Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghostcluster | Hacker News Reader

Between the Kuwaiti oil fires of the first gulf war, and many more country-sized forest fire events, we've learned that Nuclear Winter is not a likely scenario. In fact, the very scientists who coined the term in the 1980s have backed away from it.

Nuclear war would be awful, and certainly the radioactive fallout would be bad, and the damage to thriving historical cities, not to mention the human toll. But extinction level? Unlikely.

One thing this pandemic has taught me is the resilience of the modern supply chain to huge unexpected disruption. It's much stronger in that dimension than I initially feared in early March.

View on HN

I dunno if I would describe the supply chain as "resilient" -- I honestly think we just got lucky that things so far haven't been worse.

To be fair, large grocery store chains were beginning preparations as far back as December 2019, which gave them time to cut out less-essential SKUs and increase production for more essential products. Big businesses with contacts in China had plenty of heads up before the disease went global.

Depending on the radioactive exposure caused by a nuclear war, the impact on the supply chain could theoretically be much more catastrophic than a pandemic. If major water supplies or agricultural infrastructure were tainted, for example, the results would be devastating.

are you really comparing COVID to a hypothetical nuclear war?

COVID barely disrupted the supply chain because people who actually work those mission critical jobs had to continue working on site. This wouldn’t be the case if nukes were dropping

In my mind, the most likely candidate for a nuclear war right now comes in a chaotic escalation of the conflict between Pakistan and India. I think this scenario would be horrible, but its damage to the rest of the world's supply chains? Probably less than COVID?

The other conflict that worries me is a major provocation by China towards Taiwan. This is the foreign policy scenario that frightens me most, and feels like the most likely potential 'Franz Ferdinand execution'-type event that could lead to a global world war. But in such a war, would we be likely to see a total nuclear back-and-forth between factions? I think this is less likely than in current day India v. Pakistan. But I could be totally wrong. As Francis Fukuyama illustrates, it's hard to predict future foreign policy scenarios with any accuracy.

Of note, India and China also have a simmering conflict with each other. My understanding of it is meager, but it seems to me while unlikely to boil over on its own, conditions could change if a conflict you mentioned happens.

you talk about localized conflicts far off US mainland, and what most here talk about is more on scale of global all out nuclear war

Nuclear Winter was the scenario most widely used to justify a hypothetical total worldwide collapse, but we now know that this particular scenario is unlikely, even in the case of the most violent possible global exchange.

> I think this scenario would be horrible, but its damage to the rest of the world's supply chains? Probably less than COVID?

Punjab is one of world largest food production regions.

Given how much crop land would be ruined, it is likely that global starvation would end most of humanity and not much of civilization would survive. Sure there would be people wondering around a hundred years later, but they might not know how to read, write, speak real languages, or reason abstractly. 99% of humans starving would make for some crazy times.

Yep, see the bronze age collapse for an example of this.

Reading and writing lost. People living in cities that had flourished for a thousand years just a couple centuries before, but the current inhabitants didn't know the name of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com