You won't be able to enjoy dank memes regardless, on account that you will be blind from cataracts. You see, you will be tilling the soil all day under intense UV rays.
That's only if MAD and all-out nuclear war occurs. In the event of a limited nuclear exchange, it's just a real big bomb went off somewhere that I hope you're nowhere near.
Grief doesn't have stages. They don't come in order, and there's no way to grieve wrong. Bereavement is a very difficult time, no matter the cause. Not everyone survives it. In the event of a nuclear holocaust, it's not clear if the lucky ones are the ones that survive or the ones that died in the blast. Thankfully, MAD doctrine assures us we'll never see that, despite what cold war propaganda would have you believe.
On a cheery note for a Monday morning, worth noting that Threads was based on a fairly optimistic scenario for the Soviets attacking the UK - a real attack would probably have been far worse:
That source confusingly indicates both that the scenario was underestimated:
>It was assumed that 131 nuclear weapons would fall on Britain with a total yield of 205 megatons (69 ground burst; 62 air burst)[1] with yields of 500 KT to 3 MT[2] That was felt to be a reasonably realistic scenario, but the report stated that a total strike in excess of 1,000 megatons would be likely.
But also that the scenario was overestimated:
>Square Leg was criticised for a number of reasons: the weapons used were exclusively in the high-yield megaton range, with an average of 1.5 megatons per bomb, but a realistic attack based on known Soviet capabilities would have seen mixed weapons yields, including many missile-based warheads in the low-hundred-kiloton range.
I interpreted that to mean that very large numbers of smaller weapons would have been used - probably with large amount of redundant targetting which seems to be consistent with Western targetting approaches.
The latter statement may have been written/edited by somebody who did not understand what he was reading, because it's all consistent if you know one esoteric bit of knowledge: the destructive power of a nuke is proportional to the cubic root of its yield. This makes sense if you think about it because the volume grows in proportion to the radius cubed, so doubling the yield will do nowhere near double the damage.
In other words, more small bombs does way more destruction than one big bomb if we assume the same total yield. To give a specific example, imagine dropping one 1500 kiloton bomb vs five 300 kiloton bombs. In the first scenario the destructive power would be about 11.5 units of damage. In the second example it would be 5 * 6.7 = 33.5 units - assuming no overlap.
In other other words, the report assuming a small number of high yield weapons (instead of larger number of lower yield weapons - but an otherwise comparable total yield) was understating the impact of nuclear war, potentially dramatically.
In other other other words - the report was being criticized for understating the impact of nuclear war in both cases.
I hope you would, and unless you happen to live near a major political center or a military installation, I think your chances would be very good. A nuclear war would be terrible, but it's not a doomsday scenario.
In the last months, we've seen how the Red army performs in conventional war. They were supposed to have 10,000 - 14,000 tanks, including modern ones, but we now see that they barely had any modern tanks and that after losing 2,500 tanks from the 60s, 70s and 80s, they started begging Belarus for their old tanks. They also claimed to have a modern air force, but until now, they have been unable to establish air dominance against a country that barely had any air force. And they were supposed to have a navy, but also that was an exaggeration. They claimed to have precision-guided missiles, and even supersonic missiles. They ran out of those long time ago, and they weren't that precise or fast. What they had was a lot of empty posture.
Why do we believe that they are any better at nuclear war than they are at waging conventional war? Whatever is true for a simple conventional war, is even more true for a nuclear war: Their missiles and warheads are old and unmaintained, and far fewer in numbers than they pretend.
The effects of corruption runs so deep in their society. Just like you can't buy any complex Russian products in your local stores, and just like you never wanted a Russian car, Russian military is completely incapable of successfully waging war against the West.
Can Russia launch a nuclear attack against NATO? Probably, yes. But it would be much smaller than the official numbers suggest, and layered Western missile shields would intercept a percentage of those missiles. Some missiles would miss their target and some would not detonate.
Different studies give different estimates ranging from tens of millions to hundreds of millions dead in the immediate aftermath of a strike, but studies assume that Russia is actually capable of carrying out a strike and penetrate our defenses with a large number weapons that work. Estimates of dead afterwards, are usually from starvation, not from radiation.
It's been 40-50 years since Russia actually had strength comparable to NATO. Even back then, humanity would have survived a nuclear war. Nowadays, both Russia and the free world has fewer weapons, and we now know that Russian military capabilities are routinely exaggerated. A nuclear war with Russia would be terrible, but it would be over quickly, it would end in Russian defeat, and most of us would live on afterwards.
I agree with you, but it seems to be a minority opinion among the general population here in Western Europe.
I meet a lot of people who think their life will be short and nasty if Russia drops a nuclear weapon over Ukraine (which, at a distance of 2000km, would affect us not at all).
As far as I have read, all the major NATO countries have expressed a position that they would respond immediately and violently to a nuclear attack by Russia in Ukraine (to act as a deterrent for such an unprecented attack), however they have all indicated that the response would likely be significant but non-nuclear, e.g. one response option that was mentioned was sinking of the whole Black Sea fleet with conventional missiles.
That would mean the start of a NATO-Russia war, that will almost certainly attract responses from China and other nations - the start of World War III. I didn't say that we would immediately nuke Russia, but if you think NATO directly attacking Russian troops would not change your way of life wherever you live in Europe, you're far more optimistic than I am.
I believe that deterrence works - it doesn't work perfectly, and is not a guarantee, but I strongly believe that a credible deterrent works far better than any plausible alternative we might have.
I agree, though the line between deterrence and escalation is quite thin and easy to cross.
My point was only to reply to the person thinking that a nuclear strike in Ukraine affects them not at all somewhere else in Europe, which I think is extremely shortsighted.
I would rather be at ground zero for any missile that works (assuming most of them won't even get out of their silo due to corruption). While much of the world will survive initially, the disruption to economies world wide will likely kill a ton of people conventionally due to hunger, lack of water, healthcare, and violence. That's not likely to be very pleasant anywhere. Humanity would survive, but for a lot of people it might be a short miserable life. Even today there are many places suffering a terrible existence; imagine that on a global scale where no one can afford to help other countries.
