Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without effective weapons, many will die. Nobody picks a fight with someone who can effectively fight back.
Thats why every country should have nuclear weapons. There would be so much deterrance that nobody would go for war!
Warfare before the advent of nuclear weapons was a devastatingly bloody affair, with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. And warfare these days in which only one side or neither has nuclear weapons is much the same.
But when two nuclear powers fight? There are skirmishes. Proxy wars. Posturing and arms races and diplomacy and . . . very little bloodshed. For all its terror and danger and struggle, the Cold War did not wipe out an entire generation of young men the way previous World Wars had. As violent and bloody a past as India and Pakistan have had, once they both went nuclear, they settled down. They still fight, but it's limited. Neither side wants it to escalate out of control.
That is the nature of strategic weapons. Nobody wants to pick a fight with a country that has ICBMs or B-52s. Heck, countries that have them don't want to pick fights with each other. What could they hope to win that would offset the staggering losses they could incur?
As they say, an armed society is a polite society. It scales right up to nations.
Raptor is such a weapon. Not because of the casualties it could inflict -- it can carry only a paltry eight missiles, or a couple medium bombs -- but because of what it does to an air force.
The Air Force periodically goes out for large force exercises -- where they get a huge number of jets together in the air, and act out something as close to a real war as they can. The last few years Raptor's been going to those, and its numbers are astonishing. They match up Red with tons of 4 or 4.5 gen fighters against Blue with a few 4 gen fighters and a few Raptors. And Blue wins. With a kill ratio like 180-0 or 241-2. [1]
Nobody wants to pick a fight with that.
There are two ways to get a country to resolve its conflicts with you peacefully. One is to trust in their good nature and dislike for bloodshed. The other is to make fighting not an option. The second route is more reliable in my opinion, and strategic weapons accomplish it.
If you hate war, you should love Raptor. Just sitting on the tarmac, it saves lives. American lives, yeah, but Chinese or North Korean or Russian lives too. It prevents war and forces people to pursue peace.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor#Service_history