Nuclear Test Films Declassified and Uploaded
paleofuture.gizmodo.com
paleofuture.gizmodo.com
The clips here don't have the bizarre choreographic beauty of the Dr. Strangelove finale, but they bring back the all too keen anxiety and existential terror of being powerless, while deranged world leaders measure each other's manhood by "mine's bigger than yours." Fine, you proved that yours is big enough, it doesn't really matter whose is bigger any more than whose hair is dumber, now can we _please_ return to sanity?
Not much has changed in 70 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea https://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/were_living_through_the_mos...
The EU is the one thing that stands between more war in Europe and where we are today. Quite a few forces are acting to split it up. Let's hope it is robust enough to withstand those attacks.
According to this, the absolute number of war-related deaths around the world has been decreasing for decades now. This is especially amazing since we've been experiencing a massive population increase since WW1.
https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Wars-L...
Sure, maybe fewer die. But what about the number of people displaced by war? And what about those that survive but are missing limbs etc?
I would argue there has fundamentally been change post WWII, and that is (1) the MAD doctrine--which limits active war--as well as (2) the push towards borderless states / globalization--i.e. even though Sweden is defined as sovereign, the institutions of the world dictate that if it doesn't do what the US says--whether that be torturing suspects at the US's demands[1] or taking down websites--they don't have much of a choice.
During WWII the drive for technology was extreme because of the threat of being conquered. And throughout all of human history our ancestors lived with this threat. We don't really have this threat anymore.
There is a Keynes quote, where he put it, "it is better for man to toil over their bank accounts than each other." Our wars are kind of laughably phony, and the real battle is over numbers in bank accounts--which seems to be the only reason we go to war now anyways (for all parties involved).
We do have a new kind of religion we are all following in a way in the sense that money and dieties are only endowed with whatever faith or meaning we give them. And in makes sense to do it because they've set it up so the rewards and punishments are as such.
So in a way I think this can be seen as the world'd largest and most successful social engineering project in history. I think it is a fundamental change in the nature of our masters.
1-https://www.hrw.org/news/2005/05/19/sweden-violated-torture-...
> Not much has changed in 70 years.
Well, that's not entirely true... At least, with regards to nuclear arsenals and weaponry, the last few decades have been marked by a substantial reduction by the original nuclear powers.
(Granted, there has also been some uptake, most notably India and Pakistan.)
Or that they'll die of starvation and disease 2-4 months later.
Or of the effects of nuclear winter 2 to 4 years later.
Or that virtually everything they're used to - food manufacture and distribution, electronics, machinery, transport, energy, medicine - will no longer be working, and maybe one survivor in a thousand will have the skills and knowledge needed to start even the most basic rebuilding program.
Fallout is the one thing that would have been a major danger, but it tends to be directional depending on winds. Lots of people would have been close enough to an explosion to benefit from "duck and cover" without being subjected to lethal amounts of fallout.
>those people will almost certainly die of radiation exposure from fallout 2-4 weeks later, unless they get to a shelter within 15 minutes or so, and stay there for 2-4 weeks, at a minimum, without running out of supplies or going mad.
Many people survived at Hiroshima. Not everyone is downwind of fallout. Even if you are, many of the projections I've seen show many expected survivors.
>Or that they'll die of starvation and disease 2-4 months later.
We wouldn't run out of food anywhere near that quickly. The US has vast supplies of stored food and unslaughtered animals. And radiation doesn't create disease.
>Or of the effects of nuclear winter 2 to 4 years later.
Nuclear winter has been greatly exaggerated. AT worst the growing season would be reduced and it would get a bit colder.
I find it interesting that the terror of the global thermonuclear war seems to have disappeared from the popular psyche, even though exactly the same weapons are still there ready.
If World War 3 didn't start during the Cuba Missile Crisis, it's extremely unlikely it would start now, not just because of the increased nuclear arsenals that all participants have accumulated since then but also for very trivial economic reasons.
Some things are much improved since the Cuban Missile Crisis. For example, the US Air Force is no longer eager to wage preemptive nuclear war on our enemies. Some things are much worse, though, such as the transition from bombers to ICBMs, resulting in a need to launch quickly to respond to an attack and an inability to recall a strike, or the change from a bipolar to a multipolar world with multiple conflicting nuclear weapons states.
