Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

ki4u.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 130 posts

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#91

Post by aussiesnack »

stareatgoats wrote: post #79
aussiesnack wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because that is simply not in vogue The hostile responses you've go this do rather demonstrate your point. Building peace in a world bristling with nukes held by independent sovereignties with limited information about each other and often incongruent self-defined 'interests', is indeed a hard problem. Hard problems require work and thought and research to try to solve. If conditions change to make the problem hard…

Thanks, good to hear some agreement, and I share your hope even if I'm growing more pessimistic by the day. It always creates a stir to point out the absurdity of our current predicament. If I was a psychologist I might conclude that this is because many actually share my deep sense of despair, but can see no other solution that to trod on "in the machine" so to speak. I can sympathize, but we need to start doing som…

I'm an abjurer of optimism and pessimism equally, but hope can be useful. In a way the situation is even worse than your original comment suggested. More than just the indifference of being 'out of vogue', there's a lot of active hostility to the very notion of peacebuilding, as some responses suggested. But in the end, the main alternatives to active institution-and-culture-building are either to passively await a randomish fate, or pure militarism (whether defensive or aggressive). It's entirely predictable, given the growth in technology, that either of those alternatives does lead deterministically to catastrophe. Peacebuilding, frustratingly intractable though the problems may seem, is really all there is.

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#92

Post by aussiesnack »

bulbosaur123 wrote: post #84
aussiesnack wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because that is simply not in vogue The hostile responses you've go this do rather demonstrate your point. Building peace in a world bristling with nukes held by independent sovereignties with limited information about each other and often incongruent self-defined 'interests', is indeed a hard problem. Hard problems require work and thought and research to try to solve. If conditions change to make the problem hard…

The reason this problem is so hard is because it's tragedy of the commons. That might just be our great filter.

There have been plenty of viable commons over human history. Peacebuilding is in large part the process of building institutions to manage them. The failure to put in the work to build such institutions, or to maintain them once created, is what the TOTC consists in.

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#93

Post by otikik »

bulbosaur123 wrote: post #75

It seems that most of you are ignoring that there are plenty of actors out there that actively seek destruction and ways to promote it. It's not that people are stupid. Many people of power are both intelligent and actively evil , as in-- working against your interests of survival--especially when their positions are threatened. In fact, in some rare scenarios, nuclear destruction might even make logical sense to som…

We are 8bn people. Of course there’s gonna be some wackos on that lot. Not so many with access to nuclear weapons, fortunately.

Worms might not be a very detailed geopolitical simulator. The ninja rope was nice thoug.

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#94

Post by aussiesnack »

firecall wrote: post #73
aussiesnack wrote: post #26

I was subject to discussions at school about the UK gov's ludicrous 'Protect and Survive' novelty booklet in the 70s. Some years later The Young Ones episode 'Bomb' seemed like the most appropriate response. Having grown up pretty much assuming I'd be incinerated by nukes at some point (I frequently dreamed of mushroom clouds on the horizon as a child), this is all nothing new to me. I've lived longer than I ever exp…

Yep, me too! As an X-gen child of the 70s/80s I was at various points terrified of nuclear bombs! Watching Threads when I was way to young didn't help... There are times when I'd lay terrified in bed when I heard a jet engine over my house, and thought it might be a nuclear bomb! An article I read a while back suggested that X-Gen kids have a form of PTSD from the Cold War!

Well I hope you got over it! I never did, in truth.

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#95

Post by tshaddox »

kelnos wrote: post #81
tshaddox wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a plausible situation where you'd be unable to acquire food for a couple of years and then you'd start being able to acquire food?

Why not? I mean, you could ask the same question for 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, whatever. And I don't think it's an immediate zero-to-normal kind of situation. You might be unable to get much/any food at all for a week or three, and then you might only be able to get emergency rations from the government. And then after a few months, some staples might start trickling in, with increasing quantities over time. Eventua…

> Why not? I mean, you could ask the same question for 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, whatever.

Of course, that's why I'm asking! For some time periods there are some pretty obvious answers. A fairly routine natural disaster like a flood or blizzard could easily disrupt food access for a week. A month is probably more difficult to imagine, at least in very wealthy nations/regions. At 6 months I think it already starts to get difficult to imagine the scenario.

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#96

Post by deepsun »

gdy wrote: post #83
jamal-kumar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they've been repurposing those particular surface-to-air missiles for land attacks since around July. [1] [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russia-now-firing-s-30...

'A ukrainian official alleged...' There, fixed that for you. 5V55K has the range of 47 km, Russia is much further from Poland than that. Ukraine, on the other hand, uses Soviet S-300.

What are you talking about? They launched dosens (hundreds since Feb 24th) of Kalibr missiles, all the way from Caspian and Black seas.

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#97

Post by kmm »

deepsun wrote: post #96
gdy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'A ukrainian official alleged...' There, fixed that for you. 5V55K has the range of 47 km, Russia is much further from Poland than that. Ukraine, on the other hand, uses Soviet S-300.

What are you talking about? They launched dosens (hundreds since Feb 24th) of Kalibr missiles, all the way from Caspian and Black seas.

Why are you bringing up Kalibrs if the parent was talking about S-300 type missiles?

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#98

Post by cameronh90 »

rdtwo wrote: post #55
wordyskeleton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't hear your negativity over the sound of my bathtub approaching 100% capacity.

lol to each their own. Hopefully you stashed away a couple years of food and lots of guns

I've stashed away a few years of food around my waistline.

As long as I find somewhere to hide with water, I can hopefully just outlast the initial waves of violence.

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#99

Post by throwuwu »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #3

This reminded me of the better documentary films I have seen, The Atomic Cafe (1982). It is a well-crafted film, with a neat-o formal technique of only using found footage/ audio to describe the history of US atomic-age propaganda. More interestingly to me, it offers a useful commentary about the contradictions between the use of media to present nuclear wars a survivable and possibly necessary event but simultaneous…

The notion that duck and cover is a bad strategy is ill informed. Sure, if you’re at ground zero it doesn’t make a lick of difference what you do but if you’re further out but still close enough to experience the shock wave then duck and cover is going to be the reason why you don’t get a face full of glass and wood splinters.

Re: What to do if a nuclear disaster is imminent [pdf]

#100

Post by scarecrowbob »

throwuwu wrote: post #99
scarecrowbob wrote: post #3

This reminded me of the better documentary films I have seen, The Atomic Cafe (1982). It is a well-crafted film, with a neat-o formal technique of only using found footage/ audio to describe the history of US atomic-age propaganda. More interestingly to me, it offers a useful commentary about the contradictions between the use of media to present nuclear wars a survivable and possibly necessary event but simultaneous…

The notion that duck and cover is a bad strategy is ill informed. Sure, if you’re at ground zero it doesn’t make a lick of difference what you do but if you’re further out but still close enough to experience the shock wave then duck and cover is going to be the reason why you don’t get a face full of glass and wood splinters.

Fair enough.

But still, it's part of a larger apparatus of making nuclear war appear to be "reasonable" alternative when in reality it is a horrific crime against all humanity; if you haven't seen the film, you might enjoy how it presents these drills, along with all of the other apparatus of selling nuclear war to US population.

Post reply on HN