81–90 of 140 posts
No. Its an everyone loses everything situation. Even narcistic authoritarians realize that. And in the event I am wrong, then so what, I'll be dead.
I think it's more plausible that Russia would use mini-nukes on certain strategic targets. It would be to signal that they're willing to go all the way, but without actually committing suicide by nuking western countries. The nuclear super-powers are in a situation where they have enough nukes to obliterate each other - many, many times over. But obviously no-one wants to take that chance - even with all the modern a…
Theories like nuclear winter have been disproven. Radiation is down to reasonable levels 10 minutes after explosions and down to zero well within 48 hours. What really sets nuclear weapons apart from conventional bombs is the yield to weight factor, making it possible to send them around the world with little effort and in some/great quantities. Nuclear weapons that leave much radiation would not have caused a large explosion (you want to use all of the energy for the burst). The effect will mostly be localized to the burst area and dependent on it being a surface or air burst).
The fear and uncertainty about nuclear weapons is only beneficial to those that have them and especially those that threaten to use them.
Reasoning about nuclear armageddon is hard because it's so singular. Traditional risk/benefit assessments don't really work when the outcome is so catastrophic that its utility goes to (negative) infinity. But I'd argue that this makes armageddon less plausible, because our psychological judgement of MAD is fundamentally different from normal risk assessment, and probably more cautious. A useful analogy is individual…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKcdlj-Uiw&ab_channel=ahhoo...
There is too much opportunity for an unstable individual to rise to power in a nuclear enabled country, and for said individual to have access to a nuclear arsenal.
We have a lot of really smart people in the world, and we really need to figure out some safety mechanism to make sure we don’t get wiped out by some such individual.
I think it's not a matter of if, but when. All it takes is one deranged individual. The only way to disarm the world of nukes is to unite under a rational, evidence and incentives based, benevolent world government. There's literally no other way to get rid of nukes if you've studied it. Even if every nation disarms they all live under the threat of another building them in secret. As soon as one of them suspects as…
Not true, at least in the US and Russia. More than one person in the chain of command needs to commit to an all-out nuclear attack. It is perfectly plausible that someone along the chain would not follow such order.
Here's a twitter thread (in German) explaining how this supposedly works in Russia: https://twitter.com/SwenRoschlau/status/1498575623941505026
> And why do we assume that the tech is sufficiently advanced to e.g. take out every major city at the push of a button? I guess you didn't grow up under the cold war? Typical nuclear weapons are 10-20 megatons of explosive force and can destroy everything within a city-wide radius or more. There is the capability to deliver 100-200 megaton mega weapons too (they have been tested in the 60's, look up Tsar Bomba). Del…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B83_nuclear_bomb
It can be dialed up to max 1.2 megaton.
Yields have come down since the 60s as delivery became more precise (you need less bang to kill a target if you can get closer) and MIRVs made it more efficient to put multiple devices on the same missile (they can spread out the bang over a larger target area, and as you say, they provide redundancy against countermeasures).
The threat of using nuclear weapons is much more powerful than actually using them because just about everyone thinks they can cause more devastation than they actually can. There have already been 2058 nuclear explosions on earth since 1945, close to 600 megatons in total. Theories like nuclear winter have been disproven. Radiation is down to reasonable levels 10 minutes after explosions and down to zero well within…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's much more involved than "literally the push of a button."
Not that much more. It's some phone calls to get the ball rolling. Whether or not various operators of nuclear ICBMs follow through, only one nuke is all it'd take to really massively change the world.
But it's still far from "literally the push of a button."
No. Its an everyone loses everything situation. Even narcistic authoritarians realize that. And in the event I am wrong, then so what, I'll be dead.
A reasonable human being would renounce counterattack to prevent mankind's annihilation. So the first one would be the winner.
The only use of nuclear nuke is to replicate if someone else use theirs (or rather to let them know you would, so they don't). If you don't replicate, you might as well dismantle all your nukes after that.
Unfortunately, there is no other way, if someone use a nuke, we must all die. I think Poutine and the others are well aware of that. Well I certainly hope so.