Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction? | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction?

lesswrong.com

161 pointswellokthen261 comments

What is the point of writing a post like this? I feel like there is an impetus in the 'rational' tech press to want to downplay threats like nuclear war, and emphasize dubious threats like AGI.

I really don't care if nuclear war doesn't kill every single human instantly. So what? Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse....full stop. Should we forget about disarmament?....guess not every single person theoretically dies....as in the AGI apocalypse fantasy land scenario....so let's not worry too much.

Humanity will survive. You, dear reader, will not.

In the long term, all dear readers will not survive. So why worry?

I couldn't agree more.

But, as they say, happiness is not in money. It’s in its quantity.

Civilisation can be rebuilt. Focus on existential threats over far more likely civilisation collapse threats is done by those who view unrealised potential as loss. So it’s 7 billion humans vs the trillions that could exist if we keep spreading and growing and start colonising other planets.

Here’s a good review/summary by a rationalist of a book on the topic by someone who if not a rationalist (I don’t actually know) was at least instrumental in starting the effective altruism movement which is rationalist adjacent.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precip...

> In my view, the greatest risk to humanity’s potential in the next hundred years comes from unaligned artificial intelligence, which I put at 1 in 10. One might be surprised to see such a high number for such a speculative risk, so it warrants some explanation.

The above is from the article you link. Where.....oh where....are you getting the 1 in 10 number? This is pure, and I mean pure...uncut conjecture. This is why these types of 'intellectual' offerings are so irritating to me. There is absolutely no sound, or 'rational', way to back that number up.

It’s a review of a book. Presumably it’s in the book.

Even if you don’t care to read it and doubt his ability to estimate, add the amount of zeros in there that you think appropriate. If you think humanity has the potential to get in to the quintillions like Toby and friends, then the negative EV of it is still going to be far greater than any non existential threat.

Then consider elsewhere where it’s mentioned that humanity spends more on ice cream than preventing existential threats. Maybe some of that ice cream money would help increase the accuracy of his statistics.

You'd be surprised, there's a lot of advancement that we might not be able to replicate if our civilzation fully collapsed.

For instance, so much of our early nuclear technology was dependent on the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the DRC, and it's orders of magnitude better uranium purity than anything else we've found.

> Our best source, the Shinkolobwe mine, represented a freak occurrence in nature. It contained a tremendously rich lode of uranium pitchblende. Nothing like it has ever again been found. The ore already in the United States contained 65 percent U3O8, while the pitchblende aboveground in the Congo amounted to a thousand tons of 65 percent ore, and the waste piles of ore contained two thousand tons of 20 percent U3O8. To illustrate the uniqueness of Sengier's stockpile, after the war the MED and the AEC considered ore containing three-tenths of 1 percent as a good find. Without Sengier’s foresight in stockpiling ore in the United States and aboveground in Africa, we simply would not have had the amounts of uranium needed to justify building the large separation plants and the plutonium reactors [for the Manhattan Project].

~ Colonel Ken Nichols

Additionally, without the very dense energy in the easily accessible fossil fuels we've very nearly mined out, restarting an industrial revolution would be at best extremely problematic.

We've been OK so far with progress meaning we slam the door shut to independent replication of that progress in a lot of cases.

> Additionally, without the very dense energy in the easily accessible fossil fuels we've very nearly mined out, restarting an industrial revolution would be at best extremely problematic.

I feel like this is the more important of the two points you made.

Even without Uranium, it's conceivable to have a second industrial revolution. We don't need nuclear power for that.

But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.

Could we not bootstrap with coal? There's still plenty left. Oil would be an issue though.

There isn't any easy to get coal anymore, just as any other fuel.

We may be able to start low scale stuff to bootstrap renewables, but if we lose our knowledge, things get much harder.

We've dug out almost all the easily accessible minerals - we're currently mining minerals that are cheaply accessible to us with modern technology, but the ones that were cheaply accessible to pre-industrial civilizations are long gone.

For some minerals (e.g. metals) that might possible even be a bonus, as we've brought it up to the surface and it might be more accessible than before (a scrapyard that's buried under some soil could be an excellent place to mine iron), but there won't be shallow coal or shallow oil that a second industrialization could use as a cheap power source.

>But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.

knowledge is the key. Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it. And you can collect sun light and focus it on a boiler while still being in Ancient Greeks situation - that gives you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile which can be used to generate electricity too. And they could have possibly have that too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... - piece of crystal and a wire making a diode - and you can have primitive radio.

So, the newly built civilization bypassing fossil fuels would even be better :)

> Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it.

Did they have the level of materials science to build a practical one? They weren't able to produce steel, for example.

That is my point - the necessary material science in many respects is just a knowledge. If you have copper it is relatively easy to make copper wire, at least some crude one, if you know what it is for. It took 2000 years to build the knowledge, yet having that knowledge one can rebuild a lot of stuff in orders of magnitude shorter timeframe. Btw, that reminded about that book that i liked a lot back then as a child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island - rebuilding a significant pieces of civilization starting from scratch almost.

It's not though - it's a whole interlinked ecosystem of industry and even if you have the knowledge that doesn't mean you'd be able to bootstrap. A simple example is that most wind turbines today are likely built from steel that was made in an electric arc furnace, which themselves require massive amounts of electricity to run. (And that's just the basic material, to say nothing of the tools and processes you need to actually build one).

It’s one thing to build highly optimised things and another to build things that work just well enough.

"Just well enough" may not be enough to rebuild society with. The Greeks didn't lack the knowledge of how to make a steam engine - they had novelty steam engines - but they lacked the industrial base that could actually make them productive.

i imagine how in the year 3000 the people will be arguing why the people of the 21st century, i.e. we, wouldn't build say a fusion engines and power generators (we do have "novelty" fusion devices) , or may be even FTL space ship when it happens to be such a simple thing :) We probably have the tech for the fusion, or very close to it, yet we don't know how to put it together and/or in what direction to make that small final push.

You can build turbines that produce a few kW out of wood.

As long as we don't forget how to build renewables we could skip the fossil fuel stage. Bootstrap solar panels and wind turbines using some biomass as fuel and continue from there.

It adds to our growing collection of factoids. Not everything needs to be useful. At least the article arrived at its conclusion without any Bayes theater.

I guess its the same point that drove Xeno to demonstrate that he was so much much more rational than the average Greek his contribution to the history of thought was a set of arguments that motion was impossible.

Possibly with added profit motive. Say what you like about nuclear bombs actually being real, they won't torture infinite numbers of clones of you if you don't donate to Yudowsky's AI research institute.

It's Zeno afaik

Do you think your reaction would have been as strong if the post was written by someone else?

I wrote this post, and the point is to improve discussion of societal risks. As others have pointed out, nuclear war doesn't have to kill everyone to be extremely bad and worth avoiding. I spend a lot of my time thinking about risks from nuclear and biological weapons, and downplaying these risks is not my purpose.

One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars. While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur!

I've written more about risks from nuclear war here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rn2duwRP2pqvLqGCE/does-the-u... and here: https://jeffreyladish.com/one-hundred-opinions-on-nuclear-wa...

> One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars

It also encourages lazy cynicism.

If everyone died in a nuclear war humanity got its just desserts. Mix in the West’s discomfort with death and nuclear holocaust becomes a punch line. But if our choices today will cause millions to suffer for generations, the cost becomes more tangible. The threat becomes detailed and gruesome and that makes it relatable.

> extremely bad and worth avoiding

Shrugs???? What exactly do you mean? Quantify this, how bad...with respect to AGI?

> discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars

Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST).

