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Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

#121

Post by dzhiurgis »

pstrateman wrote: post #61
newacc9 wrote: post #35

Nuclear war is survivable for the elite in their underground bunkers, and they're the ones who get to decide if it happens. People live in Hiroshima now, its not like everything turns into Chernobyl. If you survive the initial blast you have to stay inside for a couple of weeks until the radiation deteriorates. But then you'll probably starve unless you're surrounded by preppers like in Utah. I think its going to hap…

The scale of modern nuclear weapons make Hiroshima look like a toy. Every potential position of a nuclear second strike would be hit with a warhead. That's huge swaths of land converted to nothing for 2-5km in every direction. Humans might survive, but not in places with nuclear weapons. South America and Africa looking pretty safe right now.

> 2-5km in every direction

That's what? 200k-500k people? There's thousands of cities sized like that.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

#123

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

croes wrote: post #58
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #40

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.

Reasonable people can be hard to come by when the world is ending. I imagine that even the most ordinarily level headed person might become a bit emotional when nukes starting dropping on their country.

Also 'winner' might not be the best choice of words for this situation.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

#124

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #120
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #40

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.

Putin is dead already, it's just a matter of time.

We are all, given enough time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

#125

Post by senectus1 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #120
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #40

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.

Putin is dead already, it's just a matter of time.

Assuming that happens, who replaces him?

Does someone pop down the local gulag and release Navalny? Or is there a cronie that potentially worse than Putin in the shadows?

Re: Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

#126

Post by monkeydreams »

Given the extent of Russia bio and chemical weaponry programs, I would think it quite plausible that the Russian president might seek to escalate with these tools rather than nuclear weapons. Other regimes have gone down the chemical path in the past without immediate or direct repercussions. Their use does not appear to immediately lead to a nuclear response, but they possess the attribute of being one of the most feared weapons in the Russian arsenal.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

#127

Post by yesenadam »

catpea wrote: post #98
matja wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those are the ones that we know about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov

I just added couple more, here are the video versions: Stanislav Petrov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EmLf4Xlq0 Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yprpoPc2g0k Vasili Arkhipov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLokpu4ixQE According to some comments "The Collapse Of Communism: The Untold Story" is a movie about Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky and there is a book "The Spy and the Traitor." And St…

The Petrov movie you linked to, The Man Who Saved The World (2014) is a very good documentary. In it, among other things, Petrov meets his favourite actor, Kevin Costner, who asks him how many people would have died had he followed orders. Petrov says, everybody. Also he gets an award at the UN and visits a US missile silo. With reenactments of him saving the world.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277106/

Re: Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

#129

Post by dzhiurgis »

senectus1 wrote: post #125
dzhiurgis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putin is dead already, it's just a matter of time.

Assuming that happens, who replaces him? Does someone pop down the local gulag and release Navalny? Or is there a cronie that potentially worse than Putin in the shadows?

Lenin - 200k executions, 5 million deaths due to famines

Stalin - 800k executions, 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, plus some famine and some miscellaneous brings to around 5million, some estimates upwards 20 million.

Everything after that sounds like a breeze.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?

#130

Post by bb88 »

reese_john wrote: post #86
Zworyking wrote: post #21

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…

> All it takes is one deranged individual. 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

In some firing squads there's only one bullet and the rest are blanks -- though if you've been in one, some say you can tell the difference between the bullet and the blank. The idea is to give a plausible deniability to those that follow the order: "It wasn't my gun that had the bullet."

If the method for delivering the nuclear order is routine and 99.99% benign (except for the 0.01% where it's not) and the order is checked only by machines, then no one would know except for the person that made it.

Further, to enforce compliance with routine behavior, one just needs to threaten the family of the subordinates. Or better yet, occasionally take one of your subordinates and make an example out of them, once every two years say. Send them and their family to labor camps never to be seen again.

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