View source for Nuclear Anarchism Part 1: The Specter of Private Nuclear Weapons

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{{DES | des = Everybody should be able to own nuclear weapons.  Yes, really.  Case "proven" by illegitimate demands for perfection.   [http://dailyanarchist.com/2014/05/10/nuclear-anarchism-part-2-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-private-nuclear-devices/ Part 2: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Private Nuclear Devices].  [http://dailyanarchist.com/2014/05/16/nuclear-anarchism-part-3-climbing-the-kardashev-scale-for-fun-and-profit/ Part 3: Climbing the Kardashev Scale for Fun and Profit]. | show=}}
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“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me” ~ John Galt

If you follow a gun control debate long enough eventually the anti-weapon side will bring up nuclear weapons as something that no one would ever support. This is usually at the end of a series of progressively more powerful weapons, challenging the pro-weapon side until they cave in. Then the anti-weapon side will argue the line in the sand back to progressively less powerful weapons. Usually the pro-weapon side caves when nuclear weapons are brought up, but if they don’t the anti-weapon people will simply say that the idea of a privately owned nuke is too ludicrous to bother arguing about. Better to simply ridicule it. Unfortunately private nuclear weapons is a concept so far outside the Overton window of the average person that this argument works.

I intend to show that the arguments deployed against private nuclear weapons are faulty, inconsistent, and ultimately based on pure fear. I focus on nuclear weapons, but these arguments could apply to most nuclear devices.

Conservative Incoherence

I should give credit where it is due. Conservatives get it half right about weapons. Partly because they worship The Founders, and partly because they understand some of the ramifications of privately owned weapons. Sadly they also get it half wrong. This is because their theories are a hodgepodge of ad hoc justifications for what they know to be true under certain conditions. Because their theories are for the most part non-generative they fail when pushed out of that narrow range. This leads to arguments such as the Cooper Rules argument, and the Indiscriminate Destruction argument.

Cooper Rules Argument

One argument against private nuclear weapons has to do with what are known as the “Cooper Rules” aka “The Four Rules” for safely using a firearm:

1) The gun is always loaded

2) Never point a gun at something you are not willing to destroy

3) Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire

4) Always be aware of your target and what is behind it

Most of these translate to nuclear weapons in obvious ways (please don’t play with the detonate button). The problem comes from trying to apply rule 2. The detractors say that it is nearly impossible to avoid “pointing” a warhead at anyone. I guess governments do not have to abide by these rules. Are state controlled weapons inherently safe? Bridge For Sale; Cheap.

But being consistent in this leads to some problems. Am I “pointing” a demolition charge at everyone inside the potential blast radius when transporting it? Am I “pointing” my car at people when driving down the road, what about in icy conditions? Is a railroad “pointing” at people when it transports hazardous materials?

And then there are aircraft.

A commercial aircraft is an inherently unstable machine for at least two reasons:

1. It requires a constant input of energy to stay in the air.

2. Aircraft are designed to be unstable (it turns out that a completely stable plane is also uncontrollable).

This means that keeping an aircraft in a safe working condition requires constant monitoring and control input, whether by a human pilot or autopilot. While in flight there is a lot of energy stored in the plane itself in the form of its speed (kinetic energy) and altitude (gravitational potential energy), as well as the fuel. 

This is a problem because the stored energy of a plane in flight is effectively “pointing” at every single thing in its potential glide path. Whether directly in front, or off to the side should the plane curve as it goes down. To push the comparison further, with an only slightly looser definition of “pointing,” the argument could be made that an aircraft in flight points at everything in its range, worse in fact than an ICBM in flight which only points at what is in its ballistic trajectory.

When confronted with these inconsistencies the person will respond that, for example, a commercial airliner is not intended to be a weapon. However, intentions were not considered relevant when they put forth their argument, so I see no reason to give their argument the prop of intentions either.