Anything else, and I would classify it as a species wide failure to adapt to technology (In this case EXISTENTIALLY dangerous tech). Further, there is no way to grasp or accurately predict confounding factors of post total nuclear war that would put humankind at further risk.

> Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST).

This gets at the heart of existential risk. Should we abandon all technology to avoid the possibility of nuclear war and just wait for an asteroid or climate change or resource exhaustion to kill us? Nuclear destruction only gets easier over time as technology progresses. My cell phone is faster than the supercomputers of the 80's used to model nuclear explosions. Even North Korea can refine uranium. Guided rockets are cheap enough to launch high school science projects. Hypersonic cruise missiles are on the horizon.

Generally I would propose we avoid nuclear war being an existential risk by going to the stars as soon as possible. That has other costs that, yes, should be balanced against the costs of nuclear war.

AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends, balanced only by the hope that its intelligence grows far faster than the risks and that it's value-aligned with humanity.

> AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends

No, it is not. The reason is this: it is science fiction. This makes it no less, or no more, dangerous than anything else I can make up with a quasi realistic chance of existing in the near term future.

When thermonuclear bombs were detonated, they thought there was a possibility that the reaction would get away from them, and incinerate the atmosphere. The first test, they were scared this actually happened as the explosion carried on longer than they expected.

The point? They actually assigned a probability (non zero) to this event, and then carried on with the test anyway. So I could say that a hydrogen bomb, using some iteration of technology just beyond our grasp is likely to kill every human on earth in the near future. Am I right? Who knows..but in conjecturing this I am no more or 'less wrong' than anyone saying AGI is the greatest threat.

If we're comparing instantaneous risks, then I agree with your arguments. The most likely thing that could kill the most people today (in the next 24 hours) is a large nuclear war, followed by things like a nearby supernova, gamma ray burst, etc. An asteroid large enough to wipe out half of humanity before Saturday is really unlikely to be close enough to not have been observed already.

In the first atomic bomb test the atmospheric ignition risk was not a conditional probability over the next 50 years or more but an estimate of P(ignition | nuclear detonation next week). Very tightly bound immediate risk. P(detonation next week) was ~1.

When risk is estimated over the next 50 or 100 years the probabilities change quite a bit, especially because it's possible (though unlikely) that every nation cooperatively disarms its nuclear stockpile. Disarmament is not possible today so it can't count against that risk. It is a factor in the 50-year risk.

Climate change, AGI, asteroids, pandemics, biowarfare, etc. all become potential risks in the longer time scales, but their conditional probabilities are much fuzzier. That doesn't mean it's useless to try to measure the probability; when assigning dollars to counter risk it makes sense to spend relative to the expected utility loss of each potential outcome, times the probability of being able to change the outcome. There's very little reason to spend money on short timescales to avoid a nearby supernova or a gamma ray burst pointed at us. There's nothing we can do. We can do things about nuclear weapons, climate change, AGI, etc. But we need accurate probabilies to avoid the failure of devoting 100% of GDP to the current biggest risk.

AGI is not a threat within the next day or probably the next year, and even if it was it would be almost certain that events are already in motion and nothing could be done. Dealing with AGI risk means spending an appropriate amount of money to offset risks that might appear more than a year or two out.

Searching the skies for unknown asteroids is worthwhile because only with enough advance warning can anything be done, and it's quite likely we could avoid a strike with enough warning (years).

It's in everyone's best interest to disarm every nuclear weapon but there's a strong defection incentive to be the last one with them which we also have to be realistic about. Achieving zero nuclear weapons is likely to require a one-world government which is unachievable in any short or medium timeframe. What do you propose we spend money on that actually moves the conditional probabilities away from global nuclear war? Do those proposals (even with ludicrous amounts of money) have a higher likelihood of success than risk-dollars-adjusted reduction of climate change for example? If not, then we can't prevent nuclear war at any cost as you originally proposed. In fact we can't prevent nuclear war in the first place; there is no set of concrete steps (short of globally synchronized sabotage) to take this year or even next. Human beings will have their fingers on the nuclear triggers for the foreseeable future. We have to mitigate the other risks that we can right now otherwise it's a waste of money. Hopefully as the world becomes more stable it will eventually become possible to actually prevent nuclear war through disarmament.

Here's the fundamental problem as I see it: probabilities are meaningless. We can talk about conditionals...potentials...likelihoods....whatever until we are blue in the face. All they do is provide a thin veneer over what I see is the truth: we simply have no real idea regarding most existential risks. Probability is a false god that justifies our wasting resources on problems we can't hope to solve, as we don't even understand them. AGI is the canonical problem of this type--absolutely no real understanding of the parameter space. What can it do...can it do this or that...what will it do...how to bound/align what it will do...???; well--just tell me what it is first. Aliens could show up tomorrow and smoke us (in theory), so what dollar amount should we spend on that (it's the same problem really...what capabilities will the aliens have so as to focus our efforts on their not smoking us).

> What do you propose we spend money on that actually moves the conditional probabilities away from global nuclear war?

First, let me say that I appreciate the frank discussion, and that I also appreciate the original author's willingness to author posts on this topic, these are in fact important issues. To answer your question, if it were my decision (I actually just responded to a couple RFPs with a sketch of a system for viral bioinformatics [which were declined]), I would say our largest current existential threat is our systems of government that have not made significant progress in the last couple hundred years. Regardless of how we score existential threats (I eschew probabilities personally), it's clear that we will need effective governance to respond to them as they arise (let's call covid a fire drill that we failed miserably at). We need research into questioning the fundamental assumptions by which we govern (secrecy, militancy, the paradigm of competition). How do we set goals as a world, not as nations? How do we engineer trusted environments, not zero trust environments? This is where my money would be.

> AGI is the canonical problem of this type--absolutely no real understanding of the parameter space. What can it do...can it do this or that...what will it do...how to bound/align what it will do...???; well--just tell me what it is first. Aliens could show up tomorrow and smoke us (in theory), so what dollar amount should we spend on that (it's the same problem really...what capabilities will the aliens have so as to focus our efforts on their not smoking us).

I'd say aliens are in the supernova and gamma ray burst territory; even if we understood a lot about them we would be mostly powerless to counter them as an existential threat because there are very few actions we could take to deflect, defeat, or escape alien attack. Reasoning with them is probably the best we could do.

> I would say our largest current existential threat is our systems of government

Just to be clear; do you mean completely wiping out humanity or a reset to some small population that might have another chance at it?

> We need research into questioning the fundamental assumptions by which we govern (secrecy, militancy, the paradigm of competition). How do we set goals as a world, not as nations? How do we engineer trusted environments, not zero trust environments? This is were my money would be.

This is a lot closer than you may realize to what a lot of AGI existential risk folks research. AGIs will almost certainly be agents in the world; able to act and smart enough to understand their ability to act and affect the world and themselves. The correspondence to governance is pretty close; humans are pretty smart actors who understand a lot of the dynamics they have control over and have goals they want to achieve. AGI will have to fit into an ecosystem of humans and their governments in a beneficial way, and a big part of solving AGI risk is understanding governance, decision theory, goals, and values well enough to not create AGI that turns into a despotic warmonger to achieve its unaligned goals. We know that human agents can end up as despots.

Take the question of how to set goals as the world, not as nations. That extends down to the individual level as well; the coordination problem, unaligned incentives, the tragedy of the commons, decision theory, and other game theory problems can be extended from individuals vs. individuals to nations vs. nations. If anything, AGI will be easier to solve than human governance both because there will be fewer ethical restrictions and because we can (hopefully) engineer AGI in ways that align with human valued and incentives instead of trying to reason with humans.

