I have general comment on what is discussed in several individual threads here:
Such "simulations" should be seen as a tool for thought, not as truly accurate scenario of a most probable future. It is rather like assigning some numbers to a qualitative argument in a debate. To keep the complexity in check, you leave out everything that you think is not relevant to the overall outcome of the simulation. To challenge such a simulation, a critic must present his or her own simulation showing that the omitted factor may well be relevant instead.
In the Princton simulation the participants use only a bit more than 10 percent of their arsenal. Assuming that most warheads get through, simulating an intercept rate would be redundant if one also assumes that the margin of error on how many of their arsenals participants would use is much larger.
Likewise, focusing on Russia and the USA already covers almost 90 percent of all nuclear warheads. Simulating the other nuclear powers would probably not change much in the overall picture.
However, in view of the complexity of the influencing factors and the multitude of possible scenarios, the fundamental question arises as to whether such simulations can at all provide deeper general insights into the topic than what we already vaguely suspect.
Especially since finding participants here whose psychology and job experience parallel Putin's quite closely will not be easy.
One the one hand:
Putin bluffs about whether he's bluffing about bluffing. His word is chaff. If he says he won't be invading, it's a pretty good indication he will. Etc.
On the other hand:
When one person is vital to the course of events and can't be removed, prediction generally becomes a fool's game, either way; because human brains are, needless to say, highly complex. Concentrating power means anything can happen (but not that anything will, of course.)
Pick your poison. With Putin being the other player, no course of action, including pacifism, is anything but risky. Gird your loins (as none of the kids say.)
This comment is wrong and I'm negatively surprised it made it to the top, since I would have believed HN had a more discriminating approach.
The comment mirrors a very similar argument made against climate change: Since we can't simulate it accurately, we say the entire simulation is useless (" whether such simulations can at all provide deeper general insights into the topic than what we already vaguely suspect").
The key benefit of such simulations is not always scientific insight, but making the problem and its urgency palpable for the non-expert.
You "vaguely" suspect the problem, but that is not enough to make you go out and do something against it. You need to fully understand it to get the motivation to act in some way (write to your local politician, set up a fundraiser against nuclear proliferation etc.).
That's not how I personally read the comment. But let's also recognize that the accuracy of war games is very different than the accuracy of climate simulations. War games like these typically are one offs. Climate simulations have substantially larger teams, use ensembles of models, and have a long history of verification.
The above comment reads to me that they are saying the simulation should be treated like a Fermi estimate. That people can come back and say "well this is wrong and that is wrong" but the point is to get a reasonable estimate. I mean let's be real, the accuracy of this simulation is pretty low. It doesn't even consider the effects of fallout. But that's outside the scope of the simulation and that is perfectly okay. It does exactly what it is supposed to, put a pin as a starting point for conversations. We can add complexity on top of it and calculate ensembles of simulations for the different potential scenarios. But one can argue that there is a lot more randomness involved in a simulation like this than compared to climate because it depends on something that is almost impossible to model: decisions of singular persons. There's several very critical points in these simulations that depend on such decisions.
> The key benefit of such simulations is not always scientific insight, but making the problem and its urgency palpable for the non-expert.
But I'm a bit confused, because this line makes me think you two are actually in agreement.
I know it may be off topic but i don't want people to discuss about the reliability of the data involved, no, i want people to reflect about the outcome: end of humanity.
It disgusts me to think that maybe 99.99% of world population wouldn't harm another person but due to a ridicolous small fraction of the entire population, we risk to end our lives.
This is completely absurd and makes no sense at all.
"maybe 99.99% of world population wouldn't harm another person"
I think they would... especially in self-defense, in defense of someone they cared about, and plenty would do so for ideals like "freedom", "country" or "democracy"... and if they wouldn't most would be perfectly happy to let others do it for them.
That's why the military and police exist, and why most people are perfectly happy to fund and support them. It's also why wars have so many participants and supporters.
Politicians can further rile people up to commit violence against scapegoats and even preemptively against distant potential threats. It's not so difficult for them to get a lot of people to commit violence against a historical, cultural, political, religious, or ethnic enemy.
Even if you subscribe to the idea of violence being justified in specific cases, there is no reason in the idea "kill everybody including yourself".
People arguing in favor of doomsday-weapons fail to recognize, the supposedly addressed problem not having a solution in the domain of violence means you have to look elsewhere.
Humans are built with a solution to violence, along with every other animal on the planet. Actively seeking violence and defending yourself are very different thinks and since this is instinctual, I find it very implausible you can convince all 7 billion of us to not fight each other. This is why you end up with violence as a deterrent.
A police officer is a position of power. In many parts of the world, someone in this position of power will use that power to acquire resources via bribes or extortion. This person with authority of the state has a right to violence that you do not have. This person has determined they have a right to your money and a "justification" (The law of nature: I have more power) to take it.
If you give the money there is no 'harm,' yet you have been harmed with the threat of violence. If you need that money to feed yourself or get medical care for your child, it might literally result in death.
If you fight the police officer, others will come after you. If you gather your friends to fight the police officers, you have now subverted the government, created your own government (because you are now an agent of enforcement of your own set of "laws"), and now started a very small scale war (revolution) out of your desire to not be harmed.
If you don't think people would self enrich at the cost of others, I have some very bad news for you. Just because a person hasn't been physically damaged, doesn't mean they haven't been harmed.
If there was a button that gave you a million dollars but would kill a person you have never met, I think you vastly underestimate the number of people who would press it, and those that do press it, would probably be happy to press it many times.
The way you use the word harm is what prevents you from making sense of the problem.
Confusion is not the result of understanding. Sadness is.
The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the claim to the legitimate use of violence. That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state, or an entity acting in the effective capacity of a state, whatever it happens to call itself.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition The State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California Press. p. 54.
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
In your comment, what you confuse is capacity for violence (inherent in all actors, state, individual, corporate, or non-governmental institutional, with numerous extant examples of each) with the Weberian definition of a monopoly on the legitimate claim to violence. In practice, enacting violence on virtually any actor will engender some counterveiling response, though the effectiveness will vary greatly depending on the comparative power and/or disinhibition of the entity responding.
We don't grant a government the monopoly of violence -- they are the government because they hold the monopoly of violence.
The monopoly of violence is disconnected from issues of legitimacy and authority. You don't have to agree with the government, and plenty of folks don't -- hence insurgencies and rebellions all over the world. But unless you can usurp that monopoly of violence from the existing government your feelings about their legitimacy and authority are moot. Lots of governments don't give a damn about your rights, and never will.
It seems like you're misconstruing what the other person said to be a general statement about all governments when it is only applicable to democratically elected ones. Yes, you can disagree with the government but that doesn't mean they are in the wrong if they have the support of the majority of the population. If you don't like something about your government then vote, either with a ballot or with your feet.
You have a very contrived and negative view towards Police and government. While it is good to have skepticism of powerful structures, it is also important to see the facts. Most police officers are courteous, professional and protect citizens (and their rights).
I don't think you are skeptic enough about police officers. While most fit that description, most will also cover for officers who are being unethical rather than uphold the law themselves. I've run into (American) people who have quit the force they were a part of because they stated it was just too corrupt. That means there is a culture problem which is more than just a couple bad police officers. When a police officer does something bad, that's one cop being bad, but when a police officer is bad and the department doesn't do a good faith investigation and protects them, that is ACAB.
There was national civil unrest over police not holding themselves accountable. Some cases are clearly rotten and only get justice due to national coverage. That would not happen if many departments were not rotten to the core. That isn't just the police officer, but their peers, their management, the DA, judges, etc who all play a part in preventing justice when a cop does something bad.
Some police forces in the US like in San Francisco don't seem able to perform their function at even a basic level. Other police departments like Seattle's have been subjected to a consent decree over use of force. Every friend I have who has used a bike in San Francisco has had at least one bike stolen. I've had 2 bikes stolen in that city, and 2 friends who had phones yanked out of their hands. All that and I've seen San Francisco cops ticketing jaywalkers. Half of the people I know in Seattle or San Francisco have had their car window smashed at least once, mines been smashed twice. I had a bike stolen, which required breaking and entering to get, for which there was video, for which the cop knew who the perpetrator was, and yet I did not get my bike back, nor did I hear of any prosecution taking place.
Police themselves have often flown a thin blue line flag, further separating the idea of us (the thin blue line) and them ("civilians"). Us vs them is a clear culture problem.
Add to that that police forces seek out tech like drones and stingrays (electronic surveillance), deals with corporations to attain data that would otherwise require a warrant, and frequently use chemical weapons...
That's all barely touching on differential ethnic enforcement or crack downs on labor.
Then the very top of our justice system has declared war on stare decisis which is the death of supreme court legitimacy. Civil asset forfeiture and qualified immunity? Laws that cities within 100 miles of a coast don't have specific constitutional protections. For profit prisons? Police unions?
Police in America will unapologetically ruin your life over drugs or alcohol, but in other countries they take you home.
I don't feel safe around American cops, but I've been in countries where I feel safer around cops.
Cops identifying with the dirty cop rather than their victims tells you everything you need to know.
Until I see cops angry that cops aren't being held accountable and the thin blue line flag go away, I will continue to feel righteously skeptic.
My experience and every person I know who has had positive experience with police in America. This is a progressive narrative to destroy law and order and institute a desolate, dystopian and rotting policies that we see in cities like LA and SF. I am sorry, I don't buy your narrative or the mainstream progressive one.
To a liberal person, this response just reads like someone with privilege.
You're telling me that that I have an agenda meant to destroy law and order so I can live in a desolate dystopia (not even bothering to try to create a good faith explanation for why I believe what I believe), while I think you are a hapless victim of conservative media incapable of critically thinking, failing to understand that you are not supporting policy that is in your own best interest.
I wish it were possible to see eye to eye or understand each other, but clearly the schism between us is too great.
The irony is you believe I am under a delusion, and I believe you are under a delusion, and our opinions are irreconcilable. The end result (scaled across the population) can only be uneasy peace and a completely dysfunctional government or Civil War II and a balkanized America.
If you had read my post rather than jumping straight to "ridiculous liberal person," you'd see I've lived in SF and am quite unhappy with the policing there. So your assertion that I want to create an SF like environment doesn't make a lot of sense when I am simultaneously complaining about the SF environment.
I am neither liberal nor white. Not privileged in any way. That’s the construct of your own.
Actually, this is a sure fire way to take any praise of the society and twist it as “privilege”. This creates more tension and conflict, because you decide to evaluate things not based on evidence but presumption and judgement.
If you don't think you are privileged, you have not traveled (for exploration, not pleasure) enough.
If you think the concept of privilege is ridiculous, then you don't have the empathy to place yourself in another person's shoes.
Privilege is being in a situation where you could imagine walking in someone else's shoes but don't.
