"I should have become a watchmaker" - Einstein
I am very much moved by pictures of nuclear tests. Though for me, the description would go like this: "that typical boring beach like every other beach out there, with that beautiful nuclear fireball and mushroom cloud on the horizon".
Call me weird, but I'm absolutely mesmerized by videos of nuclear detonations. I appreciate that dropping nukes on people is evil and wrong, but it doesn't change that so much raw power extracted out of what's basically cleverly mixed soil, unleashed on human command, feels like a big achievement.
That we learned to control it and put into productive use in nuclear reactors is even better, but nowhere near as beautiful to watch.
Related, while I'm at all into cars, I love the ingenuity behind internal combustion engines - we took a substance that just burns very well and figured that if we can explode very small amounts of it in a container very quickly, we can produce lots of reliable, portable power. We built a whole civilization on top of it.
Cherenkov radiation is just beautiful.
Very carefully selected soil, where conditions are correct to achieve exponential growth in reactions.
Not all elements are fissile.
I didn't really understand this till recently- so I thought I'd share. Propaganda films from the 50s celebrating the Power of the Atom are a little broad in their claims.
Of course it's meant to be troubling. Conner was inspired (according to http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/library/WMConnerFallout.... ) by this book: "Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads" (Available here: https://archive.org/details/bombsatbikinioff00unit )
Here's a recent review of the film: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/15/bruce-c...
And an evocative, kind of Lovecraftian, extract from the official report:
"Things happened so fast in the next five seconds that few eyewitnesses could afterwards recall the full scope and sequence of the phenomena. By studying slow-motion films...the scientists eventually pieced together the full story. Without question one reason why observers had so much trouble in retaining a clear impression of the explosion phenomena was the lack of appropriate words and concepts. The explosion phenomena abounded in absolutely unprecedented inventions in solid geometry. No adequate vocabulary existed for these novelies. The vocabulary bottleneck continued for months even among scientific groups. Finally after two months of verbal groping, a conference was held and over thirty special terms, with carefully drawn definitions, were agreed upon. Among these terms were the following: dome, fillet, side jets, bright tracks, cauliflower cloud, fallout, air shock disc, water shock disc, base surge, water mound, uprush, aftercloud."
It was truly mesmerizing, even in black and white. Granted, the purpose was to cinematize the event, but even in a small room it felt humbling.
Yet somehow all the other horrible weapons in history get a free pass? Fireboming of populated cities and watching tens of thousands of people burn? Being stabbed in the belly with bayonet and dying painfully over the next 12 hours? Bombs that take away the sight and hearing of children? Napalm, phosphorus, etc that stick to skin and burn down to the bone? .50 caliber shells that tear people apart? Mustard gas the burns through your lungs? Biological agents that can spread in a population quickly and kill off a city?
My take is that if it builds detente that stops conflicts then it must have a net good. Humanity built these things and uses them either explicitly (Japan) or as a threat (MAD). They are artifacts of human culture. They reflect our warring nature and we cant just shame them away. In a non-nuclear world we would have the same, if not, more conflicts and many more dead. Assad has killed around 500,000 civilians with his small military and just conventional arms. No nukes needed. That's more than twice the number killed by nuclear weapons use in WWII.
There's also a moral hazard here of excusing guys like Assad because "hey at least he isn't using nukes." The more we vilify nukes and excuse conventional warfare, which is just as if not more brutal, the farther we'll be from proper peace. Nothing really changes if we get rid of nukes. You're making the mistake of confusing the symptom with the problem.
Nukes should go away, but only at a time where the threat of another world war doesn't exist. What that means politically is unknown, but arguably nukes, as horrible as they are, have stopped a proper WWIII. The more I study WWII and think about how much better our conventional weapons and manufacturing ability were during the cold war compared to the 40s, I can't imagine a conventional WWIII not ending the world. Not as dramatic as nukes, but certainly the end result would be similar. I sometimes wonder if nukes are a required stage for a species like ours. Its something that stops the possibility of a catastrophic world war while we aim to developer better social and political mechanisms to end war on this level. At that point we would naturally get rid of our nukes, the same way people in very safe neighborhoods don't sleep with guns under their pillows. I think "umm kay nukes are bad" narrative is short-sighted and ignores the real possibility of a conventional WWIII ending the world.
A nuke is everything. Nukes are too effective, allowing you to make a whole planet uninhabitable if you really felt like achieving that goal. Maybe we should be especially repelled by the fact that we've stockpiled the means to utterly erase our existence.
Here's a thought. Remember the deepwater horizon oil spill? Imagine the consequences if they had been unable to cap that well. Imagine it still flooding the Atlantic ocean (via the gulf stream) with oil today. Now imagine that all those capped wells all over the place eventually crack and start spewing oil in 100 years due to some unforeseen failure mechanism in the concrete. Where would we end up? Weapons aren't the only tech that can go wildly wrong.
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[0] - for "irradiated half the city, but at least it's still standing" values of safe.