A trusted environment is, if I take your meaning correctly, one in which nations have aligned their incentives so closely so as to be able to trust that the actions of other nations are honest and in good faith because any other options would be counterproductive. That's at least the sense I get from trust between individuals; after enough time with someone one can be fairly certain that they have enough shared values and goals to be able to come to similar decisions as one would, and trust them to act in accordance either through mutual shared interest (including friendship, admiration, respect, etc.) or the benefit of continued cooperation in the future. I suppose my first thought is that having "nations" to begin with breaks a lot of shared incentives because it overlays unevenly distributed wealth and opportunity with arbitrary legal and social groupings that nevertheless a lot of people care very deeply about. Getting nations to truly cooperate probably means giving up a lot of identity based on tradition, origin, and history. I have no clue how best to convince people that what really matters about them and their neighbors is how individually happy, fulfilled, and free to explore they are regardless of their differences. Getting rid of false beliefs in zero sum economics and the futility of status signalling might be a start, but humans are sort of innately programmed for a lot of counterproductive beliefs about status, pride, fairness, worth, etc.

Not getting too far afield, I am also curious how you reason under uncertainty without probabilities. E.g. you don't know how things may turn out but have some ideas; how do you choose what to do? How will you know if you made a good or bad choice? Is it quantifiable?

> Just to be clear; do you mean completely wiping out humanity or a reset to some small population that might have another chance at it?

Either might occur, given deployment of nuclear or bio technology.

> Getting nations to truly cooperate probably means giving up a lot of identity based on tradition, origin, and history. I have no clue how best to convince people that what really matters about them and their neighbors is how individually happy, fulfilled, and free to explore they are regardless of their differences. Getting rid of false beliefs in zero sum economics and the futility of status signalling might be a start, but humans are sort of innately programmed for a lot of counterproductive beliefs about status, pride, fairness, worth, etc.

Yes, and I think one needs to realize that this is a 100 year project. Technologies like nuclear fusion, and quantum computing I put into this '100 year' category, that is those that would catalyze profound transformations of humanity (synthetic biology being another, Abstract General Intelligence another [I do not like the term 'artificial']) given about 100 years and sufficient resources.

So rebuilding and rethinking completely the way humans govern themselves I think is one of these 100 year projects. Things like nomadic citizens (humans without borders), economics with externalities an explicit factor, zero secrecy non zero sum international relations. All stuff that is easy enough to write down, but with no real chance of swift movement towards. Future economic systems are hopefully cooperative, perhaps further enabled by greater gains in digitizing the economy (though risks towards greater inequality that is further destabilizing seem just as likely) .

> reason under uncertainty without probabilities.

I got started in math and computation working on quant stuff during the first financial crash. It was a front row seat to how probability goes wrong (your copulas aren't worth the pixels you graphed them on). The idea is that you have to recognize some things just aren't accurately quantifiable. If you don't recognize that, you just place yourself in a situation where you have a false sense of certainty about uncertainty. You just simply can't assign a probability accurately to anything you so choose. It's not that probability isn't worthwhile, it most certainly is, the point is to be able to accept when you are dealing with a situation where it is non-informational (and likely even counter-informational).

I think everyone who uses probabilities to make decisions agrees that all our models are flawed in many ways. But how else do you propose to weigh different possibilities?

As for your proposal for how to spend money, I agree those are fruitful and promising directions. I think the fields of public choice theory and mechanism design are working on some of the problems you mention.

Urgh, atmospheric ignition was considered but it was studied 6 months before the first nuclear test was conducted: [1] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/09/12/the_fear_th...

The whole atmospheric ignition thing depends on physics which just doesn't work: specifically, that you can reach a temperature without gravitational pressure that triggers nuclear fusion at ambient atmospheric pressures.

It is in the same category as the "concerns" the LHC would create black holes which swallowed the Earth.

That’s not how it was presented in [0], which is one book I had read, among others. And that’s fine if that particular argument is incorrect, the logic of the point I’m making still stands. I can envision a feasible chance of a technological improvement to explosives that would make them ‘completely’ dangerous (kill every last human) if that’s what we’re going for.

[0] https://anniejacobsen.com/pentagons-brain/

You’re making the common mistake to assume AGI significantly increases the advancement of technology. If AI research has demonstrated anything it’s Intelligence doesn’t increase linearly with computation. Compare two identical chess engines where one has 10% more computational power behind it and that program has a surprisingly limited increase in ELO score.

It’s seductive to think AGI will suddenly advance technology dramatically, but dumping more effort into existing technology has a bad habit of hitting diminishing returns. Ideas like nano-machines seem to have vast potential, until you realize biology is already operating at those scales and has significant limitations.

> It’s seductive to think AGI will suddenly advance technology dramatically, but dumping more effort into existing technology has a bad habit of hitting diminishing returns. Ideas like nano-machines seem to have vast potential, until you realize biology is already operating at those scales and has significant limitations.

There are a few reasons to think that AGI will significantly outproduce humans; it's likely cheap to run compared to the training costs. GPT-3 can generate text quite a bit faster than a human at maybe a billionth of the cost of its training, for example. Once achieved it's likely that practical progress on a lot of problems will actually be pretty rapid. Even if we only achieve parity with human intelligence and can never improve AGI beyond that we'll experience a few orders of magnitude in speedup of research.

I think it's a little early to write off nanotechnology when we haven't seen much more than tech demos at this point. Biology is a soup of proteins using brownian motion to find reaction sites. Highly impressive and amazing to be sure but needs to be wet, fed, and in a narrow temperature band. Precision molecular engineering is a game-changer in so many ways.

Producing text more cheaply is a poor metric for technological advancement. Going to the basics of say energy production, heat engines are already close to theoretical limitations. We already have 60+% efficient power plant so nothing can double future efficiency, and even in theory hitting 100% is never going to happen. The world has better technology and more infrastructure than 10 years ago, but it’s almost entirely evolutionary not revolutionary. Even the tantalizing self driving cars in the near future come with a massive downside of congestion from cars driving without people in them.

As to nanotechnology, we already design molecules to interface with biology via synthetic drugs, so essentially biological nanotechnology is going to be about creating larger structures not smaller ones.

> try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur!

in the case where mitigation is deemed acceptable, it would paradoxically make war more likely!

That's why a defensive missile shield technology is not a good investment if you want more peace. The existing MAD mantra is what stops nuclear war. It should continue until humanity unifies into a single world gov't.

> That's why a defensive missile shield technology is not a good investment if you want more peace.

That depends on whether you go for a 'weak' shield or a 'strong' shield. A weak shield may defend a dozen or two warheads: something that North Korea would launch. Japan has a 'weak' shield AFAICT:

* https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1374.html

A strong one would protect against hundreds: another major power. IMHO only the latter would destabilize peace, while the former would help defend agains crazies and potentially rogue operations.

> The existing MAD mantra is what stops nuclear war.

There are a bunch of criticism of MAD:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction#Cri...

But weak shields are only not destabilizing as long as there is complete awareness of its weak nature. Forms of reality denial are standard mode of operations in politics and good luck finding a war that didn't start with one form or another of reality denial.

On a tangent that doesn't really change ether we find weak shields bothersome or not: arguably all strong shield projects were just weak shields with reality denial built right into the sales pitch.

AFAIK anti-missile shields aren't a realistic option. Modern ICBM designs have multiple independently targetable warheads. There are also submarines with nuclear missiles. You can also launch decoys (eg: aluminium foil or flares).

