Napoleon's greatest foe

Are you demanding easy answers? There aren't any. The goal is deterrence, but deterrence doesn't work if you don't have a credible threat, which means that you have to have the credible threat, and a sufficiently insane opponent may call you on it. It's the reason why China going to a dictatorship is scary... the details of the dictatorship are irrelevant, the mere fact that one man will be in charge of the military of China is intrinsically scary. This is one place where the general bias towards inaction and other problems of a committee are advantageous; history shows that an individual is much likelier to do something really stupid for really stupid reasons than any government that is run by many people, even if there is a clear leader. A committee may fail to exploit many opportunities and may in various ways run their country into the ground, or they may even engage in misguided military adventures, but they never really rise to the level of outright evil and stupidity that an individual can muster up. For instance, if you've got a spare hour to listen, you could do worse than this: [this video] Which contains numerous examples of Napoleon doing stupid and evil things that cost thousands of lives and burned massive piles of reputation just to benefit himself. If you do watch that video, can you imagine a world in which that Napoleon has nukes ? Or, can you imagine a world in which he has them, but doesn't use them? I can't. So, alas, no, I can't promise that some of the reall