Not sure how this just popped into my head, but what if the reason we didn’t want countries like Iran and North Korea pursuing nuclear weapons went beyond the obvious destruction those devices could cause. What if the path that nuclear research went down revealed even more destructive powers only witnessed in secret laboratories. After decades of nuclear and associated research, is it not possible they’ve stumbled upon greater threats?
UPDATE 2015-03-14: I want to avoid political issues as much as possible, but one interesting thing this post suggests is that the obvious often masks something more sinister at play. Issues drawn to the front like nuclear proliferation might only be a distraction or the tip of the iceberg. There are probably good questions you can ask that branch away from talking about nuclear weapons and reveal related issues that are more prevalent to what’s actually going on.
UPDATE 2018-09-09: This is about parent topics and child subtopics. We spend our time focused on big picture items like “nuclear proliferation” with a few subtopic nodes to convince others of our “advanced understanding”, but if you could see the whole tree, what percentage of related knowledge do you really have? I would wager it’s not a big number. How can we feel so confident about our knowledge when we know so little?