How does this negate mutually assured destruction? If anything it enforces the idea that this is why we have only had close calls. No one wants to be responsible for starting the demise of (at the very least) two countries.
Yes maybe there are lots of other Earth like planets in our galaxy? universe?, where human like intelligent species aren't wondering and talking about why-not any longer.
In the game series "Mass Effect" there is a race called the Krogans which destroy themselves in nuclear war at about 1950s era technology levels, leaving their world completely destroyed and in nuclear winter.
When you come across them in the game it's been many generations since that event and they still havent recovered and only get into space because other aliens come by and "lift them up".
Would not be surprised if this is the fate of humanity as well
From the wiki:
"Unfortunately, as krogan society became more technologically advanced, so did their weaponry. The end result is that they destroyed their homeworld in a nuclear war ... The krogan were reduced to primitive warring clans struggling to survive a nuclear winter of their own creation, a state that continued until they were discovered by the salarians two thousand years later."
The fallacy still applies, we just don’t have enough data to know how lucky we really were. The question itself is biased to our present point of reference because if the world had been destroyed, no one would ask it
Considering the closest the "article" comes to answering the question is in its last 2 sentences, it's not "the end of the world" to have a discussion.
You mean that planet Earth exists in many universes in parallel? (Rather than that there are many different planets, in different universes? but not "copies" of Earth)
Maybe there are also many parallel Earth like planets in this particular universe, with human like creatures. Some of which have, some have not.
Surprisingly enough, a human is much more likely to find oneself alive in a world in which humanity was not nearly made extinct by nuclear war.
Exponentially so, if we assume, reasonably, that even if humans survived (technically) a nuclear war, their descendants would take 100s of thousands of years or longer to recover to pre apocalypse levels, vs. non nuclear war realities where the population simply keeps increasing exponentially, leading exponentially many more humans to find themselves existing in that "timeline."
This is possible, but probably represents a drastic misunderstanding of MWI/QM. I’d you’re thinking I. Terms of branches from quantum superpositions, then it would be a certainty, but a certainty among u counted multitudes. If you’re thinking Quantum Suicide... just no. Nuclear war does not fulfill the requirements of that gedanken.
> If you’re thinking Quantum Suicide... just no. Nuclear war does not fulfill the requirements of that gedanken.
Could you elaborate on why? I'm not seeing why it couldn't be couched in similar terms (replacing the box with Earth, the radiation source with nuclear war, and the cat with people) -- is it because you can't treat the Earth as a closed system in the same way?
In quantum suicide, your means of death must be both the result of a quantum superposition, and 100% lethal... otherwise you might just be in this universe, horribly maimed. Now, a nuke on your lap with the trigger hooked up to sense the decay (or not) of a given radioactive material is probably valid, but global nuclear war? No way. Odds of surviving all out nuclear war Are pretty lousy, but decidedly non-zero.
But the number of people living in a non-nuclear apocalypse world will be much higher than the number of people living in a nuclear apocalypse world (assuming the probability of a nuclear apocalypse is less than like 90% or something). Your death in a nuclear apocalypose doesn't necessarily have to be a 100% probable for you to experience this non-nuclear apocalypse world with some high probability.
That’s not a superposition or probabilities, and not really subject to this thought experiment. What you’re describing sounds more like quantum immortality, not related to suicide. The problem either way is that you only get to make your own observations... maybe that means you die, and in a branch you don’t. You don’t experience that branch though, if it exists. You don’t have any awareness of other branches now, right?
The problem is... why and how does your consciousness “move” to another reality? What is the physical mechanism that has you living and not a twin in another universe who isn’t really you... after all, you died when the bombs fell.
Most Of all though it’s important to remember that like Schrodinger’s cat this is a thought experiment meant To illustrate certain problems or features of quantum mechanics. It is an analogy or metaphor for a system dominated by quantum effects, like a single radioactive atom with a 50-50 chance of decaying in the next second. These thought experiments don’t really suggest alive/dead cats, or immortals, they highlight how quantum systems differ from Classical ones.
These ideas have led to various interpretations of QM, such as The Copenhagen Interpretarion (wavefunction collapse) and MWI (multiple universe). None of those interpretations are very rigorous, and may well be indicative of gaps in understanding as much as anything else.
