[HN Gopher] Princeton lab simulates nuclear war (2019)
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Princeton lab simulates nuclear war (2019)
Author : data_maan
Score : 112 points
Date : 2022-10-22 09:20 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sgs.princeton.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sgs.princeton.edu)
| downvotetruth wrote:
| 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.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Why would Dublin be targeted?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Everyone hates Dublin.
|
| 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.
| neuronic wrote:
| There are definitely some cities that would just look the
| same after a series of nuclear strikes.
| pb7 wrote:
| I laughed.
|
| 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.
| gsatic wrote:
| Then why wasn't Tokyo nuked?
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| pb7 wrote:
| 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.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Japan was already hit by nuclear weapons. Let them be at
| peace in the next war.
| ashwagary wrote:
| I'm sure North Korea and many Asian nations think Japan
| didn't pay a heavy enough price for their attempts at
| imperialism.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Meta comment: It seems to me that the best way to address a deep
| fear of something, is to submit it to HN and let us rip it to
| shreds.
| jrumbut wrote:
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| > 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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.
| jondeval wrote:
| When I've read about scenarios like this or the topic of mutually
| assured destruction is discussed, I notice that the concept of
| 'retaliation' is taken as a given. The premise of immediate
| retaliation creates the hypothetical domino effect that seems to
| polarize the discussion between (1) total prevention at all costs
| or (2) a terrible mass casualty scenario.
|
| Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is this assumption of
| retaliation grounded in the reality of our political systems or
| perhaps a theory of modern warfare that I'm missing? Don't get me
| wrong, it sound very plausible, but that is exactly why I'm
| questioning it and would like to expand my understanding so that
| it's grounded in something more than just a hunch.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > I notice that the concept of 'retaliation' is taken as a
| given
|
| There is no room for 'retaliation' in reality. All the
| superpowers' defense systems are set up to launch in around ~10
| minutes if they detect a nuclear launch from the other side.
| So, all these 'they used nuclear weapons first so we have to
| retaliate' delirium in the press is totally nonsense. There is
| no such 'first - second' in a war between nuclear superpowers.
| They launch simultaneously within ~15 minutes and destroy each
| other and entire world within ~40 minutes. (includes flight
| time of the slowest ballistic missile)
| manmal wrote:
| Immediate retaliation needs to be threatened at least, and in a
| believable way. Otherwise, there is little deterrence for bad
| players.
| cronix wrote:
| Quite simply, it's basic human nature. I don't think you can
| name a country that its citizens would remain complacent after
| a nuclear attack. New York, LA, DC, Chicago suddenly get wiped
| off the map. You don't think the population would demand
| retaliation? Not only the massive immediate loss of life, but
| it would decimate the economy. Look at the response to 9/11.
| That was "just" 2 buildings. Now imagine entire cities that
| would be impossible to rebuild or habitat.
| DiffEq wrote:
| Just so we are accurate. It was three buildings; hit by 3
| planes full of people. A fourth plane that hit the ground and
| several buildings in New York as secondary casualties.
| bradlys wrote:
| 9/11 had a response that was fueled by the media to get
| people into a frenzy to support an unjust invasion of
| multiple countries.
|
| The MIC was doing its job very well back then to make a
| multi-trillion war happen.
| copperx wrote:
| > You don't think the population would demand retaliation?
|
| No. After seeing the devastation, the population would demand
| not to escalate.
| technoooooost wrote:
| No. After seeing devastation, the population would demand
| to escalate.
| jondeval wrote:
| See this is interesting to me. I tend to agree with you and
| I think I would be in the de-escalate camp.
|
| Now even if that group is in the minority, how large of a
| minority would it have to be to at least question the
| 'guaranteed immediate strategic nuclear retaliation'
| assumption in our models and plans?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Unfortunately, pacifists tend to be killed or imprisoned
| by those who are willing to resort to violence.
|
| The weapons also tend to be in the hands of warmongers.
|
| Finally, and probably more importantly, if a nuclear
| attack was immanent, the US President has something like
| 5 minutes to decide on whether to launch a counterattack.
|
| The general population won't even have time to
| participate in this decision. They will just be wiped out
| along with everyone else.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Coincidentally ACOUP has an essay on this very topic[1]
| just out.
|
| TL;DR: Strategic bombing has been tried many times in the
| Second World War and after it. It has never caused the
| reaction you describe. It invariably stiffens the morale of
| the bombed population. It backfires very badly.
|
| If you want to win a war, confine yourself to military
| targets.
|
| 1. https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-
| airpower...
| gus_massa wrote:
| Humans? They will ask for a 10x retaliation.
|
| A wise politician will convince the people that a x1
| retaliation is enough and then make a deal with the other
| side to stop the destruction. Bout most politician will
| just launch a x20 retaliation to get more support from the
| crowd.
| dirtyid wrote:
| IMO nuclear game theory especially around Launch on Warning /
| immediate retaliation is going to change in the coming years as
| everyone builds up conventional global strike missiles.
| Decision makers will be incentivized to at least wait for
| confirmation before ending the world.
|
| But otherwise I'm much more pessimistic about narrative around
| "retaliation" because I think when shit hits fan, MAD doesn't
| just extends to nations trading nukes but eradicating their
| entire alliance network that can help rebuild as well. US cold
| war nuke plans on USSR included nuking PRC just in case. USSR
| was going to make sure Europe was a wasteland that couldn't
| help wasteland US rebuild. On paper US/USSR had thousands of
| nukes because you need multiple for counter-force on harden
| targets. On secret paper, it's counter value your entire rival
| block to ensure anyone who can be potential threat after,
| aren't.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Well IDK about russia or china, but if the major US population
| centers get hit, we immediately become a very republican
| country. I suspect those people will be rather eager to
| retaliate.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| There was a report published by FEMA in the early 1980s about the
| outcome of a nuclear war.