Indiscriminate Destruction Arguement

Another argument against private ownership is that a nuclear weapon is “indiscriminate” in its use (both in the size of its effect and the lingering fallout) and therefore has no function in self-defense. This argument is not against nuclear weapons per se, but any weapon which is either imprecisely targeted, or has an area of effect larger than some arbitrary threshold. Aside from the amazing prescience that this person has in knowing that there will never be a self defense situation where a nuclear weapon is the correct option, it conflates human controlled targeting with area of effect. A weapon’s area of effect does not say anything about whether it will injure an innocent, it merely changes the scenarios in which the weapon can be used without injuring an innocent. Similarly the possession of a weapon does not constitute an aggression to another person, in and of itself. Only the actual use or serious threat of use can be aggression, whether intentionally or by incompetence (drunk jerk with a gun).

It also assumes that a person requires a “self-defense” justification to own something classified as a weapon. Why? Why does someone need to give anyone any reason whatsoever? And who does the classification? The universe doesn’t have convenient slots built into its structure labeled “weapon,” and “not weapon.”

But this quote deserves special attention:

“The following tools are completely indiscriminate, and may harm innocent people decades after their use.” ~ Lazamataz, Free Republic

Really? So a nuclear weapon is completely impossible to target? Again, then why are states allowed to have them? As for the possibility of fallout hurting people in the future, in order to be consistent with this argument it is necessary to forbid any activity which can result in dangerous pollution (even on a person’s own property), not just radioactive pollution. Does this person want to be consistent? Kiss all industrial activity goodbye, unless someone can find a process that not only does not emit pollution past the property line, but does not emit any pollution. And it doesn’t stop there. There can not even be the chance that it ever emits pollution. Because if it does, someone, someday might be hurt by it.

Destructive Power

The foundational argument against private nuclear weapons (and many other things) is that they are simply too powerful to allow civilians to have them (remind me again why states can be trusted with them?). Much of this is wrapped up in the scale problem.

This argument is structurally identical to arguments against private firearms:

“If you have [evil object] there are potential scenarios which are undesirable, therefore you are not allowed to have [evil object] regardless of any mitigating factors or positive outcomes, and regardless of how probable or real they may be.”

The problem with this is that most people are not bloodthirsty maniacs, and the possibility of someone hurting another person is not the same thing as actually causing injury. If it were then a person’s mere existence is enough to make them guilty. Who decides what the evil objects are? What gives them the right? And how are they different from any other band of holier-than-thou thugs?

What has the person who simply owns or builds a nuclear weapon (without intent to injure) done that counts as aggression against anyone?

The defining feature of a nuclear weapon is that its energy is sourced from the mass converted to energy when atomic bonds are broken, not the size or composition of the energy release. It is (at least theoretically) possible to build low yield, and “clean” nukes that emit very little fallout. Aiming this argument at nuclear weapons requires a form of naturalistic bias/magical thinking, resulting in the ridiculous position that a hypothetical clean 50 ton yield nuke is BAD, but 50 tons of TNT is acceptable. This doesn’t even consider antimatter or large kinetic weapons.

Even ignoring implementation, the argument from destructive power is never held consistently. If it were then the person asserting that nuclear weapons should be banned would also be forced to ban innumerable other things that can injure or kill on a large scale. If the person is consistent with this argument the situation does not get any better. Unfortunately many, if not most forms of heavy industry have the feature that if Murphy decides to unleash his wrath a lot of people are going to die. Consider for example the 2005 Graniteville, SC collision of two freight trains due to an improperly lined switch. The crash ruptured one of the tank cars, which was filled with chlorine, spilling approximately 60 tons of its 90 ton load (a typical chlorine tank car holds a little over 17,000 gallons). Nine people died and hundreds were injured, and this was a tiny disaster.

This argument would also necessitate a complete ban on spaceflight, because any launch method that can put a given mass in low orbit can easily put that same mass in a suborbital trajectory towards any target the launching entity may choose, possibly in the form of several hundred guided kinetic kill penetrators, aka “Rods From God.” And any spacecraft on an interplanetary trajectory can release kinetic weapons against any target along its vector, doing damage equivalent to several times the mass of the attacking projectile in TNT, even on a “slow” interplanetary orbit.

Being consistent

Let’s ignore all the problems with the arguments against private nuclear weapons, all the false assumptions, and all the inconsistencies. Assume for purposes of argument that nuclear weapons really are as uncontrollable, polluting, and generally horrible as they say. Why does the state get a pass? America alone has detonated a little over 1,500 warheads (by official counts), plus the Soviet Union and other countries. State ownership doesn’t change physics. If anything it’s been proven time after time that states and organizations intertwined with states never manage to do things in a way that is both safe, and economically efficient (see NASA for an example of Safety Über Alles).