If you want to be scared silly I can recommend "One Minute to Midnight" by Michael Dobbs - it goes through the Cuban Missile crisis minute by minute with a lot of detail. The number of things that went wrong that almost led to war are remarkable - e.g. who would have thought that the Northern Lights could have helped start a nuclear war.... It also covers the story of the submarine fleet that Vasili Arkhipov was on and why they were a bit tetchy when the US Navy started annoying them.
The USN used training depth charges that apparently were unlikely to cause damage - though if you are in a submarine on the receiving end of that kind of treatment I can see why you might think otherwise.
The false alarms did not cause any actions, because people were not doing their job like machines, but as humans who care about lives.
We should honour those people, even when it is against military codes.
I would like to expand it even to non-nuclear warfare. People that stop destruction or give us insights in our destructive policies. This includes whistleblowers and press that report human rights violations, ecological destruction, and are currently punished for it. This happens in the US too.
Luckily one day these pesky humans with their own will and intelligence will be removed by Smart Contract that cannot be reverted or appealed. Hurray. :(
We should honour these people but we cannot rely on that there will always be a human that decides to go against protocol. It's going to go wrong eventually.
Luck and Stanislav Petrov, amongst other reasons. Which is utterly terrifying. I still find it amazing that Stanislav Petrov was fired from his job a few days after averting nuclear Armageddon, I think he was chiefly because he didn't follow protocol. Even though his actions prevented Thermonuclear war.
I also don't imagine there was much of a Unfair Dismissals Tribunal type arrangement for nuclear weapons officers in the USSR.
> I still find it amazing that Stanislav Petrov was fired from his job...
If he were promoted he might have spoken about the faulty system to the wrong pointy haired boss.
This is speculation, but Russian Christians have a strong sense of sacrifice, and sacrificing your career for saving the world may seem appropriate somehow.
> One particularly ominous example of this nuclear deployment was the Soviets’ “Dead Hand” system, which has only come to light since the end of the Cold War. [...] Almost unbelievably, the Soviet leadership failed to notify the West that it had built this seemingly impregnable nuclear deterrent.
One of the main reasons (besides the obvious one) for having this system was to protect against hotheaded generals at the top. The reasoning is this - if they know they have the capability of a retaliatory strike, they don't have to rush to press the button, knowing they will still have the ability to retaliate.
That could explain probably why they never bothered to publicly announce it to the West. Or maybe they assumed the West would find out about it through its spy network anyway...
I talk about WMDs / submarine communications with arms control people for fun sometimes.
Well the game theory gets weird with dead hands. Of course you want to deter, but you need to keep the deterrence partially shrouded because you do not want your adversary to know for certain that they've completely designed around you.
You want them to have known unknowns (ie, they know that they don't fully know how you're going to respond, but they know the outcome if you are successful).
I have an unorthodox opinion about nuclear weapons.
I think that we might see one or two be used in the not too distant future if things get super hot with weaponized robotics.
Most people assume that all countries are going to push for complete launch or not, but there are situations where I think they could be used. For example a large attack by India towards Pakistan could be met with a small nuclear response on a relatively unpopulated area.
Isn't that like a turkey asking why they haven't been slaughtered yet? Then the day before Thanksgiving comes and times up. That's one of the reasons the U.S. needs to adopt a "no first use" policy. If our adversaries don't have to worry about the U.S. launching another first strike, then the risk of a miscalculation goes down.
Is it that easy? If the USA declares 'no first use' do I believe it? How much more than UK, Russia, China, ... Israel, Pakistan, North Korea?
In fact, only America has ever actually used a nuclear bomb in a real war. On the balancing side, they've had a series of de-escalating disarmament treaties with the former USSR, so could be argued to be heading in the more peaceful direction than counties further down my list.
In the game Civilization I know that Gandhi will always, left to his own devices, eventually nuke me, because of a historical in-game joke. The real world is a lot less predictable.
In the same way as a national bank trying to inspire confidence in the economy they know they have to make what they say credible. So it has to be part of acting in a longer term that shows consistency with the words. But probably slow disarmament would be more likely to succeed.
In a super-power-sized exchange, increased confidence that their missiles will land before the other side retaliates. Launch sites can be destroyed, which means you may face fewer weapons. Planners during the Cold War appeared to consider "20% of my population survives and 5% of theirs does" to be a victory, and promising you won't launch until you're hours and hours of sure of what's going on is inviting a pre-emption strike. That said, even if someone promises up and down they won't retaliate until they are very sure what's going on, that's not a guarantee that if you launch 1000 missiles at them that they won't launch immediately in return. I personally think the game theory shows it's better to signal willingness to retaliate swiftly, but even if that's too much for you to stomach the game theory clearly says you'd better have the capability of swift retaliation, regardless.
