While I am one of the first to condemn the use of nuclear technology for the purposes of war I can also see how it has benefited as well. Before the advent of nuclear arms wars were fought in an ancient and predictable manner.

The idea was to get all your forces together and throw as many and as much as you can until you or the enemy folds, this strategy was always thought up and conducted by a general who sat kilometres behind the lines clean and cut off from the carnage of the battlefield, often remembering days of glory when he was a commander in some minor campaign here or there.

However with the advent of nuclear arms and quick efficient methods of delivery to any place on the planet the generals in charge were no longer cleanly removed from the battle, now if the enemy was placed on the back foot he could send an a-bomb to your home town and kill your family. It and other new technologies forced a rethink of the way in which wars were fought and can be argued that the threat of mutual annihilation was the only thing that kept the cold war cold.

Nuclear weapons should be destroyed; they have no place in our world now. But we must be sure that we do not return to the days of cannon fodder wars that lasted for decades or centuries because we have taken away the biggest stick in the arsenal.

I still think this is the funniest and most accurate description of the Liberal leadership options...

'Dead man walking? Try dead man lying in the grave, the rest of the party all poised with shovels. Malcolm Turnbull (Mr 24%) is all born to rule with his handsome head of hair, jutting chin and grey slacks. All "tally ho, what! It would be frightfully nice to retire to the drawing room with a good pipe and a fine hound." He's just waiting for the word. The word being: "There will be no leadership challenge in the foreseeable future."

Then there's Mr 41%. Mr Smoke And Mirrors. Mr Now You See Me Now You Don't.
'
He's treating them mean and keeping them keen. You know who we're talking about. How about you, Mr Peter Costello, pretending that you're the hero of your own novel keeping your cards close to your chest? Oooh, man of mystery.

It's like Costello is standing in the wings after a performance, listening to the applause and waiting to hear if it's loud enough to warrant an encore. Be careful, Costello. If you wait for too long, Turnbull will be out there tap dancing and doing magic tricks.'

Woops. Wrong topic:-) ha

90,000 people murdered? Can't you remember that there was a war on? 300,000 people were killed in Tokyo in March 1945 when the americans created a firestorm. War is hell. The reason that the atomic bombings were a good thing is that they allowed the Japanese to surrender without excessive loss of face. Remember that even after the Nagasaki bomb the Japanese army wanted to keep fighting to the last man, and it was Hirohito's casting vote that brought surrender. Without the bomb, 25 million Japanese civilians could have been killed in the allied invasion, together with all the prisoners of war and several million allied soldiers. Just look at the casualities in the last battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and scale them up for a full invasion.

Anyone interested in the defeat of Japan should read details of the planned invasion of Japan in November 1945, if the Japanese had refused to surrender. Called Operation Downfall, the first day involved landing 500,000 allied troops on Honshu, and hitting Japan with six atomic bombs.

In addition to shortening the second world war, nuclear weapons saved many millions of lives in the period 1945-1990, as it is almost certain that a major war would have been fought with Russia if it had not been for the nuclear stalemate. So far, the atomic bomb has been the greatest force for peace in history.

As long as small nations are threatened by numerically superior neighbours they will want nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

NATO used the threat of nuclear weapons as a mean of deterring an attack by the numerically superior Warsaw Pact forces during the cold war.

According to Seymour Hersh* Israel was on the point of losing the Yom Kippur in 1973. It was literally running out of ammunition. As a last resort it was about to launch a nuclear attack on Egypt and Syria.

Only when faced with the prospect of the conflict going nuclear did the US agree to a re-supply operation.

Thus, from the Israeli perspective, their nuclear deterrent has already saved them once. How likely are they to give it up?

Will India, which lost a war with China in 1962, give up its nuclear deterrent?

Would Pakistan give up its nukes?

Would Taiwan develop a nuclear deterrent if it could?

The only way to ban nukes is to guarantee the security of ALL states from attacks by numerically superior neighbours.

NATO cannot even guarantee the security of Georgia.

Let's get real.

*In "Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal & American Foreign Policy" published in 1993

There is new persuasive evidence that it was not the Bomb that finally forced Japan`s surrender but the entry of the Soviet Union into the war.See, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa," Racing the Enemy:Stalin,Truman and the Surrender of Japan",Harvard Uni Press, 2005.
Dropping the Bomb signalled not only the end of WW2 but also the onset of the Cold War. Leslie