Recently an article was written complaining that Putin was developing an Army of soldiers equipped with mind controlled robotic exoskeletons. It really sounded more ominous than it was, since it was not what I call a leap ahead of everyone else in technology, since we are developing the same thing. This begs the question, are weapons getting so deadly it will become far too dangerous at some point to deploy them. There is an example of what I am talking about and at this point it has nothing to do with nuclear weapons. The Russians have been working on antimissile missiles for years and have gotten to the point where their latest generation is so potent they are not exporting it, but they are exporting older generations of the missile. Are the Russians worried the newer generation might be used against them someday? This is something that every arms exporting nation will have to worry about in the future. Could some of the weapons we are developing be so deadly we wouldn’t even want them to get into the hands of our allies? Another problem is they may be copied if exported. Russia has had this problem with China for years.

We are at a point in our history where we don’t even know what type of weapons are being developed in our own country. Yes secrecy is an important part of weapons development, but secrecy has gone far afield with some of the things we are doing. Is a war among advanced countries even an option anymore? Many of the advanced countries have the power to annihilate any other country. It may be true the United States is the most heavily armed country in the world, but that still may not protect it from nuclear attacks, it certainly didn’t protect it on 9/11. If you remember 9/11 as I do, we weren’t even able to stop a commercial airliner so how do we expect to stop missiles traveling at many thousands of miles per hour from hitting us? We have been led to believe we have some great missile defenses, but anyone who has watched the tests knows many of these missiles which are said to have been perfected only shot down other missiles in computer simulations, because when real missile targets were used they would miss too many times.

Throughout the ages there were always people who wanted to stop wars. There is a big difference however between wars where people are shooting arrows at each other and wars which could end all life on earth. We have been developing conventional weapons which are getting far more powerful and some are as powerful as small strategic nuclear weapons. The GBU-43B Massive Ordinance Air Blast is in service with the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force. It is a conventional bomb and at one time it was said to be the most powerful nonnuclear weapon ever designed. Recently the Russians say they have tested a similar type of bomb which is four times as powerful. I guess a good question would be how powerful does a bomb need to be to perform its task? Perhaps we could have made this bomb more powerful, but didn’t see the need. The Russians tend to try and out do us. They did the same thing when it came to nuclear ordinance by building the Tsar Bomb. This bomb was fourteen hundred times more powerful than the atomic bomb we dropped on Hiroshima and only one was ever built. It was impractical because it weighed 27 tons and was hard to deliver, but it gave the Russians, or should I say the Soviets at the time the honor of building the biggest nuclear weapon ever made, because this bomb was capable of delivering 100 Megatons, but the Soviets had taken away about half the power, because they said it would create too much fallout. Even they were scared of this monster.

One has to wonder if someday down the line somebody will build a weapon that will not only destroy an enemy, but will destroy them as well. One class of weapons which we really don’t know much about is probably circling over our heads right now and that is space-based weapons. You know they have to be up there by now and we are probably not the only ones that possess them. There may not be nuclear ones overhead, because the United States and Russia signed a treaty banning nuclear weapons from space, however there are some very powerful conventional weapons which could be there. Weapon specialists have speculated some space weapons may be there to destroy satellites while others may be there to destroy targets on earth. It is a known fact some kinetic weapons can produce as much power as a nuclear weapon. One has only to look at the damage caused when a meteor hits the earth. They are nonnuclear, but packed the wallop of nuclear weapons in many cases. There has long been talk about the United States having kinetic weapons aimed at certain targets and these weapons are made from metal and are as long as a telephone pole and have fins to direct them to a target. While we don’t know if they really exist in space there is a very good chance they do. One of the reasons we believe these weapons exist is in the mid-2000s a project was begun known as the US Prompt Global Strike program. The idea was to allow the United States to strike any target on the globe instantaneously without using nuclear weapons.

I can’t help but wonder if the rate of weapons development will soon allow us to create nuclear explosions from ordinary material. It doesn’t seem possible right now, but who knows what scientists will discover in the future. Every atom on earth contains energy, no matter what type of atom it is. If scientists discover they can tap into this energy from anything, the world may be even worse off than it is now, due to the fact countries which cannot afford to have nuclear weapons may find a cheaper equivalent.

Some people are afraid building devices using nanotechnology is far too dangerous to allow. Their reasoning is weapons made this way will be just as dangerous as and even more dangerous than nuclear weapons. One scenario has a country building self-replicating nanobots which quickly turned the environment into replicas of themselves, destroying all life on earth. This is only one scenario however let us picture another one where dust sized weapons are created which are dropped on entire populations and are composed of tiny drilling robots which will enter human air passages and kill them.

I could say the most ideal thing which could happen right now is the end of weapons development, but then it might lead other countries such as North Korea to try and surpass us and even destroy us. If there was only some way we could get all the world countries to agree on anything it would be a start.