Ideally no one wants atomic bombs, but then no one has attacked a country WITH them for fear of retaliation. The only problem is the rogue states that support terrorism and the terrorists don't seem to mind retaliation as long as they kill the opposition..............which of course they would do with or without any nuclear ban or disarmament. Unfortunately throughout history there have always been, and always will be, people with different philosophies who want to impose their ideas on others and will kill to achieve them.

I would feel safer in Australia if we had a nuclear deterrent.

Daviy - I don't want to get into an argument, there is no need - we disagree and that's that. I won't convince you nor you me.

I believe we need the bomb as a deterrent since they exist - if they did not exist, I would be against the development of them, now that we know what they can do.

Before the first one was dropped, no one knew for sure what would happen. So I cannot agree the circumstances were so contrived. The Americans were sick of death and sick of war by that time, thankfully President Truman did not listen to MacArthur who wanted personal glory at the cost of US and Japanese lives through invasion.

What happened at the end of the war regarding surrender, Russia joining in and why Kyoto was spared are all topics of endless conjecture.

Your point of "Are we to continue the sins of our fathers?" sums it up, you feel it is a sin, I do not, it was in my belief a great lifesaver. (I have a personally autographed picture of the plane and pilot by Col. Paul Tibbett (later Gen.))

Let's leave it at that, I can see you are quite passionate about it, I have military training and have a dispassionate strategic and tactical view.

"Its glib reassurances might help sell uranium, but at the cost of the nuclear weapons free world that has eluded us since the terror of Hiroshima."

and it is glib to presume not using nuclear weapons would have produced a better military outcome over an enemy whose highpoint in social development was the rape of Nanking.

I agree with those who point out the deaths attributable to a conventional invasion and occupation of Japan would have caused far greater death and carnage than dropping the atomic bomb.

Any debate to the contrary is based soleyl on famciful myth and conjecture.

As to the nuclear industry of today, when I consider the deployment of nuclear powerstatoins across USA and Europe and compare their "failure rate" to that of the former Soviet Union, it is patently obvious, wetsern capitalist societies have the methodology to control their nuclear assets and the old socialist / communist operators did not.

As to dealing with terrorists and rogue states.. drop a bomb on them and see how they react to formenting terror against us... there is no point in having a detterant unless one is prepared to use it.

One day someone, whether terrorist or government, will use one and then maybe we will learn.

Oh wait that already happened didnt it. How many times do we need?

Is that the minister for very dark shadows?

Because there is seldom, if ever, any light, or indeed anything truly positive, in your postings.

Just gross "realistic" cynicism.

Or perhaps you are Darth Vader?

The truth about nuclear weapons.

The idea behind nuclear weapons is the idea of total war. Total war is not about conflicts based on confrontations between the armies of the warring states. Total war is about the practice of war in which the people altogether are the target.

Total war is an obscenity. It is evil. Total war would destroy the people, and it would destroy everything--for a political advantage.

The seed, or root, of the idea of total war is the commitment to global dominance. Total war has no function except except for a nation state, or an alliance of nation states, that is interested in global dominance.

This kind of warfare has become global policy in the course of the twentieth century, and now into the 21st.

Total war is absolutely unacceptable, and so the current war-like posturing must stop. It is on the verge of producing its ultimate catastrophe.

It is not that this or that nation-state should not have nuclear weapons. Absolutely no state and nobody should have nuclear weapons.

There needs to be an immediate intervention on behalf of humankind to eliminate all nuclear weapons and to establish a working process for settling issues.

At present, a "culture" of total war, a "culture" of death is ruling, while the people are engrossed in self-oblivious and self-destructive consumerism.

Shadow Minister,

The nuclear industry is the only energy sector to fuel WMDs. Nuclear power was a by-product of military research and infrastructure, not the other way around.

General Electric's and DuPont's Hanford facility, overseen primarily by Westinghouse, produced the plutonium used in the Manhattan Project.

The UK's Calder Hall at Sellafield, England, billed as the world's first civil nuclear power station in 1956, was producing not just electricity but also plutonium for nuclear weapons.

India's first nuke was produced using fuel from a Canadian research reactor, 'capable of manufacturing enough plutonium for one to two bombs a year.' (www.fas.org/nuke/guide/india/nuke)

Nobel Prize winning physicist Hannes Alven described the peaceful and military atom as 'Siamese twins.' Over 20 countries which have built N-power or research reactors are known to have used their 'peaceful' nuclear facilities for covert weapons research and/or production.

More to the point, I can think of no reason why the issue of self-inflicted total annihilation should NOT be emotive. That's a false argument. To compare the deaths from the Japanese firebombings vs the A-Bombs is pure ignorance. You may as well turn your back on local homelessness and poverty due to Africa.

I don't think anyone who truly comprehends the destructive power of today's weapons (typically 1,000 times as powerful than the 14kt Hiroshima bomb) could be anything but loudly opposed to nuclear weapons. They have not prevented wars, and we have come within minutes of accidental nuclear war on several occasions.

As mentioned by mikk, above, hindsight is strong, but is not preventative. We continue with complacency at our own peril.