You've had nothing but good experiences with cops, but can't imagine what it's like walking in the shoes of someone who hasn't. You have the privilege of not understanding what that is like. That's what privilege means.
>If there was a button that gave you a million dollars but would kill a person you have never met, I think you vastly underestimate the number of people who would press it, and those that do press it, would probably be happy to press it many times.
I have heard this thought experiment strikingly followed up with "Jeff Bezos is effectively a man who has built a machine to push the button as fast as is physically possible."
War mongers also cross the entire political spectrum almost like they're born with a death wish. It's too bad they can't be excised from the system before they gain too much power.
The basic problem in the world is that while a majority of the people may want to live self-determined lives, and be governed by a self-ruling democracy, there is a significant minority who wants to, at a personal level steal, extort, or extract value from others, and at a societal/governmental level rule over others. The latter are perfectly happy to steal, extort, extract, and/or rule over others using deception and violence.
If the people who want to live free and self-determined lives and under self-determining governments are not better prepared and better armed than the bullies, thieves, and authoritarians, they WILL be ruled by those bullies, thieves, and authoritarians.
If someone comes to your home to steal, rape, rule, or otherwise harm you or your family, is your response to say "sure, do what you want", or will you defend yourself?
Will you not call the cops if you have a chance because they might use violence to subdue or even kill your assailants (because they'd be doing violence on your behalf)?
If you defend yourself, or call the cops to do so, are you a warmonger?
If someone attacks our land and people, or a neighbor's land and people, and we call the military to defend ourselves, are we warmongers?
It is a useless accusation that undermines real understanding of what is happening.
>>Yes, self-defense is a legitimate use of violence. Is there any other point at all in this thread?
Yes, there is another point.
Many people, simply refer to all parties as "warmongers". The "warmonger" accusation is thrown every day at the people, politicians, and countries sending arms to Ukraine. Some of this can be attribute to Active Measures Dezinformatsiya "shaping the information space" directly from Russia and some to useful idiots who parrot the same lines, but not all of it. I've encountered many, like the OP, who just talk about any person or country in a position to project violent power, as a "warmonger" if they suggest using that power.
There are also many people who will claim that the USA is a "warmonger nation", far worse than Russia and China. While the USA has started military action since WWII, and some of it erroneously, it is NOT the USA that is "warmongering" in any way equivalent to the expansionist states Russia and China, both of whom have a continuous history of "annexing" neighbors (Tibet, HongKong, South China Sea, East China Sea, etc. & Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine), while the US has certainly behaved as the worlds policeman (and sometimes over-aggressively), it has not annexed anyone. Yet, there is plenty of "warmongering" rhetoric thrown at the USA, including in it's support of Ukraine, and claims that it is worse than CCP and Russian Federation.
So, what we need to distinguish is who is the expansionist aggressor, and who is the we hope better prepared and better armed democracy.
(That said, if a better-armed democracy tips over into an autocracy, watch out. and make no mistake, there are strong movements in the USA that are attempting to do exactly that, starting with actions to undermine democracy such as undermining the independent judiciary, denying elections, etc.)
EDIT: Plus, people are happy to prattle on about how the US Defense Budget exceeds the next X nations combined budgets, and how it is such a "warmonger" state. Yet when it finally becomes seen that we need to literally push back against Russia or China and defend democracy itself, it's pretty handy how all that turns out to be the "Arsenal Of Democracy" and we can actually supply the effort without breaking much of a sweat. And then people who normally call the US a "warmongering nation" can happily say "I'm all for defending countries"...
So, the main point is that I'm calling out the inconsistency inherent in the "warmonger" labeling.
I think I am quite liberal and I could be considered a warmonger.
If you have never met a truly delusional person in your life, it's easy to have pacifist ideals. As soon as you meet a truly delusional person and those delusions directly conflict with what you need or a right you think you have, you quickly learn that "war" is sometimes the only option. If there are situations that require war, then you must make sure you are capable of exerting force.
I think the quote "If you want peace, prepare for war," is quite accurate. It is perceived weakness that opens you up to having war thrust upon you by someone who has estimated they have more power. In that sense, I think pacifism is a warmongering ideology because I view "despots that have too much power will exist" as an axiom upon which any political philosophy must be built. To a despot, pacifism is opportunity to subjugate. The foundation of despotism is built upon people who will not risk what they hold dear.
Nuclear annihilation is bad, but I would rather live in a world under threat of nuclear annihilation rather than a world where only Putin or Xi could threaten the force of nuclear weapons to subjugate those they wish.
I was a pacifist until I read Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings," a very long pro-war (warmonger) screed that he consciously designed to counter pre-WWII pacifism in England. Also entertaining. But long.
Or perhaps, Tolkein convinced me that I was kidding myself if I thought I was a pacifist, in the first place. If you would break someone's arm to save a million lives, then you're not a pacifist. Which is a sorta kinda okay rough summary of the book's underlying argument.
Tolkien was an able soldier at the front in WWI. He despised war as veterans do, but by the same token he was obviously no pacifist. He also despised the NAZIs, but was confronted by students, and a nation of voters, who declared themselves uninterested in defending their country or opposing the NAZIs. Tolkein began writing LOTR in 1937. Lewis, very similar views. It is impossible to construe TLOTR as a pacifist work; although it clearly warns against pursuing "any means possible" against an enemy (as is consistent with his Christian faith.)
(I can't vouch for the latter journal, it's just consistent with what I've previously read.)
Winston Churchill, in the first volume of his history of WWII, goes into great detail re this ubiquitous democratic feckless pseudo-pacifism of the thirties. This is the context Tolkien was writing against; a thoroughgoing refusal to consider arms. It was well worth opposing, and had armed opposition been used earlier, England would have experienced only a very short, sharp war.
"Unlike other members of the "Lost Generation" who spent their words rejecting time-honored concepts such as heroism and virtue, Tolkien and Lewis borrowed heavily from the great epic stories of the past.
...
According to the C.S. Lewis Institute, "In the stories of Tolkien and Lewis, there is this very important idea about our responsibility to resist evil and choose to do the right thing, even when it looks very risky. This is what heroes do." Both men learned these lessons while on the battlefields of France during the so-called "War to End All Wars." "
It's hyperbole, no question, but I'm going to say it's kinda sorta justified by the sheer length. Meant to be humorous, but hyperbole is a relatively rare taste in humor.
The delusion, perhaps, is the average person worrying about whether they are or are not, or should or should not be, a pacifist.
It doesn’t matter.
Wars are waged by powerful interests over which the average person has no control.
I suppose on a personal level — confronted with a mugger or burglar — one could implement one’s philosophy. Thankfully, though, those occasions are rare and regardless of one’s outlook, the decision in the moment is based less on philosophy and more on adrenaline, panic, fear, rage, etc. (which can lead a ‘warmonger’ to capitulate and cower in fear or a ‘pacifist’ the knock the crap out of someone… one never knows.)
If there are any dictators, emperors, prime minister, or presidents on this board, perhaps their musings on the subject would mean something. If not, it’s just navel-gazing.
I've met delusional people, but I disagree with your stance. I think there has to be a better way. The reason we go to war is not because these delusional people exist, but because they are able to garner massive support. War can't exist without people willing to die for a cause. Those causes are frequently lies or exaggerations. Or issues caused by autocrats (delusional people) seeking to expand their power. The existential threat to humanity isn't so much that delusional people exist, but that the average person still holds celebrities in high regard. Because we treat men like gods.
So let’s bring this out of the theoretical realm and into reality. How does this apply to the current Ukraine / Russian war? What is the better way to thwart Russias illegal advance?
First off, I think you're trying to pigeonhole me. I hope you're holding the counter proposal to the same degree of scrutiny. But also recognize that just because someone doesn't have the answer to everything doesn't mean it is wrong (I'll also say that people have been saying the other thing for thousands of years and it has not prevented us from having wars either).
Second off, I don't think it can. It's too late already. But I think there are still elements that show the dangers of what I'm saying. Many Russians left the country. There's even some hiding in the woods. I said the danger is when people support mad men. The problem is that despite this, there are still plenty of people willing to fight his war.
But what I'm proposing is much harder and longer term. There's lots of unknowns to me. I don't know how you get people to stop worshiping leaders. It seems like it is a fundamental aspect of humanity. I'm just a computer scientist, I don't know everything about human psychology. I'm not an expert in everything, none of us are.
But I do know people over simplify things but also hold onto their opinions very strongly. So one aspect is teaching people that their ideas are not part of their identities. Doing this prevents us from taking disagreements personally. I know it means teaching people that you can be proud of your country but that blind nationalism is dangerous. I do know it means teaching people to scrutinize the power of leadership, as power often corrupts and living extremely different lifestyles often distances us. I know it means doing much more than this too. But I'm not sure how to even teach all these things to people. But I do know there are far too many people who do not wish to go to war in either country.
So how do you give them the power and prevent charismatic authoritarians from abusing them? I don't know. It is probably similar to the answer of how you prevent people from being in abusive relationships. I'm sure neither of us knows that answer but we both agree that those relationships are bad.
I’m not sure how any of this stops Russians from shooting at you.
> But also recognize that just because someone doesn't have the answer to everything doesn't mean it is wrong.
We can all want and wish for things, at some point we have to grow up and accept reality. If you don’t have a solution, then you don’t have the answers. You should’ve kept your mouth closed as you’ve said “i don’t like war, there’s a better way, but i don’t know what it is”. How many veterans that have watched their friends die do you think are on this board (you’re talking to one now)?
War is horrible but when we fight there is no other option.
Your problem is one of the iron laws of being human:
While you may be able to influence another person, you can not change another person.
You are in a state of denial (a delusion) about people and both their capacity for good and capacity for change. You elevate your own ideals against animal (whoever has the most power wins) ideals while failing to recognize your own animal nature. You think your ideals are better than, say a republicans, and yet they are fundamentally equal to you. They might be trying to change you so that you become a nationalist, in the same way you would wish for them to be globalist. You have a false sense of the superiority of your beliefs and a false sense of authority to spread them. As we saw in 2016, they can get into power and co-opt the institutions of indoctrination to indoctrinate in the ways they see fit. Power is the factor that determines who gets to use the institutions of indoctrination.
> It seems like it is a fundamental aspect of humanity.
You recognize one important axiom, but fail to find the contradicting axiom.
War is the state of two irreconcilable delusions, or a delusion and reality. War determines who is wrong, and who is left.
> So one aspect is teaching people that their ideas are not part of their identities.
Do you see how republicans talk about how schools are indoctrination centers for kids and are fighting public education because they don't like this liberal indoctrination?
What do you think it would take for people to drop Christianity?
> But I do know there are far too many people who do not wish to go to war in either country.
