Prospect for Complete Nuclear Disarmament: A Physicist's Perspective on Global Zero.

摘要

It is widely appreciated that the creation and application of civil law often fall short of achieving ideal justice. Likewise, the formulation and implementation of nuclear policy may not always meet the highest virtues we conceptually hold for human conduct. In the present discussion we ask if achieving a world completely free of nuclear weapons is practical or even desirable; we can consider this as one extreme or bounding condition. The other extreme allows nuclear weapons to be readily accessible to everyone, as easy to own as a personal hand gun in the United States, for example. The long-term prosperity of Earth plotted as a function of a number between zero and infinity is unknown, but we might imagine it to be a shape with various pragmatically acceptable zones. In other words excellent and pragmatically acceptable alternatives to a world completely without nuclear weapons probably exist, whatever ones heartfelt stance, that can carry us with confidence into the near term.