Nuclear weapons should not be abolished if you could abolish them.

Nuclear Weapons should be abolished, banned, and eradicated due to their dangerous nature and horrible lasting effects. My primary contentions are: Nuclear weapons cannot discriminate. In modern war culture we strive to separate cilivians, on either side of a conflict, from the actual soldiers. If 20 enemy soldiers are killed in a strike it is a victory, if 20 civilians in the enemy country are killed it was a terrible mistake. Due to the massive blast radius and lingering radiation, there is no effective way to use a nuclear weapon for its designed purpose without presenting a noticable and unacceptable level of danger to unarmed civilians. Nuclear weapons create a demand for more nuclear weapons. If you have something of value, generally you want to have more of that something. Even if they are not in use, nuclear weapons are of tremendous value. If we begin using them, even if for non-leathal purposes, we'll effectively make it more and more acceptable to use them, and we'll create a demand for more and more weapons. Regardless of how non-lethal the deployment is intended to be, we'll still begin to create unanticipated environmental effects by introducing large quantities of radioactive material and instances of sudden and massive temperature and pressure change. Fission is not something that happens naturally anywhere on Earth, at least not in any noticable quantities. Nuclear weapons are an empty threat. If you intend to use a nuclear weapon for its intended purpose, then the threat is an empty one. It is widely held that a nuclear exchange will not leave winners. Any participants will be devastated, and chastized, and if the exchange is large enough it will damage the entire planet, including every innocent bystander in every country. The person that launches the first nuclear weapon will have committed the ultimate warcrime. Something that no reasonable, or even semi-unreasonable individual would never do. Now to comment on my opponent's points: In response to the use of nuclear weapons to generate EMPs. My intial point, of nuclear weapons inability to discriminate has sway here. A non-nuclear EMP device has a much smaller effective radius, which means more will be needed, yes, but more control over the effected area in order to keep the negative effects from innocent bystanders. A Nuclear EMP would black out a large area, almost certainly affecting many who are not the intended target, which presents an unacceptable risk. Just as well, the radiation still is created and still has to go somewhere. Usually it gets swept into the belts which are formed from the Earth's magnetic field (if I remember my physics right). But as only a few nuclear weapons have ever been detonated in the upper atmosphere, we have no real data to say what will or will not happen if we start adding more and more radiation to those belts. In response to nulcear weapons used as an airburst. Minimal radiation is still probably too much. It leaves environmental damage as well as potential damage to innocent future bystanders if the area isn't quarantined properly. In response to nuclear weapons used to take out missile strikes. Even if it is the most efficient method, it is incredibly dangerous. Producing radiation is a danergous thing. In response to nuclear weapons used to take out asteroids. It is generally widely regarded that blowing up an asteroid is the worst possible response. The momentum of a medium to larger asteroid is so great that a nuclear blast might split it, but each individual piece will still continue towards Earth and then instead of one big asteroid, we have hundreds of medium sized asteroids. Slow calculated nudges, or the use of gravity tractors or implanted propulsion systems are all much safer and more effective. In the end I argue that you should only use a knife as a knife, not as a screw driver. It can be done, but it isn't very safe, or efficient. These uses for nuclear weapons are all uses apart from the intended use implied by the design of the bomb. If you want to cause those listed effects, it would be better to spend time in designing a non-nuclear solution, than to increase the potential use of nuclear weapons.