Why Hasn’t the World Been Destroyed in a Nuclear War Yet?
nautil.us
nautil.us
1.) Any system that continuously depends on single individuals to make the right decision to avoid catastrophe is defective by design. In the Able Archer case our boss Leonard Perroots made an instinctive decision to stand down that prevented the escalation from going further. [0]
2.) The US and Russia had disciplined command and control systems plus relatively stable political leadership. That won't always be the case; in the case of the US it's arguably not the case now.
3.) During most of the Cold War there were two main actors with nuclear weapons. There are now at least 9. [1] If instability in the US breaks trust in the nuclear umbrella I would expect that number to increase rapidly. Even the US/NK standoff is a multi-polar problem, something that seems to have escaped most US-based commentators.
To sum up the reason we have not seen use of weapons to-date is we've been incredibly lucky. Given the known miscalculations in the incidents to date that's unlikely to last.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/us/leonard-perroots-dead....
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-nine-co...
That, imo is the only correct conclusion. Anybody that wants to sell mutually assured destruction as a long term solution is missing the point that in the long term your luck will some day run out. That, besides obvious de-railings of the principle due to a lack of mental stability in leadership.
The UK developed nuclear weapons in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (the height of the Cold War), there were 4 nuclear weapons states.
The US, UK and France would collectively be considered “the West” or NATO, just as nuclear weapons inherited by Ukraine when the USSR collapsed would have been considered at the time as collectively part of the USSR.
So I agree we've been lucky, but I think we should acknowledge that mutually assured destruction has at least loaded the dice.
Even loaded dice come up '1' every now and then. So that's just a means of staying in the game a little longer, it will not ensure a long term outcome.
In fact, only America has ever actually used a nuclear bomb in a real war. On the balancing side, they've had a series of de-escalating disarmament treaties with the former USSR, so could be argued to be heading in the more peaceful direction than counties further down my list.
In the game Civilization I know that Gandhi will always, left to his own devices, eventually nuke me, because of a historical in-game joke. The real world is a lot less predictable.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1983/3/7/the-truth-about-g...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/03...
For the smaller players like North Korea or Iran, who are credibly threatening to use nuclear weapons in the next decade, but have no credible possibility of doing it at superpower scales, nothing much. They face annihilation if they launch, regardless. However, some of these smaller regimes are signaling that they are willing to face annihilation to get their strikes in. How much of this is game-theory-based posturing, and how much of it is true, well, that's for the reader to decide.
(Though I will toss in that at least North Korea is also signaling a belief that they will be annihilated if they don't get nukes, so given their belief system they may still not care, especially since it may be the case that North Korea === Kim Jong Un, and frankly, he may be rational to believe he's riding a tiger by the tail and must either get to and use nukes or personally face one sort of death or another. I see Iran as making more conventional power plays throughout the region, and even if their recent protests didn't topple the regime, it is likely that one way or another they are going to be forced to pour less resources into the nuke programs, either because they will need to placate the population, or because protest N+1 will topple the regime, or because they finally provoke external military or covert action that will result in regime change.)
There is a belief that any nuclear war will destroy the world, but that isn't true. A global war would be horrific, but civilization would survive. A war with 2-3k nuclear detonations is better than one with 20k.
Particularly, tactical nuclear weapons need to be destroyed. They are more likely to be used because they aren't a holocaust on a rocket like strategic weapons are.
Humanity will survive. Civilization will be utterly destroyed for a long time to come.
Also the humans that survived through Greenland had prepared for generations to live in hardship. Those left after any nuclear war certainly won't have been living their lives in nuclear winter world, no matter how good the doomsday peppers think they are.
But entire continents (S. America and Africa) would be entirely untouched by direct attacks.
The only risk of total collapse is deep and long nuclear winter. Even in that event (which I don't really think is realistic) coastal areas would fare better.
This is an excellent way to illustrate so many problems of this nature. "If X is a real concern, why hasn't it happened to us yet?" is such a huge problem in so many organisations, and it's so frustrating.
We should honour those people, even when it is against military codes.
I would like to expand it even to non-nuclear warfare. People that stop destruction or give us insights in our destructive policies. This includes whistleblowers and press that report human rights violations, ecological destruction, and are currently punished for it. This happens in the US too.
I also don't imagine there was much of a Unfair Dismissals Tribunal type arrangement for nuclear weapons officers in the USSR.
ETA: DragonDictate can't spell thermonuclear
If he were promoted he might have spoken about the faulty system to the wrong pointy haired boss.
This is speculation, but Russian Christians have a strong sense of sacrifice, and sacrificing your career for saving the world may seem appropriate somehow.
If anyone is interested, you can get the book on Amazon for a buck or you can download for free on Smashwords. It should be a quick and easy read.
https://www.amazon.com/Assiyah-Rising-Part-T-H-Ansz-ebook/dp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
One of the main reasons (besides the obvious one) for having this system was to protect against hotheaded generals at the top. The reasoning is this - if they know they have the capability of a retaliatory strike, they don't have to rush to press the button, knowing they will still have the ability to retaliate.