|
| The summary was worst case scenario (for US) would be 50% of
| population dead, and we wouldn't reach pre war GDP for a decade.
|
| Basically what happened to Eastern Europe during WWII.
|
| It's not good. It's bad. But it's not "end of the human race"
| bad.
|
| Paraphrasing the report: "There is no credible scenario where our
| knowledge of germ theory will be destroyed, and that knowledge
| will save the lives of millions, regardless of whether there is a
| nuclear war."
| lifeinthevoid wrote:
| All that suffering, kudos to the people who will attempt to
| rebuild civilization after that. I will not be one of them.
| 404mm wrote:
| I wonder what's the amount of warheads that can be deployed
| within minutes-to-hours. For the sake of argument, let's say the
| US have around 5-6k warheads. How many are somewhere in cold
| storage, far away from their potential launchers or carriers -
| and therefore less likely to be used. I think that comparing
| these numbers would a what determines the outcome very
| significantly. Once communication is down, the armies will become
| logistically crippled.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Enough are ready to fire to turn a large percentage of the
| world into a glass parking lot. At least that's the case with
| the US, French and UK arsenal. I have serious doubts about the
| status of the Russian arsenal, but I'm sure they could do an
| unimaginable amount of damage even if they landed only 1% of
| them.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The scenarios shown in the simulations were only using a _tiny_
| percent of each country 's entire arsenal, the final fireworks
| being caused by 150-300 nukes. And that also didn't even
| speculate on new developments, such as 'typhoon nukes.' A tiny
| fraction of nuclear war is enough to completely end modern
| civilization. Unrestrained nuclear war is enough to end
| civilization.
| aka878 wrote:
| So you're saying I should move to Argentina.
| RRRA wrote:
| Joyful weekend everyone
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| On the bright side now the Boomers can shut up about how
| tenuous their early years were with the threat of nuclear war.
|
| Same Boomers in charge now same stupid ego problems.
| luckylion wrote:
| "This is nothing. When I was in school, we had to swim 40
| miles through a radioactive swamp, wrestling mutated
| alligators."
| kcplate wrote:
| 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.
| luckylion wrote:
| How were they impacted? Anything unexpected or did you
| just find a lot more dead gators?
| kcplate wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| grecy wrote:
| uphill both ways
| residualmind wrote:
| from a gen-xer: yawn
|
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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).
| pixl97 wrote:
| Its easy to blame the programmer before you for your
| applications shortfallings, it's much more difficult to
| program yourself out of the hole.
| blueatlas wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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).
| rainworld wrote:
| A more recent simulation: https://youtu.be/WF0mEOCK2KE
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| So it looks like if things get tense, we should al emigrate to
| Australia then?
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Why Australia and not South America? Better food, people,
| language, landscape, it's more diverse, it's bigger...
| blibble wrote:
| the Chinese will wander in shortly afterwards
|
| unopposed
| kensai wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...
| :-/
| password54321 wrote:
| Why watch fiction when there are documentaries about Hiroshima?
| data_maan wrote:
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| I was honestly feeling a lot more comfortable when those figures
| were just movie props from Wargames.
| [deleted]
| mikewarot wrote:
| I'm 0:47 into the video, and it's already stretched past
| credulity to the breaking point. We've seen how completely the
| kleptocracy has crippled the Russian military. Does anyone
| seriously think that a single weapon would be used, given the
| extremely low probability of making in through a number of steps
| including:
|
| * Someone, a person with family and friends, has to follow orders
| that could kill them and everyone they know, to advance a war
| they possibly don't support.
|
| * They have to target the right location, and not some relatively
| empty area to appear to be doing their job
|
| * The missile has to correctly launch
|
| * A single very anticipated launch has to avoid all interception
|
| * It has to accurately make it to its destination
|
| * All of the parts that have been in storage since the end of the
| cold war have to have been properly maintained, maintenance that
| costs the US about $10,000,000 per year each. Any small mismatch
| in timing, composition of the core due to nuclear decay or
| humidity and corrosion, and electronics all have to work within
| microseconds of each other.
|
| To use a single weapon with all these risks, and break a 75 year
| Taboo against their wartime use, is not something a rational
| actor would do.
|
| Furthermore, the entire US military would have positive
| confirmation within 90 seconds of the nuclear detonation, and
| begin to react according to existing well tested plans.
|
| Next, the US and NATO have a vast array of non-nuclear responses
| that would effectively cripple Russian ability to project force
| beyond its borders. The conflict in Ukraine is just the stuff we
| can put into the hands of those quickly trained, and NERFed
| enough to avoid deep strikes into Russia.
|
| Also, you have to look at the human factors of those who support
| Putin internally, they don't want to loose all their spoils of
| their efforts which are mostly situated outside of Russia.
| data_maan wrote:
| You seem to see a high probabilitt that Russia will do nothing.
| How much of your income would you like to bet on you being
| right?
| mikewarot wrote:
| I was trying to highlight likely failure mechanisms that
| could occur if the order were given. I strongly believe that
| only a small percentage of their nukes would work (2-10%)[1],
| so a solo launch is less than likely to work. However if
| things to escalate, that's still 120-600 detonations if they
| were to the 6,000 weapons in their stockpile.[2]
|
| In which case, you wouldn't be able to collect if I was wrong
|
| [1] Guestimate -- based on no provable facts or sources
|
| [2] https://thebulletin.org/premium/2022-02/nuclear-notebook-
| how...
| Gunax wrote:
| I think we agree it's unlikely, but best to prepare for what
| they can do, and not what we expect then to do.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" the US and NATO have a vast array of non-nuclear responses
| that would effectively cripple Russian ability to project force
| beyond its borders"_
|
| There is no way to cripple Russia's ability to project force
| beyond its borders as long as they have nukes.. and they've got
| over 5000 of them.
|
| Any attempt to do so will mean the end of the world.
