The Terrifying Possibility of Accidental Nuclear War
scienceswitch.com
scienceswitch.com
Then they wonder why Gen X is so apathetic. Between Nixon and The Bomb how else did they expect us to turn out? It's a natural self-defense reaction.
Agreed. No duck and cover. The transition was from "hey do these things to survive" to "hope you are in the blast radius".
"Threads" (UK), "The Day After" (US) are two big ones. Two lesser known ones that had a profound impact on me were "Special Bulletin" and an episode of the new Twilight Zone called "A Little Piece and Quiet"[1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or1UX7z8YBM .. this run of the new TZ had many episodes about nuclear destruction
But the made-for-rental movies you could get to watch over the weekend, there must have been a dozen of those. I still remember the one where the space station astronauts that crashland after, and the cannibals "rescue" them within minutes of touchdown.
* By the way, there only ever was one Zathras, but he used the Great Machine to time travel so that he could work more than 24 hours per day. Or maybe someone used it on him, that part's unclear (I mean, why would he do that to himself?).
Though they made sure to tell us the music we listened to sucked! We weren't into all that Vietnam protest music the Boomers thought was great. No. We were the generation the anti-war Boomers sent to war after they'd seized the reins of power. Funny anecdote, I worked with a lady who's husband was all in for the Gulf War. She was like wait, you were protesting Vietnam - so you're for war when it's someone else going and against war when you're the one being sent? She divorced him! I always thought that was funny.
Gulf War I was about forcing an invader back from the independent nation he had decided to annex, and it enjoyed wide support from the international community. It also exposed a much smaller amount of American troops to potential harm than earlier American wars, and so sparked less domestic outrage. There is no reason to expect a person who protested the war in Vietnam to oppose that defense of Kuwait, unless they were part of that relatively small demographic opposed to all Western intervention in general. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a totally different story, and I have seen an increasing amount of online comments that erroneously conflate the two.
Yes, that was the story that was told. It's the same story being told now about the Ukraine war. But that's what it is - a story. The invasion is part of the story, but it's not the whole story and it's not the entirety of the reasons we went to war with Iraq and why we're currently aiding the Ukraine.
And you are seriously suggesting that it is other people who are uninformed about these matters?
Not at all! Like I said, the common story has a kernel of truth, it's not an outright lie, but it's not the whole truth. Some people dig further, others have plenty enough other things going on in their lives to deal with digging deeper. The very same people dig at different rates at different times in their life. For example, I was a kid when Vietnam was going on. Didn't exactly dig deep into what we were doing there and what we were hoping to achieve. To be honest, I didn't dig too deep into the Gulf War or the Iraq War either - at least not at the time.
> A time of unprecedented danger: It is 90 seconds to midnight
In addition to that there's climate change, something that is happening currently (visibly, unmistakably) and is on track to getting worse and worse.
Yeah. This is definitely an 'everything old is new again' moment. Anyone remember the music video for Genesis' Land of Confusion and how that ended? Amazing how history rhymes! Here we are again with a dementia patient in the White House and everyone pretending that's OK somehow...
EDIT: To the people downvoting me, could you please explain the difference between Reagan having the nuclear football and Biden having the nuclear football to me rather than just mashing the downvote button? Thanks.
Do the teams really matter that much when we're talking about dementia patients with access to a button that pretty much kills the world?
Not to me they don't.
> could you please explain the difference between Reagan having the nuclear football and Biden having the nuclear football
Seeing as the protocol is for the President of the United States to have control over the nuclear arsenal, I don't think there is a difference. Are you suggesting that there is a difference? It is unclear your intention. Perhaps someone else will care to know what your discussion goal is here.
Because everybody is thinking that "if we don't arm ourselves, our adversaries will, and therefore gain the upper hand". That there are risks involved doesn't count, as long as they don't prove to be real (i.e. actually happen). If they prove to be real then we'll have a moratorium of a few years until the default reasoning takes over again.
I'm sorry, but I don't think we are capable of breaking out of this "highway to hell".
As for tactical nuclear weapons, I think we are still looking at a major hurdle to put that theater and launch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter has a fairly detailed elaboration on the various points of view and their history.
I would like to think that is true. I would hate to have to find out.
I don't know why this keeps being repeated though - it sounds more like something people wish for rather than something than experts actually believe. The problem with Russian nuclear weapons is that as part of various treaties they had to let other countries, including US, inspect their facilities missiles and core storage, to make sure it's all in tip top condition and nuclear arms aren't being kept in an unsafe way and maybe getting stolen/sold off. So paradoxically we have made sure that Russian nuclear forces are probably the most well kept, inspected and funded out of all of Russian departments, because they had to allow international inspections regularly.
Also, the Soviet Union as well as Russia do have a culture of corruption, plan-fulfillment-only-on-paper, diversion of public funds and organized inefficiency on the job. E.g. from the current Ukraine-Russian war, there are reports (to be taken with a grain of salt of course, but there are dozens of confirmed, similar stories from Soviet times) of food shipments containing just canned water instead of canned meat/vegetables because somebody embezzled the money and shipped water to cover it up. I can't really decide either way: maybe all this is even easier, given the secrecy surrounding everything military and nuclear. Yet maybe it is harder, given the increased scrutiny around all things nuclear.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nuclear-weapons-testing https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-russias-tactical-nuclear-we...
