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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

That's got to be one of the saddest infographics ever made. I don't like infographics, they tend to simplify complex things to the point of uselessness. But this one is in the 'food for thought' category, one of those things that we think is solidly in the past when actually it is very much in the present.

Pakistan/India is the most worrisome combination in that graph.

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At the same time, unless they are used as a desperate weapon against an undefeatable opponent, most likely nuclear weapons are relatively pointless, because they cause escalation and way too much collateral damage. Conventional means are largely sufficient to destroy military equipment, and nuclear war has for only purpose to destroy civilians more than anything else.

However, I am more concerned about the accidental use of nuclear weapons because of current procedures and measures in place. See the excellent book "Command and Control"...

Having read it, I found the point Schlosser made to be that, while working with nuclear weapons (and more specifically with large liquid-fueled rockets) is a profession relatively rich in personal danger for those who pursue it, the danger of accidental nuclear detonation per se is mitigated practically unto negligibility by the measures put in place to prevent it -- otherwise, at least one of the accidents he relates in such loving detail would've had a yield measurable in kilotons.

Not as negligible as we were previously led to believe. There have been at least five "incidents" each of which could have started WWIII -- and as far as physical safeguards, a single switch once kept a bomb from detonating on our own soil:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bom...

And yet WWIII hasn't started, and there have been no accidental nuclear detonations since we started building the weapons in the first place. Nuclear engineering, like any field of industrial or weapons technology, has inherent dangers. That's why both civilian and military engineering disciplines include safeguards.

On the civilian side, the profit-motivated nature of nuclear engineering has resulted in a variety of serious industrial accidents, which have produced a widespread but erroneous perception that the technology is just too dangerous to have, when in fact it's merely too dangerous to have in the hands of people who care only about making money off it.

On the military side, conversely, the safeguards around nuclear weapons have, thus far at least, been exactly as effective as we need them to be, and nuclear warheads are as safe as anything can be that's inherently dangerous. That's not to say they are perfectly safe, but neither is anything else; all life is risk, and I'd much rather take the risk of having them, than of not having them and being at the mercy of someone who does.

(And military power reactors tend to be a lot safer than civilian ones as well, thanks to an engineering safety culture which I gather is best described as fanatical. Me, I'm in favor of purchasing all civilian-owned nuclear power reactors and placing them in the hands of an eighth federal uniformed service, the US Nucleonics Service, staffed with Navy-trained engineers and operated as a cost center of government. But I appreciate that makes me sort of weird.)

That's the ultimate form of selection bias though. As long as it doesn't happen we can continue to discuss this and if it does happen it's moot and we likely won't be discussing it at al.

Your view is a bit US centric, there are lots of nuclear installations outside of the US. The US is probably the least of the problem in this particular respect.

I don't see how selection bias enters into it, when no matter what selection method we use, the rate of accidental detonations remains zero. I don't doubt that that will eventually change, but even a large industrial accident is hardly the end of the world.

As for US-centricity, well, that's where I live, and as cold as this no doubt will sound to a universalist, I really don't see another nation's accidental nuclear detonation as being my problem; contrary to popular belief, the mechanisms involved in commencing nuclear warfare are a little more nuanced than "oh, hey, a nuke went off somewhere on the planet? Empty the silos! Tell the subs to flush their tubes!"

Don't be too sad, earth is not drawn to scale :)

In terms of long term destructive capacity... the scale might not actually be that far off.

I'm not so sure. So far the threat of nuclear annihilation has seemed to reduce the incidence of major wars, but perhaps that's merely correlation.

It is interesting how nuclear war focuses the mind. In previous generations a cavalier attitude was often taken about war, often because nobody believes they will be on the losing side of a war. But with nuclear war there are no winners, only differing degrees of losing. In truth most war is the same, but it's difficult for most folks to see it that way.

this only works with rational actors. there are some powers aspiring to nuclear weapons that are not rational, some are openly irrational and use that as leverage

I would agree with that as well. Perhaps the reduction in conventional warfare due to nuclear weapons might be a short-lived phase. Given that Iran has as much capability to produce nuclear weapons now as the US did in 1945, and North Korea already has a nuclear stockpile, and many other countries have the technology to begin building nuclear weapons with a lead time of at most a year or two, one can't help but be concerned.

