Nuclear weapons are seen as a deterrent to war from one perspective and as a possible threat to humanity and civilization as we know it from another perspective. There's also the use of nuclear plants for energy as a result of development of nuclear weapons.
The image below shows the number of nuclear warheads held by different countries worldwide in 2022. Russia and United States having an astounding 5000 plus warheads all developed directly or indirectly because of their cold war era rivalry. The third highest stockpile belongs to china at a surprisingly low number of 350 compared to the two cold war superpowers.
Image courtesy - Federation of American Scientists
Nuclear plants running on nuclear fission must be eliminated as they can be hazardous. If ever, nuclear fusion is successfully achieved, nuclear fusion plants are always a safer option.
But as we witness the Russia-Ukraine war and Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons openly and freely, we have to question whether nuclear weapons are a deterrent to war at all. It is actually being used as a form of blackmail.
We can't know for sure how the world would be without nuclear weapons but possibly, world war 2 might not have ended the way it did and might have been prolonged.
The cold war may not have occurred or may not have been so competitive between the two superpowers to the extent that they feared each other's ability to develop nuclear delivery systems (to effectively deliver nuclear weapons on to the target without detection), hence developing other milestone technology as a consequence.
In 1992, Ukraine signed the Lisbon Protocol and it joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state in 1994.
So, having no nuclear weapons made it an easy target for Russia to step in as they wanted. So, having no nuclear weapons might have allowed the superpowers to just take what they wanted from less powerful nations.
So, if there were no nuclear weapons, less powerful nations would have had to find the fastest way to economic outperformance to beef up their national security in other ways. Superpowers wouldn't have allowed this to happen as freely through trade agreements, choking the growth aspects of others countries to maintain status quo, meaning economic growth might have been slower if that panned out.
Absence of nuclear weapons might have had a positive impact with regards to making sure there is no end of the world doom anxiety but at the same time, presence of it may have had an unintended chain of positive impacts technologically and economically as well (superpowers now might have focused on economic growth rather than maintaining fear based status quo as mentioned before keeping in mind nuclear weapons as an assumed deterrent).
You can find a detailed take on the atomic bomb and it's modern day impact here.
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