You jest, but I owned a house less than a half mile from a river where there was an acid spill in 1997 from a phosphate plant. River was caustic enough to impact the gators in it. Didn’t spend much time walking through it or wrestling the gators. Although I was chased by an angry turtle once.
As I recall there was some with scarring from the initial spill, but don’t recall reports of dead gators—they tend to be pretty resilient. Fish were killed off, though. Basically the gators left the affected area for a few years. Probably because the food chain impact.
it's so incredibly naive, shortsighted, hypocritical and foremost childish to blame everything that's gone wrong on everybody before (except?) you. because you'll do better, sure, lol. people are people, people are alike all over, and in all times. that's what needs to be realized in order to begin trying to do better; realize that you're the same. i think nobody but the generations who actually experienced one or two world wars could have done better to maintain peace during the last 70 years. now it's time to see if the ones who came after them still have it in them, only knowing hardship from their parents' experiences. but i see very little hope for the ones after those.
I don’t think I’d do better, but that goes two ways. The generation before me blames the generation before them. Thinking that I’d be any different is a bit arrogant (if a nice dream).
I'm a late boomer (1961). I don't blame the generation before me. I've known lots of them. My values, who I am, and what I do, stands entirely on their shoulders.
I think you are kind of past the age where you would blame the past generation. It’s something you mainly do at ages <30. When you get older your thinking becomes a bit more nuanced.
Lumping all of the boomer gen into one group isn’t bright. If I look at Xers and millennials, they have distinct subgroupings that vary from hyper responsible to nihilistic. The boomers were the same, they’re just getting old. It should also now be fairly apparent that voting doesn’t seem to change that much in Western “democracies” regarding this particular topic. No matter who gets in, the bankers and the military contractors seem to make billions. When the boomers did rebel (and they did in a very major way), some of them were shot and killed, others were beaten by cops in the street, and still more of them were hit with fire houses at close range. The late 60s were hell. Yes, there are tons of boomers who suck, but my own generation is pretty shitty too (older edge of millennial).
In countries like the US where a sizeable part of the population depends on advanced medical care for survival the initial deaths are but a start. I would expect the DOW and Dupont facilities that produce the precursors to keep us alive would be ashes in the first few minutes.
Except when you realize that the Toulouse region is actually a bit significant in terms of aviation / space R&D, so we're probably not very far on the target list for France.
Which at least, makes "dying very quickly and hopefully without too much pain" a plausible exit scenario in case of nuclear war :shrug:
The music seems to take direct inspiration. I guess the art in both is inspired by the massive radar screens from 80s/90s movies, which are in turn inspired by the graphics used by the US government's screens.
Threads is more realistic, but The day after literally ignited panic in millions of families (I remember watching it on Television when I was 6, almost any other neighbour household was watching the same thing!)
I would also add the more prosaic Wargames, also from 1983, to the list of movies talking about a "Global Thermonuclear War" and, similarly to what Princeton is doing, simulating "A strange game" where "the only winning move is not to play"
Maybe, but as I said I've watched it in Italy, as Italian, and almost everyone was watching it that night.
Also, I was merely pointing out that before Threads there was this other movie that pioneered the idea of the atomic holocaust.
There's also China Syndrome from 1979, but even though I think it's a better movie than The day after, the premise is different and the threat is the atomic energy industry, not warheads.
Threads is the most relentlessly grim and bleak thing I've ever seen. It's like they thought "let's make this get bleaker and bleaker until people have just had enough".
I was shown it at school aged 9 and watched it out of curiousity about 5 months ago. I couldn't believe they showed it to kids in the 80's.
After watching Threads your strategy for nuclear war goes from "hide in a basement" to "run towards the blast" as going quickly is the best approach.
> Threads is the most relentlessly grim and bleak thing I've ever seen. It's like they thought "let's make this get bleaker and bleaker until people have just had enough".
Both are very good and shocking movies. I personally found Threads more grimly realistic, and more relatable. This might be because I've watched Threads only a few years ago, while it's been decades since I've seen The Day After.
Didn't just shock a generation, it shocked the President.
There is the apocryphal story about Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor who turned politician, who saw The Day After and asked his staff if would really be that bad. His staff, hardened Cold War generals and such, replied that it would be so, so much worse.
This spooked the hell out of Reagan, and led him to reach out to the USSR to ease tensions.
Didn't stop him from building deterrents in the form of Star Wars, etc. though...
It doesn't seem to take into account British and French nuclear arsenals (although they're not commensurable to US and Russian ones). Strikes on UK and French territory (which are shown in this simulation), not even mentioning NATO commitments, would incite a response.
Also look at the other nuclear powers just sitting there dooing nothing.
This in a early cold war era US vs USSR Armageddon scenario, not a 202x scenario.
Plausible scenarios today are:
- Russia using a nuke in Ukraine and earning the hate of every single country in the world. China and India try to remain neutral but they would almost certainly drop support for Russia if they break the nuclear taboo. This would not even require a nuclear response to solve.
Has there even been a direct conventional war between two nuclear powers before? I expect that nuclear weapons are a deterrent of any war when both sides have them.
The problem with disarmament seems to be that imbalances arise, and the problem with armament seems to be that if hundreds of countries have them, there's a high probability of one of them doing something stupid/crazy/suicidal.
That was an interesting conflict from the stand point of nuclear restrain. Territories were occupied, hundreds of casualties, open fire and fighter jets; yet no nuclear threats. I haven't read up on it but just looking at the outcome of the war.
Yes, that is another hotspot, but tensions between them have risen and fallen and neither party appears to be willing to commit to the end of the world. They are in an equilibrium of MAD.
ukraine wouldn't be enough to push nato to even regular war let alone a nuclear response.
If putin keeps the radiation from spilling into nato territory its not enough to start ww3.
Despite cnn's lies, nato doesn't actually care much for ukraine, they just see this as a way to do damage indirectly to an enemy they want to hurt.
Nato isn't interested in committing suicide, afterall nuclear war benefits noone.
Honestly I see the ukraine situation either ending with a discussion that cedes at least the 2 "republics" on the border, or small yield nukes being used on small targets to scare ukraine to the negotiation table.
The reality is russia can last enough in war but ukraine is pretty tough and has nearly the same if not even more men than russia fielded.
I will refrain from making such detailed predictions but we both agree NATO will most probably NOT use nuclear weapons to retaliate if Russia uses a nuke in Ukraine.
