How destructive are nuclear weapons really? • Hacker News Board

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#161

Post by kortex » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #116

empthought wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"people who already knew how to farm without artificial fertilizers. Today we are nearly 8 billion and a much smaller fraction have any experience farming." As if it were an expensive and impractical proposition for more people to grow a little food. The reason fewer people engage in farming is that fewer people need to engage in it, and it is neither well-rewarded nor an intrinsically desirable activity for most peo…

John deer tractors digitally brick themselves if you replace a part without authorisation. Most modern Ag machinery will be gone. Modern farms don't plant seed from their last harvest, specialised farms cultivate seeds, and 'normal' farms buy them and plants them - that system will be gone. Most agrochemicals will be gone. Is your plan to give a random joe a field and a hoe? They will get maybe 30% of the yield a pro…

Hackers will suddenly become some of the most valuable people in society. Those tractors will be jailbroken inside of a month.

The average human wants to survive. If that survival is predicating on knowing about sustainable potato agriculture, you better believe that folks will learn.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#162

Post by me_me_mu_mu » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

Honestly if I ever find a terminal into the universe I’m rolling back humans.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#163

Post by kortex » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

I think it's important to have accurate models of the world, in order to make sound decisions. I don't think playing a macabre Pascal's Wager with nuclear armageddon benefits no one.

It would be an unmitigated disaster. There would be incalculable suffering. But all this talk of ending humanity as a species is not at all scientifically founded.

If anything, I think this raises the stake of responsible earth stewardship (same thing with climate change). If you believe you are well and truly fucked, fatalism kicks in and you mentally check out. But if you believe that you will most likely survive, and the amount of suffering you experience will be affected by your decisions, all of a sudden you have ethical skin in the game.

Why reduce nukes 90% if that 10% still glasses the planet? There is no qualitative change. But if a 90% reduction is the difference between 8B and 1B deaths, de-armament is now approachable, has real stakes, and makes a real impact.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#164

Post by leto_ii » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

extheat wrote: post #118

cmurf wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absurd. This kind of war destroys the government. You can only speculate what replaces it. And it'll probably be the winners (or non-losers) who dictate. 95% dead is a lot of corpses and demolished infrastructure with no fuel to operate heavy machinery to clean up anything. Europe after WW2 had the Marshall Plan. Who does this for WW3? China? India? Why not just take the intellectual property? There's no longer anyon…

I don’t think it’s absurd. Maybe overly optimistic, but life has found a way to make it to where it is today. I have no reason to not believe that humans would still be around and kicking (even some of the Dinosaurs survived to today...). Yes most of the governments would be gone—natural law would take over. But in the end, there are going to be survivors. Some of them are smart. Most of them can talk, read, write an…

> But in the end, there are going to be survivors. Some of them are smart.

Agreed. They however will be spending their time doing subsidence agriculture, basic medicine, hunting, building etc. just like anybody living in premodern conditions.

With 95% population loss you can be damn sure there will be no internet, electricity, water/sewage, refined fuel for transportation etc.

People will quickly revert to the middle ages because they'll have to. There will be no time to tinker with reinventing microelectronics.

> There will be technologically advanced places that will persist—no matter what

You can be basically sure that there won't. The 5% left will be in small remote communities, not in a few big cities.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#165

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #159

boole1854 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And can you share your source?

Sounds like it could be a classified source considering he’s referring to contemporary war plans

Elsewhere in this thread he links to David Teter's OPEN-RISOP as his source. [1]

The quality of OPEN-RISOP is generally pretty good, and the author worked at Sandia National Labs about 10-20 years ago. Targeting at least is pretty consistent with what I'd expect as high value targets. OPEN-RISOP's counterforce + countervalue scenario only tallies about 60M fatalities (~20% of US population) from the original attack. chakalakaps must be assuming cascading failures of infrastructure & food production after the initial attack (a la Threads [2]). While this is a distinct possibility, it's far from a given - and this is also one of those areas where being prepared (eg. having a year of dried foodstuffs stored, or a small personal garden) can give you a distinct survival advantage.

[1] https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/tree/main/TARGET%20...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#166

Post by oneoff786 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #155

ChuckMcM wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

This is basically what I hoped the parent might be alluding to. However, while I believe you about what you're describing, my personal experience of people wanting more tangible military action has not been "I think we could win a nuclear war", but rather, "I don't think it will come to nuclear war" (not sure if that's a better or worse attitude). Related: I usually find these conversations kind of gliding around wha…

Yes, obviously this. I support stronger military action. I don’t want nuclear war. Again, obviously.

All that blob of text is pointless. NATO need merely declare it has no offensive ambitions. Which it doesn’t. Then there’s no existential threat.

Whether Russia chooses to use nukes, likely against kyiv, is really independent of that distinction. Whether the west responds with nukes is all but assuredly “no”.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#167

Post by oneoff786 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

kortex wrote: post #158

Retric wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economies adapt to their resource constraints. A huge drop in global population means stuff like iron becomes less valuable as there is so much to extract from the remnants of our civilization. People talk about the lack of fuel, but Hydro power was initially built in September 30, 1882. It further scales to plenty of energy to bootstrap a civilization to modern extraction techniques. 15.8% of total global electricit…

Don't forget the billions of solar cells that would be literally all over the place, ready to be scavenged. Biofuel can provide most of the roles of coal and oil. The rest could be obtained from cracking the gigatons of plastic trash. We could be doing all this now , it's just not economical.

Biofuel is not really sustainable and requires fuel to harvest. Pretty much all major infrastructure equipment runs on fuel. The difficulty of shifting off of fuel is incredibly large.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#168

Post by ChuckMcM » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #155

ChuckMcM wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

This is basically what I hoped the parent might be alluding to. However, while I believe you about what you're describing, my personal experience of people wanting more tangible military action has not been "I think we could win a nuclear war", but rather, "I don't think it will come to nuclear war" (not sure if that's a better or worse attitude). Related: I usually find these conversations kind of gliding around wha…

You comment is precisely correct. It is the trolley problem writ large.

That is part of the reason why there are college courses dedicated to the topic, pages and pages of historical analysis of the choices made in situations in the past their their outcomes, analyses of the issues leading up to the "fulcrum point" of the crisis, and daily assessments (guesses) of the mental state of, and the response of, the key players in the situation.

That these situations are not popping up every day is a testament to the work of a functional state department and diplomatic corps. And it is why the people in that corps who heard a President extorting a foreign leader by withholding military support in exchange political favors, were so horrified.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#169

Post by oneoff786 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

chakalakasp wrote: post #152

chipsa wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides "be somewhere else", make it harder for other people to turn your country into a blasted landscape. Support ballistic missile defense.

ABM is hard. Evading ABM is much easier. Russia has some amazing tech for space based ABM interception evasion. ABM stuff works okayish against very small numbers of incoming warheads. ABM is completely ineffective against large numbers of inbound warheads.

I would be wary of any of Russia’s military capability claims.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#170

Post by oneoff786 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #57

mupuff1234 wrote: post #30

> For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live. This person is delusional. The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario.

> The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario. What? So civilisation is collapsing around you, and instead of a port and ships that can move grain and life-saving goods, you would rather have an army of bankers so that they can trade triple-A rated collateralized debt obligations for newly radiactive real estate?

Transporting grain makes a bit more sense than sending ground troops to Europe in a post nuclear war situation, but it’s still mostly nonsense. New York isn’t a hub of bankers. It’s the hub of commerce. Yes, it’s critically important.