I think there are other paths to sustainable energy, but certainly viable fusion power is the holy grail.

What's scary is a weapon that can cause massive damage, that we are actually willing to use.

Sure, nuclear states vs. non-nuclear traditional states is the most likely use right now, but we're not that far off from non-state actors being able to make nuclear weapons. Right now the only real protection is limiting access to fissile material.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

IMHO focused fusion destruction is likely to be far more humane than the indiscriminate destruction caused by the weapons currently in our arsenal. i.e. a highly focused weapon is likely to to result in instant death for the victims instead of minutes to months to years of suffering for victims depending on their exposure levels.

Just because war is bad does not mean we are forced to throw up our hands and stop making distinctions between degrees of badness. War is not simply infinitely bad... that's ultimately a very sophomoric view.

In industrialized countries, wars of aggression are usually never profitable, but the same can unfortunately not be said for less-developed societies. Even Europe didn't find this obvious until after World War 2. So I guess it ends up being a question of how you define "sophomoric".

"Wealth through superior firepower" has hardly ever been achieved. Even Rome mostly got rich through trade after its armies conquered Europe and North Africa, and a lawful peace was imposed. Had everyone been economically rational pretty much the same end could have been achieved through trade (spoiler: not everyone is economically rational.)

Simple looting of the kind the Spanish engaged in in the New World was never a very good path to wealth, partly because its first effect was to create massive inflation (if you use gold as money and inject vase amounts of gold into your economy without increased productive capacity, you get inflation, not wealth.)

So the conditions of gaining wealth by war are very, very narrowly defined. It's not impossible, but it's amazingly difficult.

There are defensible moral reasons for engaging in mass organized violence--I support the current American efforts to kill people in Northern Iraq, for example--but economic rationality (profitability) is never one of them, because the first step to creating wealth is never to engage in the wholesale destruction of everything the creation of wealth depends on.

Since you brought up Rome in discussing payback for warfare, you could also ask "Cui bono" here -- "who benefits?"

A war is potentially just like a gold rush, the people getting rich are the ones selling the tools to dig or make war.

Just look at my native Sweden, we managed to stay out of a few wars and shamelessly sold high quality steel to the countries fighting. It made Sweden go from the bottom to the top in Europe.

What this implies about lobbying and how wars starts I'll leave to the imagination.

(I might also add that IS has declared war on the democratic world. So trying to stop their expansion is arguably self defence.)

The outcome may be the same, but there's a whole lot more humanity in subjecting someone to the latter.

2. inflicting as little pain as possible: a humane killing.

I pulled it from http://thefreedictionary.com/humane which cites 'Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged'.

Suffering and harm are distinct things, and being humane is about the former.

When a democracy has a war with a dictatorship it is similar to when the police defends civilians from violence.

(So this don't get into a shouting match: Check "democratic peace theory". I am aware of that the police can misuse their position. A democracy often also do cynical realpolitik when it isn't its voters that gets harmed.)

Edit: You might want to do the distinction of a junta that do a general draft, so there are soldiers for the dictator which didn't volunteer. It isn't an easy solution, but citizens in a country can theoretically overthrow their dictator. Hopefully with more help than the Syrians got from Obama.

Edit 2: I assume that you don't think it is immoral to sell weapons to police. If you are that pacifist, then I think you should move to some place without police to protect you... I hear they have good weather in inner Somalia and southern Yemen. Both are traditional clan societies without police.

Edit 3: Ah, you have a 60s style of police racial violence discussion in the USA right now. I get the down votes.

The problem with direct-fire weapons is not something like "bullets don't do enough damage." It's aiming and range and so forth. A plasma weapon seems unlikely to have good range or good aiming, and if it does not come with a fusion reactor alongside it, it's also kind of hard to see how you'd power the damn thing.

I'm sure someone can imagine some upside to such a weapon, but in practice, the odds that that particular result would come instead of a million other variations that would be inferior to just shooting bullets at things seems deeply unlikely.

And as everyone has already said, we already have fusion bombs. And for that matter small tactical nuclear weapons for more battlefieldy uses.

Yes, using weapons is unfortunate. The decision to ever use a weapon should be made with the utmost discretion. But when it comes time to use a weapon, it seems hard to argue against having the most effective weapons that also have little collateral damage.

Maybe people are worried that a new, extremely effective weapon will be discovered which happens to have high collateral damage. That's a concern, but it's never been possible to delay the advancement of technology. If something is possible to discover, then it seems like some diligent researcher will eventually discover it. But the concern itself seems misplaced: most new weapons have less collateral damage, not more.

By a huge margin, the most plausible military application of anything this company develops is "a fusion reactor on an aircraft carrier."

And I say that as someone who regards it as deeply unlikely that this company will create any major step towards a fusion reactor.

But about right for a submarine.

The possibility of pivoting your business model to "building plasma cannons for the Navy" is less of a risk and more of an awesome opportunity. I mean, defense contracting is a bit of a drag and there's tons of red tape, but if there's anything as cool as building fusion reactors small enough to replace diesel generators, it's building plasma cannons for the Navy.

Not to mention the tremendous moral hazard. I am unclear as to how anyone can function as a reasonable moral actor when they profit from war.

Calling it "defense" does not solve that problem.

Building a better bullet can save lives.

A nice portable high intensity directed neutron radiation source might be pretty nasty, though.

I guess you could use it to attack people inside a building without directly destroying the building, but I would figure that if you got a high enough neutron flux to reliably kill everyone inside the building, you'd also get enough activation radiation to render the building uninhabitable for at least weeks. You might well need fancy decontamination, and possibly to demolish the building and haul away parts of it. Seems easier to just use a bomb.

"Fusors have also been developed commercially, as sources for neutrons by DaimlerChrysler Aerospace" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

But you're right, plasma is not the deadly weapon. Neutrons are.

Why is that a risk? I'd like to live in a country with that technology, because otherwise other countries will have it and we won't.

Great skill in manipulating magnetic fields would probably be useful for: MRI. Detecting landmines and UXO in a field from a UAV or otherwise safe distance. Detecting submarines, including those by terrorists or rogue states transporting NBC weapons.

While those are military applications, they're fairly unalloyedly positive.

Even the hypothetical plasma rifle isn't necessarily a bad thing; if a plasma rifle allows rich countries like US, Japan, etc. to overmatch poor countries and thus prevent war, that's kind of a plus.

You might lose some of the halo effect for one audience, but gain it from another. Not everyone things defense (or if you prefer weapons, or arms dealing) is a bad sector to be in.