I think the avenues for retaliation from the world are far more diverse but retaliation of some kind is almost certain.
I disagree. I believe the intentions would start as a non-nuclear response, but would rapidly spill out of control into a full send of all weapons.
This is the reality of the "Assured Destruction" of MAD. If you can take out your enemies ability to respond you can "win". With a tactical nuke in play and Rus-vs-US force engagement moves us to DEFCON 1. The name of that level is "COCKED PISTOL". A cocked pistol is something to handle gently, any wrong nudge could set it off.
Then in the background you have air to air engagements over the Black Sea - blockades of Kaliningrad, SSN's chasing SSBN's. Dozens of Cuban Missile Crisis type situations all playing out in parallel. One bad call by one local commander and a head of state is given 6 minutes to figure out if this is a first strike.
Once the line is crossed almost all of us die. It might take hours, days or weeks - but it will be an near inevitable conclusion.
> If putin keeps the radiation from spilling into nato territory
That is virtually impossible. You can count on at least some detectable level of radioactive fallout reaching a NATO country. That could be enough to trigger Article 5 IF the political leaders of NATO willed it.
To really simulate this sort of scenario properly, you need political wargaming (e.g. matrix games.) And the best way to do that is with politicians themselves, or at the very least members of their staff, participating in the wargames. This isn't the sort of thing you can simulate properly with computers or college students.
If Putin uses nukes on Ukraine, do you really think Ukraine, which has access to lots of nuclear material, wouldn't retaliate with a dirty bomb on Red Square and other locations?
Where do you think that would end?
Such a strategic situation would be incredibly unstable. If no retaliation comes, the madman will think he can use the same gambit to take the Baltics and other areas. He's been at this since Chechnya. There's no way he'll stop his aggression and violence unless someone stops him.
The only way to stop this is to effectively deter him from using them in the first place. And the only deterence is to credibly threaten immediate nuclear retaliation.
Russia using a nuke in Ukraine doesn’t even make any sense. What would it accomplish? The Ukrainian forces are too scattered for this to be effective. Would it scare the West into backing down? It would certainly scare a lot of people, but Putin knows that the West will not be scared into submission. If it’s done as a scare tactic, then it’s terrorism, and negotiating with terrorists is off the table.
The only way I can see Russia going nuclear is if the West becomes directly involved in the conflict, Putin sees it as the existential end of Russia, and decides to take the murder-suicide route. Let’s hope it never gets to that point.
I don't think he does know this. The last couple decades of Russian relations have consisted of the West being scared into submission. It wasn't until (a) Russia invaded Ukraine and frankly (b) Ukraine bloodied Russia's nose that everyone else woke up to the fact that Russia was a real threat that had to be and could be opposed.
Phew, my country seems mostly intact. If you're sufficiently far from a major city or a base, you should be fairly safe. Although getting food could be a problem in the long-term if nuclear winter sets in, which seems uncertain based on what I've read.
"If you're sufficiently far from a major city or a base, you should be fairly safe."
You have to be far from missile launch sites too, which tend to be scattered over many remote areas.
Hydroelectric dams, power stations are also likely to get hit, so say goodbye to electricity.
Say goodbye to modern medicine too, as pharmaceutical plants will not function without power, working supply chains and a skilled population to staff them. So anyone who depends on modern medicine (like blood pressure medication, dialysis, etc) to survive is going to be dead. Antibiotics will quickly run out, and so even minor infections that are treatable today will become life-threatening.
Hospitals will be completely overwhelmed (if they survive at all), so say goodbye to hospital care for any serious conditions. Childbirth will go back to the stone age, and child mortality will skyrocket.
You'd also have to survive the fallout... water's going to be unsafe to drink pretty much anywhere as it'll be contaminated and water treatment plants are unlikely to survive either.
The fields will be contaminated with fallout, all the animals are likely to die. You'll likely die of starvation or thirst unless you're a survivalist who happens to be in their bunker when the nukes hit (because there's unlikely to be any warning)... even then, how long is their food and water going to last?
The handful of survivors unlucky enough to live through a nuclear war will emerge on to a world devastated on a scale that's beyond imagining. Most of them would probably rather be dead, and the suicide rate among survivors will likely be high.
How many detonations are groundbursts and how many are airbursts? The latter produce a very limited fallout, so it's a key question for anyone living away from the targets of direct strikes.
In the movie WarGames [spoiler alert] in the simulation after the first strike everyone nukes everyone, to ensure the other remaining economies don't become superpowers. I'm not sure if that's realistic or only a tool for the plot.
Wait, nobody else thinks that if Russia uses a tactical nuclear weapon that North Korea won’t see a window of opportunity to fire one or more over at Japan or South Korea?
I mean technically that war is only at cease fire.
What would be the benefit to NK leadership to do so? The war may be "only" at cease fire right now, but chances are that SK and Japan (not to mention the US) would consider the use of nukes sufficient reason to storm Pyongyang and decapitate the leadership structure before they get nuked again.
Kim Jong Un knows that he will die if he actually uses nukes, so chances are he won't.
USA might be so busy with the war in Europe, the middle east, India vs Pakistan, China invading Taiwan, etc that is doesn't have a lot of resources to help defend South Korea.
That's why it could be considered an opportunity for North Korea.
The USA would have to be very very busy indeed to overlook the nuking of close allies. Also, South Korea itself is absolutely armed to the teeth and it is entirely unclear to me that North Korea stands any chance of winning a war even if they do get a nuclear first strike off.
It’s a shockingly simplistic simulation to the point that I’m not sure attaching the Princeton brand to it is doing them any favors. I was expecting to learn something new but this is even more basic than I could have guessed knowing nothing.
> It’s a shockingly simplistic simulation to the point that I’m not sure attaching the Princeton brand to it is doing them any favors.
Nuclear fearmongering is the new "current thing", so they are hurrying to take advantage of that.
But such is the academic world nowadays (more citations = more headlines = more cash for the university and the lab). Mass media is on the same track (bad incentives in action, amplified by internet)
Yeah this stood out to me. That whole area is covered in anti-air defenses for this explicit purpose. Practical experience today show's Soviet-era AA systems downing cruise missiles regularly in Ukraine.
