MORE on impending nuclear WAR

Just had a flick through the Independent who are banging on about Korea's nuclear test the other day.

There is a map which shows which countries have Nukes and which don't and the quantities they have. Here is my unofficial chart of the top Nuke owners:

1) Russia - 8,232 nuclear weapons
2) USA - 7,068 nuclear weapons
3) China - 402 nuclear weapons
4) France - 348 nuclear weapons
5) Isreal - 200 nuclear weapons (estimated)
6) UK - 185 nuclear weapons
7) India/Pakistan (tied place) - 30-50 nuclear weapons

Lovely stuff! The figures above are totals, long and short range added together. Incidentally, UK and France have no long range weapons.

Now, call me a fool but my understanding is that the power of nuclear weapons these days are hundreds if not thousands of times more powerful than those that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the gung-ho Yankies in WWII. Lets not mock them for the inferior quality of their weapons at that stage...remember kids - they dropped them on Japan (twice!!!) in order to test them more than to end the war.

So, back to my point, given the enormous power of the weapons and given the fact relitively few countries (to our knowledge) possess them, why on Gods not so green earth does a country need over 8000 of the bastards? What the hell are they going to launch them at? Surely that many could wipe out every major city in the world, what will be left to nuke after that? Perhaps they want some spares in case the operating system in some of the missiles crash and are rendered inoperable?

I was relatively comforted to know that we didn't have very many, still too many, but we are even lower than France. I reckon we should get rid of 184 of them. That way, we still have one we can launch at whatever country fires one off at us. We can then die smugly in the knowledge we have given as good as we got.