<i>I disagree. The instinct for revenge serves a very important purpose in stabilizing society. If I know you will want revenge should I kill your brother, it makes me less likely to do so, and vice versa. Revenge is also the basis of the justice system, though obviously not its total extent. For example, if you kidnap someone, we do exactly what we condemn and forcibly hold you in a facility for a number of years or life. And yet the moral implications of that are different because of the differing situation.</i><p>Revenge is not supposed to be the basis of any modern justice system, we don&#x27;t lock people up to make them suffer, we do in order to change them, to make them not commit crimes again, to make them honor the rules of the society they live in. This necessarily involves an element of force, acting against the will of the criminal, but the motive is not revenge. We actually try to avoid revenge as much as we can, we condemn vigilantism because people act irrationally and are likely to overreact or even go after the wrong one. Revenge is not stabilizing, it is destabilizing.<p><i>Appearing weak doesn&#x27;t prevent a first strike by our opponents either. In fact, it increases likelihood of one. So if our options are appear strong or weak, and appearing weak has grave consequences, I will appear strong.</i><p>If you really believe this to be true, you have to conclude that it is irresponsible for any country not to try to obtain nuclear weapons. You would have to support North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons because that will reduce the likelihood of war. Nuclear disarmament would be a stupid idea. You are suggesting that humans are egoistic greedy assholes always wanting to just conquer the entire world, to grab all the resources and the only thing that prevents them from doing this are the expected costs and causalities of the conflicts. It is a bit like suggesting that wearing sexy cloths is a bad thing because it provokes getting raped. Being strong and able to fight an attacker is not the same thing as being able and willing to nuke innocent people. The right thing to do is building missile defense capabilities, that might actually save your people. And you of course don&#x27;t do that in order to gain first strike capabilities because you no longer have to fear retaliation strikes, you actually do it to have a strong defense against attackers. You don&#x27;t develop or get rid of you offensive weapons to show that you really do it for defense and not for improving your first strike capabilities.<p><i>The people are guilty of allowing a criminal regime to initiate nuclear warfare against another party. No individual or small clique (small enough to fit in a bunker) can launch a nuclear first strike without the cooperation of a large, representative sample of their nation. They are complicit. They launched a strike. They will suffer and die.</i><p>So if a dictator forcefully acquires the power in a country, the people are guilty? It is immoral if they just try to survive instead of resisting and risking getting killed? The people in North Korea really enjoy their liefs and support the regime? Which by the way certainly fits into a bunker. Is a mother guilty in case her child, despite her best effort, becomes a murderer? Should we kill the mother in revenge for unleashing her child onto the world? Just throw her into jail for a decade or two?