[ExI] Gigideath was aboriginal humans

[Lee Corbin]

Stefano writes

> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Keith Henson wrote:
> 
> >  It's not a matter of discarding it, it's the second best power source
> >  besides power sats.
>  > 
>  > But it's incredibly dangerous.  Not just because of such things as
>  > there being no way to get rid of he waste, come cell repair machines
>  > who will care?  The problem is any neutron source can be diverted into
>  > making extremely high grade plutonium.  With much of that floating
>  > around homemade city busting nukes become something a well funded
>  > street gang can make.
> 
> I am afraid that unless we are ready to go for solutions making 1984 and
> Brave New World blush, we are eventually going to have to live with it
> anyway. It is not as if we can forever prevent people - let alone
> governments - from playing with neutrons. 

Yes.

> In any event, it has never been too clear to me why the president of the
> US of A should be trusted more not to get too nervous with the finger
> on the trigger than any other entity...

Who's trusting him or her?  And if some people do trust him (her), what
difference does it make?  They're hardly going to do anything about it.

On the other hand, in case you're interested in a more logical distribution
of nuclear warfare potential, I have several ideas that might interest you
and other readers.

Instead of the present arrangement we could

(A) choose a nation at random to possess all of America's nuclear-related
      weapons. I suppose that there is just as good a chance of (most 
      likely) some African nation being as or more responsible than the
      president of the U.S.
(B) the United States could donate all of its nuclear arsenal to the U.N.,
      although as in (A) most likely an African leader would end up in
      control of it. But at least it would be fair.
(C) go back to the cold-war (which turned out well, by the way) using
      the MAD principle.  So tomorrow the U.S. could just give away
      around half of its nuclear arsenal to, say, Russia or China. 

Or maybe you have some ideas of how an even better distribution
of nuclear armaments could be devised that would be entirely
superior to the present arrangement.

But, of course, getting the leaders of the U.S. and of the other nuclear
powers to go along with you, even if you were to adopt one of the
very reasonable (A), (B), or (C) that I outlined.

Lee