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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is interested in a real-life simulation of a nuclear missile crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VZ3LGfSMhA

I try to plug it whenever I can. It's an amazing piece of art, and it's one of the best ghost stories ever told.

Wow. It's gone.

And I didn't wget the video when I had the chance.

I can't believe it's gone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508078 All of them. There were like nine versions of the video, published by an anonymous author over the course of a year and a half. People were suspecting it was more than just a talented amateur. We'll never know.

That's so strange! Ben Marking, who are you?

EDIT: It's up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D3vCiYbXFE Thanks to dcgoss and junkculture for looking. Apparently they removed all the old revisions, so we're left with this one.

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It was an incredible video! I can't believe it's gone either. The mystique behind "Ben Marking" as discussed in that thread is only enhanced by this disappearance.

Edit: It's back? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbB0srzLuuo

Aha. This appears to be the latest version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D3vCiYbXFE

Thank you.

I think what happened is that the author removed the nine revisions and uploaded this latest one on the 17th. It was interesting to see their progression though.

Going to youtube-dl it just in case.

This video made me realize I don't think I understand how nuclear war is supposed to work. Why is a thermonuclear bomb necessary to take out an air base? Why are battlefield nukes a thing at all? The only use for nukes that I can imagine is true total war. I suppose total war would be necessary against a large country with diverse infrastructural elements, like the United States.

Nukes come in a range of sizes.

The MOAB weighs 21k pounds and is equivalent to 11 tons of TNT.

The W54 battlefield nuke weighs 51 pounds and is equivalent to 10-20 tons of TNT

Just to clarify, MOAB is a conventional ordnance

The W54 had several versions, one of which hit up to 1 KT (1,000 tons TNT equivalent) yield. Another had 250 tons of TNT yield, intended for air-to-air use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54

You don't need nukes to take out an air base, you need nukes to take out a hundred air bases at once.

Look at the one time nukes were used in war (so far) for an example. The US didn't need nukes to destroy those cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably weren't even the deadliest bombing raids of the war: that honor goes to the attack on Tokyo on March 9-10 1945.

The difference is that it took 339 B-29s to devastate Tokyo, but only one B-29 to devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If you have a few hundred bombers armed with conventional weapons, they can destroy a large target. Arm them with nuclear weapons and they can destroy hundreds of large targets.

Battlefield nukes are similar. An attacking enemy tank division can be stopped by a division of your own... or a single nuclear artillery shell.

This was really important during the cold war because the USSR had massive superiority in conventional arms. NATO troops were significantly outnumbered, and they weren't willing to spend what it would take to reach parity. Nukes were a cheap way to defend. Instead of stopping invading Soviet troops with lots of your own troops, stop them by blowing them up.

Then it just escalates. If the other guy can nuke your troops, you need to be able to nuke his or else you'll lose the war. You want to stop the other guy's nukes, so you nukes nukes that can destroy their air bases and missiles, not just tactical nukes. If the war continues then supplying your troops becomes important, and you need to destroy their factories and transportation infrastructure too.

According to a comment left by the channel owner a few days ago, the videos are still all available - just unlisted. He was fed up moderating all the comments and wants to "make room for upcoming productions".

Time to start searching your browser history I guess :p

There is an interesting series of posts (several years old), that explores possibility of a WW III, a nuclear one, had it started in year 1983. It's fiction (obviously), but a convincing one. With a ton of really interesting comments and maps illustrating movements of different armies. The "(hist)story" is based on declassified documents, historical context, existing technology available in 1983. If you found this video interesting, I suggest you read it. https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/able-archer-8...

So chilling I couldn't watch. Reminds me of watching "The day after".

Yeah. My thoughts exactly, that's the stuff of nightmares. One of the big worries I have is that a losing super power would turn to nukes once conventional weapons stores are exhausted.

The nukes only get turned to in that sense, as a territory protection matter, not as an offensive option after conventional weapons are exhausted.

It's pretty straight-forward and has been for decades: conventional forces go first; if you begin losing badly, then you pull the nuclear card to prevent any meaningful territorial losses; the war ends in some variation of a stalemate.

Whether they can make it work that way in practice, hopefully we'll never find out. The biggest challenge to the practice of it, is dealing with even small existing territorial losses when the nuclear card comes out. Countries like Pakistan and North Korea may also not function that way, hard to guess about their operations under pressure just due to the nature of their brittle regimes, but most of their leadership also likely wants to live.

In the context of the video where nuclear weapons are used in a war:

"It's pretty straight-forward and has been for decades: conventional forces go first; if you begin losing badly, then you pull the nuclear card to prevent any meaningful territorial losses; the war ends in some variation of a stalemate."

Exactly where have nuclear weapons used "for decades" in this way?

United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, France, North Korea...

They are "used" passively. Any country that has the ability to create a nuclear explosion is constantly using them as diplomatic leverage. Even if you don't detonate them, even if you don't talk about them directly, the capability alone shapes reality.

The video is about activly using nuclear weapons in a war.

Parent was

"One of the big worries I have is that a losing super power would turn to nukes once conventional weapons stores are exhausted."

Nuclear tests have been going on since the 1940s. And bigger and bigger ones every time.

It's a pretty impressive video all right. Still, I have to think - presuming it's meant to be real-time, it could happen that fast, but I don't think it could happen that way that fast. I'm not a military logistics expert, but I'd have to think, to have that much movement and activity going in an hour, they would need to spend weeks, months ahead of time getting everything planned out and in position. Steps which would presumably be very obvious to the various NATO intelligence agencies.

Now that it's gone I _really_ want to see it. I mean, I was interested in it before... but why is it gone? Any idea what the title was, or description?

Luckily the text was archived.

https://wayback.archive.org/web/20170608025320/https://www.y...

The ending of these videos scare the shit out of me. The nuclear missile launch warning robotic voice and the klaxons are too much for me.

I think it's even customised for your country - I got one for Australia. Best use of region locking I've ever seen

Here's the US version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbB0srzLuuo

Thank you for ruining my productivity

I really recommend a BBC made movie from the 80s called Threads. I reckon it was the most harrowing thing I've ever watched on TV.

Is this the same channel?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA9r2NNlWMitk1hhR7yj8SA

What is the point of this, other then scaremongering?

It serves as a reminder that it's wise to have a mentally stable commander in chief.

Warn us of the dangers of fake news.

Really, this video should have been tagged more appropriately. And they shouldn't have used the BBC branding.

"Scaremongering" implies that you're doing it insincerely and making people afraid of something they should't actually fear. I'm pretty sure this is entirely sincere, and nuclear war is a huge actual hazard for humanity.

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