I think a lot of people have died in the "low-grade" proxy wars that have taken the place of major wars, as well as the chronic unsupervised regional conflicts.

If we had major wars, then the major wars would take the place of the proxy and chronic wars, through direct replacement. American general: "Yay, now we can kill Russians openly, instead of paying our unreliable clients to kill their unreliable clients!"

The problem isn't how we kill each other; we always find a a way. The problem is that we are killing each other.

> I think a lot of people have died in the "low-grade" proxy wars that have taken the place of major wars, as well as the chronic unsupervised regional conflicts.

A lot of people, yes. But far far fewer than died in the major wars that preceded them.

Statistically, major wars have become increasingly less common and dying in a war has been an increasingly less likely cause of death. That can be difficult to see because war still exists and is still gruesome and in the 21st century it gets in your face in a way that is hard to ignore, but war is still growing less common.

"But with nuclear war there are no winners, only differing degrees of losing."

One huge problem is the historical fact of the number of American deaths from the invasion of mainland Japan. That being zero. And given past behavior, frankly losing only two cities means Japan came out ahead in the game too.

Looking at the mess we've made of Afghanistan and Iraq and Vietnam and everywhere else, you can imagine a guy calculating and "either this makes them back down completely, or we lose maybe just two cities... either way it'll be better than letting them invade for a generation..."

I doubt any remotely rational actor would look at things that way. Nuclear weapons are more potent than they were in WWII and more numerous. And also more deadly, due to increased population density in most urban areas. If the same nuclear bombs were dropped in the same locations today as in WWII nearly ten times as many people would die.

Moreover, the economic loss would be extreme, which serves as a further deterrent.

Very interesting that Pakistan, a much smaller country( by all measures) has a larger stockpile of nukes than its larger neighbor India.

The larger the threat by the opposite country, the larger the deterrent you need. In Pakistan's case, it was India's entry in the nuclear club that spurred it to develop its own capacity.

> Pakistan/India is the most worrisome combination in that graph.

why, you chose to include 'India' is kind of interesting. may you please elaborate ?

afaik, India (and China) are, still, following the NFU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use) policy.

Because they've been in a low level war for a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_conflict

This war has most likely stayed low level because both countries are aware of their nuclear capability.

Probably not the happiest of developments but an all-out war is unlikely between nuclear powers.

Except that India and Pakistan did have a low-intensity war _right after_ their reciprocal nuclear tests in 1998.

Also, India has whooped Pakistan's ass every time they have been at war, both before and after nuclear weapons, so Pakistan has a much smaller incentive to trigger an all-out war. India isn't interested in capturing Pakistan and tilt its own demographic balance.

Nothing of that contradicts the premise of what I said.

Neither India or Pakistan would jeopardise the very existence of the other nation, because rather than just lie down and die they'd get a farewell message from the other side.

I assume he's including it because of its relation with Pakistan. For whatever reason Pakistan is a concern, India will remain a concern for its willingness to retaliate.

(Note, I'm not saying they'd be wrong or right to retaliate, I'm simply sharing your parent's point of view that it's a worrisome combination).

Just something to keep in mind NFU's are just pledges. Russia, just out of the Soviet union had the pledge only to drop it.

If you look at the countries that have the pledge its none of the earlier adopters (Nato or former Soviet states). This is important because it signifies that the pledge is more of a political statement to provide comfort to existing nuclear states at the time the pledge was made. India similarly changed its pledge to only apply against nuclear states more recently.

I'm not sure who fired first matters too much when you are on the receiving end.

This is a serious point: the most serious "near misses" during the cold war were mostly caused by errors in early warning systems or procedures.

Given the instability of Pakistan there is a non-zero chance that a non-government-authorised launch could occur. What would India's response be to that?

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