And uh. Recently, I was reading a book called Skunk Works. The author explains that, basically, the US was able to keep the existence of stealth fighters a secret from the public (and Russia) for years and years. He also mentions the idea of a stealth ICBM multiple times in the book (which was published in 1995). That's when it hit me. That technology already exists. Russia and the US probably have an arsenal of stealth ICBMs. They're just not publicly boasting about it, but if you think about it, there's no reason that technology wouldn't exist, particularly since military contractors were already thinking about it over 25 years ago.

I don't understand why you would keep such a thing secret. As Dr. Strangelove rightly pointed out, a doomsday device is pointless if nobody knows about it.

Having just any weapon is worth keeping a secret. From the moment you have a weapon, and an enemy, the later will try to disarm you.

Not 'worth keeping a secret' - worth controlling the information revealed about it. In the case of nuclear weapons, you want to keep its weaknesses and fallibilities secret while trumpeting its existence from the rooftops. The more parties know you have a mega-weapon, the lower the chance you'll have to use it.

> The more parties know you have a mega-weapon, the lower the chance you'll have to use it.

But if you have to... the lower you have a chance to win, as the enemy with more than 1 gram of gray matter will do just anything to take it down before you can shoot.

Betting all of your strategy on assumption that the enemy is scared enough of you not to attack is stupidity beyond all bounds.

If you attack someone, especially if you attack somebody stronger than you, then you attack with all force available to you, and maximum ferocity.

You assume the enemy will willingly throw away his biggest chance to take away your biggest force multiplier, and the biggest chance to win?

> If you attack someone, especially if you attack somebody stronger than you, then you attack with all force available to you, and maximum ferocity.

True, IF you attack someone. But if you see someone who is unassailably stronger than you, that you couldn't possibly defeat, then you don't even go there. And that is the point of MAD. An enemy with one nuke is scary, scary enough to make them worth attacking. But an enemy with thousands of nukes, scattered across the globe, in unknown locations, which will launch at their signal (or lack of signal)... You just don't attack them.

And that's an extremely dangerous assumption. You don't need to dive deep into history for good examples of the opposite.

And if you dive deeper, you will find examples far more suicidal disparities in between warring factions.

Second, you do not count in a possibility of your opponent not even trying to win. If wars were fought by rational people, we would've long had math PhDs for generals.

Knowing you have a stealth ICBM doesn't change a thing if there is no way for the other side to defend against the non-stealth ones, so it wouldn't be a deterrent to most possible adversaries, but the optics of disclosing such a thing developed in, say, the 90s wouldn't be great.

Those that might conceivably try to defend themselves against conventional ICBMs are few and might very well know such a thing exists, it may work as a deterrent in that context.

If such a thing exists at all, not quite sure how you might make an ICBM stealthy, couldn't think of a way to hide launch and reentry signatures...

Stealth ICBMs are not a thing. Re-entry prevents complete stealth, as the plasma generates a distinctive radar signature. You could use plasma stealth to make re-entry targets impossible to lock on, but they would be detected.

Also, the existence of stealth fighters was not a secret to the Soviets. They came up with the idea of a stealth fighter and figured out how to minimize the advantage they would give before the US did either, but decided not to pursue it. They were certainly aware of the US stealth program quite early on, and even before the US program started they knew it was possible. However, because of the problematic bureaucracy of the USSR from the 70s onwards this wasn't pursued for quite a while, and by the time the program reached maturity the collapse of the USSR was well on it's way.

That is to say, you can't really hide the existence of such big technologies and paradigms to near peer opponents - they probably thought of it before you've finalized your prototype.

The post discusses only first order effects. In case of nuclear war most people will die not from kinetic shock or radiation, but from famine and deceases caused by collapse of supply chain and medical infrastructures, and from unavoidable violence during the fight for scarce remaining resources.

Exactly!

The intangible disruptions of a human society will indirectly cause eventual death due to the nuclear war. Think about it, just the COVID-19 lockdown of a few weeks can cause economy collapsed, people out of jobs, can't paid rent, utilities. A nuclear war will immediate cut off or contaminate essential human necessities, like food, water, shelters, electricity etc., so even without getting harmed by kinetic force, radiation, climate alteration, people still cannot survive long term.

I always found that more frightening than total extinction. I can't imagine all humans blinking out in a few hours. I can imagine having no food or money, trying to work dangerous odd jobs here and there and starving to death along with 30% of my town during a winter famine a few years later.

Think of life outside the Western world for a bit. This was the case for most of colonised Asia, and is still is a thing for some places in Africa.

Those effects won't cause extinction though because they'll diminish as the population shrinks so it'll reach some equilibrium. This is about extinction, not just lots of people dying. Nuclear winter wouldn't get less harmful the fewer people are around.

Very few people would choose to have children and raise them in a post-nuclear war environment, even if the radiation didn't make viable babies impossible. It's possible that the population would die out simply because it wouldn't be replaced quickly enough.

Some people don't "choose to have children." They feel like fucking so they do, and children happen afterwards.

I wouldn't expect that to change after a nuclear war, especially in a world without contraceptives.

That aside, there really needs to be more understanding of the difference between species extinction and cultural extinction.

Humans could survive for hundreds of millennia in a devolved state. They wouldn't be particularly human by our standards, but they'd have the same DNA.

But our culture would be gone. All the accumulated knowledge would be wiped out, and it's very possible nothing like it would ever return.

DNA is fairly robust. Culture, knowledge, and rationality are extremely fragile. We're not doing an outstandingly job of preserving them even without a nuclear war, and I can't imagine a nuclear war would make the situation any better.

Just continue this thread of contrarianism, I doubt we could eradicate human knowledge from the planet if we tried at this point. It is encoded in our minds, our books and our silicon chips.

We may lose the know-how / capacity to produce certain things, such as we did with Damascus steel or roman concrete, but we are an endlessly resourceful species. I place my faith in our ability to adapt and come up with new solutions as required.

If all humans aren't eradicated by nuclear war, I don't see why all memory, books, hard drives, other archives, computers, power plants, machinery, or even all contraceptives would be.

Computers and hard drives have half-life counted in years, and need energy and communication infrastructure to operate. Post-collapse, once all the computers break down, that's the end of XX-century technology. Nobody is going to make new ones, because to build and maintain machines that make computers you need working computers. Same for mining and refining necessary resources, controlling chemical processes, etc.

Whatever technological knowledge survives in the books, most of it will be useless for centuries, as we regress into pre-industrial level of technology and can't climb back out - we've already mined out all easily-accessible high-density energy sources that are necessary for reindustrialization.

If resources are already mined, why we need to mine them again?

Simple computers are relatively easy to make with today tech. Software exists already.

Why would we regress to pre-industrial level of technology? Even if you somehow wipe 90% of the population worldwide, this brings the population back to mid-18th century levels - which is to say, when industrial revolution was already ongoing. But that same number of people would know all the things that had to be discovered back then, and would still have a lot of machinery, and a lot of already-refined materials, to bootstrap from.

Nor is there a particular shortage of hydrocarbons to burn, with consumption reduced so much due to population loss and reduction in quality of life. Consider that US today emits more than 200x carbon into the atmosphere than it did in 1850, and that this growth has been exponential. So what we consider one year worth of reserves today, could provide energy for many decades in this hypothetical.

That's nonsense. People had children through the ice age! Poor struggling Africans and Indians keep having children. The people who choose not to have children seem to be contented wealthy professionals. If you're able to keep yourself alive, it's not much more work to keep children alive.

With respect, I think that’s a narrowly scoped proposition that ignores obvious perils with significant impacts.

