of the UN security council have nuclear weapons. The threat of their use gets things done, and that fades the more countries have nuclear weapons. So, insofar as there is a sinister motive to Hiroshima drumbeating, it's specifically to preserve the viability of the nuclear threat. Consider how different the current war in Ukraine would look if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons. How different would the situation in Gaza look if any of Israel's immediate neighbors also had nuclear weapons?

I'd also argue that the correct emotional response to the destruction rendered by a single airplane (vs. the 325 used for the Tokyo Firebombing) is abject horror, and that should cause any person to seriously question their use.

I'm not here to dispute that nuclear power is good or that the alternative to bombing Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki was worse than the bombings. It's that while Truman et al may have understood the extrema situation the Allies were in, that's no guarantee that future users of atomic weapons would be so deliberate.

The current situation might not be stable in the long term.

Ukraine now regrets giving up their nuclear weapons.

The "red line" of Ukraine attacking either Crimea or internationally recognized Russia was crossed and revealed to be a bluff.

The wall against proliferation will eventually break. For the life of me I can't figure out how Iran had a much harder time refining U235 with centrifuges than Pakistan did in the 1970s; I mean, I can understand how the US has been unable to deploy centrifuges to make enriched uranium for reactors (the same reason we can't have so many other nice things) but why Iran?

The lesson of Gaza may be that a people in a similar situation might want to have nuclear weapons at all costs. There definitely are paths left out of the conventional analysis of proliferation paths (accelerator-based methods, AVLIS) and even though they could reduce the footprint of producing the fuel they are also all super-high tech.)

Its definitely not stable, because the nuclear-armed countries' only arguments against nuclear proliferation are "trust us, you don't want this" and (said quietly) "if everybody has these, we'd lose a lot of power". So non-profileration efforts are a game of cat-and-mouse. We needed to have an ironclad "we are demonstrating that nobody needs nuclear weapons by doing x,y and z", and instead, Russia and NATO both said exactly that, then kept provoking each other to see who would flinch first over Ukraine.

And I agree, nuclear power is a ridiculous casualty of that scramble for power.

> I wonder if it's just an attempt to keep a cloud ...

Yes, but only peripherally. Atomic energy and atomic weapons are closely associated with a certain wealthy white western superpower. And within that superpower's political and ruling classes, there have been centuries of ideological struggles for what might be called "moral supremacy". Given how strongly the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombing push many people's "Moral Issue" buttons - those naturally become a point of contention, with plenty of folks weighing in on them whenever it seems opportune to do so.