The ratio of people killed vs farmland destroyed would likely mean there was plenty of farmland available in the aftermath. Lack of oil, fertilizer, and electricity would be the largest issues but if keeping people fed only requires something like 1-10% of current farm output that’s probably easily achieved.
Lack of water could be an issue in some areas but simply walking to fresh though not clean drinking water is viable in most areas.
Violence after disasters is more trope than reality. People will loot after a disaster, but it’s not like people are going to show up to Best Buy and work after a nuclear war. Looting is more useful to humanity than simply letting food rot because people can’t work the self checkout machine.
Starvation is more typically driven by organizational, infrastructure, or other tangential issues than by the lack of land. Africa is the best example. It's an absolute utopia in terms of the resources needed for survival, a simply beautiful land in general, and home to the highest rates of starvation in the world. It's those tangential problems that are causing it.
And these tangential issues would emerge in spades after nuclear war. For instance one of the most basic is logistics. Think about how insanely much is just involved in getting an ear of corn from a farm to you. At the most fundamental you're relying on machinery, drivers, oil, gas, refineries, roads infrastructure, food processing infrastructure and a whole lot more - before that ear of corn is anywhere near you. And then there needs to be a means of distribution, and more.
Our entire economy came on the verge of collapse because of COVID, and nuclear war would have an impact with so many orders of magnitude greater than COVID that I think even dreaming of anything even vaguely resembling normalcy afterwards is unrealistic. Violence happens after disasters when the food runs out. In practical disasters that tends to not happen due to rapid aid, delivery, support, and organization. In nuclear war, the food will run out.
That gets into a wider issue, people aren’t going to want to starve and will in general try quiet hard to avoid that fait.
Saying the current social order breaks down isn’t enough to suggest Anarchy will take it’s place. A farmer who wants to collect a harvest without oil will want manpower, and survivors will want to eat. That’s the basis of civilization.
Sure suburbs in their current form don’t work without cars and oil. But, people can migrate quite far on a half a tank of gas and their feet.
What you're saying is completely true. At the same time it's also true that tens if not hundreds of millions have died of starvation within the life of many still alive today. And the same was no less true of those individuals who undoubtedly did everything they could, and sought food absolutely everywhere they possible could. But they were looking for something which simply was not there. Sometimes human will and human ingenuity, no matter how strong or how brilliant, is insufficient to overcome a situation.
And within these stories one can also see what happens to societies once normal social function starts to collapse. While this [1] article reads like a propaganda piece, the tales it recounts are neither unique nor exceptional given the situation. Of course it does feel weird to be here kind of arguing that, "Yes we will starve." I think my main point and motivation is that the consequences of what we're discussing simply cannot be overstated. There is a dangerous amount of misinformation that increasingly seems to be headed towards, 'Maybe nuclear wouldn't be 'that' bad.' Perhaps not misinformation. Because it's true that it wouldn't be 'that' bad, it'd be vastly worse.
I agree that famine would be a serious risk, but when I look at major famines they seem to largely be imposed by government action. Irish, China, Russia, North Korea etc.
The Irish potato famine occurred in part because of the potato blight, but it was a multi year issue that at it’s core related to growing exports (cotton, grain) in favor of local food. Russia’s industrialization created famine because so many farm workers where sent to factories. China had similar root causes, the 18year old worker in that story went home to see their family and many fields where fallow. Steal all the food or workers from a village and people starve.
That’s not to say drought etc didn’t play a role, but the American dust bowl isn’t remembered as a famine because there was feedback between the amount of food crops planted and the need for food.
The majority of world's population lives in areas that wouldn't even be targeted in an all-out NATO-vs-Russia exchange. Noone is going to bomb South America, Africa, or most of Asia, so even if everyone in "participating" countries would die (which far from being true), you'd still need most of the current food demand. And the supplies of food generally flow out of the affected countries, the industrialized regions feed the developing regions with staple crops (receiving in return imports of "optional" food like coffee, cocoa and bananas) - case in point, the ongoing events about grain supply from Ukraine (and also Russia) to Africa and Middle East.
A limited exchange between a subset of current nuclear powers is even less deadly. If we assume China, India, and Pakistan, who all have nukes, don’t participate then the worlds economy might not collapse. Similarly an exchange between India and Pakistan would only disrupt most of the world if it involved salted nukes or similar horrors.
On the other hand WWII involved most of South America, Africa, and Asia to some degree. If WWIII got similarly out of hand then nukes might take out all of the worlds chip making capacity, oil refineries, and deep sea ports as strategic assets making thing far more unpleasant.
This [1] is something people should be more aware of. Those are our declassified nuclear targets from the Cold War. The Soviet Union's (and now Russia's) are almost certainly of a similar theme. While military targets did play a significant role, major targets included population, economic, industrial, and even medical infrastructure.
What military targets there were would be significantly reduced today. We were targeting military targets, not to target their military - but to try to destroy their means of nuclear delivery (bombers). Today in the ICBM era, that means of delivery is largely nuclear fortified silos spread far out and in the middle of nowhere. Poor targets.
Nuclear war isn't about defeating the enemy, it's about destroying them. If Russia nuked 100 military targets today, then tomorrow there'd be 20 million Americans looking to enlist, and every single aspect of manufacturing we have domestically or can influence abroad would be directed towards rebuilding at an unprecedented rate.
The way you overcome this is by focusing on that rebuilding: population, industry, economy, and even medical. You probably have a much better chance of surviving a nuclear war if you live out in the middle of nowhere, even beside a nuclear silo, than you do living in a common population center. Though with the goal of destruction, even that may be insufficient since there's no reason to expect things like salted bombs [2] or other doomsday type weaponry would not come into play.
A lot of indigenous people well outside the primary secondary and tertiary target areas will be survivors, many are getting by without the internet to this day and won't require access to rebuild.
