71–80 of 89 posts
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>it references a possible destruction of humanity? imagine a guy who has a gun in a drawer at home and who smokes 2 packs a day. What is going to kill him with pretty high probability? The same way the humanity is with nuclear weapons and climate change.
How is climate change anywhere near as dangerous as a nuclear war?
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I didn't live through the drills, but they were pretty smart. The popular scorn towards "duck and cover" is completely undeserved. Those drills would have saved a lot of lives if war had actually broken out. The popular misconception of nuclear weapons is that there's a zone of total destruction and that's about it, but in reality there are huge areas where buildings would collapse or windows would shatter but people…
Which is very useful, but doesn't solve the problem that those people will almost certainly die of radiation exposure from fallout 2-4 weeks later, unless they get to a shelter within 15 minutes or so, and stay there for 2-4 weeks, at a minimum, without running out of supplies or going mad. Or that they'll die of starvation and disease 2-4 months later. Or of the effects of nuclear winter 2 to 4 years later. Or that…
Fallout is the one thing that would have been a major danger, but it tends to be directional depending on winds. Lots of people would have been close enough to an explosion to benefit from "duck and cover" without being subjected to lethal amounts of fallout.
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If you read "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser it provides further proof for that. At the height of cold war, US had over 400 missiles ready to strike Moscow directly, purely because of lack of coordination between different forces(so US Army wouldn't share their attack plan with US Navy or the Airforce, so combined they would have launched over 400 missiles at Moscow, a complete overkill).
The British also had about a few dozen warheads and several hundred decoys aimed at Moscow starting in the early 1980s. This was actually pretty sensible: the British wanted an independent deterrent, and with a small force, their solution was to deter the USSR by making sure Moscow would be destroyed. The large number of warheads and decoys was needed to guarantee success against the Soviet missile defense system aro…
A more challenging question is - what happens when you get hundreds of warheads detonating in a small area? At a guess that number of explosions would punch its way down into the bedrock. It might even leave a lake of molten crust that would take years, if not decades, to cool.
Detonations in seismic areas might trigger huge earthquakes. (SF would be a very bad place to be.)
Whatever the outcome, it's a fair guess there would be unplanned consequences of all kinds. Most would be very negative, which makes rational (?) planning difficult.
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The British also had about a few dozen warheads and several hundred decoys aimed at Moscow starting in the early 1980s. This was actually pretty sensible: the British wanted an independent deterrent, and with a small force, their solution was to deter the USSR by making sure Moscow would be destroyed. The large number of warheads and decoys was needed to guarantee success against the Soviet missile defense system aro…
Of course the UUSR government would have evacuated and dispersed into remote outposts, just as the US and UK planned to. (Although lacking space and possibly security, it's not obvious the UK government centres would have survived for long.) A more challenging question is - what happens when you get hundreds of warheads detonating in a small area? At a guess that number of explosions would punch its way down into the…
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Of course the UUSR government would have evacuated and dispersed into remote outposts, just as the US and UK planned to. (Although lacking space and possibly security, it's not obvious the UK government centres would have survived for long.) A more challenging question is - what happens when you get hundreds of warheads detonating in a small area? At a guess that number of explosions would punch its way down into the…
I can only guess that the initial explosion(s) would knock out the systems on ones coming after, so a huge percentage of them would be dead on arrival, unless they were decently spaced out, or somehow all arrived and detonated at the same time. (I guess explosion interference from previous explosion is a serious topic of research when it comes to nuclear warfare, if anyone has any good reading material on this please…
Key quote: "It appears that two weapons targeted on a silo must arrive at least ten seconds apart to avoid fratricidal fireball effects, and less than one minute or more than one hour apart to avoid fratricidal nuclear dust cloud effects."
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How is climate change anywhere near as dangerous as a nuclear war?
Climate change is already happening, and well on its way to being both catastrophic and irreversible.
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Climate change is already happening, and well on its way to being both catastrophic and irreversible.
So? What's the worse that can happen? Some cities slowly get flooded and some storms become more frequent? The worst case of nuclear war is all cities get destroyed and humanity is sent back to the stone age. They aren't even comparable.
The point here is that couple degrees change over several centuries have very profound effect upon human civilization. These days we've stepped into the territory of couple degrees (and probably more with the process having significant chances to become runaway) over several decades. That is bound to result in dramatic changes.
One can try to argue that our civilization today is well insulated from climate changes. And that one will be wrong. Just consider the very recent examples. 198x were the coldest point in the 80 years cycle and that resulted in low grain yields in USSR. It coincided with low oil prices thus resulting in food shortages in USSR, and as result the USSR just disappeared as the hungry people couldn't care less. The same thing with Arab Spring which was triggered by the drought and resulting food shortages : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
So :
1. human civilization is very vulnerable to climate change effects and
2. the climate change, more severe than the ones which have destroyed civilizations in the past, is happening now orders of magnitude faster than those climate changes of the past.
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It's not that strange since all countries are well aware that any country that would start a third world war would get annihilated within minutes by the rest of the world. If World War 3 didn't start during the Cuba Missile Crisis, it's extremely unlikely it would start now, not just because of the increased nuclear arsenals that all participants have accumulated since then but also for very trivial economic reasons.
The risk is still there. You can talk about economic reasons or MAD all you want, but then some idiot loads a training tape into the live system, or scientists launch a sounding rocket and somebody forgets to tell the early warning people, or a head of state starts going crazy, and suddenly you're one bad decision away from catastrophe. Some things are much improved since the Cuban Missile Crisis. For example, the US…
This is super misleading reasoning because of anthropic bias. There are many possible Earths. On all the ones were nuclear war happened, we wouldn't be here to observe it. You can only ever observe the "surprising" result that you continue to exist. So you can't use it as evidence in a probability estimate.
We came so close to nuclear war on multiple occasions. The chance can't be that low.
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The risk is still there. You can talk about economic reasons or MAD all you want, but then some idiot loads a training tape into the live system, or scientists launch a sounding rocket and somebody forgets to tell the early warning people, or a head of state starts going crazy, and suddenly you're one bad decision away from catastrophe. Some things are much improved since the Cuban Missile Crisis. For example, the US…
>I think of it in terms of probability per year. The fact that we haven't had a nuclear war yet suggests that this probability isn't super high. This is super misleading reasoning because of anthropic bias. There are many possible Earths. On all the ones were nuclear war happened, we wouldn't be here to observe it. You can only ever observe the "surprising" result that you continue to exist. So you can't use it as ev…
I was a child of the 1950's. Only 50 miles south of New York City, we little grade school kids were routinely drilled in cowering under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Every time I heard an airplane, I was afraid it was going to drop bombs. Popular Science ran features about how to build your own fallout shelter, and how Dad could prepare his family for the coming nuclear apocalypse. The understated, tragic ho…
Born in the late 60s, so teenager in the 80s in the UK. I recall that exact same fear of every passing aeroplane. In our case the cultural equivalents of OTB and DS were Threads and The Day After, and the Protect and Survive announcements that Frankie Goes To Hollywood sampled in Two Tribes. I find it interesting that the terror of the global thermonuclear war seems to have disappeared from the popular psyche, even t…