| [deleted]
| neuronic wrote:
| By now, I think you can safely drop the assumption that we are
| dealing with a rational actor. Also those around Putin have
| been put into place for decades. He's been scheming at least
| since his KGB job in East Germany (GDR) where he is still
| revered to this day. He is effectively ruining the lives of
| every Russian at this point including the oligarchs.
|
| If the Russian elites cared about Russia at all or even just
| their own lives, they would move to remove Putin by any means
| necessary as soon as possible. The fact that he still holds
| power after this legendary series of fuck ups and his oligarch
| killing spree tells you one thing: we cannot rely on
| rationality and people clinging to their families, lives or
| wealth. It's emotional chaos fueled by propaganda.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Putin is just one man, and he can do nothing without
| supporters. It is the Putin regime which is in power, and
| were Putin alone to fall from power it's not clear that
| anything substantial would change.
|
| During WW2, had Hitler's assassins been successful and
| Himmler had taken over, it's not likely that the Holocaust
| would have been prevented and Germany might have been even
| more effective during the war without the bumbling Hitler in
| charge.
|
| Meaningful change will only come from replacing the entire
| regime, not just one man.
|
| But the Putin regime has been very successful in completely
| neutering all of its opposition, so it's not clear where such
| regime change will come from. Maybe from the general public,
| but they have been cowed in to submission or bought in to the
| propaganda.
|
| One thing that could throw a monkey wrench in to the works is
| the use of nuke or even just Putin's order to use nukes. Then
| he may well be assassinated or his regime toppled by people
| who don't want the world to end.
|
| Putin is likely very aware of this threat to his rule, so
| it's unlikely he will use nukes deliberately. But there is
| still too high a chance that nukes will be used accidentally,
| as the world has repeatedly come close to accidental nuclear
| war even in peacetime. During outright war and in a time of
| such heightened paranoia, the odds of accidental nuclear war
| are much higher.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| And the civil unrest would suck also.
| kuroguro wrote:
| Not sure how I'd survive if the option to press a button and
| have food appear at my doorstep vanished.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| grecy wrote:
| Was anyone else surprised by the very low number of fatalities?
|
| At 1:06 in the video "The Tactical Plan" says Russia sends 300
| nuclear warheads and NATO responds with approx. 180 warheads, but
| the immediate casualties are estimated _only_ 2.6 million.
|
| Maybe I've been utterly misinformed, but I thought just one
| "modern" nuclear warhead detonating in any major city in the
| world would kill more than that instantly.
|
| For 480 of them to go off and only kill 2.6 million people is
| kind of shocking, really.
| sheerun wrote:
| I guess suspenseful music is integral part of nuclear simulations
| 7373737373 wrote:
| The Defcon soundtrack is quite fitting
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hrqqld2Aew
| hotdamnson wrote:
| North east of Spain and south west of France properties prices
| will skyrocket now.
| amelius wrote:
| So, Russia will adjust their weapons to target that area, since
| that's where all the important people will be.
|
| That's the problem with predictions: they affect the outcome.
| phtrivier wrote:
| 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:
| spockz wrote:
| That sounds like the Pyrenees? What else is in between north
| east of Spain and south west of France?
| homeland221 wrote:
| rougka wrote:
| The simulation reminds of
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/DEFCON/ just with much
| weaker graphics
| waffleiron wrote:
| There is this game as well, which is DEFCON's spiritual
| successor
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1178220/ICBM/
| Stevvo wrote:
| 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.
| thisistheend123 wrote:
| This is scary.
| philjohn wrote:
| And this scenario is why the billionaires are building survival
| shelters in NZ.
| krylon wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| I don't get how that is a viable survival attempt. Surely NZ
| must be targeted all over when this has already become a meme
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| moistly wrote:
| The Maori 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.
| data_maan wrote:
| How would be wonderfully ironic would it be, if a well-
| known Google shareholder flees to his private NZ
| residence, only to be finished off by Maori.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Here's the obligatory contextual mention of the excellent UK film
| "Threads": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| "The day after" was released a year before "Threads" and it
| literally shocked a generation.
|
| Including my parents, in Italy, where it aired on February
| 1984.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I'd rate _" The Day After"_ a 5 out of 10 on the horror
| scale, while _" Threads"_ is a 10.
| richliss wrote:
| 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.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| > 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".
|
| The reality would have probably been worse.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Oh I never knew about Threads.
|
| https://archive.org/details/threads_201712
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| I agree.
|
| 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"
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" The day after literally ignited panic in millions of
| families"_
|
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > which obviously hits closer to home.
|
| 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.
| euroderf wrote:
| I'd also recommend "Miracle Mile". Dunno 'bout the horror
| scale cos it's not that kind of film. It's about the day of
| the event. Leaves an impression.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Fantastic movie that should be much better known.
|
| It has a great Tangerine Dream soundtrack as well.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| 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.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| 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...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Threads"_ can still be seen for free on youtube.[1] Highly
| recommended. It's still by far the most terrifying nuclear war
| movie I've ever seen.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE
| Cockbrand wrote:
| YT link doesn't work for me ("Video unavailable"), but
| Threads can also be viewed at archive.org:
| https://archive.org/details/threads_201712
| sebazzz wrote:
| I could easily view /r/watchpeopledie or similar subreddits.
| I'm really not easily shocked.
|
| Threads really shocked me. Nuclear war should not be threaded
| lightly.
| bayraktar wrote:
| Lacks plausibility.
|
| Doesn't attempt to describe the context in which this Russian
| first strike against NATO might occur.
|
| Doesn't mention battlefield nukes, EMP attacks or even high-
| altitude demonstrative detonations that might more plausibly
| proceed an actual high-yield land strike on Europe.
|
| Doesn't even mention the yield of this first strike, either.
| Really, what's the point?
|
| They could have done this "simulation" back in 1983. In fact, it
| makes me think like I'm watching a certain movie from back in
| '83.
|
| '83, what a year.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| (2019)?