I smashed my lego set in anger as a kid. It felt right at the time, but the end result was that what I had built was utterly destroyed, some individual pieces were permanently broken. I did not have the maturity or forethought to see how sad I would be at the destruction of my creations.
Global warming, much like obesity, is a march of small concessions until it gets to a point where the snowball is too big. War is a small march of appeasements until the despot starts seeing appeasements as submissions and becomes emboldened.
I disagree with this simply because there are plenty of people who aren't the things you are saying. This thread is proof of this. How many people don't want to go to war. You are breaking a an important axiom: there is no one size fits all for humans. But clearly we know there is something that makes these humans tick differently than other humans. So the question is if it is more nature or more nurture. I personally believe the latter, and if that is true then these pacifist qualities can be taught to people world wide. Then we can teach people to not treat men like gods. But that will require personalized journies and I do recognize the complexity in that. But I'd rather have a complex and difficult to implement system than a system that sends men to die on the whims of those that are willing to risk the livelihoods of others.
You are also moving the bar of the conversation because we first were talking about leaders who wield abusive powers and defining them as delusional. Thus my response is about how to prevent people like this from obtaining power in the first place. A preventative measure (which is why my above response is attempting to explain that preventative measures aren't good solutions for problems already occurring. i.e. a goal post moved). You have incorporated a wider definition of delusion and this moves the goal post for me to defend my position further. But in the war mongering position the widening of the goal post in this direction gets us to where we are: which is a deep seated division. That politics becomes good vs evil. While I agree that the ideas of these people are reprehensible I do not believe that discussing in this framework is productive. People never see themselves as evil and calling them such creates division rather than salvation. I can recognize that we are in this terrible position and that my thoughts do not solve this while also recognizing that once a solution is created we need to act further before rejoicing. We need to prevent this cycle of of casting out out of touch leaders who will abuse us and wait for the next one to come along. We've been doing this for tens of thousands of years, don't you think it is time we start discussing preventative measures?
Nobody wants to go to war. All war is based on rhetoric about its necessity. I think war with china is necessary, and I think the longer we don't go to war, the more pain China will be able to deal us when war breaks out (willing to accept alternative argument, for example, that unchecked dictatorship will rot china's ability to wage war). I absolutely don't want to go to war with China, but Xi is clearly delusional and has embedded into the Chinese system of government a future declaration of war against Taiwan and has made no shortage of rhetoric about using force if necessary. He's even demonstrated colonial imperial ambition directly against Hong Kong showing that his threats are not idle.
I don't want the war at all, but Xi does. I can't change Xi. That leaves one choice: prepare for war.
> there is no one size fits all for humans.
Humans have blood that carry oxygen to their brains. We have to eat to obtain energy to function. We don't know the extent to which other chemicals or structures govern our thoughts (including social ones) or not. So if you believe that our consciousness has a basis in physicality, we can't know to what extent this statement is false or to what degree it is false.
That also ignores that there are systems that govern us. All humans are subject to the idea that "the most powerful entity wins." All humans are subject to death.
That's ignoring that:
> there is no one size fits all for humans.
and
> Then we can teach people to not treat men like gods.
are a contradiction. You are trying to make one size (no gods) fit all.
If there is no one size, then conflict is necessary, and war is just a degree of conflict.
> Then we can teach people to not treat men like gods.
You want to teach people to not treat mean like gods, while they want you to teach you to have the same gods they do. You are asserting the authority and superiority of your own belief system under the implicit condition that you have more power than they do. I identify as liberal, so I believe liberal systems are better, but unless liberals can maintain power, then liberal belief systems don't matter. We are seeing America slowly become a white christian state because ethnic forces have used their power to corrupt the judicial branch while we see liberal forces floundering and incapable of achieving any goals like rule of law (the idea that laws apply to people with power).
So there is a cycle:
Ideology -> power -> war -> ideology
Ideologies generate power, which are used to win wars, which are used to increase ideology. In this way ideologies are competitive and naturally selected.
As for the second statement, you are quick to blame a leader for their delusion, and you seem to have a top down view. My view is bottom up, that small scale (a single person) delusions grow into large scale delusions, and once there are two incompatible large scale delusions, there is war.
I don't think I've moved any goal posts, I think you need to confront the idea that there is probably a person who exists with the direct opposite opinions of yours with the same desire to spread their opinion, and who is functionally equivalent in power.
> We've been doing this for tens of thousands of years, don't you think it is time we start discussing preventative measures?
If we've been doing it for tens of thousands of years, then it seems like those memes (in the technical sense of the word) have been naturally selected for because they are more viable than other memes, that is to say, we have the privilege of living in high resource times and therefore having high resource privilege, but in low resource times, we might choose to kill rather than starve. Whether the resource is food, microchips, oil, or anything else that modern society depends upon, it might be that willingness to kill your neighbor could be a competitive advantage and we see the results of those forces of natural selection alive today.
We are animals and I think we both believe in fighting our animal nature and the animal law (natural selection) that binds us, but we can't do it in violation of reality.
> I don't want the war at all, but Xi does. I can't change Xi. That leaves one choice: prepare for war.
I agree. But at the same time I also think the average Chinese person feels the same as you and I. Maybe they think it is Xi, maybe they think it is Biden (/US). But does that matter? The point I'm getting at is that those in power are able to paint this narrative, even if it is of their own doing. They make the story they write a reality by getting people to follow them.
> are a contradiction. You are trying to make one size (no gods) fit all.
Gods, not god. (I think you're also not giving that comment, which has a history older than our combined age, a good faith read)
> If there is no one size, then conflict is necessary, and war is just a degree of conflict.
This too isn't true as flexibility exists.
> My view is bottom up
Actually I think both our views are bottom up. I think you see the differences in our opinions and are creating a larger divide than there actually is.
Yes. Xi co-opted the institutions of indoctrination to teach hyper nationalist "century of humiliation", "Xi Jinping thought", and the 3 evils.
If you think that you can teach that treating humans as gods is bad, why do you think that blind nationalism can't be taught. If blind nationalism can be taught, why can't the average Chinese person be made to feel that war (to prevent the evil of separatism) is regrettable, but necessary?
He did the same thing you wish to do (indoctrinate people with a no gods ideology) to indoctrinate people with a Xi is a god ideology.
I think the average educated Chinese person probably isn't very happy, but I think the average Chinese fox news watcher equivalent is probably just fine, maybe a little suspicious of zero covid policy, but overall whipped into a nationalist frenzy.
There's plenty of video evidence of Russians not feeling the same way as you or I. There are clearly unrepentantly evil people.
> This too isn't true as flexibility exists.
I don't understand this refutation. We are seeing the results of non-flexibility in abortion politics in America, in Ukraine, and in countless other examples.
Making someone flexible violates the idea that you can't change someone (to be how you want).
Our very existence, being male and female, binds our species to eternal conflict. Genetic propagation is a limited resource that must be competed (fought) over. It doesn't take too long watching Planet Earth before it's clear that conflict is axiomatic to genetics (in the general case).
> I think you're also not giving that comment, which has a history older than our combined age, a good faith read
That is disappointing to hear. How do you think I am reading it, and how do you think I misinterpreted it?
> I think you see the differences in our opinions and are creating a larger divide than there actually is.
I think we both are likely to agree with enough time and patience. I think we would probably agree on many outputs, given the same inputs. I think your confusion and uncertainty is a result of unresolved contradictions in the axioms you hold.
I don't think you've run into a delusional person, like a manager or a parent, exercising their power over you despite every attempt made to negotiate or achieve mutual understanding, in a manner that forces you to fight rather than submit. I think your mental model of how reality works is not burdened with that experience.
Trying to get your Alzheimers grandpa to remember you is an exercise in futility. No amount of wishful thinking, desire, effort, or anything else is going to make that happen. Same for trying to get some people to feel empathy.
I think you feel grief over the state of conflict in the world, for which the first stage is denial, then you get to bargaining "something must be able to be done, we must be able to solve this or prevent it." I think eventually you will get to acceptance.
Definitely. "Live free or die" means more than anything, that if no one will sacrifice themselves in the fight for justice, then you will be oppressed, your family will be oppressed, and your children will be oppressed as will your friends and their families.
If everyone believes in the idea of "live free or die" then there is a chance to not live and die a slave to a dictator.
I prefer living to life.
I was extremely moved by the Hong Kong protestors who were living the morals of my forefathers, while my peers here in America were busy bootlicking while talking about how awesome their freedom to lick boots is.
This quote is the parent quote of "live free or die":
> "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
I on the other hand met in person someone from Hong Kong whose uncle, I believe, had been imprisoned during a much earlier demonstration for a different cause.
He didn't exclaim any morally high-flying attitude and said that after the demonstration was over and he was in jail, no public really remembered him, the news didn't write great stories about his heroic deeds and he suffered tremendously as a small cog caught between the wheels of history.
You're attitude also reminds me strongly of pre-world-war Germany where there was also a sentiment that a war with the unjust oppressors is much better than the current rotten piece; you can see where this has lead.
Ending, I don't what to dismiss your positive attitude to oush against oppression, but I want show that there is more to the issue than "live free or don't live at all".
So what you say sounds great - in theory. But letting Mike Tyson answer: "Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face".
> He didn't exclaim any morally high-flying attitude and said that after the demonstration was over and he was in jail, no public really remembered him, the news didn't write great stories about his heroic deeds and he suffered tremendously as a small cog caught between the wheels of history.
You've identified the prisoners dilemma that dictators use to attain power. Every person is faced with a dilemma. Do I defect (submit to the oppressive regime) or do I cooperate (fight the oppressive regime). Cooperation has very high cost when other people choose defect. The more people that defect, the more costly cooperation is.
Liberty requires that sacrifice, but no one wants it to be their sacrifice, and a despot uses that property to enslave everyone. Martyrs are a necessary, but not sufficient component of liberty.
> You're attitude also reminds me strongly of pre-world-war Germany where there was also a sentiment that a war with the unjust oppressors is much better than the current rotten piece; you can see where this has lead.
Russia has the same rhetoric against "Nazi oppressors" in Ukraine. China pushed rhetoric about America causing civil unrest in Hong Kong. The civil war, revolutionary war, ww2, etc. all seem to push the same sentiment.
It might not be the rhetoric itself, but the values behind the rhetoric and the consistency between rhetoric and actions.
> But letting Mike Tyson answer: "Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face".
And Mike Tyson better than anyone knows you can't be the greatest ever without getting punched in the face a few times. What sacrifices do you think he made to get where he got? I find irony in quoting someone that literally risked their life and limb to achieve what they achieved while defending the idea that choosing slavery over risking life and limb is rational.
It is clear that it is rational to make either decision. The prisoner's dilemma is a dilemma, it is not clear what the choice should be. Education can help inform what the best strategy is or at least what the outcomes of various strategies are.
