Oh come on...

There was a time factor in WW II, regarding Japan. And a human factor.
Sure, the argument can be made, that nukes shouldn't have been used on Japan in 1945, but I think we all know the answers to why they were used. (Or maybe the distorted image of the United States expands to stacking the deck against the U.S. on this bit of history as well. )

That's like rationalizing that Hitler didn't know about the extermination of the Jews, as author David Irving has argued.


In 1945, the U.S. had fought long bloody battles to take islands near Japan. They cost a lot of lives on both sides. While the Japanese clearly couldn't win the war, they could continue to fight a long bloody war of attrition to the last man.
Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war could have lasted another 10 years. And could have cost millions of lives, on both sides. It was only absolute, overwhelming force that compelled the Japanese to surrender.

And the U.S. has had close to 60 years to use nukes again, but it has maintained a very even hand.
Likewise, Britain, France and Russia.
There is a respect for the potential human cost of using nukes that has deepened over several decades, that was not fully realized in the first two or three decades. Western nations are very reluctant to use nukes. About the only way I think the U.S. would use nukes is in retaliation against a nuclear attack.

No such reluctance, in the rogue nations who seek to acquire them. I've read words of Islamists who speak of obtaining nukes as an absolute necessity for the defense of Islam, attacking the source of corruption of the Islamic world.

First and foremost as Islamic targets are obviously the United States and Israel.

The region considered for three decades to be the most likely place on Earth for a thermonuclear war is between India and Pakistan.

There is a level of potential devastation of nukes that third-world and rogue nations have much less regard for. These are extremely volatile states, with much less regard for death, even their own, in the name of their cause.

Do you really have no pause, at the thought of nations that breed suicide bombers with chilling regularity, that would suddenly have nukes?

Do you believe for a moment that they wouldn't use those weapons against their real or perceived political/cultural enemies, for the greater glory of Allah, and assure their glorious place in heaven, and in the revered annals of martyrdom?

And there's just the numbers game. The more nations with nukes in play, the more likely one will be used, either by a government, or seized by fanatics in a nuclear coup. The more nations have them, especially poor nations that can't really afford good military training and weapons maintenance and security for their nukes, the more likely something insane will happen.

All the loose nukes around a declining impoverished Russia we've worried about for 15 years ? Imagine a place even less stable than Russia with nukes.