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Why so few strikes in France and UK? Two countries with a nuclear
| arsenal...
| Bayart wrote:
| 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.
| alexvoda wrote:
| 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.
|
| - Kim doing something stupid.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| mrcheesebreeze wrote:
| 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.
|
| they will almost certainly negotiate.
| tomohawk wrote:
| 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.
| alexvoda wrote:
| 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.
| amalter wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _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.
| philjohn wrote:
| Or tensions rising between India and Pakistan, both nuclear
| powers.
| alexvoda wrote:
| 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.
| jfoster wrote:
| 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.
| messe wrote:
| Yes, the Sino-Soviet border conflict of 1969 and the
| Kargil war between India and Pakistan in 1999.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| aliqot wrote:
| Year 1 will be about survival, fiefdoms and immediate resources.
|
| Years 5 will be managing latent fallout and wars over territory
| and natural resources.
|
| Year 20 we will focus on the rebuild, children will only know
| this as 'life'
|
| Years 50-100 we repeat and maybe this time finish ourselves off.
|
| We are a war species, and we're not unique in that regard. Any
| organism sufficiently advanced enough will reach this from the
| moment they're able to assign value to a resource.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Where do the apes come in?
| RivieraKid wrote:
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" 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.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I would worry more about the severance of supply chains if your
| country/region imports much of its food.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| This is an easy problem compared to a nuclear winter. But
| this depends on the country of course.
| krylon wrote:
| "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
| admissionsguy wrote:
| 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.
| practice9 wrote:
| NATO & USA in particular already said they will respond
| conventionally in the event of Russian nuclear first strike.
|
| Also in simulation no Russian fighter jets / bombers were
| intercepted & shot down while bombing Europe, which is very (>
| 70%) unrealistic. Russians do not even try to enter Ukrainian
| airspace, and it's much less saturated with air defence systems
| neuronic wrote:
| With brand new IRIS-T deployed near Kyiv good luck flying any
| hostile military plane over that city ever again.
|
| That's probably also why they move to Iranian kamikaze drones.
| mrcheesebreeze wrote:
| I would assume it depends on the kind of strike.
|
| If the russians use small yield nukes not much bigger than
| regular missiles I really doubt any nato response would happen.
|
| The reality is a response is a possible avenue to real nuclear
| war, its stupid to basically commit suicide like that.
|
| Russia wouldn't dare let anything reach the rest of europe, any
| nukes they use are almost certainly going to be small yield
| which nato wouldn't bother responding too, they are about as
| big as regular missiles.
| dandanua wrote:
| > I really doubt any nato response would happen
|
| So, you propose normalization of nuclear strikes usage by
| invading countries? Which are committing genocide, war
| crimes, terror. Yet losing a conventional war because of
| their utter stupidity and incompetence.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" NATO & USA in particular already said they will respond
| conventionally in the event of Russian nuclear first strike."_
|
| Do you happen to have a link to that announcement?
|
| Everything I've heard from them on the subject has been pretty
| vague talk about proportionality.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Looking at that the big winner would be China as the largest
| remaining economic power with intact infrastructure.
| Aeolun wrote:
| And we'd all be happy for it. If there is at least one major
| economy remaining then humanity may sort of survive what comes
| next.
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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.
| Archelaos wrote:
| I have general comment on what is discussed in several individual
| threads here:
|
| Such "simulations" should be seen as a tool for thought, not as
| truly accurate scenario of a most probable future. It is rather
| like assigning some numbers to a qualitative argument in a
| debate. To keep the complexity in check, you leave out everything
| that you think is not relevant to the overall outcome of the
| simulation. To challenge such a simulation, a critic must present
| his or her own simulation showing that the omitted factor may
| well be relevant instead.
|
| In the Princton simulation the participants use only a bit more
| than 10 percent of their arsenal. Assuming that most warheads get
| through, simulating an intercept rate would be redundant if one
| also assumes that the margin of error on how many of their
| arsenals participants would use is much larger.
|
| Likewise, focusing on Russia and the USA already covers almost 90
| percent of all nuclear warheads. Simulating the other nuclear
| powers would probably not change much in the overall picture.
|
| However, in view of the complexity of the influencing factors and
| the multitude of possible scenarios, the fundamental question
| arises as to whether such simulations can at all provide deeper
| general insights into the topic than what we already vaguely
| suspect.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Especially since finding participants here whose psychology and
| job experience parallel Putin's quite closely will not be easy.
|
| One the one hand: Putin bluffs about whether he's bluffing
| about bluffing. His word is chaff. If he says he won't be
| invading, it's a pretty good indication he will. Etc.
|
| On the other hand: When one person is vital to the course of
| events and can't be removed, prediction generally becomes a
| fool's game, either way; because human brains are, needless to
| say, highly complex. Concentrating power means anything can
| happen (but not that anything will, of course.)
|
| Pick your poison. With Putin being the other player, no course
| of action, including pacifism, is anything but risky. Gird your
| loins (as none of the kids say.)
| BonoboIO wrote:
| On (I think the atp) a podcast one participant said that he lived
| in a part of New York, that would be hit first in a nuclear war
| and he doesn't have to think about survival or living in a post
| war world.
|
| That was mindblowing to me, make sense too. Why live in a world,
| where you are probably killed by radiation, looters or injuries
| and suffer a painful death. Watching your family die in front of
| you, when it could be over in an instant.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I don't want war :D But at least the
| podcaster has a point.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| At the highest level, war is like business, full of opportunities
| and risks that have to be carefully weighted.
|
| Contrary to somewhat popular belief, there are winners and losers
| after a war.
|
| The US partially built its supremacy thanks to the two world
| wars.
|
| But nuclear weapons are obviously different. I highly doubt that
| this kind of simulation is realistic.
|
| We're generally bad at predicting things that never happened, and
| this is why it is unlikely to happen, not because of the colossal
| death count, but because of the unpredictability.
| bitL wrote:
| Did you ever have a bad manager or a hierarchy of bad managers
| before where the most inept kept getting promoted, utilizing
| bad metrics and estimates? What makes you think the same
| situation can't happen at the highest command?
| neuronic wrote:
| Nothing but I don't believe in the Peter principle anymore
| after reading about its cousin, the Gervais principle.