Conscripts in Russia are literally being marched off to their death because they have been enslaved. Had they fought their mafioso kelptocratic oppressors (at great sacrafice), they could be enjoying the fruits of their labor and incredibly rich natural resources rather than being forced to ethnically cleanse themselves (at least the non muscovites) in the meat grinder.
It is a personal tradeoff everyone has to make and find, when, in your words, to defect or to cooperate.
Yes, indeed
In your original comment you seemed to be making an unusual hard tradeoff in terms of freedom, that is why I invoked the example of the imprisoned demonstrator.
Make Tyson was obviously exceptional. I think our discussion is more what regular people would do.
Top athletes also have coaches that mentally keep them to overcome resistance. Regular people typically (unfortunately) don't have access to that .
And yes, the example you give regarding Russia is exceptionally and probability a good counterexample to mine, to illustrate the other side of the Coin.
Not the parent, but yes absolutely. If I can’t speak out against things I don’t like then I am not living. You can hole up and wait out the nuke tossing then join the workers party rebuilding their palaces after you come out. Your children will likely be forced into labor as well, that’s Poohbears favorite move.
Sure but if a propagandized population is hellbent in what they believe, they are a danger. Just because they have been brainwashed doesn’t mean we should let our guard down out of pity. It should make us more alarmed because they would actually go and do something batshit crazy.
Considering the ridiculous politics here in America, I don't find the 70% statistic hard to believe. News is propaganda here, and people support terrible things all the time, so why should Russia be different?
> It's ridiculously easy to influence people through propaganda.
I think not enough people understand this point. So many believe that they are immune to propaganda because they laugh at some that they see. But they do not laugh at the propaganda that does influence them. There's different propaganda for different people. This is the same underlying arguments for the privacy avocation groups, but I don't want to derail the conversation at hand.
> It's ridiculously easy to influence people through propaganda.
Sure, but in democracies (or any system where legitimacy depends on the "will of the people"), why the people believe something isn't usually considered relevant.
They were released by Levada, it's now been some time that they are being influenced by Kremlin.
None of my friends / relatives / acquintances supports this war (only my GF's mother). That is a piss-poor statistic, but the sad truth is that there simply cannot be any reliable sociology in a country where saying "no to war" leads to criminal prosecution.
I think it's also crucial, that from people who "support this war", most support the image they see on TV, not the real-world atrocities. Most of people who support this war think they are fighting "battalions of NATO soldiers from Poland" and a small group of nazis who threaten Ukraininan soldiers with death if they don't go into battle. For majority it's impossible to fathom fighting with brotherly Ukrainians.
"70%" number is effectively meaningless, it might be 30 or 90, but it is a fact that the war is supported by Russian society. They may not _like_ it but they _support_ it. If Putin says the war is over now, Russians would support that too.
The common folk may be led to think that the only alternative they have to live is war. And they are led to think that by those small overpowered fraction.
It has been the case for a lot of modern wars (even those pushed by us or nato).
I'm so tired of seeing this 70% number. There is a lot of available evidence against it. Why is it so widely quoted by western media?
The poll is from Nevada, same poll company that said 1% support Navalny as a politician. Navalny got 27% on Moscow mayor election in 2013. Tens of thousands of people were on demonstrations in his support in 2021, risking getting beaten up by police and jailed.
Out of ~100 people I know, maybe a couple somewhat support war.
In Moscow, none of civilian cars you see on the streets have Z/V/military symbols in support of the war. If war has 70% support, at least 1% would put it on display.
Since there is no free press in Russia and if you publicly come out against the war you might be jailed and brutalised, I'm surprised the percentage isn't even larger.
Current Russian practice shows that there is no difference, thousands of newly mobilized men have already died and their society doesn't care, mothers just blame Ukraine.
> The few warmongers often have the support of the majority, e.g. in Russia right now, where polls consistently show 70% support or more for Putin's attack on Ukraine.
We should take a step back and think about Russia's problem.
Not only did Russia's dictatorship made it illegal and a punishable offense to express any negative feeling regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they manipulate all their media with pro-Putin and pro-war propaganda.
Keep in mind that Russia's regime response to anti-mobilization protesta was to arrest protesters and force them to the war front.
No wonder a big chunk of Russians, when faced with any war-related question, they make it their point to promptly give a canned response on how they are apolitical. Self-preservation in a totalitarian state kicks in almost as a Darwinian response.
If you found yourself living in that sort of castrating society, what would you answer if state posters asked you what you thought of the ongoing war?
If Maslow’s hierarchy of needs had one more layer at its very base, it would be power. That is, the ability to project their will into the world. People who are made to feel powerless (like the Russian population) will align themselves with a source of power (Putin) to satisfy their need for power, even if by proxy. The need for power is so fundamentally important to humans that any source of this is valued above most moral conflicts that the source may cause. This is how a large population of “good” people can commit atrocities, as in WWII Germany, for example.
This concept has always baffled me too. There's the old saying (I think from cold war era): the difference between you (a foreigner) and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders.
It is very clear to me that these existential threats are elites playing a game with our lives. The lives of everyone on this planet. The same elites that have nuclear bunkers and would survive the repercussions of their acts. The same elites who get us worked up with racism and scapegoatism. It doesn't matter if you're American, Indian, Chinese, or Russian; the honest to god truth is that the VAST majority of us want to just live in peace and don't give a shit about this geopolitical nonsense. It's strange to me that you can go back to Diogenes and find people discussing this same sentiment, about being citizens of the world. Nationalism is a hell of a drug. Fine in moderate usage but large doses make people go insane.
I do recognize that there is a lot more complexity to all this. Like another commenter pointed out, even 0.01% of 8 billion is 800k. But this shows an existential threat to humanity. That even if the rate of psychopaths with power is extremely low, that the total number is still quite large. But it isn't just these elites that make us think small cultural differences are quite large, I see every day people come to these same conclusions. I don't understand how this happens when we really are all just people doing people things. Exposure?
I'm not sure how to solve this tbh. I do think working towards a post scarce society is one of the biggest tools we can have. People tend to be much nicer and far less likely to act criminally when they don't have to worry about getting by. People aren't inherently evil, but justify small steps in that direction with good intentions. Post scarcity takes away some of this power that these people have, but it won't take away all of it. I know this is something we techies here are able to work towards, but I don't know what the other parts are, and I don't think it is going to be a fully technological solution (that would be absurd). But I do thin, like you're saying, that we need to discuss this. After all, even if it is unlikely to happen, the fate of the human race depends on this discussion. A 0.001% chance of nuclear war is still too high.
If 8 billion people in the world, your 99.99% leads to 80 million people who would be willing to harm others - a lot of people - where certainly only a fraction of that is enough to create an army for a tyrant; and to which where the second amendment in the U.S. stems from, knowing that only an armed population can counter threats on freedom.
Didn't just shock a generation, it shocked the President.
There is the apocryphal story about Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor who turned politician, who saw The Day After and asked his staff if would really be that bad. His staff, hardened Cold War generals and such, replied that it would be so, so much worse.
This spooked the hell out of Reagan, and led him to reach out to the USSR to ease tensions.
Didn't stop him from building deterrents in the form of Star Wars, etc. though...
Threads is the most relentlessly grim and bleak thing I've ever seen. It's like they thought "let's make this get bleaker and bleaker until people have just had enough".
I was shown it at school aged 9 and watched it out of curiousity about 5 months ago. I couldn't believe they showed it to kids in the 80's.
After watching Threads your strategy for nuclear war goes from "hide in a basement" to "run towards the blast" as going quickly is the best approach.
> Threads is the most relentlessly grim and bleak thing I've ever seen. It's like they thought "let's make this get bleaker and bleaker until people have just had enough".
Threads is more realistic, but The day after literally ignited panic in millions of families (I remember watching it on Television when I was 6, almost any other neighbour household was watching the same thing!)
I would also add the more prosaic Wargames, also from 1983, to the list of movies talking about a "Global Thermonuclear War" and, similarly to what Princeton is doing, simulating "A strange game" where "the only winning move is not to play"
Maybe, but as I said I've watched it in Italy, as Italian, and almost everyone was watching it that night.
Also, I was merely pointing out that before Threads there was this other movie that pioneered the idea of the atomic holocaust.
There's also China Syndrome from 1979, but even though I think it's a better movie than The day after, the premise is different and the threat is the atomic energy industry, not warheads.
Both are very good and shocking movies. I personally found Threads more grimly realistic, and more relatable. This might be because I've watched Threads only a few years ago, while it's been decades since I've seen The Day After.
It doesn't seem to take into account British and French nuclear arsenals (although they're not commensurable to US and Russian ones). Strikes on UK and French territory (which are shown in this simulation), not even mentioning NATO commitments, would incite a response.
Also look at the other nuclear powers just sitting there dooing nothing.
This in a early cold war era US vs USSR Armageddon scenario, not a 202x scenario.
Plausible scenarios today are:
- Russia using a nuke in Ukraine and earning the hate of every single country in the world. China and India try to remain neutral but they would almost certainly drop support for Russia if they break the nuclear taboo. This would not even require a nuclear response to solve.
ukraine wouldn't be enough to push nato to even regular war let alone a nuclear response.
If putin keeps the radiation from spilling into nato territory its not enough to start ww3.
Despite cnn's lies, nato doesn't actually care much for ukraine, they just see this as a way to do damage indirectly to an enemy they want to hurt.
Nato isn't interested in committing suicide, afterall nuclear war benefits noone.
Honestly I see the ukraine situation either ending with a discussion that cedes at least the 2 "republics" on the border, or small yield nukes being used on small targets to scare ukraine to the negotiation table.
The reality is russia can last enough in war but ukraine is pretty tough and has nearly the same if not even more men than russia fielded.
I will refrain from making such detailed predictions but we both agree NATO will most probably NOT use nuclear weapons to retaliate if Russia uses a nuke in Ukraine.
I think the avenues for retaliation from the world are far more diverse but retaliation of some kind is almost certain.
I disagree. I believe the intentions would start as a non-nuclear response, but would rapidly spill out of control into a full send of all weapons.
This is the reality of the "Assured Destruction" of MAD. If you can take out your enemies ability to respond you can "win". With a tactical nuke in play and Rus-vs-US force engagement moves us to DEFCON 1. The name of that level is "COCKED PISTOL". A cocked pistol is something to handle gently, any wrong nudge could set it off.
Then in the background you have air to air engagements over the Black Sea - blockades of Kaliningrad, SSN's chasing SSBN's. Dozens of Cuban Missile Crisis type situations all playing out in parallel. One bad call by one local commander and a head of state is given 6 minutes to figure out if this is a first strike.
Once the line is crossed almost all of us die. It might take hours, days or weeks - but it will be an near inevitable conclusion.