In the US, Europe, and Russia, sure, it’d be the end of civilization. However most of South America, for example, would continue relatively unscathed, especially countries like Argentina that are agriculturally self sufficient and of no strategic importance to Russia or the USA. Same for New Zealand, parts of Australia, much of Asia, and so on. Nuclear also wouldn’t affect undersea fiber optic cables so chances are something resembling the Internet would still be around. Personally I would give civilization pretty good odds.
Yeah no, Starlink wouldn't even connect since the AWS Lambda that checks whether your subscription is still valid has gone offline forever. Which isn't that big of an issue really because all the datacenters are gone and all the uplinks as well, so Starlink is now an intranet.
I mean, perhaps they do have solid and tested contingency plans for events like that, or the military has some sort of access they could use to rig it into something useful, but I don't really believe it.
If that exists, that user validation is all happening on the BE for Starlink, and while it may go down, there's no reason Starlink (assuming the actual engineering team survived in some fashion) wouldn't be able to cut it out of the loop or replace it.
I also have no particular reason to think that Russia would use their very limited ICBM stockpile to target data centers rather than military facilities.
To the best of my knowledge Russia retains hundreds of ICBMs and about a thousand warheads ready to fire at a moment's notice. Unless I've missed a crucial bit of news, I'd expect a majority of these to function as intended, as everything I read on that part of their military suggests they're operating a lot better than their army. In that case, an all-out nuclear war would mean hundreds of warheads raining down on the US with on average larger yields than the US ones to make up for less reliable targeting, and even optimistic projections for that and the effects of US retaliation assume three-digit million deaths right away and at least one growing season lost to nuclear winter. All infrastructure close to major population centers, military installations, ... would be gone, as would be anything susceptible to EMP from high-altitude detonations. I don't see Starlink software engineering and the infrastructure they require to remain operational in such a scenario.
I have a reason to think such! The "obvious" target would be things like our nuclear resources, to try to create a win condition. But in most cases this would just be wasting weapons. Those facilities, as well as ones such as where our politicians will go hide while society dies for their decisions, are designed to withstand direct nuclear impacts.
The goal of nuclear war, absent any chance for a realistic "win" conditions it to ensure that absolute destruction of the opposing country - beyond the ability to ever rebuild to a comparable relative strength. Our nuke targets from during the Cold War have been declassified [1], and it's likely that the Soviet Union's were similarly themed: population, industry, economic, medical. There's an extremely strong overlap between those areas and data centers.
In any case this is also all slightly tangential. One of the first things that will happen during WW3 is the widescale mutual destruction of satellites in the sky, for both offensive and defensive measures.
Certainly I have the equipment to be able to do IP between multiple locations - assuming that nuclear war wouldn't knock out GEO satelites and that not every vehicle and groundstation I have is destroyed.
Not sure how useful that would be though.
If a groundstation continues to work then even better, that bgan in your bag may well still work - assuming there's not too much radiation and dust in the atmosphere
Again, still not sure what the point is.
Hardlines between local command areas though - far more useful, and less likely to have been taken out.
Will we? In the case of a nuclear exchange, everyone will want to reach out internationally to call their lived ones and say goodbye, and people don't use long distance phone calls anymore, so they'll want to use the Internet for that. (And even if they did it's all VOIP on the backend these days anyway.) It's a critical piece of communication infrastructure.
"We need to make sure the internet survives a nuclear bomb so that we can say goodbye to our loved ones because we did nothing to stop anyone from dropping the bombs nor instigate peace."
That is what you said. Think about that and everything you do from now on and everyone you vote for and every piece of hate and division you have in your heart.
Powerful words, but don't put words in my mouth. I did not say the part after the "because"; that's your message (and it's a good one!). But me; I'm just here to keep making the Internet work, in my own (tiny) way. Politicians and oligarchs will make their war and their peace, all we can do is keep working and building, hoping they don't topple it all.
I went to a talk with one of the Arpanet guys about 10 years ago (annoyingly, I've forgotten who!). I remember that he thought it was ridiculous to suggest that the internet would be any good after a nuclear war, but conceded that the absurd notion might have been aired to get funding for research on packet switching.
What makes it ridiculous? Not all nuclear wars need be hundreds of nukes.
The military has to plan for the full range of the scale, from small brush fire near a minor ammo depo to full blown WWIII. But the part that is 75% towards full blown WWIII is so often overlooked by commentators it's like it doesn't exist. I could come up with 100s of scenarios where most of the internet works but there is a recently-started nuclear war. (India vs Pakistan, for example.)
that's not the Internet as a whole, is it? only http[s]-services are affected by that. in case of a nuclear attack I guess every service will be affected
http? My website runs fine if amazon and cloudflare go down.
However as I'm in the UK, a large nuke in Docklands would cause big problems. Most of my company's connectivity reaches the world through Telehouse and Sovereign House, both in Docklands, about a mile from each other. A large nuke landing on top of the Blackwall Tunnel - perhaps on top of Switch (another major building we have), would probably knock both out.
You could effectively knock out the UK's internet by sabotaging the Thames Barrier, let alone the damage just a single nuclear bomb in docklands would do.
Well, if we were going to attack the internet with nuclear weapons, how many data centers would need to be targeted? Seems like if we just threatened us-east-1, it would shutdown and save us the nuke. Switching regions to us-west-1 might actually need the ordinance to be expelled, but it might go down after us-east-1 fainted. Not really sure about cloudflare data centers, but targeting the location of 1.1.1.1 might be a lot of bang for the buck. Let's not forget Goog's 8.8.8.8 and family.
How much of routing would then happen after that first strike? How many other centralized places of the decentralized internet would need to be targeted in the first strike?
> targeting the location of 1.1.1.1 might be a lot of bang for the buck. Let's not forget Goog's 8.8.8.8 and family.
