…Because countries are less willing to fight wars due to the possibility of escalating into a nuclear war.
This is a common thing I see repeated throughout the internet. I wonder what’s Lemmy’s opinion on this.
I don’t. Personally I think it has led to more proxy wars, as the stability-instability paradox suggests. I think the amount of actual aggression went down after WWII, but has since recovered and surpassed pre-WWII levels. But now everyone is afraid of declaring war on nuclear powers, so they’ll let the nuclear country get away with genocide or other atrocities instead. Look at Israel and Russia right now for easy examples. Seems like the winning strategy now is to convince your adversaries that you’re crazy enough to launch your nukes and then you can do whatever you want without other countries taking a strong enough stance to stop you. That’s not peace, that’s nuclear intimidation. I don’t even see a peaceful way out of it.
Nuclear weapons are the single biggest mistake humanity has ever made next to the Industrial revolution.
We still fight horribly bloody wars even with the threat of nuclear annihilation. It is obvious that nuclear weapons do nothing but make everything worse, and the materials used to create them would be better used for energy generation.
If we were smart we would decommission every weapon on the planet and ensure no group or person can make another one, and put the materials to a better use.