Ask HN: Do you think nuclear armageddon is plausible?
With all the talk about escalation amid the Russia-Ukraine crisis, I have been reading about this and am wondering about the odds of this occurring.
The main counterargument I see to this happening goes like: any world leader calling for nuclear armageddon will not be obeyed/will be assassinated because they cannot convince the entire chain of command to commit suicide. This seems flaky to me. One other thought I had is that perhaps that we are not capable of nuclear armageddon, because this has not been tested end-to-end, although ICBMs and nukes have been tested quite extensively.
What does HN think? Could it happen? And why do we assume that the tech is sufficiently advanced to e.g. take out every major city at the push of a button?
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Otherwise you end up with a nice contradiction: "how could this happen?! I was assuming it could happen, so it really shouldn't have!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
Stanislav Petrov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EmLf4Xlq0
Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yprpoPc2g0k
Vasili Arkhipov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLokpu4ixQE
According to some comments "The Collapse Of Communism: The Untold Story" is a movie about Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky and there is a book "The Spy and the Traitor."
And Stanislav Petrov has a movie as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTFUqnY3E3Q
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277106/
It only takes one person to decide to launch a missile. And very few to execute on that decision.
And what an individual, or a country, wants can change.
Just because nobody had any desire to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons at the outset, it does not mean that they will not decide to later.
Consider the fact that Putin likely thought he could get away with annexing Ukraine with little international backlash, just like the last half-dozen times he's invaded and annexed parts of other countries.
Now he is the sole leader of a country that is being completely cut off from the global economy, and made a pariah in the entire western world. The national currency, and nearly all international relations are nearly shattered.
The situation is very different than it was, and things are likely starting to look desperate.
I don't expect a large-scale use of nuclear weapons, but I would absolutely not write off the possibility of their use altogether.
A useful analogy is individual risk. Consider a doctor giving a new treatment to a sick patient. It has some uncertainty, some risk including death and some potential gain including being healed. But it's possible to reason about the tradeoff and learn to better estimate this over time.
However, to a single patient, while there are both risk and potential benefit, the realized outcome is absolute: Either he lives or he dies. The mental model is very different from the doctors' because both scenarios are extremely charged.
In nuclear war, you are always the patient who either lives completely or dies completely. I guess that makes everyone humble. Or at least, it should.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKcdlj-Uiw&ab_channel=ahhoo...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/heres-goes-presidents-deci...
This is a tough call. I agree with the premise that it's quite important to make sure that an insane president can't launch nukes. At the same time, this is a fundamental issue in the military -- when they say he lacked the qualities of "leadership" what they really meant was "followership", which is a concept not really taught to us in school. Everyone in that organization has a role to play, and if they don't play that role then they are not welcome. This isn't an organization where you join to really be a leader in the "trailblazer" sense, but a leader in the "set a good a example by demonstrating how to follow the rules properly" sense.
Does that mean an officer in the military is absolved from making moral choices? Of course not. They have the free will to say no, to not do what they're told, and to abandon their role. Of course there are consequences for that, but that's not really the issue. Doing the right thing isn't supposed to be easy and consequence free. In fact it's usually quite the opposite, which is why courage is a virtue. But the point is the choice to not press the button always exists.
Also, it's worth pointing out that truly insane people are not subtle about it. I don't know how many people here have talked to genuinely insane people. but from my experience they can't go very long without revealing they are abjectly and certifiably crazy. Someone in that state of mind would have been acting crazy for quite a while (it takes time to go from a sound mind to "NUKE THE WORLD"), and everyone around him would be keenly aware of his behavior. It's destructive by its nature, and does not go around quietly.
Diseases of the mind are quite loud and they are also infectious, if people aren't aware. Not that I mean you can become literally insane in the presence of insanity, but that insanity ramps up your anxiousness, because of how unpredictable and... well insane they are behaving, which in turn degrades your decision making capabilities -- "Well, I could do this completely sane and rational thing, but that would upset the insane person I'm with for illogical reasons. But I'd rather not upset them because that's upsetting to me, therefore I will act irrationally and that's somehow the most rational thing to do". See how twisted it gets? That kind of logic is unsustainable for a rational mind for long, so if you're forced to endure those mental gymnastics, all critical thinking shuts down and you just become a reactive nervous mess. Insane people leave a wake of chaos behind them at all turns. It's not subtle.
Notably General Mark Milley recognized this in Trump at the end of 2020, and assured his chain of command that any nuclear strike order would be issued from the President to Gen. Milley and then he would transfer that order down the chain. What Milley meant to convey with this statement was that any order for a nuke would be lawful, because he would only have advanced it if he deemed it lawful. Not the President. Right, because who determines whether a strike is lawful? Not a court. Not the congress. Maybe after the fact they would have a role but not in the heat of things. The President can issue a strike but his issuance does not make it necessarily lawful; nuking California because they voted against you in an election for example would be an unlawful order on its face. So really the lawfulness of a nuclear strike order is determined in situ by the individual members of the armed services as they pass the order down the chain of command. An unlawful order can still make its way through the chain under th...
I just don't see an "off ramp" for Putin right now. The cost he's incurred is HUGE and there's really no way out of this for him.
He's already threatened a nuclear response to any country that opposes his attempt, in so many words. I'm afraid he will take advantage of one of his new hyper-glide entry nukes. My fear is not that he will launch ALL nukes, just one, to make a point, and to avoid the consequences of MAD (since target of this attack, also fearing MAD, would not want to respond in kind. They would prefer to keep the losses at one city and avoid MAD).