I think of it in terms of probability per year. The fact that we haven't had a nuclear war yet suggests that this probability isn't super high. 10% would be implausible given history. But 1% is pretty plausible. So is 0.0001%. There's a massive difference between those two probabilities, though! 0.0001% means it probably doesn't matter, and human civilization is very likely to either collapse from some other problem or advance to a point where MAD can't happen long before a nuclear war breaks out. 1% makes it perhaps the most dire threat we face.
I personally think it's closer to 1% than 0.0001%. The systems are error-prone and too many of the people involved are stupid or potentially insane.
This is super misleading reasoning because of anthropic bias. There are many possible Earths. On all the ones were nuclear war happened, we wouldn't be here to observe it. You can only ever observe the "surprising" result that you continue to exist. So you can't use it as evidence in a probability estimate.
We came so close to nuclear war on multiple occasions. The chance can't be that low.
But if you have personally walked into traffic without looking hundreds of times, I'd think you are just lucky. And that using your survival as a single data point is just survivorship bias.
Ronald Reagan was only convinced nuclear war was bad after watching this TV movie starring Steve Guttenberg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...
>President Ronald Reagan watched the film several days before its screening, on November 5, 1983. He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed," and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".
"the film was the first of its kind to depict a nuclear winter. Certain reviewers nominated Threads as the "film which comes closest to representing the full horror of nuclear war and its aftermath, as well as the catastrophic impact that the event would have on human culture" (from Wikipedia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BIDzZygIq0
It's a kind of report, explaining experiment setup, equipment, test process and results. Russian, no subtitles but picture itself explains a lot.
It's essentially written by one person (Wikipedia user Deglr6328) over a span of 2 years during 2004-2006 followed by hundreds of edits over the next decade by around a dozen users to improve wording, style, references, links, and photos.
The pattern for the best material on Wikipedia seems to be that of one subject matter expert or enthusiast writing the basic article and a small hardcore group of Wikipedia editors improving it (and who do improve it greatly -- I'm not minimizing their part). But you need the initial expert or super-passionate person to get it started.
imagine a guy who has a gun in a drawer at home and who smokes 2 packs a day. What is going to kill him with pretty high probability? The same way the humanity is with nuclear weapons and climate change.
The point here is that couple degrees change over several centuries have very profound effect upon human civilization. These days we've stepped into the territory of couple degrees (and probably more with the process having significant chances to become runaway) over several decades. That is bound to result in dramatic changes.
One can try to argue that our civilization today is well insulated from climate changes. And that one will be wrong. Just consider the very recent examples. 198x were the coldest point in the 80 years cycle and that resulted in low grain yields in USSR. It coincided with low oil prices thus resulting in food shortages in USSR, and as result the USSR just disappeared as the hungry people couldn't care less. The same thing with Arab Spring which was triggered by the drought and resulting food shortages : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
So :
1. human civilization is very vulnerable to climate change effects and
2. the climate change, more severe than the ones which have destroyed civilizations in the past, is happening now orders of magnitude faster than those climate changes of the past.
But even if you are right, it's irrelevant. Yeah, ancient civilizations were sensitive to famines and climate. We are way past that. Some of our biggest cities are in regions that were near uninhabitable before air conditioning or insecticides. Our modern irrigiation technology give us the ability to grow crops in areas that used to be desolate. We produce several times more food than we actually need. If the absolute worst case scenarios of climate change happened, our civilization would easily continue.
tell those triumphal words of our civilization glory to the 800M people today who is officially live in hunger. Or to the next couple of billions who will quickly find themselves deep in the extreme poverty/hunger if economy gets noticeably worse, food price increase and/or some shortage of food/water/etc. happens.
I suppose that you, like me, is in the top 5-10% of the global Pareto distribution of our civilization goodies, and even if there are severe food/water/energy/etc. shortage and/or food prices increase even 10 times, we'd still not be going to bed hungry even though we'd possibly have to give up some of the less necessary things. So from our point of view "civilization would easily continue". Not so to the majority of the world population though.
Anyway I'm sick of this meme that we should care about everything that happens to the third world. Look at Africa. Their population is growing exponentially. It's already far above of any reasonably sustainable size. And their economy is actually deindustrializing. They are going to suffer no matter what happens. Climate change is the least of their problems. And there is nothing we can do the help them.
my point is that nuclear war is a straw man while climate change presents clear and imminent planet-scale danger to our civilization.