Look at COVID-19 impacts on supply chains in the US and China, due to short term disruptions. Any significant nuclear conflict would have huge impacts. Destruction of Long Beach, Chicago and similar hubs would implode the economy in an extreme way.

It’s also a loss of control on the societal level that would unleash other horrors.

> While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur!

I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report from the 1980s where the author tried to project that if the US and USSR had a full scale nuclear war, US GNP would be back to normal within five years.

Who knows what government bureaucrat had a program requiring an Orwellian report like to justify whatever policy.

Who is this we? If you want to store up MREs and tin foil hats and build a bomb shelter, be my guest. Most of our efforts will be to prevent a large-scale nuclear war from happening or needing to happen.

>One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars.

This is what the thinking was during the early part of the cold war, the whole duck and cover era. The decades after that and the knowledge gained during the cold war is what lead to our current fears and justification for focusing on disarmament rather than nuclear war prep.

Whether or not humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant. Enough post nuclear fiction has been produced that people are well aware, yes, we may not all die, but life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth.

That's the point of preventing nuclear war, that's the point of the world's current attitude towards it.

Whether or not humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant to the questions like whether nuclear war is bad and whether we should work to prevent it.

However, the question whether or not humans end up totally extinct is relevant when comparing nuclear war with other very horrible risks, some of which do threaten total extinction. To discuss, prioritize and act on very serious (though, hopefully, unlikely to materialize) risks, we need a scale of "horribleness" that doesn't just give every serious problem a 10 out of 10. We need to reasonably prioritize our actions among many potentially dystopian risks - if consider a single one of them an negative infinity, a literal "AVOID AT ALL COSTS", then those "all costs" include increased vulnerability to other risks, and that's not appropriate.

What other risks are there that are directly intentionally human driven that could cause such an extreme amount of destruction, death and societal collapse over the span of a few hours?

Meteorite strike or supervolcano eruption that we could have protected ourselves against but didn't because of resources spent on nuclear war prevention.

Not sure why you added the "within a few hours" qualifier or "intentionally human driven". Have you already thought of something that takes longer, is done by humans accidentally, or is natural? Is it climate change? Does that already answer your question?

Yeah pretty much, because there is nothing else that compares in that way. Climate change is long and drawn out, meteors and disasters are acts of nature.

There is nothing else so swiftly and completely destructive that is entirely driven by humans and their choice as to whether they should destroy or not.

That's the thing about nuclear war, unlike all those other things, it really comes down to a few humans deciding not to do it. That's what makes it more terrifying than those other ones.

The suddenness is a problem because there isn't enough time to adapt? Implying that we'll adapt to climate change? Watch out for heresy there ;)

But asteroid or comet impacts. Comets in particular can come so fast and undetectably that we won't have time to react. We could prevent a comet impact if a few humans decided to build such a defense system, and we might be wiped out if those few humans decide not to do it. Sounds equivalent to nuclear war.

In near-ish future I guess deorbiting sufficiently large asteroids? In maybe further future AI and aliens.

> life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth.

Not at all. Many organisms would still find it easy to survive in a post-nuclear-war world and would eventually evolve to fill the roles of those that went extinct.

It's important to think hard about nuclear war. However the problem to focus on is that nuclear war is a lot more likely than most people think. Accidental launch in reaction to bad intelligence is a constant possibility; also the number of nuclear powers continues to increase. Civil war in any nuclear-arm nation is also something to consider. All of these could result in multiple strikes, which would unleash horrors not seen since WW II or before.

Very few things could actually make humans extinct at this point. It would take an impact like the one that produced the moon to finish us off. We're so adaptable that some of us will survive and rebuild. If we can ever get back to technological civilization without easily accessible fossil fuels is debatable, but I think we'd find a way - it would just be a lot harder and take longer.

What worries me is not extinction, but societal collapse. We've seen how disruptive covid19 was, and it was a baby event compared to things that have happened in earth's history.

Climate change and nuclear war both seem highly probable causes of societal collapse. Both are preventable if we can just find a way to not be collectively stupid. I don't how we do that, but it's insane we're not trying harder.

Realistically, if there was a full-scale nuclear war, famine and violence would kill 90-95% of people. It would also destroy a lot of our technological capabilities. There are only a handful of silicon fabs in the world, and they have complex supply chains. It could bring us back to some kind of a technological middle age, except we'd have guns, electricity and radios.

The ammo and electricity would not last long in most parts of the world. I think a lot of communities would have real trouble even feeding themselves and a few hard winters could wipe them out.

Some electricity is not that hard to generate with late middle-age manufacturing techniques. It won't be a nice stable grid, but you'd likely be able to run e.g. mining pumps with power generated from a nearby water mill.

Similarly, some refrigeration is not super difficult to build once you know how it works. That would help quite a bit against starvation from bad harvests because it allows you to have bigger stores of food.

Solar panels and diesel generators are pretty ubiquitous these days. Actually building more of either is more complicated, but bootstrapping the capability to do so before existing supplies of either run out (and we're talking years here) is quite feasible.

You could scavenge electric motors, some metal sheets and a bunch of wood into a hydroelectric generator. So there would still be electricity.

Yeah, OK, I know how to wrap copper and spin it around magnets, and get _some_ electricity, but I don't know how to measure or manage the voltage and the current. I don't know how to make an inverter. I don't know how to make a light bulb or a battery (or really anything that "uses" the power). Exiting appliances only have only at most 20 years in them.

With everybody struggling to raise crops and livestock, let along trying to reinvent the light bulb, it would a long slow climb back to civilization.

> With everybody struggling to raise crops and livestock, let along trying to reinvent the light bulb, it would a long slow climb back to civilization.

People aren’t going to forget how to trade. The people with that manufacturing and engineering knowledge aren’t going to be busy with livestock. They’ll be trading these valuable goods for food.

What if the Southern Hemisphere isn't targeted? Fallout will mostly effect the northern hemisphere, and if there isn't a nuclear winter (or a milder one than projected), then the damage will be largely economic to those nations. But their infrastructure and ability to grow food would remain intact.

I suppose refugees and the political vacuum created would be significant problems.

IIRC the nuclear winter would not be as bad as once predicted, you could see a 10 celsius drop. That would still be enough to greatly reduce crop yields though.

If you couple reduced crop yields with millions of hungry refugees, economic instability and general chaos... Who knows. Unlikely to result in human extinction, but very painful for everyone no doubt. I do think it seems unlikely that people would nuke Australia and South America. I honestly hope that if nukes are ever fired, as many countries as possible remain untouched.

Regarding at least Australia for not being nuked:

Have you ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap ?

While that is only one target, and in the middle of nowhere at that, do you still think so? For me that looks like a very valuable target to disrupt the operations of anyone who operates from there.

If 90% of the population dies, we're left with around 750 million people worldwide.

Last time the world had that many people in it was around 1750. How fast could the people back in 1750 get to the present technological level, if they had all the science and engineering and exploration already figured out, and also got a bunch of machinery to kickstart things?

Let's say 95 percent are killed. That still leaves around 400 million people. Let's say 95 of scientists are killed.

That might still leave around 4-500,000 scientists worldwide and millions of engineers, millions of medical doctors, tens of millions of technicians of different kinds. Sure, many of them will be in odd places like New Zealand, South Africa or Argentina. But that's likely where most survivors would be as well.

Just for comparison, until the 1940s the US and Europe produced around 10-20,000 doctorates per year. At no point back then did we have more scientists worldwide than we would have after 95 percent of scientists were killed today. And unlike back then, the surviving scientists would have knowledge of every scientific knowledge produced afterwards, either as personal memory or in books and databases.