There's a bizarre foundational assumption that during the "tactical" phase every weapon committed is successful, and I have no idea why. In fact it's not clear at all to me why there even is a "tactical" stage of the war: the EU powers being obliterated with nuclear weapons would immediately target Moscow for decapitation strikes, they have no reason to hold back.
Does it matter if not all tactical weapons are delivered? The point is escalation. There is no meaningful defense against ICBM/MIRVs. Also, you can rest assured that a regime that launched nukes first will not be susceptible to decapitation.
Are they providing the data they use anywhere? Are they just expecting that all Russian nukes will actually make it to the US?
The US has been somewhat open about the immense difficulty of keeping it's nuclear arsenal working reliably and has demonstrated at least some capability to intercept nuclear payloads.
Russian state of it's arsenal is likely going to be worse and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.
I don’t think you can use unknowable things like ‘state of the nuclear arsenal’, or ‘potential ability to negate or intercept nuclear weapons’ in your simulation as they’re probably state secrets, even if you did somehow know what they were.
The US has been physically inspecting Russia's arsenal (and vice versa) under the terms of New START: https://www.state.gov/new-start/
These inspections don't actually test the functionality, but we should have a pretty good idea of the condition of their nuclear arsenal, as they have of ours, as that is part of how MAD works.
From that page:
Implementation: The information provided through the treaty’s implementation contributes to reducing the risk of strategic surprise, mistrust, and miscalculations that can result from excessive secrecy or decisions based on worst-case assumptions. Since the New START Treaty’s entry into force, as of late January 2022, the two parties have conducted:
* 328 on-site inspections
* 24,000+ notifications exchanged
* 19 meetings of the Bilateral Consultative Commission, and
* 42 biannual data exchanges on strategic offensive arms subject to the treaty.
Treaty Duration: The treaty’s original duration was 10 years (until February 5, 2021), with the option for the Parties to agree to extend it for up to an additional five years. The United States and Russian Federation agreed on a five-year extension of New START to keep it in force through February 4, 2026. The treaty includes a withdrawal clause that is standard in arms control agreements.
Russian Compliance: Although the United States has raised implementation-related questions and concerns with the Russian Federation through diplomatic channels and in the context of the BCC, the United States has determined annually since the treaty’s entry into force, across multiple administrations, the Russian Federation’s compliance with its treaty obligations.
U.S. Compliance: The United States is in compliance with its New START obligations. The Russian Federation has criticized U.S. procedures used to convert B-52H heavy bombers and Trident-II SLBM launchers. The United States stands by its conversion procedures, which render the converted SLBM launchers and heavy bombers incapable of employing nuclear weapons thereby removing them from accountability under the treaty.
These 3 simulations are so much different from each other that you can't really extrapolate behavior of one from behavior of another. And, yeah, it would be naive to have faith in almost any simulation of this complexity.
Also, what is your source that the climate simulations underestimated? It was my impression that global warming has been much less dramatic than people expected it to be back in the 90's.
> it would be naive to have faith in almost any simulation of this complexity.
Careful now. There is a thin line between no having faith in a simulation and dismissing it entirely.
If you would take a look at last year's IPCC report in climate change you can see how dire the situation is, never mind that potentially in the 90s in was predicted to be even more dire.
The point is that complex simulations do show the trend, and in light of extinction the most rational response would be to assume the worst outcome and work as hard as possible to avoid that.
BTW "global warming" is linguistically a bad word, since it makes it seem that "oh well, it's just getting warmer". What is actually happening, among many things, is that weather will get more extreme (remember these one-in-a-thoisand-year events that now happen almost regularly, like the heat dome last year in SF https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_h... ? This is where it's going.)
Right now the effects aren't "dire," they're pretty meh, unless you are in an industry that is very sensitive to temp changes or small sea level rises. They are forecast to be dire, but that's what they said it would be like now back when I was in school.
2nd order effects like extreme weather getting worse is a lot less supported than the first order that temperatures are getting warmer, which is 100% proven, so "global warming" is really more accurate.
Also, we don't even have the data set to determine what a 1000 year event is. This itself is based off of a model. And, in any event, the land area of the earth is 200 million sq miles, so in any given year, you would expect to see a 1000 year event over 200K sq miles, which is bigger than California.
The blaming individual extreme events on global warming in general is also an error. The same exact error that people make when they say "it snowed a lot this winter. Global warming is a hoax."
>Keep in mind similar simulations underestimated climate change. They underestimated Covid. It would be naive to have faith in the 20 million estimate.
I think it would be safe to assume that all those estimates were politically motivated, rather than based in fact.
Assume? I would never assume, especially about motivations. Princeton might be a prestigious university, but the simulation was done by humans. I wouldn't assume anything other than human fallibility.
"Are they just expecting that all Russian nukes will actually make it to the US?"
Russia and the US have something like 5000 nukes each. Many if not all of those nukes are way more powerful than the ones that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even if only a small fraction of them make it, they'd likely be enough to completely destroy every major city in both countries... and cities are where almost the entire population lives. Plenty of remote areas will likely be hit too, because that's where the missile launch sites and military bases are.
All those huge "impregnable" bunkers you see in movies that were supposed to house governments in case of nuclear war were quietly decommissioned because it was realized that they couldn't survive hits from modern nuclear weapons and there's no way to hide them from today's surveillance technology.
So in an all-out nuclear war probably most everyone in Russia and the US would die from direct hits.. and that doesn't include knock-on effects from radiation poisoning and fallout, nuclear winter, complete infrastructural and governmental collapse (ie. no clean water to drink, all the animals dead, no food and perhaps even no ability to grow food).
As for other countries, I'd read that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the UK general in charge of his country's nuclear arsenal met his Russian counterpart and him whether he thought the movie Threads was an accurate depiction of what would happen in a nuclear war between the two countries. The Russian general laughed and said the entire UK was designated an overkill zone.
yeah people don't seem to understand the reality of nuclear war, how much nations want to avoid it, and that russia isn't a paper tiger like the news claims.
Russia is a near equal to america in its nuclear tech and absolutely has the firepower needed to induce MAD back at us.
Its the dumbest thing to think for a second that its a good idea to push for any kind of war with russia because it runs the risk of a game over for all nations involved.
places like the uk are absolutely done for, the whole island would be a mess.
"[...]
a dramatic account of nuclear war and its effects in Britain, specifically on the city of Sheffield in Northern England.
[...]
