As Pakistan and India thrust themselves deeper and deeper into the new nuclear arms race, we, as a generation, are forced to reevaluate our relationship with nuclear weapons.

Fifty years ago, nuclear weapons were viewed as a necessity and the only means of preventing an attack. During the Cold War the lines were clear as to who had weapons and why. Today, those lines are blurry. Many countries begin to produce weapons grade fuel and increase the possibility of weapons getting into the hands of militants and terrorists.

The sheer cost and power of nuclear weapons says a lot about human nature. It begs the question: Why are these creatures so fixated on their own destruction? We spend billions of dollars and thousands of man-hours on killing each other. According to the Brookings Institute, the Manhattan Project cost the United States government $20 billion. It may seem like just a bunch of zeros (10 of them), but tons of manhours, resources and science were used to devastate and kill millions in mere moments.

Now we live in a world in which we are forever weary of the potential of mankind’s annihilation. For years we lived under the icy grip of the Cold War; now it’s the grip of extremist fervor.

Nuclear weapons, genocide, suicide bombings and ethnic cleansing are all forms of mass annihilation, unique to our species. Chimps can fight wars, but we have the ability to take out everyone. According to the Brookings Institute, in 1998 the U.S. government spent almost $35.1 billion on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs.

It isn’t just the fact that we have this capacity that fascinates and scares me, but the fact that mankind spends too much time and energy thinking of complex ways to destroy his fellow man. Nuclear weapons are made to incur maximum damage. Maximum damage is felt by military personnel and civilians alike. This makes nuclear weapons the biggest threat to our existence, a threat so real and present that it far outstrips any other threat to our existence.

Writer and biologist Jared Diamond described humans as having “the power to threaten our own existence.” Diamond, an author of books like “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse” and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has dedicated his life to studying humans. He finds our penchant for mass annihilation and mass killing to be saddening, but characteristic.

Describing this phenomenon in one of my favorite books, “The Third Chimpanzee,” Diamond says: “It’s a common belief that species in a state of nature live in balance with each other and with their environment. Predators don’t exterminate prey, nor do herbivores overgraze their plants.”

Alas, we humans overuse our resources and then plan on destroying each other. We can’t live in balance with nature, let alone each other. Nuclear weapons are a reflection of humanity and our capacity for great genius and our capacity for great evil. If we destroyed all nuclear weapons and erased people’s capacity to make them, we would still devise a way to kill each other.

Nuclear deterrence theory states the reason for having nuclear weapons is that the potential for mutually assured destruction stops people from actually using nuclear weapons. Nukes are a symbol of annihilation; they symbolize the death of rationality and the reality of man’s propensity for self destruction. We are probably always going to be slaves to these tools of death because everyone thinks they are safe if they have them and unsafe without them.

The Obama government might be making strides, but they too are slaves to the nuclear weapon and what it represents. The Cold War was defined by the threat of Soviet-American holocaust. Today, the lines are more blurry and more countries have the capacity to wipe out one another. If the biggest and most powerful nations don’t push and encourage an end to nuclear dependency, the world will be like a mine field with booby traps waiting to explode.

In the words the title character from Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” “Deterrence is the art of producing, in the mind of the enemy, the fear to attack!”

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