It's quite possible the internet would survive as well. After all, it's designed for that kind of events. Thousands of libraries would survive. Millions of machines, vehicles, airplanes, computers, components etc. would survive. Wikipedia, the 100 most important scientific journals, the US patent organization database can easily be on a laptop and libraries around the world are making copies all the time.

covid19 wasn’t that disruptive though beyond superficial shit. Nobody went hungry, water supplies kept going, electricity kept flowing, etc. We’re nowhere near the brink of any kind of regional societal collapse, let alone anything national or global.

I think the same about about CC. Humans as an animal, will survive. Humanity may not.

Honestly Covid-19 was actually quite reassuring for me. There was a few brief blips of panic buying, and a bit of "flee to the countryside", but broadly things kept functioning. People and organisations stepped up and kept things moving.

All those people who fled to the countryside eventually got bored and returned to the city, where things hadn't really changed much.

This is mostly Herman Kahn redux.

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

When there were 3 TV channels in the 1960s, in prime time programming you would often hear discussions just like this, from Kahn himself at times. Topic and people inspired the movie Dr. Strangelove and was at the forefront of the national consciousness in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s.

As a set of ideas and concerns, it was beaten to death at the time, revived a bit during the “nuclear winter” thesis of the 1980s, and always was and continues to be an active issue at the Federal level. Mismanage nukes and you can be booted out even if you are the Secretary of the Air Force.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-airforce-idUSWAT00960...

It is a very, very deep rabbit hole. Could be fun to see how far you can get with unclassified sources, for various peculiar values of “fun” until you turn into a character from Strangelove yourself.

The classic starting point is On Thermonuclear War, 1960, Kahn.

Now that I think of it, Kahn died in the early 1980s. If he reincarnated immediately, he’d be in his mid 30s.

How old are you, landfish? Is that you, Kahn?

For everyone else, repeat after me, nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war. Nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war...

> For everyone else, repeat after me, nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war.

Some Japanese people would disagree with you.

It shows that people from WW2 doesn't live anymore. People forget: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

Kahn actually ran studies to come up with his numbers of a nuclear war causing a ten year economic regression and only killing 50% of a country. His point was that on a long enough timeline it would/will eventually happen, and with adequate preparation a country could ensure both objective victory and survival for the majority of its populace and civilization.

Someone has to think about the unthinkable. Wishing nukes away won't make them disappear, and as shown in Daniel Ellsberg's the Doomsday Machine, nuclear weapons have been used as weapons of war in U.S. foreign policy for decades as indirect threats and bluffs. They will eventually be used again as explosive ordinance. Civil defense was lambasted and deprioritized in the west because people thought with their hearts instead of their minds with regard to the destructive power of nuclear weapons.

Decades of poor science on nuclear winter based off of the terrible TTAPS climate model have engendered the notion that nuclear war is a death sentence to humanity. It's not true, academia knows it is not, but nobody will push the subsequent corrective nuclear winter stories because the fear of nuclear winter keeps nuclear hawks at bay in political office. The top answer in this quotation question has a ton of links on this: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax

They are weapons of war. They are effective weapons of war. They will eventually be used as explosive ordinance and not just threats and bluffs. Calling them unthinkable and anyone who plans for survival following their use a horrible person is bad emotional rhetoric. We should have an implementable plan for civil defense like China and Russia do. We should not allow fear to prevent the survival of our way of life.

Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner is one of the few books that has literally given me nightmares.

Imagine reading memos with stuff like "we plan to kill at least 600 million people, probably a lot more, a lot of them our allies"....

The first part of the book is available online:

https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html

The exact quote that stunned me being:

"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."

There were only 3 billion on the planet at the time, too. Estimates for U.S. casualties were 120 million dead in 1969. Out of 202.7 million

That still would have left the U.S. as one of the largest countries on the planet, and fallout would largely have dissipated after two to six weeks. Congress, the president, and the federal reserve agents would likely have survived thanks to top secret bunkers and Looking Glass. The military would have been wiped out. Food production would be largely unaffected for grains and vegetables, but nearly every nonhuman animal in the midwest, coastal cities, and big sky parts of the country would be dead from fallout. Food delivery and distribution would rely largely on coal rail and river barge transport, but it still did mostly at the time. It would take ten years to rebuild a refining capacity and restore the power grid and military Things would eventually return to normal. The cities would be rebuilt and reinhabited.

I know it is hard to believe, but look at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, German firebombed cities from WW2 like Dresden; they were rebuilt from the ashes. Germany was nearly entirely destroyed by WW2. It came back.

Barring nuclear winter actually occurring (which the Kuwait oil field fires kinda proves won't happen), total nuclear war is something countries can recover from, which makes it even more likely to happen in the future. As Ellsberg put it, "any nonzero chance is crazy."

> Nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war

That almost sounds plausible if you don't know the long history of nuclear weapons being almost used and avoided by sheer luck. Your thesis also breaks down once you remember that the USA is building 'small-scale' nuclear weapons with the precise intention of making them usable in current conflicts.

Not to mention that the US have recently unilaterally withdrawn from the disarmament agreement with Russia, under a supposedly Russia-friendly president.

>nuclear weapons being almost used and avoided by sheer luck.

Sheer luck is an odd way to describe "so much process and procedure and checks that when something does slip through the cracks it is correctly identified as anomalous and nobody gets nuked". Sure it might not make you feel warm and fuzzy inside and near misses show where to improve the system but to pretend it's just "sheer luck" despite god knows how many man hours being spent on the problem is naive, hyperbolic and infantile.

ok so no one has yet to comment this: another problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that a nuclear warhead becomes a permanent get out of jail free card.

Everyone knows about few Russian invasions, Chinese Uighur genocide or Nagorno-Karabakh war and total inaction against these observed in various international communities, especially between nuclear capable nations. Incidents of this scale were enough in the past to start a World War or at least years long regional conflicts.

While a global (thermonuclear) war not occurring is good, genocides and invasions are generally not; I fear the fear of former is causing latter never to be held accountable.

The hysteria over nuclear war has definitely done great harm to civil defense and preparedness in the USA. I have a print copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills[1] that I review regularly because an hour a year seems worth it to me.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Expanded/...

Well I suggest you delete that post ASAP. I do not like notion of giving ideas how to solve Climate Change and cool down the planet Trump's way, 2 months before he left office.

Yes, the topic of the article is human extinction, and one can be pedantic and say, why stray off topic? However, conceptually close is near-extinction, with unfathomable suffering and waste, destruction of nearly all human culture, nearly all humans, and nearly all plant and animal life. It's worth a sentence or two to mention this in the article, to avoid confusion on the part of the reader that the author wishes minimize the negative effects of nuclear war - which would perhaps make it more acceptable in a way.

That said, the analysis seems sound, and despite the chance that the conclusion could be misconstrued or misused, it is important to remind voters graphically of the horrors of nuclear war. That's a better strategy to avoid both extinction and near-extinction, rather than counting on military planners to not overshoot their goals of near-extinction.

> What is the point of writing a post like this?

Counter hyperbole.

Climate change has also been billed by some as a near-term extinction event. That isn’t true. When the public catches on they throw out the baby with the bathwater.

To get the risk back in perspective, it’s necessary to first disabuse ourselves of the hyperbolic harm.

The collapse of civilization and the destructive power of nuclear weapons is hyperbole now..?

The collapse of civilization can't be a hyperbole. What people especulate that maybe bring it about can be.

