[timmytokyo]

>I think it's better to have a society where property rights and other natural rights cannot be infringed upon for any reason.

So hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons? (I realize this is not a practical concern today, but I'm trying to find out if anyone truly believes there are no lines to be drawn on property rights.)

[waterhouse]

That is a difficult issue. One potential resolution I see is to say that if you see someone making his own nuclear weapons without telling anyone about it, this is strong enough evidence that he's going to try to do something terrible (i.e. it looks like a crime in progress) that you would be justified in using force to stop him.

How does this generalize and fit into the framework of property rights in general? What makes, say, manufacturing guns not strong enough evidence of trying to do something terrible? Is it mere history, or is it the defensive uses of guns, or does the magnitude of the terribleness matter, or something else? (In practice, I think purifying U-235 takes huge facilities and no one can do it in their backyard—it's probably a few orders of magnitude more expensive and complex.) Also, if it's 100% established that this one guy making the nukes is a trustworthy pacifist who won't use them, but the problem is he won't keep them in a particularly secure location, can one defensibly call his actions illegal? ("Planning to be neglectful"? How about someone who will guard them as heavily as he can, but that's just not heavily enough?) There would be a lot to explore there, but I think it may be possible to resolve the issue of nuclear weapons while keeping a pure system of property rights.

[confidantlake]

>One potential resolution I see is to say that if you see someone making his own nuclear weapons without telling anyone about it, this is strong enough evidence that he's going to try to do something terrible (i.e. it looks like a crime in progress) that you would be justified in using force to stop him.

Only 2 nuclear weapons out of the 10,000s made have ever been used. Almost no one announces they are building a nuclear weapon, it is usually done in secret. So this argument does not really hold.

What I think most people do is they see from a practical standpoint that having unrestricted access to nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous and work backwards to justify why it fits their ideological framework.

[waterhouse]

> Only 2 nuclear weapons out of the 10,000s made have ever been used. Almost no one announces they are building a nuclear weapon, it is usually done in secret. So this argument does not really hold.

The entities that have, so far, made nuclear weapons are nation-states. I think most people would agree with the following statements on that: (a) it's hard to prevent nation-states from making them (not for lack of trying), (b) many of them already made them long ago (U.S., Russia, France, China, etc.) and we're not trying to say that was illegal, (c) the concept of "illegal" at the level of nation-state actors is ... to say the least, very different in implementation, and possibly in concept, from that of "illegal" at the level of individuals. Many people think that nations making more nukes is bad, and some are in favor of disarmament treaties, but I don't think they believe international law either does or should mandate disarmament for all nations. Some would say it's hypocritical for the nuclear club to try to prevent other nations from developing nukes; I suspect others agree it's hypocritical but also don't want those nations to develop nukes.

The question in this case was, "So, hypothetically, it should be your right to own nuclear weapons [personally]?" It would be impractically difficult for one person to make nuclear weapons by himself, without essentially buying or stealing all the important stuff from elsewhere. And if it were easy for one person to make nukes, then probably no ideological system could resolve that easily. There might be some middle ground of possible scenarios that's important to resolve—e.g. if a company wants to make a nuke to use for, I dunno, their own Project Orion or mining a mountain or doing an interesting underwater experiment, then should that be illegal?

We may end up facing the "one madman can create a superweapon" scenario with biotech. Perhaps, by that time, everyone will have their own hazmat suits and their houses will have UV decontamination chambers to fight off SARS-COV-5 or whatever.

> What I think most people do is they see from a practical standpoint that having unrestricted access to nuclear weapons is extremely dangerous and work backwards to justify why it fits their ideological framework.

Yep, I cheerfully admit this is what I'm doing. At least I stated it as "I think it may be possible to resolve the issue" after mentioning problems with my proposal, instead of asserting "my ideological framework resolves this easily". Though I probably should have made the "how would an individual get access to nukes anyway, and if that were easy, then what would any legal system be able to do about that?" point first.

[confidantlake]

This sounds sensible and I agree with it. When we circle back to

> Property rights and other natural rights cannot be infringed upon for any reason

I am not squaring the circle. If we don't allow someone to build a nuke with materials they purchased, we are infringing on their property rights. If we say you can build a nuke only for mining a mountain we are infringing on their property rights. Which in my mind is a good thing. Property rights are not absolute, we just are just arguing about where to set that line. But as long as we decide to not let individual's own nukes I am fine with pretending property rights are absolute.

[chordalkeyboard]

Nuclear weapons present a threat to other people and a threat of violating their property rights, and threats are illegal.

[aaron-santos]

By what measure do you put nuclear weapons on one side and other weapons on the other?

[chordalkeyboard]

The scope of the effects. Firearms can be pointed, explosives have a damage/kill radius. It is not permissible to arrange so that a person is brought within the range of effects of a weapon without their consent.

In the case of explosives, that means you need enough property to contain the effects. In the case of nuclear weapons, it basically requires an entire planet.