There have been many stories about how the rich and powerful are preparing to protect themselves during a nuclear war. It seems they believe nuclear war is inevitable and this is almost understandable when we look around the world and see nuclear proliferation spreading. It seems like only a matter of time before every tin pot dictator and every unstable country has nukes. We worry about these countries developing delivery systems, but maybe there is a bigger worry. The bigger worry is they could slip nukes into our country with freight, or bring them in through tunnels from Mexico. I’m not so sure the drug cartels in Mexico would want this to happen no matter how much money was involved, since we are probably their biggest customer database. Nuclear proliferation is probably one of the biggest problems in the world today and what makes it even harder to control is the fact the countries which try to control it have nuclear weapons themselves. In an ideal world no one would have nukes and any country trying to perfect one would be dealt with by the rest of the world.

There is irony in all of this, because we felt we needed these weapons developed to save lives in World War II and yet in the long run they may cost more lives than we ever could’ve imagined. Enough of these weapons going off are capable of destroying the entire planet. How does one stop a country from developing nuclear weapons when that country creates a nuclear weapons development program? Especially a country that has powerful neighbors who won’t look kindly on anyone who attacks that country. Such is the case with North Korea. North Korea borders on China and Russia and neither one of those two countries wants the United States to attack it. Attacking North Korea could start World War III and Russia, China and the United States combined have enough nuclear ordinance to bring about the destruction of the world. Recently China and Russia proposed what they said was a solution to the problem. They signed an agreement with North Korea which said the North Koreans would stop developing missiles if the United States and South Korea stopped holding war games. In the agreement, which I haven’t seen by the way, it said something to the effect the United States really wanted a foothold in this part of the world and that was why we were doing what we were doing and it demanded the United States remove defensive missiles from South Korea. I don’t think anyone thinks this agreement will hold water, because it seems to be more of a public relations document.

Nukes are causing problems in other parts of the world. As countries develop nuclear weapons some of those countries are sympathetic to different causes which we are against and some of these causes call for people to be killed. We are constantly watching to make sure the nuclear countries don’t sell nuclear weapons to the nonnuclear countries. It has been said there are more nuclear countries than we know. It is an open secret Israel which has never stated it was a nuclear country, is one and there have been many stories about South Africa probably being a nuclear power. When Pakistan became a nuclear power it wasn’t only India which got worried. There were those who felt Pakistan might export nuclear weapons throughout the Middle East and in some cases to African countries. This doesn’t seem to have happened thank goodness.

As bad as nuclear weapons are, and they are very bad, we might find even more dangerous weapons as our experiments continue with fusion and with machines like the Large Hadron Collider where particles are being smashed together at ever increasing speeds. We might find out we can use tiny black holes to create weapons. If we do this it could lead to the end of all of us. I only mention this, because scientists claim as the collider gets more powerful it might create microscopic black holes, but they say it is nothing to worry about, because they will only last for a millisecond. It seems to me this is an area where we shouldn’t be tempting fate. If we look around us in space we realize black holes are very dangerous and drag everything around into them, crushing everything. No one would want to see a black hole created on earth which started sucking in everything and getting bigger. First of all we wouldn’t know how to stop this and secondly creating a black hole on earth seems to be suicide.

One of the things we should be doing is trying to find a material which would make nuclear weapons inert. I don’t know if this is possible, but I think we should be trying. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a material, it could be something else such as a plasma or a beam of some kind, but this would be an ideal defense, much better than trying to shoot down a missile with a missile. This is especially true now that missiles are being developed which can change course and have a higher rate of speed. It’s a shame all the money we have put into weapons, there are so many more useful things we could have done with it.

It has been estimated the total amount of nuclear warheads possessed by the United States and Russia is about seven thousand apiece and the amount of active nuclear weapons those two countries have is somewhere between eighteen hundred and nineteen hundred apiece. That is far more than the rest of the world’s nuclear nations combined. Both countries use a triad system of delivery which means missiles, planes and ships including submarines. It is hard to believe any country would need this many nuclear weapons. China has about two hundred and seventy and nobody wants to go against them.

Will we ever get out of this mess and stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons or will we develop even more powerful nuclear weapons? At this point developing more powerful weapons would be the end of us.