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Great nuance! The question isn't just Nuclear: Yes? or No? but for what reason: Multipolar cooperation for development? Or Keeping Up With The Jones'es for competition and maintaining hegemony? This needs to be addressed. Great work!

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Not sure I agree about “maintaining western hegemony” as the reason- it’s a bit too far of a jump at the end of the essay. I would say that with the inklings of multipolarity starting to show, the West now has competition for the first time since the “End of History.”

Competition actually requires people to bring their best to survive, and simple math tells us that nuclear is the best by far. The challenge will be to take the energy infrastructure that gets built for the AI censorship panopticon complex and wrest it away to do productive things like making steel and concrete and cars.

So let them come back to nuclear. We should welcome them and build the high energy future we want together. Hopefully we can build a “synthesis”world with free speech and other western ideals while ditching the foreign adventurism and other bad stuff!

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