For the smaller players like North Korea or Iran, who are credibly threatening to use nuclear weapons in the next decade, but have no credible possibility of doing it at superpower scales, nothing much. They face annihilation if they launch, regardless. However, some of these smaller regimes are signaling that they are willing to face annihilation to get their strikes in. How much of this is game-theory-based posturing, and how much of it is true, well, that's for the reader to decide.
(Though I will toss in that at least North Korea is also signaling a belief that they will be annihilated if they don't get nukes, so given their belief system they may still not care, especially since it may be the case that North Korea === Kim Jong Un, and frankly, he may be rational to believe he's riding a tiger by the tail and must either get to and use nukes or personally face one sort of death or another. I see Iran as making more conventional power plays throughout the region, and even if their recent protests didn't topple the regime, it is likely that one way or another they are going to be forced to pour less resources into the nuke programs, either because they will need to placate the population, or because protest N+1 will topple the regime, or because they finally provoke external military or covert action that will result in regime change.)
Yes it would. "No first use" means you have to be DAMN sure you're retaliating, rather than responding to a glitch. That requires time to confirm that, indeed, missiles are incoming, rather than just "some instruments in a secure bunker somewhere say some missiles are incoming".
Nobody will believe any such promise anyway. The real solution is continued reduction in the number of arms. Russia and America need to reduce to ~1000 each or less.
There is a belief that any nuclear war will destroy the world, but that isn't true. A global war would be horrific, but civilization would survive. A war with 2-3k nuclear detonations is better than one with 20k.
Particularly, tactical nuclear weapons need to be destroyed. They are more likely to be used because they aren't a holocaust on a rocket like strategic weapons are.
In the event of a massive nuclear conflict, the destruction of civilization is a given. The survival of humanity is far less so, but it's certainly possible.
One of the things that my travels have shown me is that there are people everywhere. To eradicate humanity completely is an exceedingly hard task. Maybe a massive nuclear conflict would destroy civilization and our knowledge to the point that the last ones alive would simply give up, but we're an incredibly hardy and adaptive species. See: Greenland, the Andes, Nepal, Siberia, Nunavut (36000 people on 2 million square kilometers, you'd have to roughly assign one bomb per person to ensure you got everybody) and so on. Some of those places are likely to be on somebodies annihilation short list, but all of them would require a degree of carpet bombing with nukes that I highly doubt it will happen. Though Washington DC, and just about every other major capital would very likely be a smoking crater.
It depends on the length and area of the nuclear winter, not on bombing each individual. There would be the added genetic destruction through radiation, so it's not just like surviving Siberia.
Also the humans that survived through Greenland had prepared for generations to live in hardship. Those left after any nuclear war certainly won't have been living their lives in nuclear winter world, no matter how good the doomsday peppers think they are.
Depends on what you define as civilization (are America and Brazil part of the same Civiilization)?
But entire continents (S. America and Africa) would be entirely untouched by direct attacks.
The only risk of total collapse is deep and long nuclear winter. Even in that event (which I don't really think is realistic) coastal areas would fare better.
>Isn't that like a turkey asking why they haven't been slaughtered yet? Then the day before Thanksgiving comes and times up.
This is an excellent way to illustrate so many problems of this nature. "If X is a real concern, why hasn't it happened to us yet?" is such a huge problem in so many organisations, and it's so frustrating.
Err this article didn't seem to give me any faith whatsoever. It's basically luck so far. The article seems to suggest that somehow the equilibrium is stronger than we think.
But I see no reason for that to hold indefinitely.
If that's all we've got a bad run of luck is coming. So it purely becomes a question of when.
50 years? 100 years? 1000 years?
Let's hope Mars is self sustaining before this happens.
Maybe it was destroyed in another part of the multiverse and we're just the ones left to ponder this question.
hahahaha, no. That line of thinking can lead to the idea that every big decision can be made by flipping a quantum coin and the result will be right in some universe.
It's interesting to think about this question by asking a similar question. If you live in a house full of people, why hasn't anyone killed anyone else yet?