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| bitL wrote:
| Gervais implies that intelligent mass-murderers were always
| at the top and the only way society functions is by having
| a clueless buffer that shields the population from this
| knowledge. Not very optimistic either.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| This is a great article that really deserves an HN post of
| its own. Thanks for linking to it.
| metadat wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158
| tehjoker wrote:
| there are winners for the upper class, no one wins in the lower
| classes
| fny wrote:
| > The US partially built its supremacy thanks to the two world
| wars.
|
| Two world wars that it did not initiate. The initial
| participants in wars more often than not sustain heavy losses.
|
| It's a suboptimal strategy to win anything.
| yosito wrote:
| > Two world wars that it did not initiate.
|
| It hasn't initiated the current conflict either, despite
| Russian propaganda.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| There is an apparent pattern in modern history where "strong
| hands" leaders severely underestimate their opponents and
| lose everything in war.
|
| There are counter examples in more ancient history.
|
| And to be clear, I am strongly anti-war.
| andretti1977 wrote:
| I know it may be off topic but i don't want people to discuss
| about the reliability of the data involved, no, i want people to
| reflect about the outcome: end of humanity.
|
| It disgusts me to think that maybe 99.99% of world population
| wouldn't harm another person but due to a ridicolous small
| fraction of the entire population, we risk to end our lives.
|
| This is completely absurd and makes no sense at all.
| civilized wrote:
| The few warmongers often have the support of the majority, e.g.
| in Russia right now, where polls consistently show 70% support
| or more for Putin's attack on Ukraine.
| https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/09/07/my-country-right-or...
|
| The common folk may find war too unpleasant to conduct
| themselves, but they rally behind someone who will do it for
| them.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| It's literally illegal to not be "in support" of the "special
| military operation" if you are in Russia. No poll could
| possibly be accurate.
| simplotek wrote:
| > The few warmongers often have the support of the majority,
| e.g. in Russia right now, where polls consistently show 70%
| support or more for Putin's attack on Ukraine.
|
| We should take a step back and think about Russia's problem.
|
| Not only did Russia's dictatorship made it illegal and a
| punishable offense to express any negative feeling regarding
| Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they manipulate all their media
| with pro-Putin and pro-war propaganda.
|
| Keep in mind that Russia's regime response to anti-
| mobilization protesta was to arrest protesters and force them
| to the war front.
|
| No wonder a big chunk of Russians, when faced with any war-
| related question, they make it their point to promptly give a
| canned response on how they are apolitical. Self-preservation
| in a totalitarian state kicks in almost as a Darwinian
| response.
|
| If you found yourself living in that sort of castrating
| society, what would you answer if state posters asked you
| what you thought of the ongoing war?
| pain2022 wrote:
| I'm so tired of seeing this 70% number. There is a lot of
| available evidence against it. Why is it so widely quoted by
| western media?
|
| The poll is from Nevada, same poll company that said 1%
| support Navalny as a politician. Navalny got 27% on Moscow
| mayor election in 2013. Tens of thousands of people were on
| demonstrations in his support in 2021, risking getting beaten
| up by police and jailed.
|
| Out of ~100 people I know, maybe a couple somewhat support
| war.
|
| In Moscow, none of civilian cars you see on the streets have
| Z/V/military symbols in support of the war. If war has 70%
| support, at least 1% would put it on display.
| andrepd wrote:
| Since there is no free press in Russia and if you publicly
| come out against the war you might be jailed and brutalised,
| I'm surprised the percentage isn't even larger.
| andretti1977 wrote:
| The common folk may be led to think that the only alternative
| they have to live is war. And they are led to think that by
| those small overpowered fraction.
|
| It has been the case for a lot of modern wars (even those
| pushed by us or nato).
|
| It's not a matter of country.
| therusskiy wrote:
| It's ridiculously easy to influence people through
| propaganda.
|
| Like you, for example, or majority of "west" for that matter,
| has completely believed that "70%" number that was released
| by Russian government.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Considering the ridiculous politics here in America, I
| don't find the 70% statistic hard to believe. News is
| propaganda here, and people support terrible things all the
| time, so why should Russia be different?
| civilized wrote:
| Except they were not released by the Russian government.
| therusskiy wrote:
| They were released by Levada, it's now been some time
| that they are being influenced by Kremlin.
|
| None of my friends / relatives / acquintances supports
| this war (only my GF's mother). That is a piss-poor
| statistic, but the sad truth is that there simply cannot
| be any reliable sociology in a country where saying "no
| to war" leads to criminal prosecution.
|
| I think it's also crucial, that from people who "support
| this war", most support the image they see on TV, not the
| real-world atrocities. Most of people who support this
| war think they are fighting "battalions of NATO soldiers
| from Poland" and a small group of nazis who threaten
| Ukraininan soldiers with death if they don't go into
| battle. For majority it's impossible to fathom fighting
| with brotherly Ukrainians.
| yks wrote:
| "70%" number is effectively meaningless, it might be 30 or
| 90, but it is a fact that the war is supported by Russian
| society. They may not _like_ it but they _support_ it. If
| Putin says the war is over now, Russians would support that
| too.
| godelski wrote:
| > It's ridiculously easy to influence people through
| propaganda.
|
| I think not enough people understand this point. So many
| believe that they are immune to propaganda because they
| laugh at some that they see. But they do not laugh at the
| propaganda that does influence them. There's different
| propaganda for different people. This is the same
| underlying arguments for the privacy avocation groups, but
| I don't want to derail the conversation at hand.
| Kamq wrote:
| > It's ridiculously easy to influence people through
| propaganda.