1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 are anycasted addresses, they don't have one location, and the location you are connected to differences based on your location. Anycast was one of the earliest things formalized by the IETF and originally created in 1989 as a method of addressing using IP, /specifically/ for resiliency and performance.
This is way too serious of a reply to my not obvious enough tongue in cheek comment, but now I've gone and learned something new with Anycast being an actual system on the inner workings of the interwebs
Hmm if your money is in Charles Schwab, and NY is turned into atoms, do they have backups in non-attacked countries, along with infrastructure to run their code on, and there is a functional internet connection from there to you, maybe. I highly doubt all that will work. Meanwhile you have no money.
I was part of a team hired to create training videos on the banking system "updates" after the OKC bombing. This was the first time I had a look under the hood of a redundant system with Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and further systems.
Primary and Secondary were running 24/7 with Secondary being in exact sync with Primary. If Primary or Secondary went down, Tertiary could be brought up in sync within 24 hours. Primary and Secondary were geographically separated (east/west coast). Tertiary was in the mid-west. After that, the additional facilities would take days to bring up, and then a bit of time to sync.
The specific bank is no longer alive as it was consumed by one of the "too big to fail" institutions.
Gotta go renewables. Solar+Wind. Solar might be hampered depending on the severity of the nuclear winter's cloud coverage, but you can probably generate quite a surplus from the wind caused by the blast waves!
It depends on how you define survive, and for how long.
In the time when the ARPANET was designed, the ICBM's accuracy was far lower, so a packet-switched network with lots of redundant links had a better chance of surviving for more time than a circuit-switched.
The idea was to have a communications network that fared a better chance to survive time enough to be able to be used to coordinate a counter-attack for a few hours or days. A network that would degrade more graciously but that would surely degrade the same in the end.
The whole OP is about disputing your theory, finding no evidence for it, finding many people involved in the early days of Internet/ARPAnet disputing it.
The type of person who jumps at the chance to recite "nuclear stuff" from back when the school I was in still had East Germany on the class globe while seeming to actively refuse to accept new information is the reason there still exists a risk of nuclear exchange.
A lot of these Americans (parent seems American, I'm also American -- I can use the word) keep forgetting: there is no draft, Iraq was a war crime, you could have chosen a different path.
I can chart out how one year in the 90s, the parallel evils of refusing to hire more auditors nor upgrade infrastructure cascaded through the federal government, culiminating in the OPM breach.
I should stop making these long Slashdot-esque rants under two people I've probably never met, because the last year it was gonna not be weird for me to trick or treat was the one after 9/11.
We are in a multipolar world now, in every sense of the word, and folks should adjust to the fact that after many conversations, with many people, in many places, it's my understanding folks, if they support nukes at all, support a robust second strike policy paired with what I would term "armed neutrality".
I can remember in college, I'd say we should get rid of the nuclear triad, instead focus on taking the existing stockpile, checking there's no... leaks or anything like that... and loading them onto cruise missles to be put on submarines or in those fancy ass stealth planes and the same homophobic, classist, ableist folks who used to use the draft to force people to fight their wars would repeat the same tired talking points from the cold war.
There's a feeling in the air like there was in 2002. They talked about whether they'd let kids trick or treat, as if some asshole was going to... what? Anthrax the candy?
The real threat was the type of person who gets an increasing edge in their voice that every year you come to their house, politely take one candy, and make your way in a big loop around the block but won't drink their kool aid or whatever. Like, yeah lady, I get it... you want me to show I trust you. I don't. I'm gonna take a candy bar and pretend I care if you live another year since you told on yourself -- and I won't be back.
This reminds me of reading about Michael Faraday researching gravity. He and a few other researchers were taking little balls of metal and moving, shaking, and rotating them next to each other to try to determine if there was any electrical activity generated from the relative movements of the masses. Faraday even tried measuring for electrical field disturbances from a mass of bismuth falling and then stopping when it hit the ground.
If their hypothesis was correct, that moving matter in relation to other matter generated a field exchange, that meant we could each have a "gravity transmitter" and "gravity receiver" that could act independently of any wired or wireless systems.
Having point to point high speed communications from anywhere on the planet to anywhere else on the planet, which themselves weren't governed or use restricted, would be game changing. Alas, current theories and decades of research haven't given us much to go on.
Its the engineering that hasn't caught up with that theory. If I shake an electron here, theres a radiowave that travels in all directions at the speed of light. The problem is isolating those signals when they are extremely weak compared to nearly infinite background "noise", that are also distinguishable signals, many of which may be carrying real information. So there's nothing about my little packet of energy that can really set it apart from what my friend is wiggling over there.
If you could develop a sensor that picked up on just a small segment of the fourier vibrations going on, identify it, and then respond, all of this theory still seems like it would hold true. It's just practically impossible.
A distributed system would survive if the network it was running on had enough redundant paths and bandwidth available to keep a path available after some number of attacks.
Yes. Some looney tunes like myself keep backups of Bitcoin on disk (HDD and CD/DVD, the latter being impervious to EMP) with the software/hardware to run them in Faraday cages. Assuming I can find a viable power source post idiot mode, it would most definitely survive. Worst case scenario it may be incomplete, but that'd be expected as consensus would have to be rebuilt anyways.
Yeah, I am sure Bitcoin will be useful after a 50 kiloton bomb is dropped on any random city. That is definitely what people will want for payment, bitcoin. Not water, food, or toilet paper... bitcoin.
Interesting read. I'm reminded of when my internet literally came to a hault after 9/11. I was just a kid back then, but I'd be curious if anyone knows why. My hypothesis has always been that the internet, up to that moment in time, was a thing people logged into when it was convenient. Some people had DSL but it was still mostly dial up. However, that day everyone wanted to know what was going on.
I don't know of any evidence that the Internet as a whole suffered outages due to 9/11, but I can certainly believe that individual web sites and/or ISPs would have struggled.
Maybe your ISP didn't have a fast enough backbone connection to support all of its customers, or maybe one of its internal routers became overloaded. Or maybe it literally didn't have enough phone lines to support all of the customers simultaneously dialing in.
