People aren't good at predicting the results of things that haven't happened before.
How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
141–150 of 221 posts
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you prepare for the complete breakdown of society and 200 million survivors competing for resources that will support maybe 15 million people in a blasted, utterly destroyed landscape with no infrastructure or production.
The same way you win a gun fight when you only have a knife: be elsewhere. America isn’t the only place in this world where someone can have a good life. That said, how (200-15) million people can all simultaneously enact the same plan, that’s much harder.
Ha! Good point. Good time to take a lifecation to Africa.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#143I’m surprised by the bad response this article received. All media I’m aware of speak of nuclear war in very vague terms and suggest an outcome similar to that which we see in entertainment science fiction. Long before the war in Ukraine I have been occasionally trying to dig a little deeper into the actual possible outcome of a nuclear war, but found only vague or outdated information and I’m very grateful to the author of the article for doing good research.
Yes, it is based on major assumptions, but those truly are the best thing we have since the discussed situation is genuinely unprecedented.
I’m also surprised by the disgust people here express towards the supposed “normalisation of nuclear war”. Much like the general public was taught by films such as Terminator that AI is something that will end the world, the perception of nuclear warfare was similarly shaped by media. When AI started seeing widespread use in daily life it became important to address the ingrained misconceptions. In the same way, now that there’s a war in Europe and Russia is threatening the use of nukes it is important for people to have a reasonably accurate idea of what such use would entail.
The idea of “nuclear war is simply unacceptable and we must avoid it at all costs” is good very getting upvotes on social media, but truth is that taking all available steps to prevent such a war is equivalent to appeasing Russia in all cases.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I encounter a lot of people with the "species-ending nuclear winter" false belief, and their attitudes are usually something like, "Oh, what can you do? Just have a drink and enjoy the fireworks." I get the sense the author is working against this line of thinking, because there is in fact a lot you can do (both in terms of preparing and in terms of responding).
How do you prepare for the complete breakdown of society and 200 million survivors competing for resources that will support maybe 15 million people in a blasted, utterly destroyed landscape with no infrastructure or production.
Besides "be somewhere else", make it harder for other people to turn your country into a blasted landscape. Support ballistic missile defense.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#145Other things to consider: Weapon reliability -- particularly on the Russian side. Will many / most of their ICBMs even get off the ground? Will the warheads actually work properly? I'm not saying they're all duds but if I was Russia I'd maybe keep 100 maintained for the sake of demonstration. Willingness to launch -- this is probably a bigger problem on the Russian side (the Americans brainwash their soldiers better!…
>Weapon reliability -- particularly on the Russian side. Will many / most of their ICBMs even get off the ground? Will the warheads actually work properly? I'm not saying they're all duds but if I was Russia I'd maybe keep 100 maintained for the sake of demonstration. From the little I've communicated with people who would know (because they used to be in the IC), the vague answer is "Yes, they would work." >European…
That's a good point. Which leads into the question of how many missile subs already have killer 'tails' just waiting to blow them out of the water when they prep for launch. So what happens then if that first strike is weak?
Either way, a sub-based first-strike is strategically risky. You're far better off hitting a single city and capitalising on the resultant horror.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly part of a general trend I've noticed post Ukrainian invasion to "sell" nuclear war as a viable response (or at least not a deterrent for "going in there and fixing things dammit") These people have never been in a supermarket and looked at the countries where their food comes from apparently since shipping would pretty much be a dead industry with all port cities (and their port facilities) basically blown to s…
There's a trend where a nuclear attack on Russia is being encouraged as a response to invading Ukraine? Or am I misreading your first sentence?
Not exactly. There is a lot of noise that NATO should intervene directly in the war. An example of that is calling for a NATO enforced "No Fly Zone" (NFZ).
Of course NFZs have to be enforced to actually be NFZs and that means NATO shooting down Russian jets/helicopters/missiles that violate the NFZ. This would be a direct attack by NATO forces on Russian forces.
Such an attack, would give the Russian's a legitimate "out" for attacking NATO forces (say in Poland) where a lot of refugees and material is being shipped through to Ukraine. That would trigger Article 5 which says, briefly, "an attack on one is an attack on all." and we would be in a full hot war with Russia.
At that point, Russia can legitimately claim they "feared for their existence" and launch a nuclear strike (tactically or globally) against NATO countries (including the US) and that ends up with the US and Russian destroying a lot property using nuclear weapons.
There is an argument being made that Putin desperately wants to get attacked by NATO so that hey can threaten nuclear war, and cause NATO to back down. It certainly looks better at home if Russia is on the ropes because NATO is attacking it rather than being on the ropes because a former satellite state of the old USSR is handing it it's ass on a platter.
