James:
re:10-1000 more groups possessing nukes
No. Think one or two orders of magnitude more. Every ethnic group in every country. Every disgruntled group of outcasts, with no stake in the status quo. Every new religious sect. Even several years into this Revolution, people are having a hard time grasping just how frictionless information transfer will become. Agriculture was invented about 10,000 B.C. It took several millenia for that technology to spread accross the planet. Lots of friction, lots of inertia. By contrast, a few years ago, I didn't know what email was. Today, everyone I know uses email. Everyone. No friction, no inertia. Every year, there is something that goes from science fiction to being a universal commodity.
Stalin and Mao didn't use nukes, even though they had them for decades. The present government of Pakistan (violent, authoritarian, Islamic fanatics) hasn't used their nukes against India. Since the penalty for not learning pacifism is death, they learned.
The present administration has had no success in stopping nuclear proliferation, and no success in taking citizen's guns away. Sure, they'd like to have a monopoly on the tools of violence. This is a rear-guard action, doomed. |
