my friends are smart

Sometimes I'm really excited about who my friends are. This post by Yudai made me really proud to be friends with someone so intelligent and insightful. He wrote this after a recent visit to Hiroshima. Hopefully he's okay with me reposting it.

The justification of nuclear weapons as deterrent of war is flawed and outdated. First and foremost, the indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons makes them illegal, especially when targeted at cities and children (because international law provides that blood of children should not be spilled ie: children should not be used as tools of war). Second, with the amount of nuclear weapons in the world, Mutually Assured Destruction between two warring states would go beyond the two and definitely have the potential of destroying the whole human race (through nuclear winters, black rain, radiation etc.) So the term "Mutually Assured Destruction" is more accurately, "The Complete and Utter, Indiscriminate Destruction of Everyone and Everything on Planet Earth." Third, the proliferation of nuclear weapons does not actually reduce the risk of war, it only guarantees the maximum amount of destruction and suffering when one does occur. Look at the results of North Korea's A-bomb test in October...it almost caused a war. It definitely did not make the world a safer, more stable, more peaceful place.

The ice age, stone age, bronze age, industrial revolution, and not the modern age of computers and electronics and nuclear weapons. Modern? Hmmm...Aren't we just doing the same things that we've been doing for eons and eons, just with bigger, prettier weapons? Modernity should include justice and peace, diplomacy and communication; an era where war is as obsolete as one of these:

Because, after all, wouldn't PEACE be the ULTIMATE deterrent of war?

He's so right. Can you imagine how impossible it would be to see war as a solution to a problem if we truly knew peace?