There is a lot riding on the outcome of the current conflict and it reached a point, quickly enough, that I believe it will reshape geopolitics for decades.
Throughout the Cold War there were people, on both sides, who felt "we could win such a war." Their definition of "winning" was somewhat twisted (as a full out war would result in knocking the world into a very very bad place civilization wise) and it was the subtext of the movie Dr. Strangelove. We have been exceptionally fortunate that we haven't tested their theories. I am, somewhat obviously, in the camp that full on nuclear hostilities would reduce the planet to a population of perhaps one or two million humans, mostly in South America and the Pacific island nations. But I am not anywhere close to being an expert on these things, just a systems analyst type.
So my observations have been:
Call: "We should go in there an kick the Russian's asses."
Response: "We won't because that would start a nuclear war, and we don't want that."
Response: "What if we would 'win' the resulting Nuclear war? Still not going to go kick there asses?"
If you watch any sort of "large conversation" like this, where part of a group wants some action and another part of the group doesn't want that action, you will see this sort of interplay. It happens in companies, it happens in counties, states, countries, and the world at large. Various voices attempting to achieve a sufficiently high level of consensus from the group in order to take an action. Failing to achieve a high enough level consensus results in "group antibodies" which are basically people who become so offended at the action proposed the switch to becoming active members of resistance and start trying to generate counter action consensus.
I have exploited this effect to create change in large organizations that were stagnant. You start by pushing just enough on the change to 'surface' the people who had been acting through intermediaries to act directly. Then you can identify them and have a one on one conversation to get them signed up for the change. Do that enough times to surface all the resistance, and then at some point the change just "goes through" because "everyone seems to think it is the right thing to do."
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#147I’m surprised by the bad response this article received. All media I’m aware of speak of nuclear war in very vague terms and suggest an outcome similar to that which we see in entertainment science fiction. Long before the war in Ukraine I have been occasionally trying to dig a little deeper into the actual possible outcome of a nuclear war, but found only vague or outdated information and I’m very grateful to the au…
You can bet that the #1 aim of Western governments currently is trying to figure out a way to neutralize the threat posed by Russian nukes, but until we figure that out, appeasing (or at least not antagonizing) Russia is all we have.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a trend where a nuclear attack on Russia is being encouraged as a response to invading Ukraine? Or am I misreading your first sentence?
Not exactly. There is a lot of noise that NATO should intervene directly in the war. An example of that is calling for a NATO enforced "No Fly Zone" (NFZ). Of course NFZs have to be enforced to actually be NFZs and that means NATO shooting down Russian jets/helicopters/missiles that violate the NFZ. This would be a direct attack by NATO forces on Russian forces. Such an attack, would give the Russian's a legitimate "…
> Of course NFZs have to be enforced to actually be NFZs and that means NATO shooting down Russian jets/helicopters/missiles that violate it
No, that's not actually the issue.
The issue is that the usual method of NFZ enforcement means preemptively destroying Russian air defenses first, to make it safe for aircraft patrolling the skies to find and intercept aircraft that might violate it.
Of course, at least one NATO member (e.g., Poland) has gone beyond calling for an NFZ to call for NATO peacekeepers on the ground for various purposes.
NATO’s Eastern flank is not super happy with waiting for Russia to attack them, given their demonstrated aggressiveness and rhetoric tied to historical imperial Russian territory.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#149"The world can have a little nuclear war... as a treat." Honestly the normalization of nuclear war on this forum is so disgusting that this article doesn't deserve a better response than that. Stop crawling up your own contrarian asshole that far. The "best" outcome of nuclear war will be so bad that you'll probably wish you were just incinerated in the blast. (And Russia will never in a million years show any kind o…
This is why NA is not really under threat.
Europe, on the other hand really should be preparing for the possibility of an attack. Which is where we get into trouble -- European NATO members _believe_ they are under the 'MAD' umbrella, but Putin doesn't believe it. And so they really should prepare their infrastructures for that possibility, rather than just waving it away as an impossibility.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like you have the order of things mixed up. The point is that destroying a financial hub of the world is a more effective way of collapsing civilization than destroying a port.
Could you provide at least some reasoning, if not evidence, to support this counter-intuitive assertion?
1. Moscow is definitely getting targeted, as it’s a big administrative centre. But it’s also a big population centre, so a revenge attack on a big population centre is to be expected.
2. Food and manufacturing nowadays depends on things like futures contracts, foreign currency exchange, lines of credit and so on. Not to mention the ownership of the companies doing it! The right type of damage to the financial system could be very impactful.
3. There’s plenty of bombs to go around.