A third and final attack targets primary economic targets such as the Tinsley Viaduct. This third attack causes massive structural damage to Sheffield; the blast and heat kill an estimated 12 to 30 million people in the U.K. in the wider exchange. [...]"
Just reading the Wikipedia synopsis of this films plot I already feel like it’s nightmare material.
How on earth we as in humanity want to keep weapons around that would render us this way is still beyond my comprehension.
I also don’t know that I want to be a survivor of a nuclear war. I will be honest, don’t think I could handle it. I have dogs and a wife that needs specialized care. Just thinking about the terrible things that could happen to them alone and not even getting into the rest of the people I care about has already managed to depress me now.
I’d rather avert circumstances than even risk exchanging nukes
Perhaps it is time we truly change those incentives once and for all.
Whatever “effectiveness” nuclear weapons have is not worth it. Rather relegate them to the dust bin of history under “terrible decision, do not recommend, keep away”
I realize it’s merely wishful thinking right now but it feels paramount to me
This comment terrifies me to the bone. Note: I'm a long term Eastern European immigrant (not Russian or Ukrainian). Unlike most of HN, I have been in a war, it's much worse than most civilians imagine it. Much.
One of the things we knew during the cold war was that nuclear war would be the ruin of society. It was rightly feared. Keeping the peace between the two nuclear powers wasn't seen as a sign of weakness, everyone realized the alternative. Aside from the immediate millions of deaths, the longer term (ie after the first day) effects would be capital C Catastrophic, even if the threat of nuclear winter was overstated.
I read this as: oh it wouldn't be so bad. We could probably shoot many of them; and many won't make it, probably. This is incredibly optimistic; Russia has started modernization of its nuclear arsenal long before us because it has a stronger reliance on nuclear deterrence in defensive capability than we do.
At the time of writing this, this is also the top voted comment. Simply terrifying. Every day I have the fear we're going to head straight into the new Cuban missile crisis and one that we may not be so lucky to escape.
we are probably heading towards that because the usa did the same thing that caused it already.
The crisis happened because the usa put bombs in turkiye which is super close to the ussr.
Now the usa has bombs in turkiye and other nato members near russia.
The issue is that we can't handle what we dish out, I guarantee if russia station nukes further than we stationed them to russia that we would freak out and threaten nuclear apocalypse.
the usa makes unnecessary enemies by acting hypocritical and basically pushing other nations around.
At one point we could have gotten russia in nato and could have slowly influenced it to be like the rest of nato.
Instead we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr.
"we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr"
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US gave Russia a tremendous amount of money in hopes it would aid its transition to a modern democracy... much of that money just disappeared and the former Soviet elites stole or bought up much of what used to belong to the state in the newly privatized economy. Meanwhile the KGB and organized crime in Russia joined forces and turned the country in to a corrupt dictatorship, which had a chip on its shoulder against the West and looked backwards to the glory days of the empire of the Soviet Union.
While all this was going on, the US considered the Cold War over and actually changed its military strategy to focus on fighting many small urban conflicts and terrorists rather than facing the USSR in a world war. It also scaled down its nuclear capabilities tremendously.
The US wouldn't have done any of these things had it wanted to "give Russia the middle finger".
This post oversimplifies several things, or gets them wrong. Most money were from the IMF, France and Germany, not the US, and it was in loans, it wasn't just aid. Clinton was a "personal friend" of Yeltsin, the same "elite" who stole tremendous amount of foreign money, refused to limit his power to create checks and balances, botched the privatisation and generally turned Russia into oligarchy with controlled media. He was also a person who led Putin to power. This "friendship" ended up in their collusion in 1996 elections to save Boris (already massively hated by then, due to the Chechen war and privatisation) against the communist opponent. Part of that is known as Xerox affair and is surprisingly well documented in English. Similar to Russia's involvement in the US elections 2 decades later, the US involvement didn't help Yeltsin much in 1996 actually (he did everything himself), but it made the population disillusioned towards the US, created a fertile ground for the national myth, and more importantly the collusion pushed aside Nemtsov, then the most popular politician with no ties to USSR. (does the name ring a bell? It should)
the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.
Unlikely. The Russians have an actually effective interception system: nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles. For political or environmental reasons, the US doesn't use those. Everything we use has at best a fifty percent interception rate and the Russians have more reentry vehicles than we have interceptor missiles.
Most experts seems to think that interception is basically impossible to do reliably with current technology, even before you get into the question of countermeasures, and that with the sheer quantity of warheads, it's basically a given that a large majority would land.
Whether the entire six thousand or so warheads would explode, or the one-and-a-half thousand deployed missiles would actually reach their targets is anyone's guess.
However, bearing in mind that even one nuclear explosion is capable of killing about a million people, if detonated in an urban center, it really just takes a comparative handful of working weapons, say 1-2%, to kill as many people outright, in the initial explosions, as the number that died in the whole of WW2[0].
[0]: 1-2% of 6000 = 60-120, 60 to 120 * 1million = 60 to 120 million, around the same ballpark as deaths in WW2. That's obviously just the initial direct deaths, there would obviously be many more (an order of magnitude, at least) from follow-on effects. And this is ridiculously low-balling the estimate for how many of the warheads would be delivered to target: a more realistic estimate would be like, 90%.
Russia has hypersonic reentry vehicles, they are pretty much impossible to intercept (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat), each of these MIRV contains 10-15 nuclear warheads or an unspecified number of hypersonic glide vehicles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_v... )with nuclear payloads. They figured out the hydrodynamics to make the hypersonic glide vehicles work, I believe the US is roughly a decade behind on that. Note that this requires genuinely hard math to do and the US funding on this was temporarily suspended because it was thought to be infeasible.
The publicly known US tests of hypersonic gliders all failed or rather disintegrated, as I said there is a genuinely hard problem to be solved here and the US stopped research into it in the 80s for quite a while.
There is nothing that makes hypersonic reentry vehicles uniquely difficult to intercept, I'm not sure why anyone would assume that. The US considered this a solved problem in the 1980s.
As for the US being "behind", the US was developing and testing endo-atmospheric hypersonic missile platforms as far back as the 1980s. Russia et al designed hypersonic weapons with significantly compromised terminal guidance performance, a compromise the US will not accept in operational systems. Terminal guidance is the hardest technical problem when designing long-range endo-atmospheric hypersonic weapons. That the US is starting to move these systems toward production after 30-40 years of research suggests that they've solved the problem of terminal guidance to their satisfaction.