|
| Sure, but in democracies (or any system where legitimacy
| depends on the "will of the people"), why the people
| believe something isn't usually considered relevant.
| mradek wrote:
| Sure but if a propagandized population is hellbent in what
| they believe, they are a danger. Just because they have
| been brainwashed doesn't mean we should let our guard down
| out of pity. It should make us more alarmed because they
| would actually go and do something batshit crazy.
|
| It's honestly very unsettling to think about.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| If Maslow's hierarchy of needs had one more layer at its very
| base, it would be power. That is, the ability to project
| their will into the world. People who are made to feel
| powerless (like the Russian population) will align themselves
| with a source of power (Putin) to satisfy their need for
| power, even if by proxy. The need for power is so
| fundamentally important to humans that any source of this is
| valued above most moral conflicts that the source may cause.
| This is how a large population of "good" people can commit
| atrocities, as in WWII Germany, for example.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| As practice shows, it's one thing to support the attacks but
| quite another to be willing to go to the frontline...
| yks wrote:
| Current Russian practice shows that there is no difference,
| thousands of newly mobilized men have already died and
| their society doesn't care, mothers just blame Ukraine.
| loceng wrote:
| If 8 billion people in the world, your 99.99% leads to 80
| million people who would be willing to harm others - a lot of
| people - where certainly only a fraction of that is enough to
| create an army for a tyrant; and to which where the second
| amendment in the U.S. stems from, knowing that only an armed
| population can counter threats on freedom.
| zenta wrote:
| Nit: I don't know that it changes the point, but 0.01% of 8B
| is 800K.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" maybe 99.99% of world population wouldn't harm another
| person"_
|
| I think they would... especially in self-defense, in defense of
| someone they cared about, and plenty would do so for ideals
| like "freedom", "country" or "democracy"... and if they
| wouldn't most would be perfectly happy to let others do it for
| them.
|
| That's why the military and police exist, and why most people
| are perfectly happy to fund and support them. It's also why
| wars have so many participants and supporters.
|
| Politicians can further rile people up to commit violence
| against scapegoats and even preemptively against distant
| potential threats. It's not so difficult for them to get a lot
| of people to commit violence against a historical, cultural,
| political, religious, or ethnic enemy.
| godelski wrote:
| This concept has always baffled me too. There's the old saying
| (I think from cold war era): the difference between you (a
| foreigner) and me is smaller than the difference between us and
| our respective leaders.
|
| It is very clear to me that these existential threats are
| elites playing a game with our lives. The lives of everyone on
| this planet. The same elites that have nuclear bunkers and
| would survive the repercussions of their acts. The same elites
| who get us worked up with racism and scapegoatism. It doesn't
| matter if you're American, Indian, Chinese, or Russian; the
| honest to god truth is that the VAST majority of us want to
| just live in peace and don't give a shit about this
| geopolitical nonsense. It's strange to me that you can go back
| to Diogenes and find people discussing this same sentiment,
| about being citizens of the world. Nationalism is a hell of a
| drug. Fine in moderate usage but large doses make people go
| insane.
|
| I do recognize that there is a lot more complexity to all this.
| Like another commenter pointed out, even 0.01% of 8 billion is
| 800k. But this shows an existential threat to humanity. That
| even if the rate of psychopaths with power is extremely low,
| that the total number is still quite large. But it isn't just
| these elites that make us think small cultural differences are
| quite large, I see every day people come to these same
| conclusions. I don't understand how this happens when we really
| are all just people doing people things. Exposure?
|
| I'm not sure how to solve this tbh. I do think working towards
| a post scarce society is one of the biggest tools we can have.
| People tend to be much nicer and far less likely to act
| criminally when they don't have to worry about getting by.
| People aren't inherently evil, but justify small steps in that
| direction with good intentions. Post scarcity takes away some
| of this power that these people have, but it won't take away
| all of it. I know this is something we techies here are able to
| work towards, but I don't know what the other parts are, and I
| don't think it is going to be a fully technological solution
| (that would be absurd). But I do thin, like you're saying, that
| we need to discuss this. After all, even if it is unlikely to
| happen, the fate of the human race depends on this discussion.
| A 0.001% chance of nuclear war is still too high.
| [deleted]
| hayst4ck wrote:
| A police officer is a position of power. In many parts of the
| world, someone in this position of power will use that power to
| acquire resources via bribes or extortion. This person with
| authority of the state has a right to violence that you do not
| have. This person has determined they have a right to your
| money and a "justification" (The law of nature: I have more
| power) to take it.
|
| If you give the money there is no 'harm,' yet you have been
| harmed with the threat of violence. If you need that money to
| feed yourself or get medical care for your child, it might
| literally result in death.
|
| If you fight the police officer, others will come after you. If
| you gather your friends to fight the police officers, you have
| now subverted the government, created your own government
| (because you are now an agent of enforcement of your own set of
| "laws"), and now started a very small scale war (revolution)
| out of your desire to not be harmed.
|
| If you don't think people would self enrich at the cost of
| others, I have some very bad news for you. Just because a
| person hasn't been physically damaged, doesn't mean they
| haven't been harmed.
|
| If there was a button that gave you a million dollars but would
| kill a person you have never met, I think you vastly
| underestimate the number of people who would press it, and
| those that do press it, would probably be happy to press it
| many times.
|
| The way you use the word harm is what prevents you from making
| sense of the problem.
|
| Confusion is not the result of understanding. Sadness is.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| We grant government the monopoly of violence in return for
| protecting individual rights. That's the idea.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| We don't grant a government the monopoly of violence --
| they are the government because they hold the monopoly of
| violence.
|
| The monopoly of violence is disconnected from issues of
| legitimacy and authority. You don't have to agree with the
| government, and plenty of folks don't -- hence insurgencies
| and rebellions all over the world. But unless you can usurp
| that monopoly of violence from the existing government your
| feelings about their legitimacy and authority are moot.
