Would Nuclear Disarmament Put the World at Risk?

Over the last few months, I've heard news reports of people getting killed in mass shootings. It seems like a new one pops up every month or so. When it comes to guns, I believe that more guns make the world a safer place. After all, if everyone was armed and carrying, there would be less situations where one man could take out 20 people in a movie theater, school, or shopping mall. If everyone is armed and everyone knows everyone is armed, a deranged maniac would be shot to death if he tried something stupid. However, this is a just a theory. It is also likely that in the chaos and confusion, every armed man would think every other armed man was the deranged maniac and then there would be 200 dead men instead of 20.

I will admit that I have a strong bias to the first position. If everyone knows everyone is armed, then there is a deterrence to actually using a weapon. Commonly, these mass shootings have been happening in gun free zones. Deranged maniacs just want to shoot as many people as possible without getting shot at in the process. This is why police stations and military bases are usually not targeted by deranged maniacs.

I then started to wonder about a larger scale. Nuclear weapons are pretty much just really big guns. Today, there are about 17,000 nuclear weapons around the world in different countries. Throughout all of history, the atomic bomb was only used twice. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima wiped out 90,000 to 150,000 people while the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki wiped out 40,000 to 80,000 people. The amount of nuclear weapons in the world could easily wipe out 700 million people on the low end.

Over the last several years, nations have been working towards disarming the nuclear weapons however it seems like total disarmament would be impossible. As countries continue to disarm their weapons, the countries that still have their weapons would be in more of a position to threaten other countries. The theory of nuclear deterrence falls to pieces.

By making the attempt to get rid of nuclear weapons, we might be increasing the risk of a deranged maniac actually using one. And even if total disarmament happened, the knowledge of how to develop the weapons still exists. Pandora's box was opened when that knowledge was discovered.