Everyone, needs a kick in the discovery . Richard Feynman.

I recently watched a piece of "conspiracy theory" that theorised a ridiculous possibility that weaponised nuclear weapons "don't actually exist".
Much like the conspiracy theories that would have us believe that in the madness of the cold war, the lunar landings were faked to make the Russians, and the heavily taxed American public, believe that Americans had conqered the moon; I recently saw a video that suggested that the footage related to the atomic bomb bomb were a work of fiction.

I will pause here for effect, just to let that sink in.

The original video footage of the mushroom clouds rising out of the blinding flash of the numerous detonations on record, when examined frame by frame using the technology available today, appear to have been doctored. Fabricated.

It seems one could quite easily fake the distinct signature  mushroom cloud with conventional explosives.
This claim is so outrageous that it left me at a lost for an initial response. I realise that it doesn't make any sense at all, but I suspended disbelief, in the same way I would if I were watching a sci-fi movie and let it all soak in, and in the end, like all good conspiracy theories, it didn't actually sound that farfetched.

Firstly there are numerous inconsistencies in the videos footage that are available. Inconsistencies that can be found in all publicly released footage of nuclear tests, over land and ocean, by all countries.

Let us  for the purposes of the exercise ignore the vaste collection of video evidence and focus on what we are left with.

Back in cold war,
We had two crazy, rich countries carving out the known world. Precariously balanced. Eternally Poised on the brink of war. If one of them acquired the means to destroy the other, the balance was out. So they spent all of their vast wealth either trying to achieve superiority, or by trying to outwit the other.

Hitler was apparently close to perfecting the difficult technology of the atomic bomb and it was imperative that they,  the allies got there first.

So the story goes that  after pouring tons of money into the Manhatten project, they faked it's  the success.

They carpet bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and rigged and used  conventional explosives to create the distinctive mushroom clouds. The high levels of  radiation were we are told a  plant..

The photographic evidence of the destruction was indistinguishable from the previously  carpet bombed Tokio and the fact that people were able to rebuild the cities so quick without having the wait millenia for the half life of the plutonium to degrade is being proposed as the proof that those cities were made to think they were nuked when in actual fact it was all part of an elaborate ruse.

In the years that followed, the policy of  "mutual assured destruction" or MAD was spun to assure the world that these weapons existed and would not be used for fear of destroying both actors and the rendering the earth uninhabitable to boot.

The public, we are told, bought into this and poured more of their hard earned tax dollars into the effort to get ahead and stay there.

If they had nukes, why publish that fact?

If any country had managed to refine plutonium and master the elaborate chain reaction to detonate the bomb, and it could all be packaged into a unit, small enough to fit into a weapon, light enough to be flown over the target, what would it hope to achieve.?

Why build these obscene  bombs at all; when all you needed was the world to believe you had succeeded.

Could they  not have achieved exactly the same effect, if all the nukes where an elaborate piece of propaganda.

As crazy as it sounds, I would respect the powers if this were true.

If they realised that all they needed was the appearance of the ultimate weapon. Weapons that would never be used, need not actually exist.

This would obviously mean that any other country that believed the spiel, might go on to actually get the technology to work, and develop the bomb for real. They might find themselves being the only "real" nuclear armed country.

Even if the money were squandered on parties and hookers I would respect that illusion  more than the reality in which humans went out and produced an indiscriminate weapon that could either destroy the planet, or render it
Uninhabitable for the the next 15000 years.

Nuclear power plants do indeed exist, but they are a  far cry from the nuclear weapons of today.

So on short, do the bombs actually exist. Hell yes. How else could they maintain superiority over China. the India and Pakistan. How would all these competing countries work together and succeed in perpetuating such a colossal Hoax?

All in the name of keeping ahead with the Kardashians...

Do they need to exist?

Probably not.

It would be much cheaper for countries to spend money on the  appearance of  having the technology, than to spend their last dollar, actually creating a weapon that can't and should not be used.