Every news website had major outages that day, I don't know details but I wouldn't be surprised if they were dealing with 100x or 1000x their normal traffic and they existed in a world before you could just push the scale up button on your AWS/GCP panel.
It's also very likely that your ISP had backhaul issues, and myraid other issues existed related to capacity.
For local connections I think you're spot on. A lot of ISPs had massively over provisioned backhaul. With a larger than average number of users connected simultaneously and heavily using their connections there was not enough backhaul to handle the load. This could be even more pronounced on cable since a single segment could have hundreds of subscribers sharing that segment's bandwidth.
I worked for a hosting company back then (quite a major name in the U.K.) and we didnt have any outages. So I suspect the other guesses are right wrt jammed phones lines, specific local ISP backhauls, and news sites being overloaded.
I think it's a fair assumption that major backbone sites are now a prime target like any other critical infrastructure. And close does count here because of EMP.
My understanding is that Internet is largely still hand tuned thing. It operates automatically, but failures in BGP and peering would cause it to break up and if the admins doing exactly that are dead... Well, good luck setting it back up without secondary channels.
I guess if things in Ukraine keep heating up as they are now we'll find out soon enough!!
Many people fail to see how dangerous this war is. It could readily lead to an all-out nuclear war between all the nuclear powers on the globe. We've been stirring the hornets nest and Russia is now calling our bluff.
Some believe that if Putin is removed Russia will somehow become a model Democracy, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. If Putin is replaced it will be by some ultra-nationalist which will spell even more trouble.
Fortunately those in charge of policy-making in the US seem to understand how dangerous it is. As long as only one side has nukes, the danger is greatly reduced.
Wrong. Russia using nukes in Ukraine will inevitably lead to a nuclear conflict between NATO and Russia. I just pray Russia's military refuses to use nukes to decide the military adventure started by Putin.
As far as Russia's concerned NATO is already a combatant in this conflict. It will only take a slight nudge to light the fuse.
> Wrong. Russia using nukes in Ukraine will inevitably lead to a nuclear conflict between NATO and Russia. I just pray Russia's military refuses to use nukes to decide the military adventure started by Putin.
I don't know about "inevitably" but I'd agree to "very likely." On the other hand, NATO not being directly involved in the Ukraine makes it less likely that nukes will be used in the Ukraine. When the other side has nukes, the fog-of-war means you may wrongly think that they were used, and retaliate with nukes.
I'd put more weight on Baran's claims. He has primacy, it was clearly documented in the Rand Techical Reports and then retold well in the Wired article with Stewart Brand.
Yes, Cerf, Kahn et al revived and invented a good amount of it, but the ideas had been circulating for a decade by that point, at the phone companies and US military, which is where the academic money came from anyways.
I'm finding that increasingly, whenever I read "X is a myth", it turns out to be mostly a myth. I guess it's a popular article form, it gets clicks, it doesn't have to be completely true, right?
In this case, Wikipedia makes it pretty clear that while surviving a nuclear attack specifically might not have been an explicit part of the design goals of the designers (which may have started the myth myth), resilience against large-scale failures was exactly the feature that made the technology interesting to its military sponsors:
> Nonetheless, according to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development":
>> The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.
My takeaway is that while the ARPANET creators might not themselves have particularly cared about surviving nuclear disasters, without the completely decentralized packet switching that made this at least a possibility, it wouldn't have ever received the funding to get off the ground.
Shortening this fact to "ARPANET was funded to survive a nuclear attack" is IMO a fair sound-bite sized summary, not a "myth" to be debunked, even though the story has obviously more nuances.
That's a good way to put it. There's the habit of eliding all nuances in casual writing, especially for any large project as in reality there are multiple groups involved with some separation of interests and goals.
This is a good find. However I read through the key portions of the cited Lukasik article about the founding of ARPANET (pp. 10-12), and I can't find any real support for the claim in his introduction. He mentions the Baran RAND proposal and its survivability goals, but I saw no evidence provided that ARPA funded Taylor's ARPANET project because they thought it would help meet those same goals.
It's also important to mention that Lukasik wrote this article in 2011, over 40 years after the fact, and that the claim you quote is contradicted by pretty much everyone else involved at the time, including Lukasik's boss at the time ARPANET was conceived, Charles Herzfeld (as cited in the same wikipedia article.)
> I'm finding that increasingly, whenever I read "X is a myth", it turns out to be mostly a myth. I guess it's a popular article form, it gets clicks, it doesn't have to be completely true, right?
Betteridge's law - "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
> The routing protocols of ARPANET were developed at Bolt, Beranek and Newman. Bob Kahn, John McQuillan and William Crowther and maybe David Walden (?) were principal architects of the routing system of the ARPANET. (Vint Cerf)
Regarding that question mark, David Walden was actually the software designer and Severo Ornstein his hardware counterpart.
Compare:
> In 1968 BBN was preparing to bid on the contract from ARPA to develop the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMPs) [ARPA68]. Frank Heart, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, and David Walden were the main members of BBN’s proposal team (although other BBN people participated) with Heart as the team leader, Kahn with prior background in the concepts of packet switching, Ornstein as the hardware designer, and Walden as the software designer. Shortly before the due date for BBN’s proposal [BBN68] to ARPA, Will Crowther was added to the team as another (more senior) software person; and after BBN was awarded the contract, Ben Barker was added as a hardware designer and Bernie Cosell as a third software person. BBN was awarded to IMP development contract with a start date of January 1, 1969.
BTW, as I've read it, the use of packet switching was all about connection times, connecting from hop to hop versus the time required for establishing a cross-continental circuit switching line. (And yes, packet switching for telephony had once been pitched for its military robustness, but this is not why it was considered for ARPANET.)
You must be young. Before the 90's you had a thing called the Cold War between the US+allies and Russia+allies. There was a harrowing spectre of possible nuclear war all throughout the 50's, 60's, 70's and well into the 80's; imbuing itself upon military strategy, pop culture, and the general zeitgeist at large. The Internet was born during this time.