> If putin keeps the radiation from spilling into nato territory
That is virtually impossible. You can count on at least some detectable level of radioactive fallout reaching a NATO country. That could be enough to trigger Article 5 IF the political leaders of NATO willed it.
To really simulate this sort of scenario properly, you need political wargaming (e.g. matrix games.) And the best way to do that is with politicians themselves, or at the very least members of their staff, participating in the wargames. This isn't the sort of thing you can simulate properly with computers or college students.
If Putin uses nukes on Ukraine, do you really think Ukraine, which has access to lots of nuclear material, wouldn't retaliate with a dirty bomb on Red Square and other locations?
Where do you think that would end?
Such a strategic situation would be incredibly unstable. If no retaliation comes, the madman will think he can use the same gambit to take the Baltics and other areas. He's been at this since Chechnya. There's no way he'll stop his aggression and violence unless someone stops him.
The only way to stop this is to effectively deter him from using them in the first place. And the only deterence is to credibly threaten immediate nuclear retaliation.
Has there even been a direct conventional war between two nuclear powers before? I expect that nuclear weapons are a deterrent of any war when both sides have them.
The problem with disarmament seems to be that imbalances arise, and the problem with armament seems to be that if hundreds of countries have them, there's a high probability of one of them doing something stupid/crazy/suicidal.
That was an interesting conflict from the stand point of nuclear restrain. Territories were occupied, hundreds of casualties, open fire and fighter jets; yet no nuclear threats. I haven't read up on it but just looking at the outcome of the war.
Yes, that is another hotspot, but tensions between them have risen and fallen and neither party appears to be willing to commit to the end of the world. They are in an equilibrium of MAD.
Russia using a nuke in Ukraine doesn’t even make any sense. What would it accomplish? The Ukrainian forces are too scattered for this to be effective. Would it scare the West into backing down? It would certainly scare a lot of people, but Putin knows that the West will not be scared into submission. If it’s done as a scare tactic, then it’s terrorism, and negotiating with terrorists is off the table.
The only way I can see Russia going nuclear is if the West becomes directly involved in the conflict, Putin sees it as the existential end of Russia, and decides to take the murder-suicide route. Let’s hope it never gets to that point.
I don't think he does know this. The last couple decades of Russian relations have consisted of the West being scared into submission. It wasn't until (a) Russia invaded Ukraine and frankly (b) Ukraine bloodied Russia's nose that everyone else woke up to the fact that Russia was a real threat that had to be and could be opposed.
Obviously you have to start somewhere with a simulation, but to me it seems like you'd want to quickly add in the food/water/energy aspect and perhaps consider the additional damage caused by conventional weapons.
It seems as though at least one of the simulated parties has a current doctrine of trying to destroy power plants and food distribution hubs, we'd have to assume that will be part of an apocalyptic exchange.
> It seems as though at least one of the simulated parties has a current doctrine of trying to destroy power plants and food distribution hubs
Given the state of economic "optimization" our current systems are operating under I would imagine that even if the enemy did not strike energy and food distribution centers on purpose these systems would fall apart pretty quickly. Redundancy and resilience costs money, money that would not land in certain pockets if spent.
Fall apart? They'd be taken apart. People have to eat. The level of fear would could create an unprecedented and unpredictable mob mentality. See 6 Jan for example.
It being taken apart counts as falling apart in my book. Panic and mobs are one thing, but certainly something like the interruption of continous cooling chains would play into it as well.
When I've read about scenarios like this or the topic of mutually assured destruction is discussed, I notice that the concept of 'retaliation' is taken as a given. The premise of immediate retaliation creates the hypothetical domino effect that seems to polarize the discussion between (1) total prevention at all costs or (2) a terrible mass casualty scenario.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is this assumption of retaliation grounded in the reality of our political systems or perhaps a theory of modern warfare that I'm missing? Don't get me wrong, it sound very plausible, but that is exactly why I'm questioning it and would like to expand my understanding so that it's grounded in something more than just a hunch.
Quite simply, it's basic human nature. I don't think you can name a country that its citizens would remain complacent after a nuclear attack. New York, LA, DC, Chicago suddenly get wiped off the map. You don't think the population would demand retaliation? Not only the massive immediate loss of life, but it would decimate the economy. Look at the response to 9/11. That was "just" 2 buildings. Now imagine entire cities that would be impossible to rebuild or habitat.
Just so we are accurate. It was three buildings; hit by 3 planes full of people. A fourth plane that hit the ground and several buildings in New York as secondary casualties.
Coincidentally ACOUP has an essay on this very topic[1] just out.
TL;DR: Strategic bombing has been tried many times in the Second World War and after it. It has never caused the reaction you describe. It invariably stiffens the morale of the bombed population. It backfires very badly.
If you want to win a war, confine yourself to military targets.
Except for, you know, the one time nukes were used in anger (yeah I know it was complicated, but still). Strategic bombing is one thing, but it's really hard to depopulate a city that way. Whereas once nukes start flying, the majority of citizens know they stand a healthy chance of dying in the next few hours or days. I don't know if that changes the result, but the dynamics will be different enough that I wouldn't cite strategic bombing as a comparison.
A wise politician will convince the people that a x1 retaliation is enough and then make a deal with the other side to stop the destruction. Bout most politician will just launch a x20 retaliation to get more support from the crowd.
See this is interesting to me. I tend to agree with you and I think I would be in the de-escalate camp.
Now even if that group is in the minority, how large of a minority would it have to be to at least question the 'guaranteed immediate strategic nuclear retaliation' assumption in our models and plans?
Unfortunately, pacifists tend to be killed or imprisoned by those who are willing to resort to violence.
The weapons also tend to be in the hands of warmongers.
Finally, and probably more importantly, if a nuclear attack was immanent, the US President has something like 5 minutes to decide on whether to launch a counterattack.
The general population won't even have time to participate in this decision. They will just be wiped out along with everyone else.
IMO nuclear game theory especially around Launch on Warning / immediate retaliation is going to change in the coming years as everyone builds up conventional global strike missiles. Decision makers will be incentivized to at least wait for confirmation before ending the world.
But otherwise I'm much more pessimistic about narrative around "retaliation" because I think when shit hits fan, MAD doesn't just extends to nations trading nukes but eradicating their entire alliance network that can help rebuild as well. US cold war nuke plans on USSR included nuking PRC just in case. USSR was going to make sure Europe was a wasteland that couldn't help wasteland US rebuild. On paper US/USSR had thousands of nukes because you need multiple for counter-force on harden targets. On secret paper, it's counter value your entire rival block to ensure anyone who can be potential threat after, aren't.
> I notice that the concept of 'retaliation' is taken as a given
There is no room for 'retaliation' in reality. All the superpowers' defense systems are set up to launch in around ~10 minutes if they detect a nuclear launch from the other side. So, all these 'they used nuclear weapons first so we have to retaliate' delirium in the press is totally nonsense. There is no such 'first - second' in a war between nuclear superpowers. They launch simultaneously within ~15 minutes and destroy each other and entire world within ~40 minutes. (includes flight time of the slowest ballistic missile)
Well IDK about russia or china, but if the major US population centers get hit, we immediately become a very republican country. I suspect those people will be rather eager to retaliate.
Are they providing the data they use anywhere? Are they just expecting that all Russian nukes will actually make it to the US?
The US has been somewhat open about the immense difficulty of keeping it's nuclear arsenal working reliably and has demonstrated at least some capability to intercept nuclear payloads.
Russian state of it's arsenal is likely going to be worse and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.
This comment terrifies me to the bone. Note: I'm a long term Eastern European immigrant (not Russian or Ukrainian). Unlike most of HN, I have been in a war, it's much worse than most civilians imagine it. Much.
One of the things we knew during the cold war was that nuclear war would be the ruin of society. It was rightly feared. Keeping the peace between the two nuclear powers wasn't seen as a sign of weakness, everyone realized the alternative. Aside from the immediate millions of deaths, the longer term (ie after the first day) effects would be capital C Catastrophic, even if the threat of nuclear winter was overstated.
I read this as: oh it wouldn't be so bad. We could probably shoot many of them; and many won't make it, probably. This is incredibly optimistic; Russia has started modernization of its nuclear arsenal long before us because it has a stronger reliance on nuclear deterrence in defensive capability than we do.
At the time of writing this, this is also the top voted comment. Simply terrifying. Every day I have the fear we're going to head straight into the new Cuban missile crisis and one that we may not be so lucky to escape.
we are probably heading towards that because the usa did the same thing that caused it already.
The crisis happened because the usa put bombs in turkiye which is super close to the ussr.
Now the usa has bombs in turkiye and other nato members near russia.
The issue is that we can't handle what we dish out, I guarantee if russia station nukes further than we stationed them to russia that we would freak out and threaten nuclear apocalypse.
the usa makes unnecessary enemies by acting hypocritical and basically pushing other nations around.
At one point we could have gotten russia in nato and could have slowly influenced it to be like the rest of nato.
Instead we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr.
"we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr"
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US gave Russia a tremendous amount of money in hopes it would aid its transition to a modern democracy... much of that money just disappeared and the former Soviet elites stole or bought up much of what used to belong to the state in the newly privatized economy. Meanwhile the KGB and organized crime in Russia joined forces and turned the country in to a corrupt dictatorship, which had a chip on its shoulder against the West and looked backwards to the glory days of the empire of the Soviet Union.
While all this was going on, the US considered the Cold War over and actually changed its military strategy to focus on fighting many small urban conflicts and terrorists rather than facing the USSR in a world war. It also scaled down its nuclear capabilities tremendously.
The US wouldn't have done any of these things had it wanted to "give Russia the middle finger".
This post oversimplifies several things, or gets them wrong. Most money were from the IMF, France and Germany, not the US, and it was in loans, it wasn't just aid. Clinton was a "personal friend" of Yeltsin, the same "elite" who stole tremendous amount of foreign money, refused to limit his power to create checks and balances, botched the privatisation and generally turned Russia into oligarchy with controlled media. He was also a person who led Putin to power. This "friendship" ended up in their collusion in 1996 elections to save Boris (already massively hated by then, due to the Chechen war and privatisation) against the communist opponent. Part of that is known as Xerox affair and is surprisingly well documented in English. Similar to Russia's involvement in the US elections 2 decades later, the US involvement didn't help Yeltsin much in 1996 actually (he did everything himself), but it made the population disillusioned towards the US, created a fertile ground for the national myth, and more importantly the collusion pushed aside Nemtsov, then the most popular politician with no ties to USSR. (does the name ring a bell? It should)
"Are they just expecting that all Russian nukes will actually make it to the US?"
Russia and the US have something like 5000 nukes each. Many if not all of those nukes are way more powerful than the ones that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even if only a small fraction of them make it, they'd likely be enough to completely destroy every major city in both countries... and cities are where almost the entire population lives. Plenty of remote areas will likely be hit too, because that's where the missile launch sites and military bases are.
