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Comment by r-bryan | Hacker News Reader

I was a child of the 1950's. Only 50 miles south of New York City, we little grade school kids were routinely drilled in cowering under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Every time I heard an airplane, I was afraid it was going to drop bombs. Popular Science ran features about how to build your own fallout shelter, and how Dad could prepare his family for the coming nuclear apocalypse. The understated, tragic horror of _On the Beach_ was complemented but not countered by the mordant humor of Dr. Strangelove.

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?

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Born in the late 60s, so teenager in the 80s in the UK. I recall that exact same fear of every passing aeroplane. In our case the cultural equivalents of OTB and DS were Threads and The Day After, and the Protect and Survive announcements that Frankie Goes To Hollywood sampled in Two Tribes.

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.

What does OTB and DS mean in this context?

The two pieces of media referenced in the ancestor comment: On the Beach, and Doctor Strangelove.

On The Beach Doctor Strangelove

I guess OTB = "On The Beach" and DS = "Doctor Strangelove"

Thanks - sorry, I should have just put the full names.

It's not that strange since all countries are well aware that any country that would start a third world war would get annihilated within minutes by the rest of the world.

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.

The risk is still there. You can talk about economic reasons or MAD all you want, but then some idiot loads a training tape into the live system, or scientists launch a sounding rocket and somebody forgets to tell the early warning people, or a head of state starts going crazy, and suddenly you're one bad decision away from catastrophe.

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.

>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.

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.

Nuclear war wouldn’t wipe out humanity. We, for dome value of “we,” would be around to talk about how it happened.

I doubt most of the people here would be alive and the population would be significantly reduced.

Can we really apply the anthropic principle so narrowly? Are we to conclude that my risk of death when crossing the street could be really high, and I can’t tell anything from the fact that it hasn’t happened because I wouldn’t be around to think about it if it had?

You can look at how often other people are hit by cars. You can also look at "close calls" where you were almost hit but miraculously saved.

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.

>The Day After

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".

As a kid I had nightmares for ages after watching 'when the wind blows'. I can't recommend that film highly enough.

Threads indeed, this one really brought it home:

"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)

I recall a film I saw on TV as a kid called Testament which just killed me. It depicted a family slowly dying off after their town is bombed. I cried for a few nights after seeing it. I've never watched it since. I wonder if I could handle it now as an adult.

> while deranged world leaders measure each other's manhood by "mine's bigger than yours

Not much has changed in 70 years.

Not much has changed since recorded human history.

In terms of elemental psychology, probably not. But the weapons have changed, and moving from conventional to nuclear weapons is a sort of phase shift.

I'd say something has changed since we're currently experiencing one of the most prolonged periods of peace in the last 2000 years (Europe) [1] and generally the world over [2]. This could be because the "price" of conflict has gone up, but still, it is something to think about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea https://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/were_living_through_the_mos...

Except for that bit where we had a major war in former Yugoslavia.

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.

Isn't there war going on in the Middle East?

That does not change the fact that life for the average human today is, on the whole, more peaceful than at any point in recorded history. It is all too easy to lose track of this when you hear about all the horrific happening around the world every day

Average westerner, maybe...

It's more than just for the average westerner, but also for the average human, isn't it?

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...

That's a fascinating chart. Yes, it shows that war deaths have been decreasing for decades, but it contradicts that great-grandparent's claim that "life for the average human today is more peaceful than at any point in recorded history". Looking at the red line, it seems that there have been many peaks and valleys in the last 600 years. We're in a local valley (more peaceful period) right now, but it doesn't suggest a long-term trend to me.

Also, deaths alone do not give the whole picture.

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?

This hasn't been much more peaceful than the century following the Napoleonic Wars, which makes a lot of the political grandstanding going on terrifying.

One of my profs in Uni said that it was difficult to find more than a few years in recorded history without active war.

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-...

>> while deranged world leaders measure each other's manhood by "mine's bigger than yours

> 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.)

I've heard it hypothesized that the drills were intended, in part, to make the populace fear in order to support certain policies. Without the drills, the threat of nuclear war would be only theoretical. Having lived through it, what is your impression?

I didn't live through the drills, but they were pretty smart. The popular scorn towards "duck and cover" is completely undeserved. Those drills would have saved a lot of lives if war had actually broken out. The popular misconception of nuclear weapons is that there's a zone of total destruction and that's about it, but in reality there are huge areas where buildings would collapse or windows would shatter but people could easily survive with some protection. Protection like being under a sturdy piece of furniture.

Which is very useful, but doesn't solve the problem that 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.

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.

"Duck and cover" dates from a time when an all-out nuclear war would have resembled General Turgidson's description of an outcome where we "get our hair mussed." It still would have been devastating beyond anything in human history (except for what would have happened to Europe and the USSR) but it the country would have been left largely intact. Most of what you describe is what would have been the aftermath of a war some decades later, when the USSR's ability to strike the US had increased by orders of magnitude.

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.

First of all, "duck and cover" is from the 1950s. Before ICBMs existed, and before there were as many bombs as later on.

>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.

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