>Anyway I'm sick of this meme that we should care about everything that happens to the third world.
Well, beside that caring about weak and less fortunate is our normal human trait, we brought the climate change upon the whole planet, so we should bear at least some responsibility. Anyway, hunger and poverty isn't limited to the third world - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
"Research from the USDA found that 14.9% of American households were food insecure during at least some of 2011, with 5.7% suffering from very low food security.[3] Journalists and charity workers have reported further increased demand for emergency food aid during 2012 and 2013."
>Look at Africa. Their population is growing exponentially. It's already far above of any reasonably sustainable size.
Africa is big and with a lot of resources. It can sustain much bigger population.
>And their economy is actually deindustrializing.
there is a bunch of very different countries with very different population, economy, society. Some countries have recently or currently have civil wars and as result are in chaos. The same is Syria which was pretty highly developed country just 7 years ago.
>Climate change is the least of their problems.
it is one of the major causes of the current (Arab Spring) and future civil (and may be between states) wars which would wreak havoc upon the involved countries/societies.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/secrets-out-soviets-did-not-target-cities-20120805-23ny1.html
Continental Europe, especially Germany, was an exception because of expectations of immediate ground warfare and the likelihood of tactical nukes. But arguably that's less an exception and more a variation of the same logic.
[1] Decapitation means you've nobody to negotiate with in a timely manner, ensuring the enemy will resort to unleashing every last nuclear weapon at their disposal. Neither side was stupid enough to have unleashed everything at once. All scenarios I've read described an escalation in launches over 1 or 2 days, sometimes longer, with opportunities for negotiated or even unilateral ceasefires.
Most US air and naval bases are in close proximity to population centers.
That's an Australian assessment of what they expected the Soviets to do in the 1980s.
The actual behaviour largely depends on the specific war-plan and epoch.
Actual Soviet documents from the 1950s show the Soviets planned to 'troll' the West by nuking a few non-Central-Front cities, such as Darwin or Perth, and assessing the response. Would the USA or NATO reply in kind, or back down?
> generally, both the Soviets and Americans avoided population centers as well as (IIRC) decapitation strikes
Not at all. Have a read at these US targets from one of the 1950s SIOPs:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/us/politics/1950s-us-nucl...
While many are industrial facilities, government buildings and the like, one for each city is simply designated “Population.”
In later years the targetting turned more towards counterforce ( military targets ) as the CEP of missiles crept down into the hundreds of metres. But before the mid-1980s that simply wasn't feasible
A major problem when trying to decode nuclear war strategy is that the rational thing to do after the missiles have started flying is different from the rational thing to threaten beforehand. If your goal is nuclear war, you want to threaten the enemy with complete and utter destruction from which they will never recover. Once it starts, you want to focus on the enemy's ability to attack you further, and probably ignore the enemy's civilian population and infrastructure. But it's hard to present the "total destruction" option as a credible threat unless you actually set up your forces to go through with it.
A more challenging question is - what happens when you get hundreds of warheads detonating in a small area? At a guess that number of explosions would punch its way down into the bedrock. It might even leave a lake of molten crust that would take years, if not decades, to cool.
Detonations in seismic areas might trigger huge earthquakes. (SF would be a very bad place to be.)
Whatever the outcome, it's a fair guess there would be unplanned consequences of all kinds. Most would be very negative, which makes rational (?) planning difficult.
Key quote: "It appears that two weapons targeted on a silo must arrive at least ten seconds apart to avoid fratricidal fireball effects, and less than one minute or more than one hour apart to avoid fratricidal nuclear dust cloud effects."
Spoiler alert: about four fifths of Americans end up dead, and about one third of all humans on Earth. The survivors contend with famine and plague on a scale never before seen. Most of the world's industrial capacity is destroyed.
I find it fairly easy to distinguish that scenario from the world we live in, personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment...
> anti-ICBM missiles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-35_anti-ballistic_missile_sy...
> ground to space lasers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra-3
> "killer satellites"
Killer satellites were developed starting in the 60s and deployed operationally in 1991. It seems reasonable to think that some pre-operational capability might have existed in 1988: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/is.html
I'm not sure where the nuke satellites and lasers came from.
When it comes to answering the question of "what would a post-war world look like?" the only significant system out of these is the nuke satellites causing an EMP. That could (and probably would) have been just as easily done with standard ICBMs so I don't think it changes the answer very much.