All those huge "impregnable" bunkers you see in movies that were supposed to house governments in case of nuclear war were quietly decommissioned because it was realized that they couldn't survive hits from modern nuclear weapons and there's no way to hide them from today's surveillance technology.
So in an all-out nuclear war probably most everyone in Russia and the US would die from direct hits.. and that doesn't include knock-on effects from radiation poisoning and fallout, nuclear winter, complete infrastructural and governmental collapse (ie. no clean water to drink, all the animals dead, no food and perhaps even no ability to grow food).
As for other countries, I'd read that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the UK general in charge of his country's nuclear arsenal met his Russian counterpart and him whether he thought the movie Threads was an accurate depiction of what would happen in a nuclear war between the two countries. The Russian general laughed and said the entire UK was designated an overkill zone.
yeah people don't seem to understand the reality of nuclear war, how much nations want to avoid it, and that russia isn't a paper tiger like the news claims.
Russia is a near equal to america in its nuclear tech and absolutely has the firepower needed to induce MAD back at us.
Its the dumbest thing to think for a second that its a good idea to push for any kind of war with russia because it runs the risk of a game over for all nations involved.
places like the uk are absolutely done for, the whole island would be a mess.
"[...]
a dramatic account of nuclear war and its effects in Britain, specifically on the city of Sheffield in Northern England.
[...]
A third and final attack targets primary economic targets such as the Tinsley Viaduct. This third attack causes massive structural damage to Sheffield; the blast and heat kill an estimated 12 to 30 million people in the U.K. in the wider exchange. [...]"
Just reading the Wikipedia synopsis of this films plot I already feel like it’s nightmare material.
How on earth we as in humanity want to keep weapons around that would render us this way is still beyond my comprehension.
I also don’t know that I want to be a survivor of a nuclear war. I will be honest, don’t think I could handle it. I have dogs and a wife that needs specialized care. Just thinking about the terrible things that could happen to them alone and not even getting into the rest of the people I care about has already managed to depress me now.
I’d rather avert circumstances than even risk exchanging nukes
Perhaps it is time we truly change those incentives once and for all.
Whatever “effectiveness” nuclear weapons have is not worth it. Rather relegate them to the dust bin of history under “terrible decision, do not recommend, keep away”
I realize it’s merely wishful thinking right now but it feels paramount to me
> Russian state of it's arsenal is likely going to be worse
Up until recently Russia was sending up American astronauts on Soyuz rockets to the ISS because they had a reliable system (based on the R7 ICBM) and we didn't.
> and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.
Intercepting ICBMs is orders of magnitudes more difficult than intercepting theater weapons like scuds because of the velocities involved.
This simulation was of 10% of each nations arsenal. If Russia launches 20% of their arsenal then it should make up for any amount of failure (and interception is likely to be negligible).
Worries me that we have so much motivated thinking trying to discount the risks of nuclear war these days. That's how you wind up in a nuclear war just like the one suggested here.
Russia has hypersonic reentry vehicles, they are pretty much impossible to intercept (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat), each of these MIRV contains 10-15 nuclear warheads or an unspecified number of hypersonic glide vehicles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_v... )with nuclear payloads. They figured out the hydrodynamics to make the hypersonic glide vehicles work, I believe the US is roughly a decade behind on that. Note that this requires genuinely hard math to do and the US funding on this was temporarily suspended because it was thought to be infeasible.
The publicly known US tests of hypersonic gliders all failed or rather disintegrated, as I said there is a genuinely hard problem to be solved here and the US stopped research into it in the 80s for quite a while.
There is nothing that makes hypersonic reentry vehicles uniquely difficult to intercept, I'm not sure why anyone would assume that. The US considered this a solved problem in the 1980s.
As for the US being "behind", the US was developing and testing endo-atmospheric hypersonic missile platforms as far back as the 1980s. Russia et al designed hypersonic weapons with significantly compromised terminal guidance performance, a compromise the US will not accept in operational systems. Terminal guidance is the hardest technical problem when designing long-range endo-atmospheric hypersonic weapons. That the US is starting to move these systems toward production after 30-40 years of research suggests that they've solved the problem of terminal guidance to their satisfaction.
The US has been physically inspecting Russia's arsenal (and vice versa) under the terms of New START: https://www.state.gov/new-start/
These inspections don't actually test the functionality, but we should have a pretty good idea of the condition of their nuclear arsenal, as they have of ours, as that is part of how MAD works.
From that page:
Implementation: The information provided through the treaty’s implementation contributes to reducing the risk of strategic surprise, mistrust, and miscalculations that can result from excessive secrecy or decisions based on worst-case assumptions. Since the New START Treaty’s entry into force, as of late January 2022, the two parties have conducted:
* 328 on-site inspections
* 24,000+ notifications exchanged
* 19 meetings of the Bilateral Consultative Commission, and
* 42 biannual data exchanges on strategic offensive arms subject to the treaty.
Treaty Duration: The treaty’s original duration was 10 years (until February 5, 2021), with the option for the Parties to agree to extend it for up to an additional five years. The United States and Russian Federation agreed on a five-year extension of New START to keep it in force through February 4, 2026. The treaty includes a withdrawal clause that is standard in arms control agreements.
Russian Compliance: Although the United States has raised implementation-related questions and concerns with the Russian Federation through diplomatic channels and in the context of the BCC, the United States has determined annually since the treaty’s entry into force, across multiple administrations, the Russian Federation’s compliance with its treaty obligations.
U.S. Compliance: The United States is in compliance with its New START obligations. The Russian Federation has criticized U.S. procedures used to convert B-52H heavy bombers and Trident-II SLBM launchers. The United States stands by its conversion procedures, which render the converted SLBM launchers and heavy bombers incapable of employing nuclear weapons thereby removing them from accountability under the treaty.
Most experts seems to think that interception is basically impossible to do reliably with current technology, even before you get into the question of countermeasures, and that with the sheer quantity of warheads, it's basically a given that a large majority would land.
Whether the entire six thousand or so warheads would explode, or the one-and-a-half thousand deployed missiles would actually reach their targets is anyone's guess.
However, bearing in mind that even one nuclear explosion is capable of killing about a million people, if detonated in an urban center, it really just takes a comparative handful of working weapons, say 1-2%, to kill as many people outright, in the initial explosions, as the number that died in the whole of WW2[0].
[0]: 1-2% of 6000 = 60-120, 60 to 120 * 1million = 60 to 120 million, around the same ballpark as deaths in WW2. That's obviously just the initial direct deaths, there would obviously be many more (an order of magnitude, at least) from follow-on effects. And this is ridiculously low-balling the estimate for how many of the warheads would be delivered to target: a more realistic estimate would be like, 90%.
the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.
Unlikely. The Russians have an actually effective interception system: nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles. For political or environmental reasons, the US doesn't use those. Everything we use has at best a fifty percent interception rate and the Russians have more reentry vehicles than we have interceptor missiles.
These 3 simulations are so much different from each other that you can't really extrapolate behavior of one from behavior of another. And, yeah, it would be naive to have faith in almost any simulation of this complexity.
Also, what is your source that the climate simulations underestimated? It was my impression that global warming has been much less dramatic than people expected it to be back in the 90's.
> it would be naive to have faith in almost any simulation of this complexity.
Careful now. There is a thin line between no having faith in a simulation and dismissing it entirely.
If you would take a look at last year's IPCC report in climate change you can see how dire the situation is, never mind that potentially in the 90s in was predicted to be even more dire.
The point is that complex simulations do show the trend, and in light of extinction the most rational response would be to assume the worst outcome and work as hard as possible to avoid that.
BTW "global warming" is linguistically a bad word, since it makes it seem that "oh well, it's just getting warmer". What is actually happening, among many things, is that weather will get more extreme (remember these one-in-a-thoisand-year events that now happen almost regularly, like the heat dome last year in SF https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_h... ? This is where it's going.)
Right now the effects aren't "dire," they're pretty meh, unless you are in an industry that is very sensitive to temp changes or small sea level rises. They are forecast to be dire, but that's what they said it would be like now back when I was in school.
2nd order effects like extreme weather getting worse is a lot less supported than the first order that temperatures are getting warmer, which is 100% proven, so "global warming" is really more accurate.
Also, we don't even have the data set to determine what a 1000 year event is. This itself is based off of a model. And, in any event, the land area of the earth is 200 million sq miles, so in any given year, you would expect to see a 1000 year event over 200K sq miles, which is bigger than California.
The blaming individual extreme events on global warming in general is also an error. The same exact error that people make when they say "it snowed a lot this winter. Global warming is a hoax."
>Keep in mind similar simulations underestimated climate change. They underestimated Covid. It would be naive to have faith in the 20 million estimate.
I think it would be safe to assume that all those estimates were politically motivated, rather than based in fact.
Assume? I would never assume, especially about motivations. Princeton might be a prestigious university, but the simulation was done by humans. I wouldn't assume anything other than human fallibility.
I don’t think you can use unknowable things like ‘state of the nuclear arsenal’, or ‘potential ability to negate or intercept nuclear weapons’ in your simulation as they’re probably state secrets, even if you did somehow know what they were.
This is a very pessimistic (but still quite possible) scenario and hopefully it will not realize. I once per year watch myself the movie "The Day After" (1983) to remind me of the horrible consequences.
This should probably be required watching on a population level - to make sure people don't get complacent and are aware in the risks and can push their politicians to do everything they can do avoid such an outcome.
NATO & USA in particular already said they will respond conventionally in the event of Russian nuclear first strike.
Also in simulation no Russian fighter jets / bombers were intercepted & shot down while bombing Europe, which is very (> 70%) unrealistic. Russians do not even try to enter Ukrainian airspace, and it's much less saturated with air defence systems
If the russians use small yield nukes not much bigger than regular missiles I really doubt any nato response would happen.
The reality is a response is a possible avenue to real nuclear war, its stupid to basically commit suicide like that.
Russia wouldn't dare let anything reach the rest of europe, any nukes they use are almost certainly going to be small yield which nato wouldn't bother responding too, they are about as big as regular missiles.
So, you propose normalization of nuclear strikes usage by invading countries? Which are committing genocide, war crimes, terror. Yet losing a conventional war because of their utter stupidity and incompetence.
Russia is losing a conventional war to the US, hence why we're talking about the possibility of a nuclear strike. This will not normalize using a nuclear device in an invasion, they're just not that useful tactically.
The bigger issue that needs to be discussed is that we need to recognize that the current balance of power in the world is unstable. The US hegemon is weakening and in this new normal, the current border configuration is unstable and will be corrected to more stable borders. We should accept this not fight a world war over what is an inevitable adjustment.