That could explain probably why they never bothered to publicly announce it to the West. Or maybe they assumed the West would find out about it through its spy network anyway...
Well the game theory gets weird with dead hands. Of course you want to deter, but you need to keep the deterrence partially shrouded because you do not want your adversary to know for certain that they've completely designed around you. You want them to have known unknowns (ie, they know that they don't fully know how you're going to respond, but they know the outcome if you are successful).
I have an unorthodox opinion about nuclear weapons.
I think that we might see one or two be used in the not too distant future if things get super hot with weaponized robotics.
Most people assume that all countries are going to push for complete launch or not, but there are situations where I think they could be used. For example a large attack by India towards Pakistan could be met with a small nuclear response on a relatively unpopulated area.
That's 8th on the list in the movie Wargames :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/24ujzq/for_fans_of_...
When you come across them in the game it's been many generations since that event and they still havent recovered and only get into space because other aliens come by and "lift them up".
Would not be surprised if this is the fate of humanity as well
If you're not then it's difficult to argue with this, that's simply not the definition of survivorship bias.
It's a gruesome question, but the point is that even though people living together will certainly have arguments, someone who is sane will never seriously consider killing someone else.
Ultimately nations usually act as if they are scaled up people, which makes sense because they are run by people.
Full scale nuclear war represents the probability of complete and total annihilation for all parties involved. At this scale of destruction, war becomes an existential crisis for nations themselves, which is intolerable to a nation itself - no longer just a nation's citizens - which, from a nation's perspective, are expendable.
This may seem callous, but we need to recognize that organisms of different scales have different sets of concerns and priorities from one another. Just as we often don't think twice about doing something that would cause cells in our bodies to die, like binge drinking on the weekend - which from our cells' perspective would amount to a holocaust - nations have historically not thought twice about going to war when such war represented a minimal existential threat, even if a few thousand soldiers would have to die.
Nuclear war represents total destruction of nations in a way that traditional modes of warfare fought, say, between 17th century European powers did not, as this earlier warfare - while bloody and terrible for the individual soldier - would usually at worst (from a national perspective) lead to the loss of a few territories, which is tolerable.
In my experience with groups of people it doesn't make sense.
So, while I'm willing to bet my wife isn't murderous (I don't -know-, but I'll assume so)...do I really want to assume a -stranger- isn't, knowing that there are murderous people out there, and that if I'm wrong my entire family will die?
I mean, you say "someone who is sane will never seriously consider killing someone else" - great, how possible is it for an insane person to end up heading a nuclear armed country? I mean, I don't think I want to trust 192 (or whatever our country count is at) random strangers to all be sane.
Maybe there are also many parallel Earth like planets in this particular universe, with human like creatures. Some of which have, some have not.
Surprisingly enough, a human is much more likely to find oneself alive in a world in which humanity was not nearly made extinct by nuclear war.
Exponentially so, if we assume, reasonably, that even if humans survived (technically) a nuclear war, their descendants would take 100s of thousands of years or longer to recover to pre apocalypse levels, vs. non nuclear war realities where the population simply keeps increasing exponentially, leading exponentially many more humans to find themselves existing in that "timeline."
Could you elaborate on why? I'm not seeing why it couldn't be couched in similar terms (replacing the box with Earth, the radiation source with nuclear war, and the cat with people) -- is it because you can't treat the Earth as a closed system in the same way?
The problem is... why and how does your consciousness “move” to another reality? What is the physical mechanism that has you living and not a twin in another universe who isn’t really you... after all, you died when the bombs fell.
Most Of all though it’s important to remember that like Schrodinger’s cat this is a thought experiment meant To illustrate certain problems or features of quantum mechanics. It is an analogy or metaphor for a system dominated by quantum effects, like a single radioactive atom with a 50-50 chance of decaying in the next second. These thought experiments don’t really suggest alive/dead cats, or immortals, they highlight how quantum systems differ from Classical ones.
These ideas have led to various interpretations of QM, such as The Copenhagen Interpretarion (wavefunction collapse) and MWI (multiple universe). None of those interpretations are very rigorous, and may well be indicative of gaps in understanding as much as anything else.
But I see no reason for that to hold indefinitely.
If that's all we've got a bad run of luck is coming. So it purely becomes a question of when.
50 years? 100 years? 1000 years?
Let's hope Mars is self sustaining before this happens.
I hope no one thinks that we have 100.00000% reliable processes to avoid a nuclear war, taking both positive and negative human factors into account.
Eventually the current setup will fail us if we don't develop into a more civilized society where pointing armed nukes at each other is not needed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/09/us-to-loosen...
My concern is that an huge population allow for "parallel processing" for pathogenic evolution to find weak vectors in humans, and this will be mistaken as a nation-state attack leading to a nuclear war.
hahahaha, no. That line of thinking can lead to the idea that every big decision can be made by flipping a quantum coin and the result will be right in some universe.