The Nut Job Problem, or rather: The Scary One

Even after arguing that most people are not going to go out and blow up the nearest city because someone burned their breakfast there is still another problem, which is a subset of the Destructive Power argument. That is:

“What about the people who really are insane? The true psychopaths who really think that they are doing a good thing by spreading murder, torture, and whatever other evils they come up with.

The problem here is not that the people who are still somewhat rational can’t be deterred from aggression. They can be, even if at a cost. The problem is not even that a lone nut job stops taking his meds and wants to go out with a bigger bang then shooting up the local mall. They can do that now, but pretty much don’t. The lone nut job almost invariably has a certain sort of fantasy, and impersonal explosives just don’t fit that fantasy. The problem is people who have an idea, and are willing to commit the most horrible acts in service of that idea. That may be a Marxist destroying “capitalist oppressors”, or it might be a Muslim breathing fire at the infidel, or a Christian who has decided that blowing up the abortion clinic isn’t enough, but he must destroy the city that contains it.

I concede that I do not know how to handle this one. It is a hard problem. When nuclear weapons were first developed there were serious engineering difficulties building them, such as getting all the explosives to detonate within a sufficiently short period of time. Most of those difficulties can now be solved with hobbyist level equipment, and as far as I know the only real showstopper at this point is the availability of the nuclear materials themselves. The implication is that if wealth levels increase much further the last difficulties will fall away.

For a while everyone could pretend that nuclear weapons would always be too hard for anyone to build on their own. Most people still have their heads in that sand. But given these conditions it is only a matter of time until Bin Laden 2.0 turns some port into a radioactive crater, or a General Ripper flips out and attempts to protect the Purity Of Essence. At that point whoever is around, whether that is a state or a private defense network, is going to have a massive headache on their hands. About the only method I know of that could actually work, and does not involve extreme totalitarianism, is the retaliatory punitive expedition, but this will cause many libertarians to scream bloody murder because it violates the purity of the NAP.

Will the earth become a mushroom patch? Will people irradiate each other over petty disputes? Will the vegetables in your garden attack you?  We need to come up with some better ideas, whether we have a state or not.

In Part 1 I showed that the arguments against private nuclear weapons (and nuclear devices in general) are faulty. I also intend to show that nuclear technology can be handled safely, without succumbing to the obsession of Safety Über Alles.

In the comments on Part 1 Vanmind brought up the danger of what might commonly be called “rogue elements” using nukes as states collapse. I consider this to be an example of the General Ripper version of the nut job problem, and I’ll also note that many of our theories dealing with the spasms of retreating statism seem to have pretty large holes. I made a comment on the previous part correcting some errors and oversights. I recommend reading it if you haven’t already.

The real problems with nuclear technology, and how to handle them:

Radiation

Surprising as it may be to the layman, direct radiation from a nuclear explosive can be a relatively small, or even non-existent problem depending on the design and yield of the explosive. With low fallout, low yield, or enhanced radiation devices the released neutrons can travel significantly outside the fireball, and can cause low level (and short-lived) neutron activation of the surroundings. With a high yield device the sphere of total destruction will be larger than the sphere of radiation penetration, resulting in the emitted direct radiation being a non-issue.

For a nuclear power plant the core can be shielded by a number of methods, the first being the coolant (absorbing radiation is part of how it cools in fact). Shielding methods for the most part boil down to simply putting mass around the radioactive areas, though it is obviously somewhat more complicated than that.

What is interesting is that an operating coal fired power plant releases more radiation via fly ash than an operating nuclear power plant (note: this is often misreported as coal ash being more radioactive than nuclear waste, which is false). The only reason I can think of for why this is not considered a problem by most people is that coal is “known” and understood, lighting something on fire and being warm is very easy to understand. Putting certain metals next to each other in a specialized container and getting heat seems like magic.