Wait, how about the New York Times? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/us/politics/russia-nuclea...
Paradoxically a google search would have helped.
"Provided you make the effort to maintain warheads properly, though, they ought to work. “Russia has a robust nuclear capacity. They refurbish their warheads often,” says Amy Woolf, a US specialist in nuclear weapons policy. Schneider, too, is confident that Russia’s nukes are serviceable. It would be unwise to assume otherwise. "
I can't read the WSJ or NYT articles without subscription so I cannot comment on those.
It seems pretty undeniable that both Russia and NATO would be more willing to countenance a direct confrontation.
Not only that, surely by this point both sides would be dusting off plans to start construction once again. That immediately opens up the likelihood of preemptive strikes to prevent your opponent actually achieving a new nuclear weapon.
I'm not so sure - someone else might equally argue that if Ukraine had nuclear weapons it wouldn't have been attacked in the first place, so maybe that's the path that it should have taken.
And equally - "both Russia and NATO would be more willing to countenance a direct confrontation."
Maybe. Or maybe it's posturing. I think EU's support for Ukraine is huge and populations of many countries still support sending them weapons and supplies, but if they had to send their men and women to die in Ukraine the discussion would be different. Not saying they wouldn't, just that it's easy to say "oh if only Russia didn't have nuclear weapons we'd definitely go and fight them". It's theoretical.
Without nuclear weapons, Russia would likely not have invaded in the first place, because a NATO intervention would have been likely and would have ended in the annihilation of the Russian military in just a few weeks.
The only reason Russia is willing to engage in a direct conflict with Ukraine is their nuclear weapons make them feel secure that that won’t evolve into a direct conflict with NATO, which, without nuclear weapons, would be immediate ruin for Russia.
Nuclear weapons enable direct aggression by nuclear powers against anyone except other nuclear powers.
Actually, you don't need to imagine.
But we have a concrete example nowadays.
Ukraine gave up their nukes after ussr fell apart, with a territorial independence guarantees from russia... we all see how that ended for side that gave up nukes.
The amount of nuclear weapons the US and especially the Soviet Union built was absolutely nutter loony Cocoa Puffs insane. Part of that was a disturbing fact that they are the cheapest way to kill people as long as you don't mind killing hapless schmucks indiscriminately. And you want to make sure you get them all. Flip side is enormous amounts of resources needed to create arsenals the size the US and the Soviets had.
[1] https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2017-10/news-briefs/man-save...
EDIT: Oh, he has died. I hope people were taking him gifts.
The analogy is a broad one: a stressed human operator thinks they are under attack; they have a tiny amount of unreliable information, and a short time window to make decisions; they have an opportunity to counter-attack, but a false negative means the opportunity is irreversibly lost (because the adversary's aircraft attacked their aircraft on the ground / because the adversary's ICBM destroyed their ICBM on the ground).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
Any accident that looks anomalous, a single ICBM or SLBM, isn't likely to provoke an actual war with reasonable actors. The other side's just likely to then use the threat of war to extract truly painful concessions.
The "reasonable" thing still leaves out Russia, I suppose. But I have serious doubts they could even manage a nuclear strike at this point. How many missiles would make it out of the silos, how many bombs would detonate? The outskirts of Las Vegas have suffered worse than they could manage.
The threat I'm talking about is human error in command & control that causes the legitimate launch of a large number of ICBM's at once.
They've kept strategic ambiguity, but it's obvious that the US has developed a plan (or several plans) on how to react if Russia drops a nuke on Ukraine. And it seems clear that the US feels they can make Putin and Russia regret the use of nukes without using American nukes in response.
Russia still acts rationally, but with poor assumptions (see Ukraine). If they were to actually launch a nuke at the West, for any reason, they would have to weight almost certain annihilation. One side of MAD still holds.
I wonder how many of those accidents are actually accidents.
If you aren’t familiar, look up Tsar Bomba on youtube and witness how terrifyingly destructive a 50 megaton warhead is. Then look up the abject cruelty that is the Neutron Bomb. Education on nuclear war and fallout is of the utmost importance, to get people around the world in the mindset of disarmament.
Tsar Bomba was a one-off experiment – and one designed for some level of psychological intimidation that you appear to have fallen for. No nuclear-armed country today maintains 50-megaton warheads for actual use against an adversary. Instead, planning involves use of a larger number of smaller warheads, and that is already enough to be worried about.
You dont have to kill everyone in nuclear strikes. Destroy every single powerplant, radio station and port in a single strike and watch them going back to dark ages in matter of minutes.
No electricity and no communications means mass chaos. every city becomes a unsustainable trap with no supplies.
It would be terrifying to be in a middle of that. A nation that would tear itself apart for self preservation while all supplies are somewhere far out, 'in a place where food comes from'.
There is practically no fallout from air bursts.
Nuclear warhead is a late WW2 strategic bombing raid in a 100kg package, delivered in a fraction of a second, and with no protection against it.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/330...
Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
What you might notice (depending on if your country thinks it useful) will be siren signals and radio/TV broadcasts. But I guess it is even too short a time for those, and you cannot do more than "move into the cellar" anyways.