> Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).

This is a reasonable enough metaphor but we don't have to pretend to be idiots either and act like every single technology is totally neutral in its design. Knives are a good example, actually. Kitchen knives are totally adequate for killing people (I assume, I'm no expert) but they clearly have a design meant for something else. A nuclear weapon, to choose a stupidly obvious example, has no capability other than mass death. It seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether we want these two objects to be under the same regulatory regime.

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homebrewer 4 days ago | parent [-]

> has no capability other than mass death

A 30-kiloton nuclear explosion was used by the USSR to extinguish a large natural gas fire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field

They would be used for constructive purposes far more if not for mutual distrust between nuclear powers, and the public hysteria around anything associated with the word "nuclear":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion

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nathan_compton 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is another version of "we don't need to pretend to be stupid."

Yes, one could cook up all sorts of uses for the things called nuclear weapons, which we designed by people to kill other people. But we don't have to pretend to be stupid and assume nuclear weapons don't, I don't know, exist in a context of warfare which shapes their design and warrants actual thought about their use and regulation?

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wat10000 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And the massive amounts of harmful fallout, don’t forget that.

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account42 3 days ago | parent [-]

There are also harmful downsides to the alternative methods used now.

	▲	wat10000 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Alternative methods for doing what? Putting out gas well fires?