31–40 of 221 posts
The analysis is interesting and makes sense that populations wouldn’t largely be targeted, but it seems that’s assuming some kind of logical strategy to the war where the objective is to disable the forces of your opponent. That’s nice and tidy to then say populated areas won’t largely be targeted, but what if the objective in using them just becomes to create as much human suffering as possible?
>not an existential threat to humanity ... [but] it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back…
You can only shrug it off looking at the abstract numbers. You absolutely do not want to live through a period of history that's anything like that.
I'm not sure what universe this cat lives in, but I'm pretty sure Moscow would far more concerned with vaporizing Wall Street than in whatever naval stuff happens in Red Hook or Port Elizabeth (rather than Annapolis or Chesapeake). Or does he think wars are still won by navies instead of bankers? :-D
How can we be sure of even a conservative estimate of current warheads. Why wouldn’t US/Russia have significantly more nuclear war heads than they are a) allowed and b) saying they have? Surely it’s in their interest to have more than the other.
What do you gain from having additional warheads? If you have enough to kill all enemy decision makers and effectively destroy the enemy nation then having more doesn't do anything for you. The big cost is that your enemy will discover you are secretly amassing nuclear weapons and will escalate against you. Incentives seem to align to keeping relatively low numbers of nukes to me.
The Ukraine military has reporter their own casualties as 3'000 men so far, which is huge, yet 10+ times that many people go into sport arenas every week.
If nuclear war now would kill 50% of the global population, it would certainly define our history for centuries, yet half of us (i.e more than 4 billion humans) would still be there afterwards.
As a wannabe libertarian, I believe in freedom of speech and information. But if I had to choose a single topic of all that has to banned, it would be this. Due to several cognitive biases human perception tends to lean towards black & white depiction of the world. In nuclear war topic black is "we all are gonna die so there is no point to use the nukes" and white is "well, it's not that bad after all, maybe we could…
If you want to force people to lie or remain silent about what you consider a dangerous truth despite it being discernibly false in order to maintain a convenient fiction soviet style you probably aren't actually a libertarian.
The analysis is interesting and makes sense that populations wouldn’t largely be targeted, but it seems that’s assuming some kind of logical strategy to the war where the objective is to disable the forces of your opponent. That’s nice and tidy to then say populated areas won’t largely be targeted, but what if the objective in using them just becomes to create as much human suffering as possible?
I think it might be for the better that we think nuclear weapons are world ending in that it stops them from being used
For example if Russia were to commit further atrocities worse than actual nuclear war, and the civilized world refused to call their bluff because the cost of imaginary nuclear war is worse still.
Of course there are also scenarios where bluffs getting made and called are net-negative utility, and maybe you wouldn’t make those bluffs if you thought them being called would end the world? However Putin is already making threats of nuclear retaliation, so this point is probably moot.