No, that's not how dynamical feedback systems work. Border expansion is held in check by the opposing force from the territories being expanded into. When one country can't protect their borders, the over-extended regions are likely to eventually get annexed up until the point where the country's force can provide sufficient opposition. That's the way of the world.
Nuclear weapons don't change this calculus significantly, except for the fact that a country with nukes can now defend their borders even with an incompetent conventional force, making expansion into a nuclear power negative-sum. Nuclear weapons do not make it easier to annex new territory as they are practically useless tactically. So there is no scenario where a fascist with nukes takes over the world.
What nukes do is massively raise the costs of intervention by stronger conventional forces. For the same reason it is negative sum to annex territory from a nuclear power, it is negative sum to interfere with the core interests of a nuclear power. If Putin judges Ukraine as key to Russia's survival, he may judge the cost of retreat to be similar to how he would judge encroachment on Russian territory, thus making the use of nuclear weapons rational. What nuclear weapons do is force the recognition of the core interests of your adversaries. There is a stable state where the core interests of Russia are recognized, with any further expansion having negative cost. The world will get to that point one way or another. Endless ratcheting of tension in dynamical systems cannot be contained forever.
I think both conventionally and turn off all Russian infrastructure infrastructure using a cyberattack. Nearly everybody in the world uses iPhone and Android, so for the US it’s not that hard to take control of the machines they want to (and probably have already done it).
I'm 0:47 into the video, and it's already stretched past credulity to the breaking point. We've seen how completely the kleptocracy has crippled the Russian military. Does anyone seriously think that a single weapon would be used, given the extremely low probability of making in through a number of steps including:
* Someone, a person with family and friends, has to follow orders that could kill them and everyone they know, to advance a war they possibly don't support.
* They have to target the right location, and not some relatively empty area to appear to be doing their job
* The missile has to correctly launch
* A single very anticipated launch has to avoid all interception
* It has to accurately make it to its destination
* All of the parts that have been in storage since the end of the cold war have to have been properly maintained, maintenance that costs the US about $10,000,000 per year each. Any small mismatch in timing, composition of the core due to nuclear decay or humidity and corrosion, and electronics all have to work within microseconds of each other.
To use a single weapon with all these risks, and break a 75 year Taboo against their wartime use, is not something a rational actor would do.
Furthermore, the entire US military would have positive confirmation within 90 seconds of the nuclear detonation, and begin to react according to existing well tested plans.
Next, the US and NATO have a vast array of non-nuclear responses that would effectively cripple Russian ability to project force beyond its borders. The conflict in Ukraine is just the stuff we can put into the hands of those quickly trained, and NERFed enough to avoid deep strikes into Russia.
Also, you have to look at the human factors of those who support Putin internally, they don't want to loose all their spoils of their efforts which are mostly situated outside of Russia.
I was trying to highlight likely failure mechanisms that could occur if the order were given. I strongly believe that only a small percentage of their nukes would work (2-10%)[1], so a solo launch is less than likely to work. However if things to escalate, that's still 120-600 detonations if they were to the 6,000 weapons in their stockpile.[2]
In which case, you wouldn't be able to collect if I was wrong
[1] Guestimate -- based on no provable facts or sources
By now, I think you can safely drop the assumption that we are dealing with a rational actor. Also those around Putin have been put into place for decades. He's been scheming at least since his KGB job in East Germany (GDR) where he is still revered to this day. He is effectively ruining the lives of every Russian at this point including the oligarchs.
If the Russian elites cared about Russia at all or even just their own lives, they would move to remove Putin by any means necessary as soon as possible. The fact that he still holds power after this legendary series of fuck ups and his oligarch killing spree tells you one thing: we cannot rely on rationality and people clinging to their families, lives or wealth. It's emotional chaos fueled by propaganda.
Putin is just one man, and he can do nothing without supporters. It is the Putin regime which is in power, and were Putin alone to fall from power it's not clear that anything substantial would change.
During WW2, had Hitler's assassins been successful and Himmler had taken over, it's not likely that the Holocaust would have been prevented and Germany might have been even more effective during the war without the bumbling Hitler in charge.
Meaningful change will only come from replacing the entire regime, not just one man.
But the Putin regime has been very successful in completely neutering all of its opposition, so it's not clear where such regime change will come from. Maybe from the general public, but they have been cowed in to submission or bought in to the propaganda.
One thing that could throw a monkey wrench in to the works is the use of nuke or even just Putin's order to use nukes. Then he may well be assassinated or his regime toppled by people who don't want the world to end.
Putin is likely very aware of this threat to his rule, so it's unlikely he will use nukes deliberately. But there is still too high a chance that nukes will be used accidentally, as the world has repeatedly come close to accidental nuclear war even in peacetime. During outright war and in a time of such heightened paranoia, the odds of accidental nuclear war are much higher.
The music seems to take direct inspiration. I guess the art in both is inspired by the massive radar screens from 80s/90s movies, which are in turn inspired by the graphics used by the US government's screens.
At the highest level, war is like business, full of opportunities and risks that have to be carefully weighted.
Contrary to somewhat popular belief, there are winners and losers after a war.
The US partially built its supremacy thanks to the two world wars.
But nuclear weapons are obviously different.
I highly doubt that this kind of simulation is realistic.
We're generally bad at predicting things that never happened, and this is why it is unlikely to happen, not because of the colossal death count, but because of the unpredictability.
Well, when you impose economic embargo (as the US did on Japan), and you supply one of the parties (the UK) with weapons, you might not necessarily initiate the war, but you in fact actively participate in it. You can get away with that involvement if the threat is relatively minor (like in Vietnam or Afghanistan cases), but history tells us you can't avoid entering the war if what you do is an existential threat for the other party. Now try to replace Japan with Russia and UK with Ukraine and you can see where it is going. Also, in this war it's not necessary to occupy the territory, so while the US territory was safe during both world wars, it's not the case now.
Did you ever have a bad manager or a hierarchy of bad managers before where the most inept kept getting promoted, utilizing bad metrics and estimates? What makes you think the same situation can't happen at the highest command?
Gervais implies that intelligent mass-murderers were always at the top and the only way society functions is by having a clueless buffer that shields the population from this knowledge. Not very optimistic either.
Year 1 will be about survival, fiefdoms and immediate resources.
Years 5 will be managing latent fallout and wars over territory and natural resources.
Year 20 we will focus on the rebuild, children will only know this as 'life'
Years 50-100 we repeat and maybe this time finish ourselves off.
We are a war species, and we're not unique in that regard. Any organism sufficiently advanced enough will reach this from the moment they're able to assign value to a resource.
In the future we'll determine that the Pleiades[0] cluster has contained enough earth material to be a functioning hot backup of our own home this whole time. ~400 light years away, Pleiades aka Messier 45 can carry us until it disperses in 250 million years.
It's likely we are the apes in comparison to our brothers in the Seven Sisters area. The suns don't set there, they just move to make room for the others.
[0] - The same can be said of many asterisms that currently make up that portion of the Golden Gate
Doesn't attempt to describe the context in which this Russian first strike against NATO might occur.
Doesn't mention battlefield nukes, EMP attacks or even high-altitude demonstrative detonations that might more plausibly proceed an actual high-yield land strike on Europe.
Doesn't even mention the yield of this first strike, either. Really, what's the point?
They could have done this "simulation" back in 1983. In fact, it makes me think like I'm watching a certain movie from back in '83.
On (I think the atp) a podcast one participant said that he lived in a part of New York, that would be hit first in a nuclear war and he doesn’t have to think about survival or living in a post war world.
That was mindblowing to me, make sense too.
Why live in a world, where you are probably killed by radiation, looters or injuries and suffer a painful death. Watching your family die in front of you, when it could be over in an instant.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want war :D
But at least the podcaster has a point.
There was a report published by FEMA in the early 1980s about the outcome of a nuclear war.
The summary was worst case scenario (for US) would be 50% of population dead, and we wouldn’t reach pre war GDP for a decade.
Basically what happened to Eastern Europe during WWII.
It’s not good. It’s bad. But it’s not “end of the human race” bad.
Paraphrasing the report: “There is no credible scenario where our knowledge of germ theory will be destroyed, and that knowledge will save the lives of millions, regardless of whether there is a nuclear war.”
I wonder what’s the amount of warheads that can be deployed within minutes-to-hours. For the sake of argument, let’s say the US have around 5-6k warheads. How many are somewhere in cold storage, far away from their potential launchers or carriers - and therefore less likely to be used.
I think that comparing these numbers would a what determines the outcome very significantly. Once communication is down, the armies will become logistically crippled.
The scenarios shown in the simulations were only using a tiny percent of each country's entire arsenal, the final fireworks being caused by 150-300 nukes. And that also didn't even speculate on new developments, such as 'typhoon nukes.' A tiny fraction of nuclear war is enough to completely end modern civilization. Unrestrained nuclear war is enough to end civilization.
Enough are ready to fire to turn a large percentage of the world into a glass parking lot. At least that’s the case with the US, French and UK arsenal. I have serious doubts about the status of the Russian arsenal, but I’m sure they could do an unimaginable amount of damage even if they landed only 1% of them.
Paris, Dublin (radar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93NATO_relations...), Madrid, Toyko & Australia not being targeted make it that much more unrealistic. Even if those were hit any other remaining urban area would have its population get dragged in for peace keeping & humanitarian clean up.
But if you’re going for maximum economic damage, a capital whose economic value is largely in tax avoidance wouldn’t be that high up on the list since in a post-apocalyptic world, taxes will be the least of everyone’s worries.
I made another comment agreeing that this simulation is overly simplistic in multiple ways. It‘s basically a simulation of US and Russian nukes with European soil as the first strike. There’s no way other nuclear powers would sit idly by.
I’m not sure anything is gained by nuking Tokyo? I guess you could smash a few US airbases here, but it’s anyone’s guess if they contain nuclear warheads.
How would russian aircrafts with known nuclear capability cross so much NATO airspace without being taken down immediately?
Also, I don't think answering a single nuke with another nuke would be a smart move, especially when the radioactive fallout would hurt allies. Conventional destruction of nuclear and military capabilities seems a much more reasonable and efficient defense to me.
It’s a shockingly simplistic simulation to the point that I’m not sure attaching the Princeton brand to it is doing them any favors. I was expecting to learn something new but this is even more basic than I could have guessed knowing nothing.
> It’s a shockingly simplistic simulation to the point that I’m not sure attaching the Princeton brand to it is doing them any favors.
Nuclear fearmongering is the new "current thing", so they are hurrying to take advantage of that.
But such is the academic world nowadays (more citations = more headlines = more cash for the university and the lab). Mass media is on the same track (bad incentives in action, amplified by internet)
Yeah this stood out to me. That whole area is covered in anti-air defenses for this explicit purpose. Practical experience today show's Soviet-era AA systems downing cruise missiles regularly in Ukraine.