Fallout

Fallout mostly consists of vaporized radioactive elements spread over a given area. In many ways it is very similar to chemical pollution with a few tweaks. In addition, many of the isotopes commonly feared are feared because their chemical properties allow them to be absorbed by the body in large quantities. Fallout tends to be associated with bombs, but can also occur with catastrophic containment failure of a power plant, Chernobyl being the canonical example.

Larger devices, or ones detonated at high altitude have a massive advantage over power plant failures and low yield devices in that they can propel the radioactive “ash” into the higher atmosphere, where it would be mixed into the jet stream, diluting the ash to irrelevance.

But whatever the source, contamination by short or long-lived isotopes is a relatively minor problem. Isotopes with short half-lives burn themselves out quickly (however they release considerable radiation while doing so), and long-lived isotopes emit very little radiation.

Contamination by isotopes with a medium length half-life is what causes problems, because the isotopes stick around for a long time (months to decades), but emit significant amounts of radiation. It is also important to note that the chemical properties of the fallout are frequently more dangerous than the radiological properties. One example of this is depleted uranium, which emits only a minuscule amount of radiation, but is highly toxic. Plutonium is another element that is like this.

The answer for handling short-lived isotopes is to leave the area until radiation levels drop. For long-lived isotopes there often isn’t much that is worth doing. Cleaning up medium-life isotopes can be anything from trivial (shovel some dirt into a truck and take it away), to extremely complicated and expensive, making it more cost effective to simply wall off and abandon the property for a few decades. Chemical pollution can have a very similar spectrum of possible danger levels also, with the bonus that many kinds of contamination will stay there forever until they are cleaned up, with no option of waiting for it to decay.

For anyone who doubts that chemical pollution can be just as bad (read: FUD capable) as radioactive pollution, I suggest perusing Things I Won’t Work With, a collection of blog posts by a chemist talking about various nightmare chemicals, of particular interest are the methylates, and the classic Sand Won’t Save You This Time. The articles are written in an easy to understand (and hilarious) style, so even if you don’t know anything about chemistry there is still a lot you can get out of them.

Radioactive waste

This isn’t a problem for nuclear explosives, but it is relevant for reactors. In some ways it is the reactor counterpart of fallout because it is produced in normal operation. Since this is one of the Grand Boogiemen of anti-nuclear hysteria it requires some attention, so I need to explain just what nuclear waste is.

With a traditional reactor design the nuclear fuel is formed into pellets which are then placed in rods. As the reactor operates the fuel fissions and transmutes into different elements. Most of these elements are radioactive and promptly fission into different elements over varying amounts of time. During this process the operating reactor will slowly build up a concentration of what are called “neutron poisons” in the fuel rods. These isotopes absorb neutrons, but either do not undergo induced fission, or if they do fission they require more neutrons to do so than other parts of the fuel. The result is that after a while a fuel rod is useless as fuel. It simply can no longer sustain fission despite the fact that around 95% of the original nuclear fuel is still present. At this point the stupid (and costly) action is to take the rod out of the reactor and dispose of it. The smarter option is to reprocess it and remove the neutron poisons, resulting in a fresh fuel rod ready for use. This can be done about 20 times, resulting in a complete burnup of fuel in the reactor. Some reactor designs use fuel that doesn’t choke itself as quickly, or can be reprocessed while in use (molten salt reactors being one example).

The nuclear waste problem is a fantastic example of what happens when you allow government to decide on matters of safety. In the US reprocessing is illegal. Officially that is because of fears of “nuclear proliferation.” However, like anything else, there are conspiracy theories about what the real reason might be. Personally I believe that the coal, oil, and in modern times “renewable” energy industries are partly responsible due to lobbying (why wouldn’t they try to hobble nuclear tech?). However this is merely speculation.

What is not speculation is that in the USA those in a position to choose reactor designs have repeatedly picked ones that produce large quantities of bomb making materials, even when there were much safer, or potentially more efficient designs available. If the spent fuel rods are considered waste then the military can buy bomb making materials far cheaper than the market price.

For radioactive isotopes that simply can’t be burned up in a reactor and have no economic use there are methods of disposal that take into account the long time span of radioactivity, one of which is to mix the waste with borated glass, and drop the canisters into a subduction zone. It is also possible to drop the canisters into the sun, or a crater on the moon, but only if the price of putting mass into orbit is cheap enough.

