A World We Never Made

Tonight I watched a documentary about nuclear weapons with my ten-year-old in an attempt to instill some awareness, however faint, of these monstrous devices in his mind. I grew up in the waning days of the Cold War and the early post-Soviet era and thus lack nothing for awareness of the power and menace of these weapons, but he was born nine years after the Soviet Union collapsed and wasn't, before this evening, entirely clear on what nuclear weapons were. He took the film mostly as I thought he would- as a series of incredible explosions demonstrating awesome power. I didn't intend to frighten him anyway, and the film we watched- Trinity and Beyond- is meant to be viewed pretty much as he took it. I just wanted to plant the seed of awareness in his head, in the hope that when he gets older and understands more about the world, he'll understand what a terrifying game we play whenever we start a war in this nuclear age.

While watching it I thought of what may become an ongoing feature for me here, similar to the Americanization Updates I used to provide on Netcynic about the ongoing calamity in Iraq. (Ann Coulter once memorably crowed about how Iraq was being 'Americanized' circa 2004 and I wanted to keep my readers up to date on that process.) It'll be a list of things the free market never would have produced, and a little discussion of why not and why they're undesirable.

Today's selection from the World We Never Made* pile is nuclear weapons. These little morsels of Armageddon are entirely the product of the state and the state's main activity, war. It's difficult to see why, in a free market, any private firm would have spent the billions needed to develop something so purely destructive, and so it's difficult to imagine anarchist nukes, or even nukes in my current version of Utopia, a worldwide Nozickian minarchy. Of course it's not impossible that nukes could have been produced by the market; it is just very difficult to see the incentives. Even if some rogue businessman developed a devilish urge to RULE THE WORLD!!!, he'd be better off spending his billions equipping an army than developing one experimental weapon, the first use of which would instantly mark him for death. Only the state is insensitive enough to incentives and opportunity cost to expend the vast amount of resources needed to build doomsday devices. Thanks, federales!

*The phrase is adapted from this beautiful, heartbreaking song from Dr. John:

If my little political movement of one has an anthem, it's that song.

I'm a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made