I am not young by any means. Which is why I am yelling at all you kids asking yourselves these everyday questions regarding the existential threat of nuclear war.
But I guess that is why we also in the middle of climate disaster.
The fantasy that life could still be lived after nuclear attack is disturbing in itself without any further "strategy".
What use would the internet be at that point? Even if you survived, your body and food is now under non-stop attack from radiation, you have far bigger problems.
Look at how miserable the world is that everyone literally gave up on protecting themselves from a pandemic.
Now imagine widespread radiation with the same mentality "well you can't see it so it can't hurt you" and further fantasy "only old people die from it, I'll be fine"
I think, if the net was meant to maintain military communications after nucwar, it would have developed TOR much earlier and made that the default, so it wasn't clear where communications were being sourced or delivered. We'd all be exchanging messages that might be part of the critical infrastructure.
In reality, they worked on radiation-hardened point to point multipath comms that allow them to evade jamming and know who they are talking to.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadIt is funny though, the very basics eg. climate control, clean water, unspoiled food... More important than internet.
https://www.webpal.org/SAFE/aaarecovery/1_farm_recovery/uv.h...
As long as there's electricity and as more of the internet moves into outer space, it'll work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg
I appreciate that anyone who has seen Threads might find that difficult to believe.
>It was assumed that 131 nuclear weapons would fall on Britain with a total yield of 205 megatons (69 ground burst; 62 air burst)[1] with yields of 500 KT to 3 MT[2] That was felt to be a reasonably realistic scenario, but the report stated that a total strike in excess of 1,000 megatons would be likely.
But also that the scenario was overestimated:
>Square Leg was criticised for a number of reasons: the weapons used were exclusively in the high-yield megaton range, with an average of 1.5 megatons per bomb, but a realistic attack based on known Soviet capabilities would have seen mixed weapons yields, including many missile-based warheads in the low-hundred-kiloton range.
In other words, more small bombs does way more destruction than one big bomb if we assume the same total yield. To give a specific example, imagine dropping one 1500 kiloton bomb vs five 300 kiloton bombs. In the first scenario the destructive power would be about 11.5 units of damage. In the second example it would be 5 * 6.7 = 33.5 units - assuming no overlap.
In other other words, the report assuming a small number of high yield weapons (instead of larger number of lower yield weapons - but an otherwise comparable total yield) was understating the impact of nuclear war, potentially dramatically.
In other other other words - the report was being criticized for understating the impact of nuclear war in both cases.
In the last months, we've seen how the Red army performs in conventional war. They were supposed to have 10,000 - 14,000 tanks, including modern ones, but we now see that they barely had any modern tanks and that after losing 2,500 tanks from the 60s, 70s and 80s, they started begging Belarus for their old tanks. They also claimed to have a modern air force, but until now, they have been unable to establish air dominance against a country that barely had any air force. And they were supposed to have a navy, but also that was an exaggeration. They claimed to have precision-guided missiles, and even supersonic missiles. They ran out of those long time ago, and they weren't that precise or fast. What they had was a lot of empty posture.
Why do we believe that they are any better at nuclear war than they are at waging conventional war? Whatever is true for a simple conventional war, is even more true for a nuclear war: Their missiles and warheads are old and unmaintained, and far fewer in numbers than they pretend.
The effects of corruption runs so deep in their society. Just like you can't buy any complex Russian products in your local stores, and just like you never wanted a Russian car, Russian military is completely incapable of successfully waging war against the West.
Can Russia launch a nuclear attack against NATO? Probably, yes. But it would be much smaller than the official numbers suggest, and layered Western missile shields would intercept a percentage of those missiles. Some missiles would miss their target and some would not detonate.
Different studies give different estimates ranging from tens of millions to hundreds of millions dead in the immediate aftermath of a strike, but studies assume that Russia is actually capable of carrying out a strike and penetrate our defenses with a large number weapons that work. Estimates of dead afterwards, are usually from starvation, not from radiation.
It's been 40-50 years since Russia actually had strength comparable to NATO. Even back then, humanity would have survived a nuclear war. Nowadays, both Russia and the free world has fewer weapons, and we now know that Russian military capabilities are routinely exaggerated. A nuclear war with Russia would be terrible, but it would be over quickly, it would end in Russian defeat, and most of us would live on afterwards.
I meet a lot of people who think their life will be short and nasty if Russia drops a nuclear weapon over Ukraine (which, at a distance of 2000km, would affect us not at all).
My point was only to reply to the person thinking that a nuclear strike in Ukraine affects them not at all somewhere else in Europe, which I think is extremely shortsighted.
Lack of water could be an issue in some areas but simply walking to fresh though not clean drinking water is viable in most areas.
Violence after disasters is more trope than reality. People will loot after a disaster, but it’s not like people are going to show up to Best Buy and work after a nuclear war. Looting is more useful to humanity than simply letting food rot because people can’t work the self checkout machine.
And these tangential issues would emerge in spades after nuclear war. For instance one of the most basic is logistics. Think about how insanely much is just involved in getting an ear of corn from a farm to you. At the most fundamental you're relying on machinery, drivers, oil, gas, refineries, roads infrastructure, food processing infrastructure and a whole lot more - before that ear of corn is anywhere near you. And then there needs to be a means of distribution, and more.
Our entire economy came on the verge of collapse because of COVID, and nuclear war would have an impact with so many orders of magnitude greater than COVID that I think even dreaming of anything even vaguely resembling normalcy afterwards is unrealistic. Violence happens after disasters when the food runs out. In practical disasters that tends to not happen due to rapid aid, delivery, support, and organization. In nuclear war, the food will run out.
Saying the current social order breaks down isn’t enough to suggest Anarchy will take it’s place. A farmer who wants to collect a harvest without oil will want manpower, and survivors will want to eat. That’s the basis of civilization.
