Pay no attention to the timber in my eye

Does it strike anyone else as hypocritical that so many people in the US argue that we have to go to any means necessary to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons when we're the only country on the planet to ever actually use nuclear weapons? I mean, in the interest of full disclosure, I still think that America did the right thing, faced with an insanely militaristic Japan and possessing a very limited nuclear arsenal, if they were ever going to be used, that was the time to use them. The thing that gets lost in all this talk about how Iran shouldn't have nuclear weapons is the question of why any of the rest of us should have them.

In a perfect world, Superman would exist and he could fly around the world with his x-ray vision and take all the nukes in the world and throw them into the sun (ok, maybe not a perfect plan since I have no idea what this would do to the sun). But, crappy movie plots aside, the elimination of nuclear weapons should be a serious topic of discussion for the whole world. With Russia rising from the ashes of the end of communism and China chugging towards a spot at the hegemon's table we seriously risk going back to the days when the end of the world could be any day. The idea, to paraphrase JFK, that a few men hold in their mortal hands the power to end all life on this planet is scary. I barely trust Obama with this power, let alone people I didn't vote for and don't know. I don't even trust our allies with nukes. Its just a bad idea overall. The problem is, can we ever close pandora's box?

Let's say that after years of negotiations and political arm wrestling the world finally rids itself of nuclear weapons (how they would get rid of them, I don't know, I say launch them into space and hope for the best). What stops some country from deciding that if they can create nuclear weapons before its enemies realize what they're doing that they can conquer the world? Then a nuclear arms race begins anew or most of the countries in the world are just charred craters leaving billions dead and most of the world uninhabitable. That's a bright sounding future. Is our safest option really to keep all our nukes around for mutually assured destruction? Doesn't that plan rely on everyone involved being rational? Doesn't the fact that George W. Bush was once President of the USA prove that that is not always the case? This whole issue makes me depressed. When do we get to have Gene Roddenberry's awesome rational future people with their space ships?