Yeah, I phrased that poorly. I meant to say that the the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the likelihood of full out nuclear war causing the total collapse of civilization is considered hyperbole now..?

According to the post, yes. To state that such event may lead to total collapse wouldn't be a new idea at all. It's the mainstream hypothesis since the cold war.

To challenge those ideas by articulating the opposite (that it may not lead to total collapse) it's new (to me at least) and good food for thought.

Can't cite anything, but I'm pretty sure that the nimble investment in nuclear energy that society has made as a whole in the past decades were fueled by fear of total collapse as if it's impossible for humans to play with fire without completely obliterating ourselves. And considering the new(ish) challenges we have (climate and others) I find it helpful to think that past demons/fears can be managed in a constructive way.

> The collapse of civilization and the destructive power of nuclear weapons is hyperbole now..?

No, extinction as a consequence is.

Modern civilisation as we know it will collapse. This was spun, by some people, into nuclear war will end humanity. That’s hyperbole.

Hmm, it still seems advisable to do everything humanly possible to avoid nuclear conflict.

_If_ I survived such a conflict, I’d probably wish I hadn’t.

> everything humanly possible

Does this include, say, accelerating climate change? This isn't an idle hypothetical, nuclear reactor technology is similar enough to nuclear weapons technology that any country with a reactor can produce crude nuclear weapons in a matter of months.

Hard decisions exist and must be made. At some point we must quantify risks.

But they won't be made unless someone is ready to bear the consequences. Those are decisions which have no all-positive outcome.

Just a single point: climate change will devastate many of our coastal areas and that's where a huge portion of our economy, culture and populations are based.

Displacement (migration) and economic collapse are inevitable here since the next 150 years will see nearly all sea trade ports in big trouble. And shipping is absolutely at the backbone of our economy - most stuff you use comes from another continent.

Sure, you can leave New York City or Hamburg and setup shop farther inland but... it's not like this will happen overnight and then we have new coastal lines ready for new ports and sea trade and everyone can send iPhones around the planet again.

Don't even try to move the shipping volume of sea trade to air freight btw.

Well, at a certain point it changes the geopolitical calculus. Not that nuclear war should ever be entered into lightly. But guaranteed human extinction pretty much rules out any and all justification. In the most anti-nuclear paradigms, even second-strike is off the table, because it only exacerbates nuclear winter.

Whereas if nuclear war is winnable, as Pentagon strategists have been saying since the 1950s, then first nuclear strike should probably still be on the table for certain extreme geopolitical situations.

So, the question seems pretty relevant in that it's a major determinant in terms of setting optimal military doctrine.

> What is the point of writing a post like this?

if nothing else, it paints a more accurate picture of the issue. is there something wrong with that?

In the context of civilization collapse, I think the author is overestimating how likely it is that people will be able to figure out subsistence farming using only locally available materials before they starve. Does anyone on Earth still do that, i.e. with no reliance on materials shipped in from elsewhere?

Does a surviving civilization need/want to rely on the same processes that (may) have led to their outcome?

There are about 100 uncontacted tribes thought to remain.

There is a vast range of non-native eadible plants and animals that have now been introduced to every country.

That would make a huge difference compared with traditional indigenous societies. However farming does require steady state weather - which is unlikely after a nuclear war?

There still isn't enough to sustain people on subsistence farming. And subsistence farming, is well, subsistence-level - it precludes specialization which means it precludes most of the advantages technology brings us today.

If you're ever in a civilizational collapse scenario, literally the most important thing you can do is rapidly restart the farm supply chain by whatever means necessary - anyone imagining building a fortress for themselves is building a tomb.

Subsistance farming for a limited number of people can be done by burying potatoes in the ground and digging them back up in the autumn. Well, it's a bit more to get a good yield, but not that much more, you can (and some places do) teach that to literal kindergartners in a single day. We can't sustain 7 billion of people this way, but if some catastrophe kills 99% of humanity, the availability of better cultivars makes subsistence farming for the remainder much easier than five hundred years ago.

Subsistance farming based on potatoes is not without its risks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

The Native Americans of the Olympic Peninsula produced a complex civilization without agriculture of any kind.

That was made possible mostly by the unique weather and ecology of the area; it can't be done in most places, but it can be done in enough places to keep humanity from going extinct.

Full scale nuclear war means big cities will be bombed and millions of people die. What civilizational collapse are you talking about? The lack of Hollywood movies and absence of the NYSE?

I think you're underestimating the number of target between just the US and Russia. Each has approximately 1600 warheads deployed. Even with using 3 warheads per target, that means over 500 cities/targets in each country destroyed. Of course neither side would use all their active warheads on the opposing country; they would save some for other nations. Then you have to factor in British and French warheads. Israel, Pakistan, India, China and NK would all join in as well. So perhaps the African continent might be spared, and the majority of South America as well. But full scale nuclear war would eliminate North America, most of Europe, a large portion of Eurasia and the Far East.

And then what is left would have to face the fourth horsemen of the Apocalypse; carrying famine, disease, pestilence.

Oh and conventional warfare would occur as well.

> Of course neither side would use all their active warheads on the opposing country; they would save some for other nations

Nor would all of those warheads will detonate, land on target (some will hit and target the ocean) or launch successfully.

> But full scale nuclear war would eliminate North America,

I doubt it. Maybe you're being hyperbolic here, to whit.

If you eliminate the top 20 US ports, the aircraft carriers and a couple military bases (including Washington DC), you have destroyed modern USA but you do have to wait out the sub launches and miscellaneous hidden missile silos. There's little point to sending nukes to Montana, Kansas, etc. Nothing more (probably a lot less). Show me something that asserts anything more is necessary.

You don't eliminate land and population you dont have to, to win a war. Mad-max wastelands are hyperbolic fantasy that ignore basic human agency, imo. Country X isn't scared of refugees or natives of Louisiana forming an invasion force to retaliate so there's no reason to wipe out the land. Again, misfires happen and nuclear fallout is bad for everyone, but that's not the same thing as "eliminating" NA.

True, perhaps 10% might fail. But I think you're underestimating how many targets there are across the US. Both military bases as well as industrial targets. First strike targets would hit Montana and Kansas as both have Minutemen ICBM silos. Omaha would be wiped out since Offut AFB is next door. Louisiana has shipbuilding that would get nuked, as does Wisconsin. If you learn about SIOP, and accept that the Soviets had similar plans, you'll understand. The USSR didn't intend a nuclear war to "liberate" the USA. It planned to destroy the country, not just its military capabilities.

> First strike targets would hit Montana and Kansas as both have Minutemen ICBM silos

80s Russia is not really a good predictor. I simply disagree with both the reasoning and conclusion which has radically changed with technology and revelations about capability between all nations.

I think this kind of proliferation scenario vastly overestimates how many targets any country will bother to target. Aiming at neighbors makes a lot more sense than attacking countries overseas in full scale nuclear war today.

Target lists might not include Aunt Emma's farm, but probably still would take out any important industrial and rural targets: mines, mills, chemical plants, refineries, pipelines, textiles, machine shops, warehouses, granaries...

Civilization would look very different for sure.

Talking about total supply chain collapse.

Standard issue "rationalist" flex: pick a controversial topic, take a contrarian (or at least apparently contrarian) position, argue it in some creative way.

Bonus points if it treads close to some socially or politically taboo topic while avoiding anything that goes directly for it. Being overtly inflammatory and divisive is for low-brow YouTubers. High brow rationalists only hint at the possible controversial implications.

* Also YouTuber could be translated as "you are a potato."