It's a gruesome question, but the point is that even though people living together will certainly have arguments, someone who is sane will never seriously consider killing someone else.
Ultimately nations usually act as if they are scaled up people, which makes sense because they are run by people.
Full scale nuclear war represents the probability of complete and total annihilation for all parties involved. At this scale of destruction, war becomes an existential crisis for nations themselves, which is intolerable to a nation itself - no longer just a nation's citizens - which, from a nation's perspective, are expendable.
This may seem callous, but we need to recognize that organisms of different scales have different sets of concerns and priorities from one another. Just as we often don't think twice about doing something that would cause cells in our bodies to die, like binge drinking on the weekend - which from our cells' perspective would amount to a holocaust - nations have historically not thought twice about going to war when such war represented a minimal existential threat, even if a few thousand soldiers would have to die.
Nuclear war represents total destruction of nations in a way that traditional modes of warfare fought, say, between 17th century European powers did not, as this earlier warfare - while bloody and terrible for the individual soldier - would usually at worst (from a national perspective) lead to the loss of a few territories, which is tolerable.
> Ultimately nations usually act as if they are scaled up people, which makes sense because they are run by people.
This is such a breathtakingly incorrect statement - as in, completely wrong - that I can’t imagine for the life of me why you believe it. All evidence is that no, countries (and companies) do not behave like their constituent parts, and attempting to (lazily) hang your metaphor on “well let’s just talk about how individuals act” is entirely wrong and pointless.
That's a fine analogy...except for all the murders committed by family members in houses. It happens sufficiently frequently that there's the well known (and possibly apocryphal) idea that police always treat a spouse as a primary suspect.
So, while I'm willing to bet my wife isn't murderous (I don't -know-, but I'll assume so)...do I really want to assume a -stranger- isn't, knowing that there are murderous people out there, and that if I'm wrong my entire family will die?
I mean, you say "someone who is sane will never seriously consider killing someone else" - great, how possible is it for an insane person to end up heading a nuclear armed country? I mean, I don't think I want to trust 192 (or whatever our country count is at) random strangers to all be sane.
The conclusion of this article is almost breathtakingly naive. I was assigned to HQ US Air Forces Europe during the Able Archer exercise in November 1983, which triggered mobilization of Soviet nuclear forces. I've been thinking about that experience for most of my life. Here are a few points from long reflection.
1.) Any system that continuously depends on single individuals to make the right decision to avoid catastrophe is defective by design. In the Able Archer case our boss Leonard Perroots made an instinctive decision to stand down that prevented the escalation from going further. [0]
2.) The US and Russia had disciplined command and control systems plus relatively stable political leadership. That won't always be the case; in the case of the US it's arguably not the case now.
3.) During most of the Cold War there were two main actors with nuclear weapons. There are now at least 9. [1] If instability in the US breaks trust in the nuclear umbrella I would expect that number to increase rapidly. Even the US/NK standoff is a multi-polar problem, something that seems to have escaped most US-based commentators.
To sum up the reason we have not seen use of weapons to-date is we've been incredibly lucky. Given the known miscalculations in the incidents to date that's unlikely to last.
> To sum up the reason we have not seen use of weapons to-date is we've been incredibly lucky.
That, imo is the only correct conclusion. Anybody that wants to sell mutually assured destruction as a long term solution is missing the point that in the long term your luck will some day run out. That, besides obvious de-railings of the principle due to a lack of mental stability in leadership.
> 3.) During most of the Cold War there were two main actors with nuclear weapons. There are now at least 9. [1] If instability in the US breaks trust in the nuclear umbrella I would expect that number to increase rapidly. Even the US/NK standoff is a multi-polar problem, something that seems to have escaped most US-based commentators.
The UK developed nuclear weapons in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (the height of the Cold War), there were 4 nuclear weapons states.
If the UK, France, and China were not main actors in the Cold War, then why are they, along with Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea, main actors in the modern world? The UK and France haven't exactly been getting more important in the past 50 years in global affairs.
The other arsenals were pretty small and the confrontations that I'm aware of were between the US and USSR. The Soviet response to Able Archer was triggered in part by paranoia about US Pershing II missile deployments, which were in progress around that time. NATO nuclear policy was almost entirely a US game as far as I know.
