Is Every Ideal Being Prime Indicative of a Commutative Ring Being a Field?

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    Prime Ring Theory
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Homework Statement



Given a commutative ring with unity, show that if every ideal is prime than the ring is a field.

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The Attempt at a Solution



I think that I can show that a ring is a field iff it has no nontrivial ideals. So I guess I need to show that if a ring has only prime ideals than these ideals must be trivial. I'm not sure how to do this though.
 
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Can you show that the ring must be an integral domain? (Hint: Consider the ideal that consists just of the zero element.) Next show that every non-zero element is a unit to complete the proof. (Hint: Let r be a non-zero element. Consider the ideal generated by r^2.)

Petek
 
There are two things I don't understand about this problem. First, when finding the nth root of a number, there should in theory be n solutions. However, the formula produces n+1 roots. Here is how. The first root is simply ##\left(r\right)^{\left(\frac{1}{n}\right)}##. Then you multiply this first root by n additional expressions given by the formula, as you go through k=0,1,...n-1. So you end up with n+1 roots, which cannot be correct. Let me illustrate what I mean. For this...
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