There currently sit on Earth’s launchpads enough nuclear weapons to dedicate one each to destroying every city with over 150,000 inhabitants — with the delivery-speed of reaching their targets in less than one half hour.
Behind each of these, now ready to be launched (as you are reading this) wait more to be readied and reloaded: quite literally enough to destroy every city on Earth (by any meaningful measure).
Every single day the nations of Each spend money to maintain this vast system — the cost for which amounts to double the cost it would take to feed every single hungry child on Earth fully in the same time frame.
With the money that has been spent solely on the nuclear problem, it is no exaggeration to say that a utopia could have been instead paid for, one in which every human being — even amongst our expanding population — could presently be taken care of. Instead, everyday these resources are funnelled towards equipping for our total destruction.
Many would blame the politicians, but I do not fully. This is an abject failure of humanity in multifacets, and here this falls predominantly to another group. To a certain extent, upon successful invention their hands have been bound:
Even if a peace and disarmament treaty were signed to completely ban all nuclear weapons, every single one would never be gotten rid of. Any reasonable country would keep a few in secret, for fear that the others were doing the same.
Everyday terrorist and insurrectionist groups are pressing weak points in this vast dam — which sometime is nearly sure to break — to obtain information on how to build their own nuclear weapons.
Ergo, now that they have been created, demonstrated, evidenced and proven, Pandora’s box is open. There is no going back. And who opened the box?
The faulty ethics of a handful of scientists, who were much more concerned with what they could do than what they should, and even at best were — just following orders. Today many of them are hailed as brilliant fathers of modern physics and quantum mechanics. Departments and awards are named after them. The potential argument that they are mass murderers is relegated to footnotes, and often even celebrated for the intelligence solving such a great technical problem clearly shows.
What of the technical problem of how to take care of other human beings?
It did not have to be this way. They could have, seeing the potential, refused to develop the idea to its prototypical working conclusion, no matter the pressure or costs — since the future costs would have been inevitably greater.
In fact, this is the exact case with the Nazi bomb project, which was further ahead than that of any other country, and yet now believed by most historians to have been continuously and purposely sabotaged by the scientists involved — at risk to their own life — for exactly these reasons. They were not going to be the ones to open the box. And each scientist that could have also could have made this choice.
It is not a trade off, or an error. It is a brutal, crippling, personal and complete failure of character of the people who developed the bomb first that has forever hung a brutal shadow on humanity. In their onward affect and influence on the rest of humans and the future, they are probably the worst group of humans to have ever existed.