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Comment by tribune | Hacker News Reader

I think it was Dan Carlin who suggested it might be a good idea to (every decade or so) conduct a live nuclear test above ground and publicize it widely. Not to make sure the bomb worked - but to remind everyone of the destructive power of these devices

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It sounds like a good idea, but I think it'll backfire. You'd think that would make people want less nukes, but ultimately, it would make people want more nukes to protect themselves from others with nukes.

After hiroshima and nagasaki, the soviet union, britain, france, china, etc didn't say, "wow that's destructive, lets have less of that". They said, "wow that's destructive" and "we need some".

I think if we did that openly and showed the world the destructive power of nukes every decade, more and more nations would want to get it and we'd have more nuclear powers.

Exactly I can certainly see how a certain president would want an even bigger one than any weapon displayed last by another nation.

The same Dan Carlin mentioned above also pointed out how for the brief period where the USA had the bomb and the USSR did not we bossed them around by threatening to bomb them.

There's plenty of incentive to want the bomb.

IMO it would turn into a massive tourist attraction and lose the intended effect

“Do it for the ‘gram”, indeed.

a good idea, but would that not be significantly harmful for the environment, or is the radiation temporary?

Yes somewhat harmful to the environment but not as harmful to the environment as a nuclear war.

I feel we as a species need to get better at weighing up the costs of our action or inaction, making hard choices rather than everyone just fighting blindly for one half of the equation. /rant

Unfortunately, we've set up all our systems - governance, markets - to work through fighting. Politics, business and negotiations all work the same way: every side fights for their immediate short-term interest. One team wins this battle, other team wins that battle, and it goes on and on, until the cost of fighting outweighs any marginal improvement any side could get - and a "compromise" is reached.

I think it all comes down to the fact that we don't trust each other at scale. Because I can't trust that you'll approach searching for solutions honestly, that you'll optimize globally, I have to fight for my own interest at expense of rationality. For the same reason, you end up fighting for yours.

It's ridiculously wasteful, and I think most of humanity's problems stem from it. I can't think of a way out of it, at scale.

Bombs can be "tuned" to burn nearly all or very little of their fissable material. Radiation from the blast dissipiates nearly immediately, but the bomb would need to be designed to provide little fallout(it's doable is what I'm trying to say).

Amount of fallout depends on more things, not just settings of the bomb. Mainly on where the bomb detonates. If close to ground/water, then it's bad, lots of fallout. If in stratosphere, very little fallout.

If you burn less, you lower the yield. Burning more means you turn more mildly-radioactive plutonium or U235 into intensely radioactive fission products. Strontium-90, for example, accumulates in bones and has a half-life of 28 years.

The general rule of thumb is that the radiation in the fallout from a bomb goes down by a factor of 10 for every factor of 7 the time since the detonation increases. So it's 10 times less radioactive after a week as it was after a day. 100 times after a month and a half, 1000 times less after a year, etc.

Under the linear-no-threshold dose model we'd expect several death from fallout induced cancer per test. But on the other hand we know that the linear-no-threshold model is false. If you give some fruit flies a 50 REM dose of xrays all at once they get cancer. If you give them 50 REMs spread out over the course of a month they don't. But we don't really know what the actual model is very well so that's not a risk I'd be happy to take.

Normalising nuclear testing is a terrible idea! This is simply seen by unpacking the blandly neutral statement "nuclear testing" to the more accurate "practice mass murder by use of large explosion using a complicated device".

I don't see how normalizing or not normalizing it will have any effect whatsoever on its proliferation. No country acquires nuclear weapons to actually use them. Instead, it is (rightly) viewed as a great deterrent/insurance against being invaded and overrun.

That requires an intention to use them first against that invading nation.

Also this use would likely not be against the invading forces themselves because you'd be contaminating your own land so the use of nukes as protection against conquest requires not only the willingness to use them first but to use them on your enemy's homeland, likely military industrial targets which will also hit civilians.

That's immaterial, because your potential adversary isn't going to want to find out what your nuclear rules of engagement really are. Possessing nuclear weapons raises the threshold for putting the invasion on the table quite dramatically. And if there is a war, nuclear weapons limit its scope quite quickly.

Just think of how many Indian and Pakistani lives have been saved because the two countries stepped back when shit was about to get real. Like, three times now. All because of nukes. Unless one of them truly commits to invading and losing millions of lives, their wars are guaranteed to peter out as border skirmishes.

During the cold war, it was much debated whether 'limited nuclear war' was possible - for example, if Soviet tanks entered France and France used only small nuclear shells, only those smaller than a large conventional munition, only against military targets and only within their own borders; would that inevitably trigger an escalation to mutually assured destruction or not?

People who thought it would be tremendously convenient [0] if limited nuclear war was possible generally wanted to remove the taboo between large conventional explosions and small nuclear explosions, and so would support programs like the US "Project Plowshare" [1] and the Soviet "Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy" [2] which used nuclear weapons for mining and civil engineering.

With that said, one might very well argue that we are no longer in the cold war, and that our policies no longer need to be guided by the prospect of Soviet tanks entering France. And whether a once-per-decade reminder explosion would erode or enhance the taboo against their use in war.

[0] The WW2 Red Army had fielded more troops than the entire male population of France so France could not win a conventional war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nat...

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