18th March 2015, 5:08 AM
Indeed, but I'm really looking at this from my safe vantage point of the future. I can't say I would support covertly deploying a nuke (or some other weapon of mass destruction like an engineered super flu) every 100 years or so just to keep every generation afraid enough not to use them on much larger scales. And, well, the cynical part of me says that's what it would take, due to humanity's shocking lack of long term memory on lessons like these. You know the attitude, "That could never happen today!" is only true if you think it CAN happen today and take measures to keep it from doing so. The good news, the fear of nukes won't die with WW2 era people. That fear was kept well alive right up until the end of the cold war. So, the fear of nukes dies with us, maybe.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)