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Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

There is no war involving the US that involves the US being crippled without nuclear weapons.

If you are worried about war related cannibalism, you should be far more worried about dying from nuclear annihilation...

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Consider that the US ran out of face masks, and PPEs because it could not import them from China earlier this year. And the US public was without adequate supplies for months. And the government made vague health statements about their benefit, so that the healthcare workers would be rationed enough face masks without the public buying them all out.

I think its a safe bet that people already died because of supply chain disruptions. And this is something as simple to manufacturing as a cloth covering. Imagine a disruption to food supplies.

All it would take is a couple tankers worth of food shipments to be delayed to Oahu, by a month, and people are starving there. Everything is now "held with bubble gum and shoes string", and "just in time delivery" in this economy. There are no large food storage supplies on Oahu that I am aware of.

Hawaii is reliant on the mainland US for the bulk of its food imports AFAIK, not a global network.

It’s also in an insanely strategically valuable position.

If shipping between the mainland US and Hawaii has stopped for a month, US aircraft carriers have been sunk. Nuclear weapons have most likely been used.

You’ve absolutely got a point here about the fragility built into the current system, it just doesn’t nearly apply as much to Hawaii due to other factors.

Thats ludicrous, no-one sane will commit collective suicide of the human race. This was well covered in the Yes Minister, which I consider a documentary: https://youtu.be/o861Ka9TtT4

Suppose, magically, the entire US navy was sank overnight. Would you rather loose some random war in a remote place or be "dying from nuclear annihilation"? Even if you were to loose Hawaii, if that worth the nuclear winter?

Secondly - Global trade is fragile - shipping just needs to become unsafe and disrupted. Even some dudes with AKs on a wooden boat managed to take control of oil tankers.

Imagine there were automated kamikadze-bot robo-submarines, shipping could become too dangerous. They could even be useless against military ships, just dangerous to commercial ones and too numerous / stealthy to control.

Imagine there were automated kamikadze-bot robo-submarines

We've had those for almost a century. They're called "homing torpedoes". :-)

I think something loitering was meant, call it CARP for combat aquatic robo patrol.

Or SHARK, for Superbly hidden attack robot killer

So what?

"Spontane Verdampfung führt zur Entkrampfung!"

or, "Spontaneous evaporation is your salvation!"

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