> Russian state of it's arsenal is likely going to be worse
Up until recently Russia was sending up American astronauts on Soyuz rockets to the ISS because they had a reliable system (based on the R7 ICBM) and we didn't.
> and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.
Intercepting ICBMs is orders of magnitudes more difficult than intercepting theater weapons like scuds because of the velocities involved.
This simulation was of 10% of each nations arsenal. If Russia launches 20% of their arsenal then it should make up for any amount of failure (and interception is likely to be negligible).
Worries me that we have so much motivated thinking trying to discount the risks of nuclear war these days. That's how you wind up in a nuclear war just like the one suggested here.
Paris, Dublin (radar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93NATO_relations...), Madrid, Toyko & Australia not being targeted make it that much more unrealistic. Even if those were hit any other remaining urban area would have its population get dragged in for peace keeping & humanitarian clean up.
But if you’re going for maximum economic damage, a capital whose economic value is largely in tax avoidance wouldn’t be that high up on the list since in a post-apocalyptic world, taxes will be the least of everyone’s worries.
I made another comment agreeing that this simulation is overly simplistic in multiple ways. It‘s basically a simulation of US and Russian nukes with European soil as the first strike. There’s no way other nuclear powers would sit idly by.
I’m not sure anything is gained by nuking Tokyo? I guess you could smash a few US airbases here, but it’s anyone’s guess if they contain nuclear warheads.
Obviously you have to start somewhere with a simulation, but to me it seems like you'd want to quickly add in the food/water/energy aspect and perhaps consider the additional damage caused by conventional weapons.
It seems as though at least one of the simulated parties has a current doctrine of trying to destroy power plants and food distribution hubs, we'd have to assume that will be part of an apocalyptic exchange.
> It seems as though at least one of the simulated parties has a current doctrine of trying to destroy power plants and food distribution hubs
Given the state of economic "optimization" our current systems are operating under I would imagine that even if the enemy did not strike energy and food distribution centers on purpose these systems would fall apart pretty quickly. Redundancy and resilience costs money, money that would not land in certain pockets if spent.
Fall apart? They'd be taken apart. People have to eat. The level of fear would could create an unprecedented and unpredictable mob mentality. See 6 Jan for example.
It being taken apart counts as falling apart in my book. Panic and mobs are one thing, but certainly something like the interruption of continous cooling chains would play into it as well.
This is a very pessimistic (but still quite possible) scenario and hopefully it will not realize. I once per year watch myself the movie "The Day After" (1983) to remind me of the horrible consequences.
This should probably be required watching on a population level - to make sure people don't get complacent and are aware in the risks and can push their politicians to do everything they can do avoid such an outcome.
> Surely NZ must be targeted all over when this has already become a meme
Why would that be the case? Destroying rich people is not the goal of nuclear weapons. (There are much easier ways to kill them, if a nuclear armed state wishes so.)
> I don't get how that is a viable survival attempt.
New Zeland doesn’t have nuclear weapons. This is their declared policy. In case of a global nuclear conflict you can waste warheads on them, but any warheads aimed at them have better use against the weapons or the cities of your nuclear armed enemies. (Either as direct means of preventing a launch against you, or as a retaliation to preempt an attack with.)
It is also very far from almost anywhere. Which helps in three ways: it is unlikely that the country gets dragged into some neighbourly small scale war by accident, it makes the country less threatening in a post-apocalyptic world, and it somewhat protects the country from radioactive fallout.
Is it guaranteed that there won’t be a nuclear attack agains NZ? No, of course there are no hard guarantees about anything. But on a strategical level it is reasonable to expect to be safer than many other places.
The Māori have a contentious relationship with the colonialists who took their land. I would not expect them to welcome the very people that are to blame for tossing nukes around. They are ferocious warriors and they will take back their islands.
I think once an entire, visible class of people from the enemy (e.g. from Russia's view, the Silicon Valley millionaires) flock to a place, the place becomes visible on the global map and probability rises that it might just get a rocket.
The safest places are probably also those places that Larry Page would now like, like poor third-world countries that yet have some level of autarky.
I’m sure there will be all kind of security threats. But you see that is nothing new. If you have that much you need some level of security to protect yourself.
I don’t btw how you imagine this btw. It is not like the millionares would arrive with fanfare and start a procession around the island. There won’t be announcements on the news that so and so is now here taking your land.
They won’t arrive and start evicting Māori. The land is already theirs. Somewhere in New Zealand there are houses right as we speak (probably very nice ones!) owned by foreign millionaires.
This is much more likely to how it will happen: A non-descript jet arrives at an airport where jets arrive all the time. A black car takes the passengers to their own holiday home. Probably a gated compound at the edge of a smaller city. If anyone is watching the place they notice that the lights stay on more often in the last few days. But it is hard to get emotional about that. And then suddenly the news announce that something very bad happened at a far away place. That is it.
I've been wondering, though - those don't really help you unless you move there full-time. I think that most flights would be cancelled in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and even if you have a private plane, a nuclear explosion wouldn't have to that close to fry enough of the electronics to ground that plane.
Nevermind that you’d have about 10-15 minutes from launch of the inbound missile to get out of the urban center you inhabit, get to your plane, take off, and get 20 miles away.
You’d basically need a helicopter with you at all times, and realtime ICBM alert data. Not impossible, but not available to average hundred millionaires.
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[ 15.4 ms ] story [ 5490 ms ] threadSame Boomers in charge now same stupid ego problems.
it's so incredibly naive, shortsighted, hypocritical and foremost childish to blame everything that's gone wrong on everybody before (except?) you. because you'll do better, sure, lol. people are people, people are alike all over, and in all times. that's what needs to be realized in order to begin trying to do better; realize that you're the same. i think nobody but the generations who actually experienced one or two world wars could have done better to maintain peace during the last 70 years. now it's time to see if the ones who came after them still have it in them, only knowing hardship from their parents' experiences. but i see very little hope for the ones after those.
That's the problem with predictions: they affect the outcome.
Which at least, makes "dying very quickly and hopefully without too much pain" a plausible exit scenario in case of nuclear war :shrug:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1178220/ICBM/
Including my parents, in Italy, where it aired on February 1984.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
Threads is more realistic, but The day after literally ignited panic in millions of families (I remember watching it on Television when I was 6, almost any other neighbour household was watching the same thing!)
