I think building more nukes after we already have enough to end life on Earth is proof positive than humankind is ****ing retarded. Building that many is already mindless, but after that point shouldn't you just stop wasting money? The stated purpose has already been achieved so now it's just an idiotic dick waving competition.

you have to keep in mind the president isn't all powerful. He inherited that arms race, that situation. He was constantly being pushed in the direction of escalating the conflict. If he or Eisenhower listened to their advisors, we would've had nuclear war. So the fact he went into that position and steered us away from an actual war, I find valuable.

Once again Dan Carlin from hardcore history did a detailed podcast on this history, the various forces that were at play and just how close we actually came to nuclear Armageddon. With a different president is very likely that we wouldn't have managed to avoid it.

Carter argued in the debate with Reagan that continuing to build our nuclear arsenal was pointless after reaching the destructive capacity to kill every human on earth and Reagan responded America must be stronger and the vast majority of Americans agreed with Reagan. We’re an existential threat to humanity. No matter how far I go with my rhetoric it’s really still not enough. It can’t be overstated.

Aren't humans an existential threat in general?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record I think portraying that as an America problem is ignoring that human nature itself is braindead. Building nukes after you can destroy all life is simply the act of a species that evolved a mentality of building surplus in the face of scarcity and not knowing how to adjust when there is no longer scarcity. There's nothing more complicated to it than that no matter how much realpolitik you bring up. It's just human instinct not knowing how to deal with a reality it didn't evolve to deal with.

And so I go... SHEENA IS A PUNK ROCKER SHEENA IS A PUNK ROCKER mother****ing build those surplus riffs!!!

Explain to me all the countries from Sweden to Japan who could but don’t have them...

and why America insists on having the most

and why only America has used them

yes all of humanity is flawed but America is uniquely malignant.

The Marshall Islands. The Shoshone Nation.

And it’s not just nukes. It’s constant insane arrogance and involvement.

And on and on.

To be fair, if America didn't use it first then Japan or Germany might have done it instead. It's not like taking America out of the picture would have stopped the development of nuclear weapons or that, say, Hitler or someone else might not have used one.

One of the reasons nukes aren't flying left and right is precisely because Hiroshima was so damn horrific. But I'm pretty sure someone was gonna get nuked no matter how you slice it.

I'm pretty sure I know why Japan doesn't have nukes, but I imagine all those countries who have no ability to be any kind of top dog while also being the homeboys of a nuclear nation find no need to deal with that **** and don't want the scary **** that goes along with it. Basically Sweden is our beta male and smiles with our semen dripping out of their mouth. I'm honestly dubious that European democratic socialism isn't based on benefiting off of American imperialism so that they don't have to spend the military dollars on being imperialist themselves.

We have the most cause we got there first and we're richer and more powerful than everyone else

You're a uniquely stupid human being in thinking we're somehow just more evil than everyone else

We just happened to win at a particularly evil game

... They literally stopped their military expansionism when their global empires collapsed via the world wars and the US picked up the pieces. There's no need to guess. They have absolutely counted on the American empire to defend them.