| Lots of governments don't give a damn about your rights,
| and never will.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| You have a very contrived and negative view towards
| Police and government. While it is good to have
| skepticism of powerful structures, it is also important
| to see the facts. Most police officers are courteous,
| professional and protect citizens (and their rights).
| ratsmack wrote:
| War mongers also cross the entire political spectrum almost
| like they're born with a death wish. It's too bad they can't be
| excised from the system before they gain too much power.
| toss1 wrote:
| War mongers is a dangerous oversimplification.
|
| The basic problem in the world is that while a majority of
| the people may want to live self-determined lives, and be
| governed by a self-ruling democracy, there is a significant
| minority who wants to, at a personal level steal, extort, or
| extract value from others, and at a societal/governmental
| level rule over others. The latter are perfectly happy to
| steal, extort, extract, and/or rule over others using
| deception and violence.
|
| If the people who want to live free and self-determined lives
| and under self-determining governments are not better
| prepared and better armed than the bullies, thieves, and
| authoritarians, they WILL be ruled by those bullies, thieves,
| and authoritarians.
|
| If someone comes to your home to steal, rape, rule, or
| otherwise harm you or your family, is your response to say
| "sure, do what you want", or will you defend yourself?
|
| Will you not call the cops if you have a chance because they
| might use violence to subdue or even kill your assailants
| (because they'd be doing violence on your behalf)?
|
| If you defend yourself, or call the cops to do so, are you a
| warmonger?
|
| If someone attacks our land and people, or a neighbor's land
| and people, and we call the military to defend ourselves, are
| we warmongers?
|
| It is a useless accusation that undermines real understanding
| of what is happening.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yes, self-defense is a legitimate use of violence. Is there
| any other point at all in this thread?
|
| When people say they are "anti-war" or "pacifist", they do
| not mean anti-self-defense. This kind of rethoric is
| uninteresting.
|
| (Case in point: I am anti-war and I voted in favour of
| sending military aid to Ukraine and adoptions sanctions
| over Russia)
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Yes, self-defense is a legitimate use of violence. Is
| there any other point at all in this thread?
|
| Yes, there is another point.
|
| Many people, simply refer to all parties as "warmongers".
| The "warmonger" accusation is thrown every day at the
| people, politicians, and countries sending arms to
| Ukraine. Some of this can be attribute to Active Measures
| Dezinformatsiya "shaping the information space" directly
| from Russia and some to useful idiots who parrot the same
| lines, but not all of it. I've encountered many, like the
| OP, who just talk about any person or country in a
| position to project violent power, as a "warmonger" if
| they suggest using that power.
|
| There are also many people who will claim that the USA is
| a "warmonger nation", far worse than Russia and China.
| While the USA has started military action since WWII, and
| some of it erroneously, it is NOT the USA that is
| "warmongering" in any way equivalent to the expansionist
| states Russia and China, both of whom have a continuous
| history of "annexing" neighbors (Tibet, HongKong, South
| China Sea, East China Sea, etc. & Chechnya, Georgia,
| Crimea, Ukraine), while the US has certainly behaved as
| the worlds policeman (and sometimes over-aggressively),
| it has not annexed anyone. Yet, there is plenty of
| "warmongering" rhetoric thrown at the USA, including in
| it's support of Ukraine, and claims that it is worse than
| CCP and Russian Federation.
|
| So, what we need to distinguish is who is the
| expansionist aggressor, and who is the we hope better
| prepared and better armed democracy.
|
| (That said, if a better-armed democracy tips over into an
| autocracy, watch out. and make no mistake, there are
| strong movements in the USA that are attempting to do
| exactly that, starting with actions to undermine
| democracy such as undermining the independent judiciary,
| denying elections, etc.)
|
| EDIT: Plus, people are happy to prattle on about how the
| US Defense Budget exceeds the next X nations combined
| budgets, and how it is such a "warmonger" state. Yet when
| it finally becomes seen that we need to literally push
| back against Russia or China and defend democracy itself,
| it's pretty handy how all that turns out to be the
| "Arsenal Of Democracy" and we can actually supply the
| effort without breaking much of a sweat. And then people
| who normally call the US a "warmongering nation" can
| happily say "I'm all for defending countries"...
|
| So, the main point is that I'm calling out the
| inconsistency inherent in the "warmonger" labeling.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| I think I am quite liberal and I could be considered a
| warmonger.
|
| If you have never met a truly delusional person in your life,
| it's easy to have pacifist ideals. As soon as you meet a
| truly delusional person and those delusions directly conflict
| with what you need or a right you think you have, you quickly
| learn that "war" is sometimes the only option. If there are
| situations that require war, then you must make sure you are
| capable of exerting force.
|
| I think the quote "If you want peace, prepare for war," is
| quite accurate. It is perceived weakness that opens you up to
| having war thrust upon you by someone who has estimated they
| have more power. In that sense, I think pacifism is a
| warmongering ideology because I view "despots that have too
| much power will exist" as an axiom upon which any political
| philosophy must be built. To a despot, pacifism is
| opportunity to subjugate. The foundation of despotism is
| built upon people who will not risk what they hold dear.
|
| Nuclear annihilation is bad, but I would rather live in a
| world under threat of nuclear annihilation rather than a
| world where only Putin or Xi could threaten the force of
| nuclear weapons to subjugate those they wish.
| lurquer wrote:
| The delusion, perhaps, is the average person worrying about
| whether they are or are not, or should or should not be, a
| pacifist.
|
| It doesn't matter.
|
| Wars are waged by powerful interests over which the average
| person has no control.
|
| I suppose on a personal level -- confronted with a mugger
| or burglar -- one could implement one's philosophy.
| Thankfully, though, those occasions are rare and regardless
| of one's outlook, the decision in the moment is based less
| on philosophy and more on adrenaline, panic, fear, rage,
| etc. (which can lead a 'warmonger' to capitulate and cower
| in fear or a 'pacifist' the knock the crap out of
| someone... one never knows.)