Sure suburbs in their current form don’t work without cars and oil. But, people can migrate quite far on a half a tank of gas and their feet.
And within these stories one can also see what happens to societies once normal social function starts to collapse. While this [1] article reads like a propaganda piece, the tales it recounts are neither unique nor exceptional given the situation. Of course it does feel weird to be here kind of arguing that, "Yes we will starve." I think my main point and motivation is that the consequences of what we're discussing simply cannot be overstated. There is a dangerous amount of misinformation that increasingly seems to be headed towards, 'Maybe nuclear wouldn't be 'that' bad.' Perhaps not misinformation. Because it's true that it wouldn't be 'that' bad, it'd be vastly worse.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-fa...
The Irish potato famine occurred in part because of the potato blight, but it was a multi year issue that at it’s core related to growing exports (cotton, grain) in favor of local food. Russia’s industrialization created famine because so many farm workers where sent to factories. China had similar root causes, the 18year old worker in that story went home to see their family and many fields where fallow. Steal all the food or workers from a village and people starve.
That’s not to say drought etc didn’t play a role, but the American dust bowl isn’t remembered as a famine because there was feedback between the amount of food crops planted and the need for food.
On the other hand WWII involved most of South America, Africa, and Asia to some degree. If WWIII got similarly out of hand then nukes might take out all of the worlds chip making capacity, oil refineries, and deep sea ports as strategic assets making thing far more unpleasant.
What military targets there were would be significantly reduced today. We were targeting military targets, not to target their military - but to try to destroy their means of nuclear delivery (bombers). Today in the ICBM era, that means of delivery is largely nuclear fortified silos spread far out and in the middle of nowhere. Poor targets.
Nuclear war isn't about defeating the enemy, it's about destroying them. If Russia nuked 100 military targets today, then tomorrow there'd be 20 million Americans looking to enlist, and every single aspect of manufacturing we have domestically or can influence abroad would be directed towards rebuilding at an unprecedented rate.
The way you overcome this is by focusing on that rebuilding: population, industry, economy, and even medical. You probably have a much better chance of surviving a nuclear war if you live out in the middle of nowhere, even beside a nuclear silo, than you do living in a common population center. Though with the goal of destruction, even that may be insufficient since there's no reason to expect things like salted bombs [2] or other doomsday type weaponry would not come into play.
[1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
It'll likely be the end of civilisation as you know it though.
I mean, perhaps they do have solid and tested contingency plans for events like that, or the military has some sort of access they could use to rig it into something useful, but I don't really believe it.
I also have no particular reason to think that Russia would use their very limited ICBM stockpile to target data centers rather than military facilities.
The goal of nuclear war, absent any chance for a realistic "win" conditions it to ensure that absolute destruction of the opposing country - beyond the ability to ever rebuild to a comparable relative strength. Our nuke targets from during the Cold War have been declassified [1], and it's likely that the Soviet Union's were similarly themed: population, industry, economic, medical. There's an extremely strong overlap between those areas and data centers.
In any case this is also all slightly tangential. One of the first things that will happen during WW3 is the widescale mutual destruction of satellites in the sky, for both offensive and defensive measures.
[1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear...
Not sure how useful that would be though.
If a groundstation continues to work then even better, that bgan in your bag may well still work - assuming there's not too much radiation and dust in the atmosphere
Again, still not sure what the point is.
Hardlines between local command areas though - far more useful, and less likely to have been taken out.
That is what you said. Think about that and everything you do from now on and everyone you vote for and every piece of hate and division you have in your heart.
Who do you think pays you?
That might be what you read. In that case work on the hate and division in your heart before you preach.
The military has to plan for the full range of the scale, from small brush fire near a minor ammo depo to full blown WWIII. But the part that is 75% towards full blown WWIII is so often overlooked by commentators it's like it doesn't exist. I could come up with 100s of scenarios where most of the internet works but there is a recently-started nuclear war. (India vs Pakistan, for example.)
However as I'm in the UK, a large nuke in Docklands would cause big problems. Most of my company's connectivity reaches the world through Telehouse and Sovereign House, both in Docklands, about a mile from each other. A large nuke landing on top of the Blackwall Tunnel - perhaps on top of Switch (another major building we have), would probably knock both out.
You could effectively knock out the UK's internet by sabotaging the Thames Barrier, let alone the damage just a single nuclear bomb in docklands would do.
How much of routing would then happen after that first strike? How many other centralized places of the decentralized internet would need to be targeted in the first strike?
1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 are anycasted addresses, they don't have one location, and the location you are connected to differences based on your location. Anycast was one of the earliest things formalized by the IETF and originally created in 1989 as a method of addressing using IP, /specifically/ for resiliency and performance.
Primary and Secondary were running 24/7 with Secondary being in exact sync with Primary. If Primary or Secondary went down, Tertiary could be brought up in sync within 24 hours. Primary and Secondary were geographically separated (east/west coast). Tertiary was in the mid-west. After that, the additional facilities would take days to bring up, and then a bit of time to sync.
The specific bank is no longer alive as it was consumed by one of the "too big to fail" institutions.
The insanity of humanity all here on HN...
Ham radio is still used by many people, and will never go away.
In the time when the ARPANET was designed, the ICBM's accuracy was far lower, so a packet-switched network with lots of redundant links had a better chance of surviving for more time than a circuit-switched.
The idea was to have a communications network that fared a better chance to survive time enough to be able to be used to coordinate a counter-attack for a few hours or days. A network that would degrade more graciously but that would surely degrade the same in the end.
The type of person who jumps at the chance to recite "nuclear stuff" from back when the school I was in still had East Germany on the class globe while seeming to actively refuse to accept new information is the reason there still exists a risk of nuclear exchange.
A lot of these Americans (parent seems American, I'm also American -- I can use the word) keep forgetting: there is no draft, Iraq was a war crime, you could have chosen a different path.
I can chart out how one year in the 90s, the parallel evils of refusing to hire more auditors nor upgrade infrastructure cascaded through the federal government, culiminating in the OPM breach.
