[mikeash]

Nuclear weapons work great to keep the peace... until they don’t. The notion that they greatly reduce the occurrence of war seems to be spot on... but you’re trading an ongoing problem for an ongoing small chance of a complete catastrophe.

Your proposal to promote peace through nuclear proliferation would probably work great for a while. Then twenty or fifty or a hundred years down the line, something will go wrong and civilization will die. That doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff to me.