Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

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This is completely wrong. Literally almost the opposite is true.

There are lots and lots of countries who use nuclear civilian energy and don't have nuclear weapons.

While at the same time there are lots of countries who have nuclear weapons but no civilian nuclear power.

In fact, it would be more accurate to say that countries who have civilian nuclear power are less likely to have nuclear weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...

The NPT allows countries to have civilian nuclear power but not nuclear weapons, and many do. My country, Switzerland being an example. Japan is a large country where this applies as well.

The connection between civilian nuclear power and nuclear weapons is almost non existent. Countries that want nuclear weapons, just get them directly, they don't develop civilian nuclear power first.

So please stop spreading this harmful misinformation.

Please compare the list of countries with plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country with the list of countries with nukes: https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/worldwide. Note that most of the exceptions in Eastern Europe and Asia were formerly part of the Soviet Union or Warshaw Pact. Japan is indeed a notable exception as the country also has enrichment capabilities etc. Though note that they, too, seem to phase out the usage, though. Switzerland is planning it's phase out too, AFAIK.

Of course many of the original countries have both. However you are ignoring many exception in both directions, there are a number of countries with nuclear weapons but not nuclear power, and the other way around also.

So 9 countries have nuclear weapons. Of those, 2 don't use civilian nuclear power, that's 22%.

You have 32 countries with civilian nuclear power, that means 25 with no nuclear weapons. These 25 are literally distributed over all 5 continents. That is 80%.

And notably non of the 9 with nuclear weapons have primarily used civilian nuclear power to bootstrap the bomb.

So the data you provided is literally proving my point.

> Though note that they, too, seem to phase out the usage, though. Switzerland is planning it's phase out too, AFAIK.

That really has nothing to do with what we are talking about. But it was one of the worst votes in Swiss history. The campaign was totally based on absolutely absurd argument and driven by pure demagoguery. And we are not actively shutting down, we have just decided not to build anything new.

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