Low fallout devices

There are ways to build nuclear explosives that produce very little fallout, even when detonated as a groundburst. Among the evidence for this are the Soviet devices (3 x ~15 kiloton) detonated as part of the Tagia test to excavate the Pechora-Kama Canal.

With pure fission explosives a lot of the fallout is a result of low efficiency. Devices designed for small physical size (such as artillery shells) have some of the worst efficiencies, because they simply don’t have the space to use a design with good efficiency. One way to increase the efficiency of a pure fission device is to use larger and more powerful conventional explosives to produce a denser compression in the fissile material, this results in a more complete burnup (lower fallout), as well as less fissile material needed for a given yield.

In a fusion explosive (at least in the Teller-Ulam design) in order to reduce fallout the fusion stage uses a lead tamper instead of the usual uranium tamper. In addition the radiation case is made of thin, neutron transparent materials. Hilariously this turns it into a neutron bomb, increasing the direct radiation blast but producing minimal fallout. Also designing the device to get more of it’s total yield from fusion reduces the fallout.

Externalities

What I implied in the Fallout section is not strictly true; radioactive fallout does behave differently than chemical pollution, and the damage mechanisms are different. But the point is that they can be handled the same way. There is nothing about nuclear pollution that prevents suing the polluter for damages and cleanup. The argument from diffuse fallout does not hold because this question must be answered for chemical pollution as well. The possible argument that the sheer damage possible is beyond what anyone could pay does not hold either, for reasons that I addressed in Part 1.

It turns out that we do have an answer (two actually) to the problem of diffuse pollution injuring many people by a small amount each. One is the class action lawsuit, the other is Coase’s Theorem. Coase’s Theorem states that if transaction costs are zero all externalities will be internalized. It is not possible to actually drive those costs to zero, but we can push them low enough to have a good approximation. For two examples of the effect of low transaction costs see Kickstarter and Bitcoin.

Coase’s Theorem is one of the bedrock concepts on which libertarianism is based, because it utterly repudiates one of the common justifications for the state as a means to prevent and/or control negative externalities.

 “I like to describe Coase’s Theorem as the Killer Joke of political economics. That is, you can spot the people who understand it in fullness easily – because they turn into libertarians.” ~ Eric S. Raymond

The Extortion Scenario

One common problem raised against anarchism is how to defend against a foreign power who simply says, “Pay X amount or City Y is vaporized.”The small form of this is the Dark Knight Rises scenario. A small group takes over a city by the threat of destroying it if anyone attempts to take them out.

Unfortunately for the would-be extortionist, everyone involved will think through the logic of how this works (given the existence of a functioning defense network). If the people pay up he comes back for more, other extortionists show up, and it will not stop. The result is that he may get the first payment, possibly even the second payment before an insurance company posts the video of the extortionist and his henchmen being killed. This outcome is assisted by the fact that the extortionist is highly unlikely to have the air of legitimacy that a government has.

This may regrettably result in a crater or two before people figure out that it won’t work, but the results of giving in are worse. No one complies with a plane hijacker anymore, do they? They know that the results of doing so are worse than taking out the attacker, because the passengers know that they are probably already dead. That lesson has been learned, though it sadly cost thousands of lives to do so.

In this scenario, a nuclear device does not change the situation much, as this kind of extortion does not depend on their existence. A couple aircraft or a ship full of ammonium nitrate can do the same thing. The Texas City Disaster of 1947 being a classic example.

Safety Über Alles

Sadly, thinking that nuclear hazards are always more dangerous than any other hazard, combined with government regulation, has resulted in a situation where the vast cost per gigawatt savings of nuclear power is almost completely soaked up by nonsense standards and completely illogical ways of thinking. It is possible to submit a reactor design for approval that is provably safer than any current design and have it rejected because it uses parts which have not been certified as “nuclear grade.” This also ties in to regulatory capture because there are many groups who stand to benefit, or at least think they do, from high cost nuclear power.

Without statist interference this can not happen, the structural shielding, and reprocessing methods will be chosen based on the true costs and risks, not on what someone thinks who will never have to live with the consequences, but can force their opinion on others with impunity. Similarly, explosives will be designed for efficiency and safety based on their economic uses, whether that is mining, or spacecraft propulsion, or yes, even as weapons.