|
| If there are any dictators, emperors, prime minister, or
| presidents on this board, perhaps their musings on the
| subject would mean something. If not, it's just navel-
| gazing.
| godelski wrote:
| I've met delusional people, but I disagree with your
| stance. I think there has to be a better way. The reason we
| go to war is not because these delusional people exist, but
| because they are able to garner massive support. War can't
| exist without people willing to die for a cause. Those
| causes are frequently lies or exaggerations. Or issues
| caused by autocrats (delusional people) seeking to expand
| their power. The existential threat to humanity isn't so
| much that delusional people exist, but that the average
| person still holds celebrities in high regard. Because we
| treat men like gods.
| Nomentatus wrote:
| I was a pacifist until I read Tolkein's "Lord of the
| Rings," a very long pro-war (warmonger) screed that he
| consciously designed to counter pre-WWII pacifism in
| England. Also entertaining. But long.
|
| Or perhaps, Tolkein convinced me that I was kidding myself
| if I thought I was a pacifist, in the first place. If you
| would break someone's arm to save a million lives, then
| you're not a pacifist. Which is a sorta kinda okay rough
| summary of the book's underlying argument.
| andrepd wrote:
| > Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings," a very long pro-war
| (warmonger) screed that he consciously designed to
| counter pre-WWII pacifism in England
|
| This is hilariously off-mark. Tolkien was a very anti-war
| person (shaped by his experience in the Great War).
| Nomentatus wrote:
| Tolkien was an able soldier at the front in WWI. He
| despised war as veterans do, but by the same token he was
| obviously no pacifist. He also despised the NAZIs, but
| was confronted by students, and a nation of voters, who
| declared themselves uninterested in defending their
| country or opposing the NAZIs. Tolkein began writing LOTR
| in 1937. Lewis, very similar views. It is impossible to
| construe TLOTR as a pacifist work; although it clearly
| warns against pursuing "any means possible" against an
| enemy (as is consistent with his Christian faith.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_and_Country_debate
|
| https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/11/tolkien-
| lewis...
|
| (I can't vouch for the latter journal, it's just
| consistent with what I've previously read.)
|
| Winston Churchill, in the first volume of his history of
| WWII, goes into great detail re this ubiquitous
| democratic feckless pseudo-pacifism of the thirties. This
| is the context Tolkien was writing against; a
| thoroughgoing refusal to consider arms. It was well worth
| opposing, and had armed opposition been used earlier,
| England would have experienced only a very short, sharp
| war.
|
| "Unlike other members of the "Lost Generation" who spent
| their words rejecting time-honored concepts such as
| heroism and virtue, Tolkien and Lewis borrowed heavily
| from the great epic stories of the past. ... According to
| the C.S. Lewis Institute, "In the stories of Tolkien and
| Lewis, there is this very important idea about our
| responsibility to resist evil and choose to do the right
| thing, even when it looks very risky. This is what heroes
| do." Both men learned these lessons while on the
| battlefields of France during the so-called "War to End
| All Wars." "
|
| https://www.grunge.com/596312/the-c-s-lewis-and-j-r-r-
| tolkie...
| argiopetech wrote:
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| 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.
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The threat of using nukes is _much_ more valuable than the
| actuality of using them, which would be immediate self-
| destruction.
|
| It's just an extremely convenient dead man's switch (if you
| hurt/kill me, it'll be millions paying the price).
| postalrat wrote:
| 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.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Why wouldn't the USA retaliate with its own nuclear strike
| on North Korea? They would have to.
|
| North Korea wants nukes to avoid getting regime changed
| like Iraq. Not to start an offensive nuclear war that
| they'd lose.
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| zvmaz wrote:
| I always thought that a nuclear war is the end of us all.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Defcon ripoff
| vntok wrote:
| Why does it assume that no bombers would be downed en route? Why
| does it assume that no missile would be intercepted?
| pb7 wrote:
| 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.
| practice9 wrote:
| > 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)
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| 2019
| data_maan wrote:
| So would you say we have nothing to fear?
| alexvoda wrote:
| Not doing favors at all. This lowered my impression of the
| Princeton brand.
| [deleted]
| XorNot wrote:
| 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.
| incrudible wrote:
| 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.
| rutierut wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| data_maan wrote:
| But you can trust the conclusion: you have a good chance of
| dying in such a scenario.
| causi wrote:
| _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.
| mrcheesebreeze wrote:
| yeah thats a good point, russia has crappy tanks and stuff
| but a lot of that is they used their military spending on
| nuclear weapons.
|
| they know its their best trump card and they want to "win" by
| killing us more efficiently.
| luma wrote:
| 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.
| pasabagi wrote:
| 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%.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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
| boppo1 wrote:
| >we as in humanity want to keep weapons around
|
| We don't. But it's basically impossible to get rid of them
| given the existence of incentives.
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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
| mrcheesebreeze wrote:
| 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.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > the movie _Threads_
|
| 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. [...]"
| rgmerk wrote:
| The fact that it might be 20 million rather than 40 million
| Americans who might die immediately doesn't exactly fill me
| with comfort.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Keep in mind similar simulations underestimated climate
| change. They underestimated Covid. It would be naive to have
| faith in the 20 million estimate.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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.
| data_maan wrote:
| > 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.)
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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."
| mikewarot wrote:
| >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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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.
| orbifold wrote:
| 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/A
| vangard_(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.
| isatty wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike
|
| Suggests that the US is not behind. If Wikipedia has that
| information it is likely that we're already several decades
| ahead, in fact.
| orbifold wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| lordgroff wrote:
| 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.
| mrcheesebreeze wrote:
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" 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".
| aaomidi wrote:
| Then the US was fucking stupid if they thought the money
| wasn't going to get gobbled up.
|
| You can't just $$$ to an unstable country and expect it
| to work.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| 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)
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