I would also add the more prosaic Wargames, also from 1983, to the list of movies talking about a "Global Thermonuclear War" and, similarly to what Princeton is doing, simulating "A strange game" where "the only winning move is not to play"
Yeah, because they hadn't seen Threads, and because The Day After is about the effect of nuclear war on the US, which obviously hits closer to home.
If they'd seen Threads their reaction to The Day After would have probably been much milder.
Maybe, but as I said I've watched it in Italy, as Italian, and almost everyone was watching it that night.
Also, I was merely pointing out that before Threads there was this other movie that pioneered the idea of the atomic holocaust.
There's also China Syndrome from 1979, but even though I think it's a better movie than The day after, the premise is different and the threat is the atomic energy industry, not warheads.
I was shown it at school aged 9 and watched it out of curiousity about 5 months ago. I couldn't believe they showed it to kids in the 80's.
After watching Threads your strategy for nuclear war goes from "hide in a basement" to "run towards the blast" as going quickly is the best approach.
The reality would have probably been worse.
https://archive.org/details/threads_201712
It has a great Tangerine Dream soundtrack as well.
There is the apocryphal story about Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor who turned politician, who saw The Day After and asked his staff if would really be that bad. His staff, hardened Cold War generals and such, replied that it would be so, so much worse.
This spooked the hell out of Reagan, and led him to reach out to the USSR to ease tensions.
Didn't stop him from building deterrents in the form of Star Wars, etc. though...
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE
Threads really shocked me. Nuclear war should not be threaded lightly.
This in a early cold war era US vs USSR Armageddon scenario, not a 202x scenario.
Plausible scenarios today are:
- Russia using a nuke in Ukraine and earning the hate of every single country in the world. China and India try to remain neutral but they would almost certainly drop support for Russia if they break the nuclear taboo. This would not even require a nuclear response to solve.
- Kim doing something stupid.
The problem with disarmament seems to be that imbalances arise, and the problem with armament seems to be that if hundreds of countries have them, there's a high probability of one of them doing something stupid/crazy/suicidal.
If putin keeps the radiation from spilling into nato territory its not enough to start ww3.
Despite cnn's lies, nato doesn't actually care much for ukraine, they just see this as a way to do damage indirectly to an enemy they want to hurt.
Nato isn't interested in committing suicide, afterall nuclear war benefits noone.
Honestly I see the ukraine situation either ending with a discussion that cedes at least the 2 "republics" on the border, or small yield nukes being used on small targets to scare ukraine to the negotiation table.
The reality is russia can last enough in war but ukraine is pretty tough and has nearly the same if not even more men than russia fielded.
they will almost certainly negotiate.
I think the avenues for retaliation from the world are far more diverse but retaliation of some kind is almost certain.
This is the reality of the "Assured Destruction" of MAD. If you can take out your enemies ability to respond you can "win". With a tactical nuke in play and Rus-vs-US force engagement moves us to DEFCON 1. The name of that level is "COCKED PISTOL". A cocked pistol is something to handle gently, any wrong nudge could set it off.
Then in the background you have air to air engagements over the Black Sea - blockades of Kaliningrad, SSN's chasing SSBN's. Dozens of Cuban Missile Crisis type situations all playing out in parallel. One bad call by one local commander and a head of state is given 6 minutes to figure out if this is a first strike.
Once the line is crossed almost all of us die. It might take hours, days or weeks - but it will be an near inevitable conclusion.
That is virtually impossible. You can count on at least some detectable level of radioactive fallout reaching a NATO country. That could be enough to trigger Article 5 IF the political leaders of NATO willed it.
To really simulate this sort of scenario properly, you need political wargaming (e.g. matrix games.) And the best way to do that is with politicians themselves, or at the very least members of their staff, participating in the wargames. This isn't the sort of thing you can simulate properly with computers or college students.
Where do you think that would end?
Such a strategic situation would be incredibly unstable. If no retaliation comes, the madman will think he can use the same gambit to take the Baltics and other areas. He's been at this since Chechnya. There's no way he'll stop his aggression and violence unless someone stops him.
The only way to stop this is to effectively deter him from using them in the first place. And the only deterence is to credibly threaten immediate nuclear retaliation.
The only way I can see Russia going nuclear is if the West becomes directly involved in the conflict, Putin sees it as the existential end of Russia, and decides to take the murder-suicide route. Let’s hope it never gets to that point.
I would worry more about the severance of supply chains if your country/region imports much of its food.
You have to be far from missile launch sites too, which tend to be scattered over many remote areas.
Hydroelectric dams, power stations are also likely to get hit, so say goodbye to electricity.
Say goodbye to modern medicine too, as pharmaceutical plants will not function without power, working supply chains and a skilled population to staff them. So anyone who depends on modern medicine (like blood pressure medication, dialysis, etc) to survive is going to be dead. Antibiotics will quickly run out, and so even minor infections that are treatable today will become life-threatening.
Hospitals will be completely overwhelmed (if they survive at all), so say goodbye to hospital care for any serious conditions. Childbirth will go back to the stone age, and child mortality will skyrocket.
You'd also have to survive the fallout... water's going to be unsafe to drink pretty much anywhere as it'll be contaminated and water treatment plants are unlikely to survive either.
The fields will be contaminated with fallout, all the animals are likely to die. You'll likely die of starvation or thirst unless you're a survivalist who happens to be in their bunker when the nukes hit (because there's unlikely to be any warning)... even then, how long is their food and water going to last?
The handful of survivors unlucky enough to live through a nuclear war will emerge on to a world devastated on a scale that's beyond imagining. Most of them would probably rather be dead, and the suicide rate among survivors will likely be high.
I mean technically that war is only at cease fire.
Kim Jong Un knows that he will die if he actually uses nukes, so chances are he won't.
It’s just an extremely convenient dead man’s switch (if you hurt/kill me, it’ll be millions paying the price).
That's why it could be considered an opportunity for North Korea.
North Korea wants nukes to avoid getting regime changed like Iraq. Not to start an offensive nuclear war that they’d lose.
Nuclear fearmongering is the new "current thing", so they are hurrying to take advantage of that. But such is the academic world nowadays (more citations = more headlines = more cash for the university and the lab). Mass media is on the same track (bad incentives in action, amplified by internet)
There's a bizarre foundational assumption that during the "tactical" phase every weapon committed is successful, and I have no idea why. In fact it's not clear at all to me why there even is a "tactical" stage of the war: the EU powers being obliterated with nuclear weapons would immediately target Moscow for decapitation strikes, they have no reason to hold back.