This implies that if a solution to the nut job problem exists it will be far more likely to be found, and the damage mitigated by a private system.

In the previous two articles I have talked about the reasons people bring against private nuclear devices, and how they can (and must) be handled without statist intervention. In this article I am going to talk about why we want these things. First, I highly recommend reading the essay Why Alternative Energy Isn’t, which demolishes a few of the common myths floating around about energy production and distribution, and is useful background material to keep in mind while reading this.

Wealth as a direct correlate of energy

At the foundational level wealth creation involves working against entropy, which requires a net energy input. As evidence, energy production and use has tracked wealth since the industrial revolution, and by the early 20th century the energy production of industrialized countries had eclipsed the total energy production of the world up to that time with corresponding wealth increases. Current energy production and wealth dwarf even that seemingly massive feat. Increased efficiency in the use of that energy is analogous to deflation increasing real purchasing power.

Nuclear power is relevant to this not just because it is an extremely high density energy source, but also because it can completely invert the production and use of certain products, specifically hydrocarbons.

Hydrocarbons are used both as chemical feedstocks (plastics, fertilizer, and a host of others) but also as fuel. With energy and the proper elements, mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, it is possible to synthesize hydrocarbons for both uses. In the case of fuel it makes more sense to think of it as a form of energy storage rather than fuel. This pulls the foundation out from under peak oil theories (as if economics hadn’t already done that) because not only is oil no longer the fuel of civilization, but it can be made to order in whatever quantity desired. The reason that hydrocarbon powered machines would still be used is because of fundamental power to weight ratios (aircraft) and/or minimum size thresholds for a viable power plant (automobile).

Here are a couple examples of peaceful uses of nuclear bombs, leaving out the most obvious one of asteroid deflection:

Mining / Excavation Explosives

Place bomb where you want a hole. Push the detonate button. Create hole. A rather simple process.

 It is complicated by the fact that a ground burst will produce a higher fallout than the same device detonated in the air or in a vacuum, but it has already been demonstrated that this can be done with surprisingly little fallout (the Tagia tests mentioned in the previous article).

It probably would not work, and is somewhat insane even if it does work, but consider a large, active volcano, such as Mt. Saint Helens shortly before it blew up. It may be possible to use a chain of warheads to quickly dig massive canals and dikes to contain the lava flows, and maybe even to tap the side of the magma chamber to direct the eruption in the desired direction. This obviously depends on being able to handle or contain the fallout. Definitely insane, but if it would work it demonstrates the advantages of nuclear explosives.

Orion

The Orion Drive (aka. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion) is in it’s simplest form a spaceship with a nuclear bomb behind it. Detonate the bomb. The ship moves. Surprising as it may be, this is easily survivable with proper design. A bomb is detonated roughly 100 meters behind the ship, roughly once per second, and a large disc (usually of metal, but some designs used plywood I believe) absorbs the force of the blast. If the disc is sprayed with oil it will not erode in the plasma. Then giant shock absorbers spread the momentum pulse out to give a smooth ride.

Orion is important because it is one of the few propulsion technologies that can be built with current technology (actually with 60’s tech), has enormous thrust so it can be used for surface to orbit launch, and decent specific impulse so it doesn’t need to carry as much reaction mass for a given mission. This makes Orion very well suited to being used for an ultra-heavy surface to orbit launch, asteroid interception, a doomsday arkship, and even medium speed (~10% of c) interstellar travel.

It was actually the Orion Drive that forced me to confront the topic of private nuclear bombs. But Orion is not the only type of nuclear rocket. There are many versions of the nuclear thermal rocket concept that completely contain the radionuclides used, or are simply a reactor used as a power source to run a plasma rocket. Orion is simply the most extreme high thrust capable one.

However, those of us who are blessed with the gift of mad science do not require reasons: Orion is an end in itself.

Scale: why it matters, and what it means to reject it

Many of these arguments are tangled up with the scale of a given society, or the relative scale between two societies. Unfortunately most people have a tendency to ignore this. Applied to nuclear weapons this means that people think that they will always be doomsday devices that can only be trusted in the hands of what we all know to be the most trustworthy entity imaginable: The State.