I'm arguing less against the fact that the US and USSR drove the nuclear MAD in the Cold War than the fact that you cite the number of important nuclear powers as going from 2 to 9. In terms of modern countries, the US and Russia are the only countries with significant stockpiles. UK and France have reduced their stockpiles from the Cold War (so if they were insignificant then, they're even more so now). The other 5 countries have increased or maintained stockpiles, but only China reaches British/French levels. India, Pakistan, and Israel have even fewer and are only sufficient to effect war on a small scale against specific rivals. North Korea's nukes are incapable of doing anything more than seriously pissing off the entire world (arguably, their ability to shell Seoul is more effective deterrent than their nukes).
The UK developed nuclear weapons in 1952, France in 1960
The US, UK and France would collectively be considered “the West” or NATO, just as nuclear weapons inherited by Ukraine when the USSR collapsed would have been considered at the time as collectively part of the USSR.
While I think luck plays a major part, in almost all cases the consequences of a retaliation set quite a high bar for the evidence from warning systems to pass. In the case of shooting down spy planes, that bar is lower. In the case of arresting a foreign national on suspicion of espionage, it's lower still. If armageddon wasn't on the table, many of the individuals involved in these close calls might have acted differently.
So I agree we've been lucky, but I think we should acknowledge that mutually assured destruction has at least loaded the dice.
> but I think we should acknowledge that mutually assured destruction has at least loaded the dice.
Even loaded dice come up '1' every now and then. So that's just a means of staying in the game a little longer, it will not ensure a long term outcome.
Yup, totally agree with that. I personally don't see how disarmament can ever happen though, so I choose to think of it as a chronic problem like the threat of an asteroid strike, and just hug my kids a little harder.
This is a very interesting topic to me, so much so I wrote a small sci-fi novella called Assiyah Rising that addresses this very topic. It's set in the modern day, but it contains historical flashbacks to Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, two men who prevented large scale nuclear wars. Disturbingly, those were just two instances in a long list of near nuclear disasters that happened during the short period of time we have had nuclear weapons.
If anyone is interested, you can get the book on Amazon for a buck or you can download for free on Smashwords. It should be a quick and easy read.
There isn't a simple answer. The history of nuclear weapons is littered with near misses. The number is staggering!
If I am to infer a reason for the lack of our destruction I can think of three things that seem invariant from history. 1) we've been really lucky 2) we've been lucky because nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to detonate 3) it would seem that the raw power of nuclear weapons paradoxically has a sobering effect on those who wield them. In that no one who has them seems to actually want to use them this especially goes for those in the command chain responsible for firing them. Not to say at times there haven't been people who would or want to use them, just that nobody yet has.
One of my big concerns about the future is nuclear war being triggered by a new plague.
My concern is that an huge population allow for "parallel processing" for pathogenic evolution to find weak vectors in humans, and this will be mistaken as a nation-state attack leading to a nuclear war.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
When you come across them in the game it's been many generations since that event and they still havent recovered and only get into space because other aliens come by and "lift them up".
Would not be surprised if this is the fate of humanity as well
If you're not then it's difficult to argue with this, that's simply not the definition of survivorship bias.
Maybe there are also many parallel Earth like planets in this particular universe, with human like creatures. Some of which have, some have not.
Surprisingly enough, a human is much more likely to find oneself alive in a world in which humanity was not nearly made extinct by nuclear war.
Exponentially so, if we assume, reasonably, that even if humans survived (technically) a nuclear war, their descendants would take 100s of thousands of years or longer to recover to pre apocalypse levels, vs. non nuclear war realities where the population simply keeps increasing exponentially, leading exponentially many more humans to find themselves existing in that "timeline."
Could you elaborate on why? I'm not seeing why it couldn't be couched in similar terms (replacing the box with Earth, the radiation source with nuclear war, and the cat with people) -- is it because you can't treat the Earth as a closed system in the same way?
The problem is... why and how does your consciousness “move” to another reality? What is the physical mechanism that has you living and not a twin in another universe who isn’t really you... after all, you died when the bombs fell.
Most Of all though it’s important to remember that like Schrodinger’s cat this is a thought experiment meant To illustrate certain problems or features of quantum mechanics. It is an analogy or metaphor for a system dominated by quantum effects, like a single radioactive atom with a 50-50 chance of decaying in the next second. These thought experiments don’t really suggest alive/dead cats, or immortals, they highlight how quantum systems differ from Classical ones.
