ForumGarden

I’ve never been comfortable playing at philosopher or intellectual wannabee. However, as I have posed the kind of question that may suggest otherwise, I should elaborate.

I spent most of my schooldays in a boy’s only boarding school. At any given time, before, during or after school, as soon as two lads had an issue with each other, no matter how trivial, the older boys would goad them in a bout of fisticuffs.

Then when I attended university the fights were usually at a pub when the protagonists were rather pissed, but still the idea was to inflict pain & damage on your opponent.

And so to matters of more importance.

I think the dissolution of the Soviet Union began around the beginning of 1990 & within a year the republics began declaring their independence & eventually became sovereign nation-states.

Twenty one or so years later, with the Cold War consigned the to scrap heap of history, the USA & Russia still have enough weapons to kill every form of life on earth several times over … always supposing that dying more than once was possible.

According to Wikipedia, Russia has the biggest stockpile of WMDs on the planet. They have in fact declared that they have an arsenal of about 40,000 tons of chemical weapons as at 1997, of which half have now been destroyed. According to the FOAS (Federation of American Scientists), Russia has 4,650 active nuclear warheads & the U.S. 2468. These are of course estimates because neither side is going to come completely clean. I mean, why not claim to have 4500 warheads instead of 4,650? I am always so sceptical of exact figures like this.

Around 2007 Russia was estimated to have 3,281 (again so precise a number) of active strategic nuclear warheads plus an unknown number of tactical nuclear weapons.

These include 489 land based missiles carrying about 1,788 warheads.

12 Submarines carrying 609 warheads.

79 Bombers carrying 884 cruise missiles



Now if Russia possesses the above, it’s my bet that the USA probably has the same if not more at their disposal, not to mention the U.K, France, Germany, China and sundry other states.

So who are we going to kill with all this stuff?

So I ask again … why do earthlings so love to kill?

Why Do Earthlings Kill Each Other So Easily?

Why Do Earthlings Kill Each Other So Easily?

Because we don't have exoskeletons.

Thank you! I'll be here all week. Tip your waitress!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I just watched a bio on Ronald Reagan where they showed him and Gorbachev agreeing to eliminate all of their medium-range missiles. I'd love to see that again, but I don't think we know who has the nukes over there now. We could probably get rid of a fair portion of our oldest stuff and still be able to easily sanitize the earth. The gesture might prompt someone else to do the same.

I don't know the answer, but we could always settle it behind the bike sheds later.

Sometimes I think it is a existence of the threat of being able to use these weapons of mass destruction....the viable threat is power.

If one country is able to annihilate another country and the situation excalates.....who will be left to rule?

It comes down to power. Power over the environment around you. Way back in the far flung past we survived by dominating and taking advantage of the environment around us, we made it provide for us. Sometimes other groups wanted to come into our territory and use what such and such had, this lead to conflict. They threw spears and rocks at one another or bit and beat one another, whatever. In reality it is part of nature.

While outwardly we have changed and we have advanced our natures have not. We still carry the animal with us. There's still a monkey on our back, flogging us along the road of life. Those nukes in their silos and missile bays of the subs are simply bigger and better spears kept way back in the cave.

Why do we keep them? Because we aren't going to change anytime soon. I don't know what would ever change us. Perhaps something along the lines of aliens coming to turn us into their version Gucci shoes and cheeseburgers. Of course as soon as we defeat them (if) we would promptly go back to killing one another most likely.

I don’t really know, but I how two comments.

1. I don’t think that we kill each other that easily, it may seem so and we are certainly capable of horrendous atrocities, but the population of humans continues to grow and grow and it is mostly due to cooperation and community.

2. One of the reasons why I think that we are capable of such killing as we can do is that humans by nature have no natural enemies other than disease, natural catastrophes and the each other. I think that part of it is just in our natural make up as humans. We have always done it, we can now only do it on much larger scales.