The other effect of ignoring scale is the endless droning of variants of this:

“Nuclear devices are too expensive for individuals to own and maintain”

To anyone who has studied economics this is utterly ridiculous on the face of it. True enough, they probably are too expensive right now, although even that is doubtful. But any increase in wealth levels will reduce the cost in real terms, easily making them affordable. And that does not even take into account any technological advances that make it cheaper to produce them.

The line of reasoning exhibited in the above quote is almost completely ignorant of how wealthy the average person in a first world country is compared not only to the pre-industrial age, but even to a few decades ago. That ignorance leads to further error in assuming that something being expensive now means that it will always and forever be so. Or maybe this is just another example of people thinking that it is better to have one’s head in the sand rather than face a possibly ugly reality.

For an extreme example of scale and why it matters consider a 50kt warhead detonated 250 meters above a medieval village. There is no village afterwards. Contrast that with the same warhead detonated 250 meters away from an O’Neil Cylinder. If constructed from aluminum the bomb will vaporize about 1cm of material from the hull. If constructed from titanium that reduces to about 6mm. Any fragile equipment on the outside of the cylinder on the same side as the warhead will be destroyed as well, but everything else is intact and the people inside are almost certainly unharmed.

The argument will be made that nuclear weapons make mass murder and destruction easy, but all increases in available energy make this easier, for the same reasons that an increase in usable energy allows greater wealth. The overarching effect of increasing scale is to make things that would have been extinction level events into minor annoyances: what can wipe out a small hunter-gatherer tribe will not even be noticed by a modern city, what can wipe that out will not do much damage to a global but planet bound civilization. Planetary annihilation level disasters are survivable by a civilization spread across a solar system, and an interstellar civilization can survive even a supernova.

Understanding scale also provides the counter to another argument:

“If one person has a nuclear weapon they can dictate terms to everyone else because they are so much more powerful.”

The problem here is not that one person has a great deal of energy at their command. It is that they are using it to dominate others. Some may think this to be an argument for distributing energy/wealth equally, but this can only be done with extreme levels of force, utterly destroying the moral pedestal the equalizers thought they were standing on. And then there is the problem of it being theft. Actually following out this logic leads to the crab bucket: anyone who tries to do better is pulled back into egalitarian poverty and conformity.

Aside from those problems let us look at the historical record: people who have developed greater energy sources have almost always developed and used them for peaceful purposes to produce wealth, with the one glaring exception of the atomic bomb, which was developed during a time of war by State-sponsored scientists.

On a practical level the best way to deal with this problem (using the term loosely), is to continue technological development making it possible for everyone to have access to greater amounts of energy. Which is exactly what people naturally do, and have done for the last 200 or so years.

Energy Jumps

Our civilization has gone through an energy jump before. During the 19th century, when coal replaced wood as the dominant energy source, one effect of this was to allow the environment to recover after widespread deforestation. A second energy jump occurred when oil became the dominant energy source.

These jumps have not resulted in an increase of individuals killing each other because it is easier for them to do so. Rather, the increased wealth created opportunities which have allowed people to live who would have died before, and to be able to do what they want while they are alive.

Conclusion

The only way private nuclear devices can be prevented from becoming a reality is to completely halt technological and scientific progress. And for what? So we can feel virtuous that we stopped the evil of nuclear weapons as we die of starvation because we have forced a Malthusian horror on ourselves via a totalitarian State?

All the problems (the real ones that is) that are caused by nuclear power and weapons can be mitigated, often with methods enabled by the very devices that supposedly cause nothing but harm. And this holds for any problem that is capable of being solved, because larger quantities of energy imply more options to deal with problems. It even applies to environmental matters, because it is only the wealthy who have the luxury of choosing what resources they use, and of spending resources to maintain “natural” beauty, or even long term survival.

But in the end it doesn’t really matter what everyone else thinks. Those who reject nuclear technology will be out competed by those who don’t. The ones who use it will inherit the stars. Those who don’t will be left to scratch out an existence on a single rock until something wipes it clean. And nuclear reactors are only one step on the way to power sources like Dyson bubbles, and matter to energy converters based on black hole Hawking radiation.
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