There's a bizarre foundational assumption that during the "tactical" phase every weapon committed is successful, and I have no idea why. In fact it's not clear at all to me why there even is a "tactical" stage of the war: the EU powers being obliterated with nuclear weapons would immediately target Moscow for decapitation strikes, they have no reason to hold back.
Does it matter if not all tactical weapons are delivered? The point is escalation. There is no meaningful defense against ICBM/MIRVs. Also, you can rest assured that a regime that launched nukes first will not be susceptible to decapitation.
In the movie WarGames [spoiler alert] in the simulation after the first strike everyone nukes everyone, to ensure the other remaining economies don't become superpowers. I'm not sure if that's realistic or only a tool for the plot.
Phew, my country seems mostly intact. If you're sufficiently far from a major city or a base, you should be fairly safe. Although getting food could be a problem in the long-term if nuclear winter sets in, which seems uncertain based on what I've read.
"If you're sufficiently far from a major city or a base, you should be fairly safe."
You have to be far from missile launch sites too, which tend to be scattered over many remote areas.
Hydroelectric dams, power stations are also likely to get hit, so say goodbye to electricity.
Say goodbye to modern medicine too, as pharmaceutical plants will not function without power, working supply chains and a skilled population to staff them. So anyone who depends on modern medicine (like blood pressure medication, dialysis, etc) to survive is going to be dead. Antibiotics will quickly run out, and so even minor infections that are treatable today will become life-threatening.
Hospitals will be completely overwhelmed (if they survive at all), so say goodbye to hospital care for any serious conditions. Childbirth will go back to the stone age, and child mortality will skyrocket.
You'd also have to survive the fallout... water's going to be unsafe to drink pretty much anywhere as it'll be contaminated and water treatment plants are unlikely to survive either.
The fields will be contaminated with fallout, all the animals are likely to die. You'll likely die of starvation or thirst unless you're a survivalist who happens to be in their bunker when the nukes hit (because there's unlikely to be any warning)... even then, how long is their food and water going to last?
The handful of survivors unlucky enough to live through a nuclear war will emerge on to a world devastated on a scale that's beyond imagining. Most of them would probably rather be dead, and the suicide rate among survivors will likely be high.
Except when you realize that the Toulouse region is actually a bit significant in terms of aviation / space R&D, so we're probably not very far on the target list for France.
Which at least, makes "dying very quickly and hopefully without too much pain" a plausible exit scenario in case of nuclear war :shrug:
How many detonations are groundbursts and how many are airbursts? The latter produce a very limited fallout, so it's a key question for anyone living away from the targets of direct strikes.
I've been wondering, though - those don't really help you unless you move there full-time. I think that most flights would be cancelled in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and even if you have a private plane, a nuclear explosion wouldn't have to that close to fry enough of the electronics to ground that plane.
Nevermind that you’d have about 10-15 minutes from launch of the inbound missile to get out of the urban center you inhabit, get to your plane, take off, and get 20 miles away.
You’d basically need a helicopter with you at all times, and realtime ICBM alert data. Not impossible, but not available to average hundred millionaires.
> Surely NZ must be targeted all over when this has already become a meme
Why would that be the case? Destroying rich people is not the goal of nuclear weapons. (There are much easier ways to kill them, if a nuclear armed state wishes so.)
> I don't get how that is a viable survival attempt.
New Zeland doesn’t have nuclear weapons. This is their declared policy. In case of a global nuclear conflict you can waste warheads on them, but any warheads aimed at them have better use against the weapons or the cities of your nuclear armed enemies. (Either as direct means of preventing a launch against you, or as a retaliation to preempt an attack with.)
It is also very far from almost anywhere. Which helps in three ways: it is unlikely that the country gets dragged into some neighbourly small scale war by accident, it makes the country less threatening in a post-apocalyptic world, and it somewhat protects the country from radioactive fallout.
Is it guaranteed that there won’t be a nuclear attack agains NZ? No, of course there are no hard guarantees about anything. But on a strategical level it is reasonable to expect to be safer than many other places.
The Māori have a contentious relationship with the colonialists who took their land. I would not expect them to welcome the very people that are to blame for tossing nukes around. They are ferocious warriors and they will take back their islands.
I’m sure there will be all kind of security threats. But you see that is nothing new. If you have that much you need some level of security to protect yourself.
I don’t btw how you imagine this btw. It is not like the millionares would arrive with fanfare and start a procession around the island. There won’t be announcements on the news that so and so is now here taking your land.
They won’t arrive and start evicting Māori. The land is already theirs. Somewhere in New Zealand there are houses right as we speak (probably very nice ones!) owned by foreign millionaires.
This is much more likely to how it will happen: A non-descript jet arrives at an airport where jets arrive all the time. A black car takes the passengers to their own holiday home. Probably a gated compound at the edge of a smaller city. If anyone is watching the place they notice that the lights stay on more often in the last few days. But it is hard to get emotional about that. And then suddenly the news announce that something very bad happened at a far away place. That is it.
I think once an entire, visible class of people from the enemy (e.g. from Russia's view, the Silicon Valley millionaires) flock to a place, the place becomes visible on the global map and probability rises that it might just get a rocket.
The safest places are probably also those places that Larry Page would now like, like poor third-world countries that yet have some level of autarky.
it's so incredibly naive, shortsighted, hypocritical and foremost childish to blame everything that's gone wrong on everybody before (except?) you. because you'll do better, sure, lol. people are people, people are alike all over, and in all times. that's what needs to be realized in order to begin trying to do better; realize that you're the same. i think nobody but the generations who actually experienced one or two world wars could have done better to maintain peace during the last 70 years. now it's time to see if the ones who came after them still have it in them, only knowing hardship from their parents' experiences. but i see very little hope for the ones after those.
I don’t think I’d do better, but that goes two ways. The generation before me blames the generation before them. Thinking that I’d be any different is a bit arrogant (if a nice dream).
I'm a late boomer (1961). I don't blame the generation before me. I've known lots of them. My values, who I am, and what I do, stands entirely on their shoulders.
I think you are kind of past the age where you would blame the past generation. It’s something you mainly do at ages <30. When you get older your thinking becomes a bit more nuanced.
You jest, but I owned a house less than a half mile from a river where there was an acid spill in 1997 from a phosphate plant. River was caustic enough to impact the gators in it. Didn’t spend much time walking through it or wrestling the gators. Although I was chased by an angry turtle once.
As I recall there was some with scarring from the initial spill, but don’t recall reports of dead gators—they tend to be pretty resilient. Fish were killed off, though. Basically the gators left the affected area for a few years. Probably because the food chain impact.
Lumping all of the boomer gen into one group isn’t bright. If I look at Xers and millennials, they have distinct subgroupings that vary from hyper responsible to nihilistic. The boomers were the same, they’re just getting old. It should also now be fairly apparent that voting doesn’t seem to change that much in Western “democracies” regarding this particular topic. No matter who gets in, the bankers and the military contractors seem to make billions. When the boomers did rebel (and they did in a very major way), some of them were shot and killed, others were beaten by cops in the street, and still more of them were hit with fire houses at close range. The late 60s were hell. Yes, there are tons of boomers who suck, but my own generation is pretty shitty too (older edge of millennial).
Was anyone else surprised by the very low number of fatalities?
At 1:06 in the video "The Tactical Plan" says Russia sends 300 nuclear warheads and NATO responds with approx. 180 warheads, but the immediate casualties are estimated only 2.6 million.
Maybe I've been utterly misinformed, but I thought just one "modern" nuclear warhead detonating in any major city in the world would kill more than that instantly.
For 480 of them to go off and only kill 2.6 million people is kind of shocking, really.
I have two guesses: this simulation is really inaccurate, or the average warhead is actually quite small and targeting military assets instead of civilian ones. A nuclear bomb on a military facility maybe only needs to be big enough to destroy a few square miles, not big enough to level Manhattan.
edit: after searching, average ICBM is 500-1000 kilotons which basically destroys most buildings in 50 square miles and causes third degree burns for around 150 square miles (probably killing most). Nuke map shows 1.5 million fatalities in downtown Manhattan with 800 kilotons
> average ICBM is 500-1000 kilotons which basically destroys most buildings in 50 square miles and causes third degree burns for around 150 square miles (probably killing most).
OK, makes sense to me.
> Nuke map shows 1.5 million fatalities in downtown Manhattan with 800 kilotons
Huh? That means there are only 1.5 million people in 50 square miles of Manhattan? (ignoring the 150 of third degree burns) That seems terribly low to me.
Manhattan in it's entirety is 22 square miles [1]
So one "average" nuke will easily kill everyone in all of Manhattan and a ton of the surrounding area... but that's only 1.5 mil?
They are immediate casualties. This means they died immediately. Hundreds of millions if not billions would die over the next few weeks, depending on the number and size of the nukes.
In countries like the US where a sizeable part of the population depends on advanced medical care for survival the initial deaths are but a start. I would expect the DOW and Dupont facilities that produce the precursors to keep us alive would be ashes in the first few minutes.
Wait, nobody else thinks that if Russia uses a tactical nuclear weapon that North Korea won’t see a window of opportunity to fire one or more over at Japan or South Korea?
I mean technically that war is only at cease fire.
What would be the benefit to NK leadership to do so? The war may be "only" at cease fire right now, but chances are that SK and Japan (not to mention the US) would consider the use of nukes sufficient reason to storm Pyongyang and decapitate the leadership structure before they get nuked again.
Kim Jong Un knows that he will die if he actually uses nukes, so chances are he won't.
USA might be so busy with the war in Europe, the middle east, India vs Pakistan, China invading Taiwan, etc that is doesn't have a lot of resources to help defend South Korea.
That's why it could be considered an opportunity for North Korea.
The USA would have to be very very busy indeed to overlook the nuking of close allies. Also, South Korea itself is absolutely armed to the teeth and it is entirely unclear to me that North Korea stands any chance of winning a war even if they do get a nuclear first strike off.
Such "simulations" should be seen as a tool for thought, not as truly accurate scenario of a most probable future. It is rather like assigning some numbers to a qualitative argument in a debate. To keep the complexity in check, you leave out everything that you think is not relevant to the overall outcome of the simulation. To challenge such a simulation, a critic must present his or her own simulation showing that the omitted factor may well be relevant instead.
In the Princton simulation the participants use only a bit more than 10 percent of their arsenal. Assuming that most warheads get through, simulating an intercept rate would be redundant if one also assumes that the margin of error on how many of their arsenals participants would use is much larger.
Likewise, focusing on Russia and the USA already covers almost 90 percent of all nuclear warheads. Simulating the other nuclear powers would probably not change much in the overall picture.
However, in view of the complexity of the influencing factors and the multitude of possible scenarios, the fundamental question arises as to whether such simulations can at all provide deeper general insights into the topic than what we already vaguely suspect.