The US has been somewhat open about the immense difficulty of keeping it's nuclear arsenal working reliably and has demonstrated at least some capability to intercept nuclear payloads.
Russian state of it's arsenal is likely going to be worse and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.
These inspections don't actually test the functionality, but we should have a pretty good idea of the condition of their nuclear arsenal, as they have of ours, as that is part of how MAD works.
From that page:
Implementation: The information provided through the treaty’s implementation contributes to reducing the risk of strategic surprise, mistrust, and miscalculations that can result from excessive secrecy or decisions based on worst-case assumptions. Since the New START Treaty’s entry into force, as of late January 2022, the two parties have conducted:
* 328 on-site inspections
* 24,000+ notifications exchanged
* 19 meetings of the Bilateral Consultative Commission, and
* 42 biannual data exchanges on strategic offensive arms subject to the treaty.
Treaty Duration: The treaty’s original duration was 10 years (until February 5, 2021), with the option for the Parties to agree to extend it for up to an additional five years. The United States and Russian Federation agreed on a five-year extension of New START to keep it in force through February 4, 2026. The treaty includes a withdrawal clause that is standard in arms control agreements.
Russian Compliance: Although the United States has raised implementation-related questions and concerns with the Russian Federation through diplomatic channels and in the context of the BCC, the United States has determined annually since the treaty’s entry into force, across multiple administrations, the Russian Federation’s compliance with its treaty obligations.
U.S. Compliance: The United States is in compliance with its New START obligations. The Russian Federation has criticized U.S. procedures used to convert B-52H heavy bombers and Trident-II SLBM launchers. The United States stands by its conversion procedures, which render the converted SLBM launchers and heavy bombers incapable of employing nuclear weapons thereby removing them from accountability under the treaty.
Also, what is your source that the climate simulations underestimated? It was my impression that global warming has been much less dramatic than people expected it to be back in the 90's.
Careful now. There is a thin line between no having faith in a simulation and dismissing it entirely.
If you would take a look at last year's IPCC report in climate change you can see how dire the situation is, never mind that potentially in the 90s in was predicted to be even more dire.
The point is that complex simulations do show the trend, and in light of extinction the most rational response would be to assume the worst outcome and work as hard as possible to avoid that.
BTW "global warming" is linguistically a bad word, since it makes it seem that "oh well, it's just getting warmer". What is actually happening, among many things, is that weather will get more extreme (remember these one-in-a-thoisand-year events that now happen almost regularly, like the heat dome last year in SF https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_h... ? This is where it's going.)
2nd order effects like extreme weather getting worse is a lot less supported than the first order that temperatures are getting warmer, which is 100% proven, so "global warming" is really more accurate.
Also, we don't even have the data set to determine what a 1000 year event is. This itself is based off of a model. And, in any event, the land area of the earth is 200 million sq miles, so in any given year, you would expect to see a 1000 year event over 200K sq miles, which is bigger than California.
The blaming individual extreme events on global warming in general is also an error. The same exact error that people make when they say "it snowed a lot this winter. Global warming is a hoax."
Read the IPCC report. Please.
I think it would be safe to assume that all those estimates were politically motivated, rather than based in fact.
Russia and the US have something like 5000 nukes each. Many if not all of those nukes are way more powerful than the ones that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even if only a small fraction of them make it, they'd likely be enough to completely destroy every major city in both countries... and cities are where almost the entire population lives. Plenty of remote areas will likely be hit too, because that's where the missile launch sites and military bases are.
All those huge "impregnable" bunkers you see in movies that were supposed to house governments in case of nuclear war were quietly decommissioned because it was realized that they couldn't survive hits from modern nuclear weapons and there's no way to hide them from today's surveillance technology.
So in an all-out nuclear war probably most everyone in Russia and the US would die from direct hits.. and that doesn't include knock-on effects from radiation poisoning and fallout, nuclear winter, complete infrastructural and governmental collapse (ie. no clean water to drink, all the animals dead, no food and perhaps even no ability to grow food).
As for other countries, I'd read that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the UK general in charge of his country's nuclear arsenal met his Russian counterpart and him whether he thought the movie Threads was an accurate depiction of what would happen in a nuclear war between the two countries. The Russian general laughed and said the entire UK was designated an overkill zone.
Russia is a near equal to america in its nuclear tech and absolutely has the firepower needed to induce MAD back at us.
Its the dumbest thing to think for a second that its a good idea to push for any kind of war with russia because it runs the risk of a game over for all nations involved.
places like the uk are absolutely done for, the whole island would be a mess.
Had to look it up, seems the movie was seen as optimistic ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film):
"[...] a dramatic account of nuclear war and its effects in Britain, specifically on the city of Sheffield in Northern England. [...] A third and final attack targets primary economic targets such as the Tinsley Viaduct. This third attack causes massive structural damage to Sheffield; the blast and heat kill an estimated 12 to 30 million people in the U.K. in the wider exchange. [...]"
How on earth we as in humanity want to keep weapons around that would render us this way is still beyond my comprehension.
I also don’t know that I want to be a survivor of a nuclear war. I will be honest, don’t think I could handle it. I have dogs and a wife that needs specialized care. Just thinking about the terrible things that could happen to them alone and not even getting into the rest of the people I care about has already managed to depress me now.
I’d rather avert circumstances than even risk exchanging nukes
We don't. But it's basically impossible to get rid of them given the existence of incentives.
Whatever “effectiveness” nuclear weapons have is not worth it. Rather relegate them to the dust bin of history under “terrible decision, do not recommend, keep away”
I realize it’s merely wishful thinking right now but it feels paramount to me
I don't understand how that would be possible.
One of the things we knew during the cold war was that nuclear war would be the ruin of society. It was rightly feared. Keeping the peace between the two nuclear powers wasn't seen as a sign of weakness, everyone realized the alternative. Aside from the immediate millions of deaths, the longer term (ie after the first day) effects would be capital C Catastrophic, even if the threat of nuclear winter was overstated.
I read this as: oh it wouldn't be so bad. We could probably shoot many of them; and many won't make it, probably. This is incredibly optimistic; Russia has started modernization of its nuclear arsenal long before us because it has a stronger reliance on nuclear deterrence in defensive capability than we do.