So that's my fear. One strike, to a major city, with a first-of-its kind hyper glide entry vehicle to which no country has a deterrent.
The rationale (if you can call it that) is that no country would want to continue with sanctions against Russia after that point, for fear of the same happening to them.
Disclaimer, I live in the heart of Seattle, so I must admit this has been keeping me up at night.
I think the "California nukes Texas in 2093" (or vice versa) version of nuclear armageddon is way more plausible than the "Putin goes insane and nukes Ukraine/other targets 2022" version of nuclear armageddon.
I see the complete opposite.
Broad sanctions to Russia (think complete embargo like Cuba) and any country not enforcing said embargo. Immediate seizure of any Russian or Russian-aligned assets owned in the west by anyone with allegiance to such. Passports becoming instantly worthless.
* Substitute Antarctica for any rural site that isn't within 100 miles of a ground zero.*
Russia can't survive long-term with the sanctions, so he has to put a stop to them.
The only encouraging thing I could say is that if he follows your plan of one strike, I can't imagine it would be to the US. Even if we didn't go MAD in response, we would immediately be at war with Russia until one of us is destroyed.
The nuclear super-powers are in a situation where they have enough nukes to obliterate each other - many, many times over. But obviously no-one wants to take that chance - even with all the modern anti measures they have.
I think both sides are willing to accept pretty substantial losses, if it means avoiding an all out nuclear war.
Nothing happened when Russia invaded in 2014., and nothing happened now.
> According to Stephen MacFarlane, a professor of international relations, "It gives signatories justification if they take action, but it does not force anyone to act in Ukraine." [...] Regardless, the United States publicly maintains that "the Memorandum is not legally binding", calling it a "political commitment".
Yep. Plus a noisy, demonstrative test explosion somewhere in the North Sea to make a point.
Strong chance of both, I think. Particularly what you suggest.
At this point it's insane to think otherwise, because he's already telegraphing that he'll use battlefield nukes if pushed. Everything else of any significance that he's telegraphed so far, he's done.
He's a psychopath, telling us in advance, to prolong his enjoyment and make us responsible for what he does.
And he's losing in every significant way; he won't be able to cope with that.
If people think it isn't, they risk it. And thats how it happens.
So, yes. And no. Who really knows.
I would agree that forces wouldnt push the big red button if theyre informed of what actually happening, unfortunately I think most in those positions are kept in media silence.
what if theyre told their hometown is being nuked? Id expect retaliation from most people.
The only way to disarm the world of nukes is to unite under a rational, evidence and incentives based, benevolent world government. There's literally no other way to get rid of nukes if you've studied it.
Even if every nation disarms they all live under the threat of another building them in secret. As soon as one of them suspects as much the race is back on to re-arm.
Not true, at least in the US and Russia. More than one person in the chain of command needs to commit to an all-out nuclear attack. It is perfectly plausible that someone along the chain would not follow such order.
Here's a twitter thread (in German) explaining how this supposedly works in Russia: https://twitter.com/SwenRoschlau/status/1498575623941505026
If the method for delivering the nuclear order is routine and 99.99% benign (except for the 0.01% where it's not) and the order is checked only by machines, then no one would know except for the person that made it.
Further, to enforce compliance with routine behavior, one just needs to threaten the family of the subordinates. Or better yet, occasionally take one of your subordinates and make an example out of them, once every two years say. Send them and their family to labor camps never to be seen again.
It can absolutely happen. The subs are armed and ready. Literally the push of a button.
The fact it hasn’t happened yet is something to be thankful for everyday.
My guess would be he doesn’t need to do much, and that the “risk” would be someone down the chain of command refuses to carry out the order.
It's some phone calls to get the ball rolling. Whether or not various operators of nuclear ICBMs follow through, only one nuke is all it'd take to really massively change the world.
But it's still far from "literally the push of a button."
Wait though which guy are you talking about
the thing i've heard said is that at any given moment in time now we are potentially 30 minutes away from the end of civilization as we know it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
We grow up in a world where are lead to believe that our leaders are leading because they are smarter than we are and that they actually have a plan for everything.
While not entirely untrue, our leaders (if you can call them that) are nevertheless dumb apes like you and me.
Will the dumb apes start nuclear armageddon? Improbable, so far. But implausible? Not completely.
Humans are apes, but the other apes couldn't produce nuclear weapons (or even a knife).
If we're different enough from other apes to produce nuclear weapons (and everything else we've created), we're different enough that any analogy to how they would use them is nonsense.
To put it another way: our relationship to apes is as relevant to our propensity for nuclear war as our relationship to dogs or bananas.
What does that prove? The heart of my answer is that there's no reason to believe we are better than other organisms to the extent that we wouldn't do something irrational, no matter how drastic. If a close ancestor of ours can potentially smack a button that launches nuclear missiles out of some misguided simian impulse, unless there's evidence demonstrating otherwise, this is all the reason you need to believe that this is also true of humans to a non-zero degree. We are by no means debugged as a species despite all the forking and rebasing we've done since Australopithecus.
> If we're different enough from other apes to produce nuclear weapons (and everything else we've created), we're different enough that any analogy to how they would use them is nonsense.
I have no idea what "different enough". If we are "different enough", then what's with all the fighting and the tribalism?
> To put it another way: our relationship to apes is as relevant to our propensity for nuclear war as our relationship to dogs or bananas.
The human and chimpanzee phenotypes share substantially more attributes than do dogs and bananas. I wouldn't have used the word "ape" if I thought something more genetically distant like a banana would have sufficed.