How do you stop being bullied? How to ensure compensation when your house burns down? What’s your prospect of being rescued from a multi-storey building should there be an earthquake?
Well, a bully will stop bullying you if he thinks you can fight back. In fact, he won’t actually start. So, if he knows that you are an expert in the martial arts, he won’t come near you. True, learning all that kicking and hand chopping can be very expensive both from the cost of the training and for the time and effort involved. But, you are safe.
When it comes to your house burning down, well that’s absolutely what you don’t want to happen. Ever. You don’t plan for an inevitable ‘when’ it burns down, but for an ‘if’ it burns down. ‘If’ your house burns down, it would be traumatic and so many memories will be lost. But without insurance, that’s it, you are homeless with nothing. That’s why you take out an insurance. You don’t want to ever cash in on it. You want it there as your very last resort.
And finally, imagine living in a large multi-storey building and there’s an earthquake. You are going to want to be rescued, aren’t you? You are going to want the fire and rescue services to have invested in some mega clever equipment that can reach up and get to you, rather than the fire and rescue services just shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘Oh well’. You’d not be happy that they’d not bothered to invest in your future. It’s something you expect the authorities to do. They are there to look after you as much as is possible.
And so we come now to the nuclear deterrent. Those who oppose it will rely on gruesome horror stories of hundreds of thousands of people, especially innocent children, being melted instantly to death, and others dying a very protracted painful death. For some obscure reason they are obsessed with nuclear bombs going off. They will weep and say “We must never use the nuclear weapons”. Stupidly they don’t seem to ‘get’ that we are using them every minute of every hour of every day. The weapons are used in the same way that the self defence martial arts we first spoke of are used.
As we know, the bully won’t pick on the person they know has the ability to kick their arse. So, the martial arts are never actually engaged against the bully. The fact that they are ‘there’ acts as a deterrent to the bully. In a sense, the martial arts are being ‘used’ every minute of every hour of every day, even though no kick or chop is needed. That’s the same as the nuclear deterrent.
It is true that it is a great possibility that as humanity evolves we are safer from direct action by states. It appears very unlikely that any neighbouring country would ever invade and annex the UK. And were they thinking of doing so, the fact that we held a nuclear deterrent as our insurance policy might make all the difference. Insurance policies, as we surmised earlier are really only there for the worst case scenario, the last resort. You never actually want to have to make a claim.
Ukraine had no such nuclear deterrent, and so Russia feared nothing when it marched in and annexed Crimea, did it?
And it is the duty of government to do what it can to protect us. We expect it. Just as we expect to be rescued in the large multi-storey building. At this stage in human evolution we need to have a deterrent that is, well, the ultimate deterrent. Maybe in a few hundred decades from now we will have evolved into a safety zone when all the fighting or threatening will have stopped and humanity will stop warring. When it does, that’ll be the time we don’t need to use a deterrent.
For now though, we do, don’t we.
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