I should stop making these long Slashdot-esque rants under two people I've probably never met, because the last year it was gonna not be weird for me to trick or treat was the one after 9/11.
We are in a multipolar world now, in every sense of the word, and folks should adjust to the fact that after many conversations, with many people, in many places, it's my understanding folks, if they support nukes at all, support a robust second strike policy paired with what I would term "armed neutrality".
I can remember in college, I'd say we should get rid of the nuclear triad, instead focus on taking the existing stockpile, checking there's no... leaks or anything like that... and loading them onto cruise missles to be put on submarines or in those fancy ass stealth planes and the same homophobic, classist, ableist folks who used to use the draft to force people to fight their wars would repeat the same tired talking points from the cold war.
There's a feeling in the air like there was in 2002. They talked about whether they'd let kids trick or treat, as if some asshole was going to... what? Anthrax the candy?
The real threat was the type of person who gets an increasing edge in their voice that every year you come to their house, politely take one candy, and make your way in a big loop around the block but won't drink their kool aid or whatever. Like, yeah lady, I get it... you want me to show I trust you. I don't. I'm gonna take a candy bar and pretend I care if you live another year since you told on yourself -- and I won't be back.
If their hypothesis was correct, that moving matter in relation to other matter generated a field exchange, that meant we could each have a "gravity transmitter" and "gravity receiver" that could act independently of any wired or wireless systems.
Having point to point high speed communications from anywhere on the planet to anywhere else on the planet, which themselves weren't governed or use restricted, would be game changing. Alas, current theories and decades of research haven't given us much to go on.
If you could develop a sensor that picked up on just a small segment of the fourier vibrations going on, identify it, and then respond, all of this theory still seems like it would hold true. It's just practically impossible.
I'm not an amateur.
Maybe your ISP didn't have a fast enough backbone connection to support all of its customers, or maybe one of its internal routers became overloaded. Or maybe it literally didn't have enough phone lines to support all of the customers simultaneously dialing in.
It's also very likely that your ISP had backhaul issues, and myraid other issues existed related to capacity.
Many people fail to see how dangerous this war is. It could readily lead to an all-out nuclear war between all the nuclear powers on the globe. We've been stirring the hornets nest and Russia is now calling our bluff.
Some believe that if Putin is removed Russia will somehow become a model Democracy, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. If Putin is replaced it will be by some ultra-nationalist which will spell even more trouble.
As far as Russia's concerned NATO is already a combatant in this conflict. It will only take a slight nudge to light the fuse.
I don't know about "inevitably" but I'd agree to "very likely." On the other hand, NATO not being directly involved in the Ukraine makes it less likely that nukes will be used in the Ukraine. When the other side has nukes, the fog-of-war means you may wrongly think that they were used, and retaliate with nukes.
I'd put more weight on Baran's claims. He has primacy, it was clearly documented in the Rand Techical Reports and then retold well in the Wired article with Stewart Brand.
Yes, Cerf, Kahn et al revived and invented a good amount of it, but the ideas had been circulating for a decade by that point, at the phone companies and US military, which is where the academic money came from anyways.
In this case, Wikipedia makes it pretty clear that while surviving a nuclear attack specifically might not have been an explicit part of the design goals of the designers (which may have started the myth myth), resilience against large-scale failures was exactly the feature that made the technology interesting to its military sponsors:
> Nonetheless, according to Stephen J. Lukasik, who as deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975) was "the person who signed most of the checks for Arpanet's development":
>> The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET -- where the quote is sourced directly to an article by this Stephen Lukasik.)
My takeaway is that while the ARPANET creators might not themselves have particularly cared about surviving nuclear disasters, without the completely decentralized packet switching that made this at least a possibility, it wouldn't have ever received the funding to get off the ground.
Shortening this fact to "ARPANET was funded to survive a nuclear attack" is IMO a fair sound-bite sized summary, not a "myth" to be debunked, even though the story has obviously more nuances.
It's also important to mention that Lukasik wrote this article in 2011, over 40 years after the fact, and that the claim you quote is contradicted by pretty much everyone else involved at the time, including Lukasik's boss at the time ARPANET was conceived, Charles Herzfeld (as cited in the same wikipedia article.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
Betteridge's law - "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Regarding that question mark, David Walden was actually the software designer and Severo Ornstein his hardware counterpart.
Compare:
> In 1968 BBN was preparing to bid on the contract from ARPA to develop the ARPANET Interface Message Processors (IMPs) [ARPA68]. Frank Heart, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, and David Walden were the main members of BBN’s proposal team (although other BBN people participated) with Heart as the team leader, Kahn with prior background in the concepts of packet switching, Ornstein as the hardware designer, and Walden as the software designer. Shortly before the due date for BBN’s proposal [BBN68] to ARPA, Will Crowther was added to the team as another (more senior) software person; and after BBN was awarded the contract, Ben Barker was added as a hardware designer and Bernie Cosell as a third software person. BBN was awarded to IMP development contract with a start date of January 1, 1969.
[1] https://walden-family.com/bbn/imp-code.pdf
BTW, as I've read it, the use of packet switching was all about connection times, connecting from hop to hop versus the time required for establishing a cross-continental circuit switching line. (And yes, packet switching for telephony had once been pitched for its military robustness, but this is not why it was considered for ARPANET.)
But I guess that is why we also in the middle of climate disaster.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/bgp-m...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/stran...
The fantasy that life could still be lived after nuclear attack is disturbing in itself without any further "strategy".
What use would the internet be at that point? Even if you survived, your body and food is now under non-stop attack from radiation, you have far bigger problems.
Look at how miserable the world is that everyone literally gave up on protecting themselves from a pandemic.
Now imagine widespread radiation with the same mentality "well you can't see it so it can't hurt you" and further fantasy "only old people die from it, I'll be fine"
In reality, they worked on radiation-hardened point to point multipath comms that allow them to evade jamming and know who they are talking to.