> Only one country has used nukes in a wartime
>environment. No prizes for guessing who.

And because only one country has used them, that means no country ever will again? I think that's dangerously naive. You can bet any amount of money you want that if any one of Japan, Germany, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or France had had nuclear weapons or had developed them at any time during WWII, they would have used them without a second thought. Hitler would have liked nothing more than to put a nuke on a V-2 and destroy London with it, and Churchill would have jumped at the chance to drop a few nukes on Berlin. The fact that the US developed them first and dropped them on Japan is simply how history happened to play out. If someone else had developed the bomb first, they would have used it first.


> These tests are meant to find a better version
>of the Trident Intercontinental Ballistic
>Missile, a weapon of mass destruction - what do
>they need to know? How big a bang it makes? How
>many people it will kill?

Uh. Yes, and yes. What other reasons would there be to test nuclear weapons? And what makes you think this isn't a good reason to test them?
If you think your bomb is going to take out a major industrial center and all it manages to do is make a big noise, that's hardly useful, is it?

>
> The point I was trying to make is that its a
>very poor strategy to wax lyrical about making
>the world a better place whilst simeltaneously
>agreeing to make a stretch of wasteland glow in
>the dark. Unless of course he's looking for a
>political distraction.

I think keeping our nuclear arsenals up to snuff makes this country a safer place to live, ultimately. And if that's not the duty of my government I don't know what is.

-- Dave