These ideas have led to various interpretations of QM, such as The Copenhagen Interpretarion (wavefunction collapse) and MWI (multiple universe). None of those interpretations are very rigorous, and may well be indicative of gaps in understanding as much as anything else.
We should honour those people, even when it is against military codes.
I would like to expand it even to non-nuclear warfare. People that stop destruction or give us insights in our destructive policies. This includes whistleblowers and press that report human rights violations, ecological destruction, and are currently punished for it. This happens in the US too.
I also don't imagine there was much of a Unfair Dismissals Tribunal type arrangement for nuclear weapons officers in the USSR.
ETA: DragonDictate can't spell thermonuclear
If he were promoted he might have spoken about the faulty system to the wrong pointy haired boss.
This is speculation, but Russian Christians have a strong sense of sacrifice, and sacrificing your career for saving the world may seem appropriate somehow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
One of the main reasons (besides the obvious one) for having this system was to protect against hotheaded generals at the top. The reasoning is this - if they know they have the capability of a retaliatory strike, they don't have to rush to press the button, knowing they will still have the ability to retaliate.
That could explain probably why they never bothered to publicly announce it to the West. Or maybe they assumed the West would find out about it through its spy network anyway...
Well the game theory gets weird with dead hands. Of course you want to deter, but you need to keep the deterrence partially shrouded because you do not want your adversary to know for certain that they've completely designed around you. You want them to have known unknowns (ie, they know that they don't fully know how you're going to respond, but they know the outcome if you are successful).
I have an unorthodox opinion about nuclear weapons.
I think that we might see one or two be used in the not too distant future if things get super hot with weaponized robotics.
Most people assume that all countries are going to push for complete launch or not, but there are situations where I think they could be used. For example a large attack by India towards Pakistan could be met with a small nuclear response on a relatively unpopulated area.
That's 8th on the list in the movie Wargames :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/24ujzq/for_fans_of_...
In fact, only America has ever actually used a nuclear bomb in a real war. On the balancing side, they've had a series of de-escalating disarmament treaties with the former USSR, so could be argued to be heading in the more peaceful direction than counties further down my list.
In the game Civilization I know that Gandhi will always, left to his own devices, eventually nuke me, because of a historical in-game joke. The real world is a lot less predictable.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1983/3/7/the-truth-about-g...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/03...
For the smaller players like North Korea or Iran, who are credibly threatening to use nuclear weapons in the next decade, but have no credible possibility of doing it at superpower scales, nothing much. They face annihilation if they launch, regardless. However, some of these smaller regimes are signaling that they are willing to face annihilation to get their strikes in. How much of this is game-theory-based posturing, and how much of it is true, well, that's for the reader to decide.
(Though I will toss in that at least North Korea is also signaling a belief that they will be annihilated if they don't get nukes, so given their belief system they may still not care, especially since it may be the case that North Korea === Kim Jong Un, and frankly, he may be rational to believe he's riding a tiger by the tail and must either get to and use nukes or personally face one sort of death or another. I see Iran as making more conventional power plays throughout the region, and even if their recent protests didn't topple the regime, it is likely that one way or another they are going to be forced to pour less resources into the nuke programs, either because they will need to placate the population, or because protest N+1 will topple the regime, or because they finally provoke external military or covert action that will result in regime change.)
There is a belief that any nuclear war will destroy the world, but that isn't true. A global war would be horrific, but civilization would survive. A war with 2-3k nuclear detonations is better than one with 20k.
Particularly, tactical nuclear weapons need to be destroyed. They are more likely to be used because they aren't a holocaust on a rocket like strategic weapons are.
Humanity will survive. Civilization will be utterly destroyed for a long time to come.
Also the humans that survived through Greenland had prepared for generations to live in hardship. Those left after any nuclear war certainly won't have been living their lives in nuclear winter world, no matter how good the doomsday peppers think they are.
But entire continents (S. America and Africa) would be entirely untouched by direct attacks.
The only risk of total collapse is deep and long nuclear winter. Even in that event (which I don't really think is realistic) coastal areas would fare better.
This is an excellent way to illustrate so many problems of this nature. "If X is a real concern, why hasn't it happened to us yet?" is such a huge problem in so many organisations, and it's so frustrating.
But I see no reason for that to hold indefinitely.
If that's all we've got a bad run of luck is coming. So it purely becomes a question of when.
