221–230 of 273 posts
Today, the 1950's era "Duck and Cover" drills [1] are sometimes laughed at. However, in the event of an actual nuclear blast, some simple preparation would save lives. When a bright flash lights up the sky, people indoors will naturally run to the nearest window to see what happened. This is the wrong thing to do, because the bright flash of an explosion is followed a few seconds later by a pressure wave, turning the…
Very often the problem doesn't seem to be the disaster itself, it's how unprepared we are to deal with it and the fact it's economically unfeasible. People can't just move to a healthy, habitable planet nearby because there is no such (known?) thing. Think about how devastating nuclear war would be on our lifestyle, when things such as viruses and a higher frequency of cold and heat waves are already disrupting it.
Why are we entertaining this utterly wrong article? It is myopically naive on a very dangerous topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spot on. In the entire scenario it seems we forget recent pandemic, and what happen few days in. In the case of nuclear war exchange there won't be any toilet paper, period. :) Joking aside, we forget how hooked we are to industrial society. Any such event would mean world without shops, internet, new version of anything... no progress... for at least one human lifetime. Back to stone age. Everything we are used to a…
You don't need a nuclear war for all that to happen. As I once read in one defence publication, USA is only 4 biggest fertiliser complexes away from the famine, assuming the assailing party can blockade the country to prevent food importation. The same is for the biggest oil, and fuel manufacturing complexes. USA is also "just" 50 power stations away from the grid becoming useless. USA is though much, much better off…
This is just an argument against a straw man. Nuclear war, is bad, any mass killing is bad, any society collapse is bad. It means actual prolongated suffering for most humans. Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome, I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse. It's like the back talk against climate warming, trying to down play it as a non extinction event. Well th…
The real strawman is in your comment though.
Who said nuclear war wouldn't be bad, just because it likely won't cause human extinction? Most people agree that regular wars are bad, and there never was any threat of extinction with them.
> But I digress, my point is that the rational community seems to have a smarty pants mentality
No, the rational community has a rational mentality. One can be against war without claiming it would be the end of the world. Hitting your toe is also not the end of the world but you probably still consider it a bad thing to happen.
This is just an argument against a straw man. Nuclear war, is bad, any mass killing is bad, any society collapse is bad. It means actual prolongated suffering for most humans. Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome, I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse. It's like the back talk against climate warming, trying to down play it as a non extinction event. Well th…
Spot on. In the entire scenario it seems we forget recent pandemic, and what happen few days in. In the case of nuclear war exchange there won't be any toilet paper, period. :) Joking aside, we forget how hooked we are to industrial society. Any such event would mean world without shops, internet, new version of anything... no progress... for at least one human lifetime. Back to stone age. Everything we are used to a…
Us city-people, yes. But there's enough people out there who are mostly self-sufficient, and there's even a bunch of urban preppers who would more than likely have a relatively easy time surviving complete industrial collapse of a nation.
(I say relatively easy because it would obviously be hard and unpleasant times for everyone, but for some that would be doable)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spot on. In the entire scenario it seems we forget recent pandemic, and what happen few days in. In the case of nuclear war exchange there won't be any toilet paper, period. :) Joking aside, we forget how hooked we are to industrial society. Any such event would mean world without shops, internet, new version of anything... no progress... for at least one human lifetime. Back to stone age. Everything we are used to a…
You don't need a nuclear war for all that to happen. As I once read in one defence publication, USA is only 4 biggest fertiliser complexes away from the famine, assuming the assailing party can blockade the country to prevent food importation. The same is for the biggest oil, and fuel manufacturing complexes. USA is also "just" 50 power stations away from the grid becoming useless. USA is though much, much better off…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is mostly Herman Kahn redux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn When there were 3 TV channels in the 1960s, in prime time programming you would often hear discussions just like this, from Kahn himself at times. Topic and people inspired the movie Dr. Strangelove and was at the forefront of the national consciousness in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. As a set of ideas and concerns, it was beaten to…
> Nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war That almost sounds plausible if you don't know the long history of nuclear weapons being almost used and avoided by sheer luck. Your thesis also breaks down once you remember that the USA is building 'small-scale' nuclear weapons with the precise intention of making them usable in current conflicts. Not to mention that the US have recently unilaterally withd…
Sheer luck is an odd way to describe "so much process and procedure and checks that when something does slip through the cracks it is correctly identified as anomalous and nobody gets nuked". Sure it might not make you feel warm and fuzzy inside and near misses show where to improve the system but to pretend it's just "sheer luck" despite god knows how many man hours being spent on the problem is naive, hyperbolic and infantile.
Finally, I wonder how bad the effects on reproductive health would be from the various radiation effects be? Humans who had trouble reproducing, with a much degraded medical system might face further downstream problems from that. Same thing with animal species, which might cause more food troubles.
Point is, there is significant survival trouble just from a violent collapse of civilisation, that estimating the probability of human survival is fairly impossible. Finally, if humanity becomes so critically weakened, even (by today's standards) minor disasters might become extinction events.