I haven't read all (maybe not even a lot) of Sam Harris' books, but I have read some and I've watched him speak and debate on some videos. From what I have read and watched, I have rather enjoyed. Sam seems to be a thinker and often seems to play a bit of devil's advocate and sometimes throws out thought provoking hypothetical (<-- keyword) ideas to either get a point across or instigate thought and discussion. I have read, what I believe is, the only excerpt where he discusses the nuclear option and I don't quite follow how anyone reading the full context of it can gather from it that he is explicitly stating that what he, personally or otherwise, wants to truly use nuclear weapons in any way. He states clearly that he thinks it would be an awful and stupid thing or something to that effect if I recall correctly. But he proposes a hypothesis on how it might come to pass if radicalized terrorism is left unchecked and those radicalized terrorist were themselves able to obtain nuclear weaponry. So, I have not thoroughly researched all of his statements in all contexts, but based on what I have seen and read I feel it's a bit absurd to state that Sam Harris believes we should actually use nuclear weapons, in any sense or for any reason. He simply stated an argument of how he could see it happening. I think making arguments like that are far from absurd and quite contrarily required.

In manufacturing there is a common practice that I'm sure goes by many names. Where I used to work we called it PPA (Potential Problem Analysis). We would sit around a table and discuss, a project, a piece of equipment or whatever else you could imagine, and write down a list of potential problems we could come up with. We would come up with all kinds of things from things that were almost certainly going to happen to truly absurd things. We would also rate each of these on the severity and the probability. Based on those ratings we would pick the items that had either a high probability of happening or had a high severity rating or some combination of and come up with ways to prevent and/or mitigate these problems if they did arise.

Without someone thinking about a potential threat, such as terrorists getting nuclear weapons, and putting that idea out there, we wouldn't ever plan to be able to deal with it. What Sam did was put the idea forth, with the a thought about how it might be probable, and what MAY be a probable outcome. Again, what I had read did not seem to indicate he was advocating for it, just that he felt it may be a possibility. No? Or do you think I'm completely missing info or completely misreading what he has written/said?