50 years? 100 years? 1000 years?
Let's hope Mars is self sustaining before this happens.
hahahaha, no. That line of thinking can lead to the idea that every big decision can be made by flipping a quantum coin and the result will be right in some universe.
I hope no one thinks that we have 100.00000% reliable processes to avoid a nuclear war, taking both positive and negative human factors into account.
Eventually the current setup will fail us if we don't develop into a more civilized society where pointing armed nukes at each other is not needed.
It's a gruesome question, but the point is that even though people living together will certainly have arguments, someone who is sane will never seriously consider killing someone else.
Ultimately nations usually act as if they are scaled up people, which makes sense because they are run by people.
Full scale nuclear war represents the probability of complete and total annihilation for all parties involved. At this scale of destruction, war becomes an existential crisis for nations themselves, which is intolerable to a nation itself - no longer just a nation's citizens - which, from a nation's perspective, are expendable.
This may seem callous, but we need to recognize that organisms of different scales have different sets of concerns and priorities from one another. Just as we often don't think twice about doing something that would cause cells in our bodies to die, like binge drinking on the weekend - which from our cells' perspective would amount to a holocaust - nations have historically not thought twice about going to war when such war represented a minimal existential threat, even if a few thousand soldiers would have to die.
Nuclear war represents total destruction of nations in a way that traditional modes of warfare fought, say, between 17th century European powers did not, as this earlier warfare - while bloody and terrible for the individual soldier - would usually at worst (from a national perspective) lead to the loss of a few territories, which is tolerable.
This is such a breathtakingly incorrect statement - as in, completely wrong - that I can’t imagine for the life of me why you believe it. All evidence is that no, countries (and companies) do not behave like their constituent parts, and attempting to (lazily) hang your metaphor on “well let’s just talk about how individuals act” is entirely wrong and pointless.
In my experience with groups of people it doesn't make sense.
So, while I'm willing to bet my wife isn't murderous (I don't -know-, but I'll assume so)...do I really want to assume a -stranger- isn't, knowing that there are murderous people out there, and that if I'm wrong my entire family will die?
I mean, you say "someone who is sane will never seriously consider killing someone else" - great, how possible is it for an insane person to end up heading a nuclear armed country? I mean, I don't think I want to trust 192 (or whatever our country count is at) random strangers to all be sane.
1.) Any system that continuously depends on single individuals to make the right decision to avoid catastrophe is defective by design. In the Able Archer case our boss Leonard Perroots made an instinctive decision to stand down that prevented the escalation from going further. [0]
2.) The US and Russia had disciplined command and control systems plus relatively stable political leadership. That won't always be the case; in the case of the US it's arguably not the case now.
3.) During most of the Cold War there were two main actors with nuclear weapons. There are now at least 9. [1] If instability in the US breaks trust in the nuclear umbrella I would expect that number to increase rapidly. Even the US/NK standoff is a multi-polar problem, something that seems to have escaped most US-based commentators.
To sum up the reason we have not seen use of weapons to-date is we've been incredibly lucky. Given the known miscalculations in the incidents to date that's unlikely to last.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/us/leonard-perroots-dead....
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-nine-co...
That, imo is the only correct conclusion. Anybody that wants to sell mutually assured destruction as a long term solution is missing the point that in the long term your luck will some day run out. That, besides obvious de-railings of the principle due to a lack of mental stability in leadership.
Also try not to give me things that cnn has told you you should be outraged about
The UK developed nuclear weapons in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (the height of the Cold War), there were 4 nuclear weapons states.
The US, UK and France would collectively be considered “the West” or NATO, just as nuclear weapons inherited by Ukraine when the USSR collapsed would have been considered at the time as collectively part of the USSR.
So I agree we've been lucky, but I think we should acknowledge that mutually assured destruction has at least loaded the dice.
Even loaded dice come up '1' every now and then. So that's just a means of staying in the game a little longer, it will not ensure a long term outcome.
If anyone is interested, you can get the book on Amazon for a buck or you can download for free on Smashwords. It should be a quick and easy read.
https://www.amazon.com/Assiyah-Rising-Part-T-H-Ansz-ebook/dp...
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/759765
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/09/us-to-loosen...
My concern is that an huge population allow for "parallel processing" for pathogenic evolution to find weak vectors in humans, and this will be mistaken as a nation-state attack leading to a nuclear war.