By BRYANT VAN ROSSEM

The Mirror reporter

The world is always arguing about something: population, world hunger, global warming and much more. But one…is nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are all around the world but only a few countries are known to have these weapons, The United States of America, Russia, England, China, and North Korea are the big ones with a few smaller countries, too.

Some people think nuclear weapons are not needed and countries should all be disarmed while others believe they help keep peace and are like a great wall of defense for a country.

In my opinion, the world needs nuclear weapons. They may be very dangerous in the wrong hands but they have been around for many years and we have never had to use them after World War II. They have been evolving and changing, and many other countries have them now. They will keep the peace, like they were, between the big countries.

A nuclear-free world is the goal is of many countries. They want these weapons gone and believe they should never have been made.

According to “The Telegraph,” the world has over 15,000 nuclear warheads and most belong to the United States and Russia. That many warheads would destroy the world if activated. This is one of the reasons people think that no country should have these weapons.

Another reason comes from history. Take, for example, the Cold War. It was a time when the US was competing against Russia in many areas like the space race. We were both building up our nuclear arsenals and the tensions matched the escalation.

There also have been a few accidents over the years with the nuclear bombs. There has been radiation leakage, accidental plane crashes and just simple things going wrong with planes and the bombs.

On the other side, people feel nuclear weapons have helped keep an uneasy peace, and further nuclear weapon proliferation might even help avoid the large-scale conventional wars that were so common before their invention at the end of World War II.

Nuclear weapons have been around for many years and only been used on another country twice during World War II when the United States bombed Japan. After that only tests have been going on.

The International Atomic Energy Agency was created in 1957 to encourage peaceful development of nuclear technology while providing international safeguards against nuclear proliferation.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world has dropped greatly over the years, but they are still around to help protect nations. While many people hate the idea of nuclear weapons in the world, they are here. The International Atomic Energy Agency is doing its best to lower that number to make a nuclear-free world.

Even though the numbers dropped from around 60,000 nuclear warheads in 1985 to about 15,000 today, I believe the world will always have nuclear weapons. They are one of the greatest defenses a country has.