At the time of writing this, this is also the top voted comment. Simply terrifying. Every day I have the fear we're going to head straight into the new Cuban missile crisis and one that we may not be so lucky to escape.
The crisis happened because the usa put bombs in turkiye which is super close to the ussr.
Now the usa has bombs in turkiye and other nato members near russia.
The issue is that we can't handle what we dish out, I guarantee if russia station nukes further than we stationed them to russia that we would freak out and threaten nuclear apocalypse.
the usa makes unnecessary enemies by acting hypocritical and basically pushing other nations around.
At one point we could have gotten russia in nato and could have slowly influenced it to be like the rest of nato.
Instead we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US gave Russia a tremendous amount of money in hopes it would aid its transition to a modern democracy... much of that money just disappeared and the former Soviet elites stole or bought up much of what used to belong to the state in the newly privatized economy. Meanwhile the KGB and organized crime in Russia joined forces and turned the country in to a corrupt dictatorship, which had a chip on its shoulder against the West and looked backwards to the glory days of the empire of the Soviet Union.
While all this was going on, the US considered the Cold War over and actually changed its military strategy to focus on fighting many small urban conflicts and terrorists rather than facing the USSR in a world war. It also scaled down its nuclear capabilities tremendously.
The US wouldn't have done any of these things had it wanted to "give Russia the middle finger".
You can’t just $$$ to an unstable country and expect it to work.
Unlikely. The Russians have an actually effective interception system: nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles. For political or environmental reasons, the US doesn't use those. Everything we use has at best a fifty percent interception rate and the Russians have more reentry vehicles than we have interceptor missiles.
they know its their best trump card and they want to "win" by killing us more efficiently.
Whether the entire six thousand or so warheads would explode, or the one-and-a-half thousand deployed missiles would actually reach their targets is anyone's guess.
However, bearing in mind that even one nuclear explosion is capable of killing about a million people, if detonated in an urban center, it really just takes a comparative handful of working weapons, say 1-2%, to kill as many people outright, in the initial explosions, as the number that died in the whole of WW2[0].
[0]: 1-2% of 6000 = 60-120, 60 to 120 * 1million = 60 to 120 million, around the same ballpark as deaths in WW2. That's obviously just the initial direct deaths, there would obviously be many more (an order of magnitude, at least) from follow-on effects. And this is ridiculously low-balling the estimate for how many of the warheads would be delivered to target: a more realistic estimate would be like, 90%.
Suggests that the US is not behind. If Wikipedia has that information it is likely that we’re already several decades ahead, in fact.
As for the US being "behind", the US was developing and testing endo-atmospheric hypersonic missile platforms as far back as the 1980s. Russia et al designed hypersonic weapons with significantly compromised terminal guidance performance, a compromise the US will not accept in operational systems. Terminal guidance is the hardest technical problem when designing long-range endo-atmospheric hypersonic weapons. That the US is starting to move these systems toward production after 30-40 years of research suggests that they've solved the problem of terminal guidance to their satisfaction.
Up until recently Russia was sending up American astronauts on Soyuz rockets to the ISS because they had a reliable system (based on the R7 ICBM) and we didn't.
> and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.
Intercepting ICBMs is orders of magnitudes more difficult than intercepting theater weapons like scuds because of the velocities involved.
This simulation was of 10% of each nations arsenal. If Russia launches 20% of their arsenal then it should make up for any amount of failure (and interception is likely to be negligible).
Worries me that we have so much motivated thinking trying to discount the risks of nuclear war these days. That's how you wind up in a nuclear war just like the one suggested here.
That said, I don’t think it would be targeted since it’s existence is a greater detriment to the enemy than it’s destruction.
But if you’re going for maximum economic damage, a capital whose economic value is largely in tax avoidance wouldn’t be that high up on the list since in a post-apocalyptic world, taxes will be the least of everyone’s worries.
It seems as though at least one of the simulated parties has a current doctrine of trying to destroy power plants and food distribution hubs, we'd have to assume that will be part of an apocalyptic exchange.
Given the state of economic "optimization" our current systems are operating under I would imagine that even if the enemy did not strike energy and food distribution centers on purpose these systems would fall apart pretty quickly. Redundancy and resilience costs money, money that would not land in certain pockets if spent.
unopposed
If you have not done it until now, here's a link for the full movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-phsyn3KQM
Just don't blame me for the miserable tight stomach afterwards... :-/
Why would that be the case? Destroying rich people is not the goal of nuclear weapons. (There are much easier ways to kill them, if a nuclear armed state wishes so.)
> I don't get how that is a viable survival attempt.
New Zeland doesn’t have nuclear weapons. This is their declared policy. In case of a global nuclear conflict you can waste warheads on them, but any warheads aimed at them have better use against the weapons or the cities of your nuclear armed enemies. (Either as direct means of preventing a launch against you, or as a retaliation to preempt an attack with.)
It is also very far from almost anywhere. Which helps in three ways: it is unlikely that the country gets dragged into some neighbourly small scale war by accident, it makes the country less threatening in a post-apocalyptic world, and it somewhat protects the country from radioactive fallout.
Is it guaranteed that there won’t be a nuclear attack agains NZ? No, of course there are no hard guarantees about anything. But on a strategical level it is reasonable to expect to be safer than many other places.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-581...
I think once an entire, visible class of people from the enemy (e.g. from Russia's view, the Silicon Valley millionaires) flock to a place, the place becomes visible on the global map and probability rises that it might just get a rocket.
The safest places are probably also those places that Larry Page would now like, like poor third-world countries that yet have some level of autarky.
I don’t btw how you imagine this btw. It is not like the millionares would arrive with fanfare and start a procession around the island. There won’t be announcements on the news that so and so is now here taking your land.
They won’t arrive and start evicting Māori. The land is already theirs. Somewhere in New Zealand there are houses right as we speak (probably very nice ones!) owned by foreign millionaires.
This is much more likely to how it will happen: A non-descript jet arrives at an airport where jets arrive all the time. A black car takes the passengers to their own holiday home. Probably a gated compound at the edge of a smaller city. If anyone is watching the place they notice that the lights stay on more often in the last few days. But it is hard to get emotional about that. And then suddenly the news announce that something very bad happened at a far away place. That is it.
You’d basically need a helicopter with you at all times, and realtime ICBM alert data. Not impossible, but not available to average hundred millionaires.