Just so we're clear though, the disarmament that we should aim for is to change physics so that nuclear weapons don't work at all, right? Because that's an option, we could change how the patent system works.
Land mines are a much better metaphor for patents than nuclear weapons are. Say what you will about the evils of nuclear warfare, but we haven't seen any world wars lately, and nuclear weapons are to thank for that state of affairs.
Patents (and land mines) are a lot less useful to society.
> Say what you will about the evils of nuclear warfare, but we haven't seen any world wars lately, and nuclear weapons are to thank for that state of affairs.
It seems disingenuous to assume that the way it happened is the only way it could have happened. MAD exchanged the near-certainty of world war for a coin-flip between mostly-peace and total annihilation. We can certainly be happy that we lucked out on the coin-flip, but I don't think it follows that MAD was a policy of pure wisdom and sanity.
No question about that -- MAD was a reckless gamble that nothing would accidentally trigger the endgame. Hardly a sensible strategy. Still, it's hard to argue with the results so far.
The real concern is the ascendance of leaders who don't care if they die, or whose religion assures them that they'll come out on the winning side of Armageddon. But the analogies with patent law run out of steam well before reaching that point.
I don't think it's fair to say that nuclear weapons are why we don't have world wars anymore. I believe it has a lot more to do with globalization and the fact that most countries now recognize that it's a lot more profitable to trade with other countries than to go to war with them.
I used to think that was the case, too, and then someone pointed out how incredibly well-connected and economically interdependent the world was in the years leading up to WWI.
Global trade back then was like our modern dot-com boom, but with real money and merchandise. People were sure it would change everything. Turned out not so much. As long as the lives of the old men who ran the world weren't personally at risk, they had no reason not to go to war with each other. Nukes, not trade, were what finally changed that calculation.
You may want to change your mind again, given that there is a trivial fallacy in "We haven't had a world war yet, so clearly nuclear weapons prevent one from happening."
It is, in fact, the poster child for survivorship bias!
We have also come extremely close to having nuclear war, on multiple occasions.
The 'long' 19th century that ended in WWI was rather globalized, and we only surpassed them a few decades ago. But we did surpass them.
We have less armed conflicts and their victims now than during the MAD years of the cold war---perhaps that's a better piece of evidence that something other than nuclear weapons is helping us keep the peace?
They're critiquing the analogy to nuclear weapons. Patent-weapons can be voided by altering the underlying legal framework, but nuclear-weapons can't be voided by changing the underlying rules of physics.
