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Comment by alexasmyths | Hacker News Reader

" Even ignoring the logical absurdity this would require, the simple fact is that nuclear war nearly happened on many occasions as a result of various misadventures, and it was a matter of pure dumb luck that it didn't."

No - this is false.

It was the existential and immense nature of the consequences of war that enabled the parties to 'back down'.

Without nukes - the US and USSR would have likely started a bunch of scuffles here and there.

There's a great chance that US/USSR navies duked it out over Cuba - because the consequences would have been likely very limited - unless they escalated of course.

Yes, we were lucky that it didn't go down as well, but nukes have been a huge factor in keeping the war basically cold..

"some less risky peace-building efforts" - there is really no such thing. 'Balancing Power' is what creates peace for the most part.

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Two Soviets who personally prevented nuclear war.[0][1] If these don't sound like 'dumb luck' to you, well... It wasn't 'the parties' that backed down, it was the world's immense luck to have a particular individual being in the right place who didn't follow orders, and didn't go along with the consensus.

Why these guys aren't better known, I have no idea.

[0] http://time.com/4947492/stanislav-petrov-soviet-officer-nucl...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

I raise your hypothetical destruction three persons who engaged in all out Warfare, either against ones own nation or against one another, with thorough destruction and civilizational decline.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong

My assumption is that those scientists working on the bomb, where perfectly aware of what humanity was capable of (even with democracy and hightech) and decided to raise us this rockets as a monumental finger of "Never again or never ever after!". Way to go to tame a beast, who thinks you are a useful plaything. Well played Mr.Oppenheimer.

Rage all you want upon this monument of reason, erected against the intellectual treason you commit against the humanity that is- not the humanity you wish for.

The inferno of the first WorldWar, the Inferno of the second WorldWar, the various Colonial Wars and all the useless carnage before - these all started with a humanity capable of deducing deterrence, but true deterrence appeared first in presidential discussions after the existence of ICBMs.

Sorry, I didn't really understand a word of that.

I don’t think you clicked on either of the links in the comment you’re replying to.

Yes, no "dumb luck" prevented nuclear war, but the actions of two true heroes who were brave enough to go against the grain and the possibility of extreme consequences from their regime.

You're ignoring the many cases meticulously documented from official sources by Schlosser and others where accidents and rogue orders only didn't set off a world-scale nuclear war because of lucky breaks (literally in some cases -- the hardware breaking) and disobedient underlings. There is really little debate about this amongst historians. The documents are there.

Run the experiment several times, and this luck inevitably runs out. Continue with nuclear weapons, and there just will be a nuclear war.

I've read the books, and frankly it's freaky. It looks a lot like anthropic selection, which is a conclusion I don't want to come to--and which should be false, it's not like nuclear war would cause extinction.

I don't have a good explanation for that number of coincidences, though.

> Without nukes - the US and USSR would have likely started a bunch of scuffles here and there.

They did.

but the scuffles were not direct confrontations between the armed forces of the superpowers (the nukes held them back, they were afraid of a possible escalation); the wars were always in far-off places between proxies (or that the other side was a proxy)

I don't consider proxy wars to be "better wars", I'd consider them even worse than conventional warfare because it's people, sometimes whole nations, dying for somebodies else cause.

" dying for somebodies else cause."

False. 'Proxy wars' is a misleading title.

The Korean war was not a 'proxy war' it was a real war, that happened to also be a proxy for other powers.

Country A does not fight random country B for no reason.

They are generally real conflicts where their actions may happen to have geostragetic alignment with other powers.

> Country A does not fight random country B for no reason.

No, they usually don't. But countries, nations, and people often have very long lasting disagreements. Instrumentalizing those, for another "bigger" cause isn't really that hard of a task for the far more influential and powerful countries C and D.

C and D end up supplying A and B with money, weapons, training and sometimes even direct manpower.

The result is usually a conflict that escalates much more quickly in scope and severity than it would have without the involvement of C and D.

they are still better than what WWIII would look like

A century of suffering in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia is the consequence of those little wars.

These predate the US-USSR cold war, though. They're rooted in good old fashioned colonial exploitation.

The Soviets distributed kalashnikovs, rpgs and other weapons with missionary zeal to attain world communism. The US did all sorts of nasty stuff.

The outcome is a tire fire that will burn for my lifetime at least.

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