Vats containing chemicals more dangerous than in Bhopal would leak. Nuclear reactors all over the world would melt down with no one to contain them. Oil wells would rust and burst.
Presumably in Pakistan. /s
On the other hand, my inner 12 year old still finds them very keen. But thankfully, he's pretty constrained ;)
Biological weapons can probably do this 10x faster and via weaponized viruses meaning no ICBM's needed, just a good enough virus to be carried by human and animal hosts that infect the world. Or infect common crops and watch the world burn as everyone starves.
A total war between the US/NATO and USSR sans nuclear weapons would also probably have ended western civilization and probably drawn in everyone else too. World-killer? Maybe, maybe not, but the world left over would have been one no one wold want to live in. The same way a post-nuclear world would be.
If anything nukes kept US/NATO and the USSR from going hot. That conflict could very much been a world-ender and was itching to happen for decades.
Nukes just... work. You twist a couple of keys, flip a switch and 45 minutes later human civilization ends.
A weaponised virus doesn't have these constraints, and could destroy humanity, but at least it takes some time, and can probably be somewhat mitigated.
In nuclear war, a split second decision could annihilate every living human, erase all evidence of our existence, and maybe cause a big enough climate shift to permanently end life on this planet.
Not to take too much from the argument, but that line is way overblown. I think it's hard to believe a nuclear war would kill all humans (it would certainly destroy civilization, but killing everybody is way harder) but nobody can be sure of that. Anyway, the Earth has survived meteor strikes larger than humanity's entire arsenal and life is still here.
Certainly not.
> Assad
Years of brutal civil war vs literally two moments. We have been seconds away from nuclear war several times due to computer bugs. And those are the times we know about!
How many more have been kept secret?
If I am not mistaken that is a quote attributed to Sir Arthur ("Bomber") Harris [1] who led the bombing campaign of Germany as Commander-in-Chief of the British Bomber Command during World War II. In an interview he was asked if dropping bombs on cities full of civilians was moral. His response went something like this: "Name me one thing in war that is moral. Is sticking a bayonet in a man's belly moral?".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Arthur_Harris,_1st_Baronet...
If you really want to engage in a philosophical discussion, do include all the history. It has always been about protecting resources that are deemed important. At some point, someone wants what someone else has. I suppose we could maybe stop the horizon at explosives.
Once it went from melee to ranged combat, things really changed. So, "who could make the bigger boom?" became the defacto leader. The problem is that nuclear weapons are as big as it gets, at the moment, with more and more organizations wishing they had them too. Being a strong arm in the weapons race is very important.
But using them is atrocious. The destruction is beyond the pale. And it affects those that used to be meaningless: us, the commoners. Killing uninvolved people is a hard pill to swallow, so it is hard to be the one to pull that trigger. I hope to hell it never happens. And I worry, a tiny bit, about people with the stupidity to think that their beliefs "command them" to use them to prove a point.
I tend to blame human nature for the destruction of our own selves, not the weapons we do it with. One way another, humans will kill each other, nuclear or not.
I think in a situation where the Americans didn't build an A bomb then no one would have for some time.
Would it have made a difference to our world now? It's hard to tell, but the Soviets certainly would have taken more Japanese territory than they did in our timeline.
My opinion was Stalin was too pragmatic to start WWIII, Before and after WWII he only provided limited support to Soviet-aligned groups (see: post-war France and the Spanish or Greek civil wars) in other part of the world to avoid antagonizing the west too much.
The real answer is, who knows?
Check out Oliver Stone's Untold History [1], or many other history sources for various opinions. There is considerable debate about it.[2]
In reality, the Japanese were on the verge of surrender. The U.S. had badly firebombed Japan, burning hundreds of thousands of people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Untold_History_of_the_Unit...
I don't think there was much chance of Japanese surrender without an actual invasion
I don't know about you, but I'd only have to be nuked once before I'd run up the proverbial white flag.
Also it saved a lot of prisoners of war from a cruel death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war#Empire_of_Japa...
Here's the problem though: most interesting and useful technologies of the future are not compatible with human nature. E.g. any interesting interplanetary drive that would give us reasonable transit times is at the same time a powerful WMD, simply because of the energies we'll be working with. Or bio/nanotech, dream of so many industries, is also potentially much worse than nukes.
Makes me worry if we grow up in time, or end up killing ourselves with our toys.
Our best shot at surviving the great filter is been spread out enough that when someone goes "Ooops" and levels wherever they are there are other self-sufficient humans far enough away to survive.
Not sure if we'll ever achieve that (though I think in totality it's only just beyond our current technology) though since it would require a colossal investment that would make the Apollo program look tiny to bootstrap it.
barring some significant breakthrough in fusion.
Instead of fighting in sandboxes, et cetera.
I'm afraid not.
This idea of compartmentalization is a strong argument against globalism. "Oops"es in government, society, and culture can be just as deadly.
They've been around for quite a while, so the evidence is against that conclusion.
You can't blame the whole of humanity for the shamefulness of a few Western powers. Surely, there are cultures all across the world that chose not to use violence.