Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal

Rest assured that if this alternate history scenario had occurred historians would not be talking about the inefficiency of the attack, they would be talking about the most devastating attack that Germany was able to conduct against Americans on their own soil during the war. It would have completely changed the American mindset and culture forever.

This was a very specific single technical problem, requiring a silo from basic science to theoretical physics to advanced engineering, etc., with each layer having its own space of failure modes.

Something like the reverse is true with sufficiently-capable and sufficiently-efficient AI, which we are rapidly evolving to.

In our current situation, the attack surface is quite literally our entire highly interdependent civilization and its components. AI does not need to be autonomous, it just needs to employed, either will wilful bad intent, or, poorly stated goals, or, poor alignment, or, simple mistakes and errors, to break things.

The challenge with security is always that the attacker need only succeed once.

This does not mean doomerism has it right, especially in narratives based on poor understanding or extapolation beyond what is now konwn. The chance of "extinction" in particular is overstated.

The chance of one or more compounding "Chernobyl scale" gray swan events however is ever increasing.

Personally I don't think that's remotely contestable.

As a civilization and society and industry we need to have process, and public process at that, about the nature of the risks faced.

That process has not yet emerged in any coherent way; a hundred letters have been signed and such but to no actual effect, bar one performative "executive order" this week.

With his seeming love of certain periods of German history, I think it's appropriate to observe that Tucker Carlson has a backpfeifengesicht.

Contrary to Fallout lore, most nuclear bombs dont leave much concentrated radioactive material unless it was done on purpose. You either need a shittier and smaller explosion with the same material, or you need a ground burst which reduces the effective blast area.

The US was on ground zero in under 2 weeks in Japan and couldn't detect anything over the background in radioactive isotopes.

  The strikes conducted by the USAAF on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history. Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.

Perhaps that "third bomb on Tokyo" fear was a bit made up and ahistoric.

https://www.aec.go.jp/bunya/04/plutonium/20260805_e.pdf

As of the end of 2025, the total amount of Japan’s separated plutonium managed both within and outside Japan was approximately 44.4 tons, of which approximately 9.9 tons were held domestically and approximately 34.5 tons were held abroad.

Despite the nomenclature, weapons grade plutonium is not necessary to make nuclear weapons. Reactor grade plutonium has more problems with predetonation ("fizzle") and decay heat management, but both obstacles can be bypassed by design changes. In particular, "boosting" with a mixture of deuterium and tritium overcomes predetonation problems and can ensure repeatable high yields even with plutonium containing a high fraction of Pu-240.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon#Gas_boo...

The fusion reaction rate typically becomes significant at 20 to 30 megakelvins. This temperature is reached at very low efficiencies, when less than 1% of the fissile material has fissioned (corresponding to a yield in the range of hundreds of tons of TNT). Since implosion weapons can be designed that will achieve yields in this range even if neutrons are present at the moment of criticality, fusion boosting allows the manufacture of efficient weapons that are immune to predetonation. Elimination of this hazard is a very important advantage in using boosting.

This design hardens weapons against neutrons from nuclear interceptors and against neutrons generated within the core itself, e.g. spontaneous fission from "dirty" reactor plutonium.

Gas boosted bombs are more mechanically complex than the bombs of the 1940s, but the US started building them in the 1950s. Japan could easily manage the complexity today. Japan has also operated its Tritium Process Laboratory since the late 1980s, with capacity to handle 16 grams of tritium at a time. That's not much, but an individual boosted warhead may need only 3 grams of tritium.

Some of the (rather convoluted) history is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macmillan_Inc.#Mergers_and_end - but there's not much evidence for any conspiracy GP may have been hinting at.

(Cap'n Bob Maxwell was essentially the left-wing Rupert Murdoch - big on tabloid journalism and building media empires through fair means and foul. A hugely controversial character, but his involvement in textbook publishing was fairly incidental)

I think it's pretty clear that ck2 was talking about using nukes.