One thing I like about the rationalist community is they tend to focus on what is factually true, instead of the metadiscussion of what a person's hidden motives are which consumes so much of the rest of the internet.

I agree that there's too much focus on hidden motives. The left has its postmodern deconstruction mindset that looks for hidden racism, etc., and the right has conspiracy theory thinking which is just its own spin on the same thing. In both cases it gets taken too far, with the left seeing phantom racism everywhere and the right seeing phantom "liberal bias" or lately "pedophilia" everywhere.

That being said, hidden motives always exist. All human activity is driven by motives that are rooted in the actor's world view and philosophy. It's how our minds work. We are idea-driven teleological beings.

Discussing these hidden motives too little just leaves them unexamined, and it's very easy to push hidden agendas through apparently rational discourse by strategically selecting what data to choose and what lines of argument to pursue. It's similar to "how to lie with statistics."

I consistently see certain hidden motives throughout the rationalist material. The most common is elitism rooted in a belief that certain people possess biologically innate superior intelligence that makes them effectively "more right" than other people. It's a biological determinist version of the idea that certain people are divinely blessed with special powers that make them superior.

This kind of biological intelligence elitism is a superstition. What you believe and how you think matters more than how big your brain is. It's like saying having a bigger engine in a car makes you a better driver. It doesn't. In fact it means that a bad driver can get into a more severe accident more easily. Highly intelligent people with irrational or deluded systems of belief can delude themselves more effectively than less intelligent people. Your average flat-Earther is probably more intelligent than the average person, not less.

I personally make a distinction between what I call dumb-dumb and smart-dumb. Dumb-dumb is a lack of intelligence. Smart-dumb is intelligence grossly misused, or coupled with a gross deficiency in emotional intelligence or a lack of self-awareness.

> Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse....full stop.

Each China, and India has more people, and potentially more troop, than USA, and Russia combined.

As I wrote before, the next third power in any massive war has an extreme incentive to stay neutral, to take the lead, or may well be land, after.

You think that Xi, and Modi will stay still at the opportunity to do the biggest land grab in history?

It's often assumed that, in an all-out nuclear exchange, everybody gets it, even if they haven't launched themselves yet. Because if you go down, you want all your potential opponents to be on the same level.

You now have 15+ potential opponents with standing armies big enough to win against anybody, but standing army of USA.

Attack them all, fully knowing that it will be a lottery of whose military will be more intact after?

Those who do, will be double idiots. Once for not shooting first, second for shooting last.

In our everyday ethics, an accident that kills 2 people is about twice as bad as an accident that kills 1 person. So we can use linear assumptions for evaluating safety measures like seatbelts and vaccines.

In the study of existential risk, killing all the people is much, much worse than killing half the people. Because if you integrate over all the people that will ever live, our descendants potentially spreading around the galaxy, killing all of them zeros out all future happiness. Killing half will only reduce population for a century or two.

Absolute panic is not the best response, even to a civilization ending event. Calm rational understanding is required to evaluate the true nature of the threat. Not to downplay it but purely to understand it. No one is saying disarmament is less critical. Please be willing to examine a truth that might counter a narrative that can be used to motivate the world in a positive direction. To do so should not be seen as herecy. We live in very tribal times please do not assume someone pointing out an inconvenient truth is opposed to everything you believe in.

The rationalists of lesswrong.com are fairly cult-like, and have weird obsessions about AGI and other issues. (Look up "Roko's Basilisk" for some real examples of how detached from reality their thinking can easily get.

Civilizational Collapse is something totally different from extinction and it's actually something very important to concern ourselves over because it's on the cards, i.e. a possible outcome we should probably be thinking about and planning for.

If it were to happen, a lot of people would accept the new reality and bear it, people are resilient.

If nothing else, and I think there is something else, it provides intellectual exploration and discovery, which is both fun and an excellent way of expanding knowledge and understanding.

If such things are not for you, then that's cool, but for those with a curious mind the point of such things is self-evident.

I've noticed that contemporary tech people (or at least the richer ones) have a cultural tick that leads them to deny or minimize the importance of real problems that don't involve shiny new technology. By way of examples:

Microsoft destroying YouTube-DL: Problem.

Amazon exploiting its non-tech workforce: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bitcoin's energy use: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Macs not running third party code: Problem.

Nuclear war: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Global climate change: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Future risk of AI paperclip maximizers: Problem.

Current danger of businesses operating as human-powered paperclip mazimixers: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Etc.

This is just an argument against a straw man. Nuclear war, is bad, any mass killing is bad, any society collapse is bad. It means actual prolongated suffering for most humans. Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome, I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse.

It's like the back talk against climate warming, trying to down play it as a non extinction event. Well that's true, We're not killing the planet, we're not even causing human extinction, we're just building a really bad future for our children.

Ofcourse people born into that future would see it as the norm, but we make decision from our view point, and the norm can be terrible when taken in to context.

But I digress, my point is that the rational community seems to have a smarty pants mentality, taking all rhetoric at face value, and usually creating very serious discussions that usually just sidetrack from the important issues.

Spot on. In the entire scenario it seems we forget recent pandemic, and what happen few days in.

In the case of nuclear war exchange there won't be any toilet paper, period. :)

Joking aside, we forget how hooked we are to industrial society. Any such event would mean world without shops, internet, new version of anything... no progress... for at least one human lifetime. Back to stone age. Everything we are used to and enjoy (technology wise), would simply seas to exist, and it is questionable how long would it take to build knowledge and start a new, especially when simple necessities as food and water are only priority.

You don't need a nuclear war for all that to happen.

As I once read in one defence publication, USA is only 4 biggest fertiliser complexes away from the famine, assuming the assailing party can blockade the country to prevent food importation.

The same is for the biggest oil, and fuel manufacturing complexes.

USA is also "just" 50 power stations away from the grid becoming useless. USA is though much, much better off than most countries on this, as its power generation is much more decentralised, thanks to largely private operation.

USA has domestic capacity to manufacture small, and medium sized turbines, but largest ones used in the superplants mentioned above are made by GE Energy in France, and some even in Japan, and China.

The same for big, top tier transformers for the grid.

Adding to this, I recommend Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge: How to rebuild our world after an apocalypse to anyone who hasn't read it yet. It's well-researched and, among other things, shows how much modern civilization relies on artificial fertilizers, crude oil shipments, and chemicals. A breakdown of world-wide shipping would have devastating consequences for most countries.

IIRC the EU is just a few cut powerlines on a windy day away from completely overloading and destroying most of the power grid.

Overloading, sure, destroying, no.

I would bet millions of Euros there have been islanding plans in place for years in the event of wide scale disconnects or voltage/frequency collapse. The aftermath wouldn't be fun but most of western Europe at least would only be enduring planned rotating blackouts at worst.

If we've gotten to the point that an adversary can and would effectively blockade the US, destroy its infrastructure, and effectively prevent it from being rebuilt for an extended period of time, then odds are we have bigger issues than famine to worry about.

> Joking aside, we forget how hooked we are to industrial society

Us city-people, yes. But there's enough people out there who are mostly self-sufficient, and there's even a bunch of urban preppers who would more than likely have a relatively easy time surviving complete industrial collapse of a nation.

(I say relatively easy because it would obviously be hard and unpleasant times for everyone, but for some that would be doable)

I agree partially, even those people in rural areas depend on fuel, machine parts, technology, books, cleaning provision and most importantly medicine and medical attention. Just imagine, dying because of simple cuts as you do not have antibiotics, or after few years, having issue with tooth decay, food poisoning... communication wise probably those that would remain would go back to good old radio wave, and what when all parts burn out... there wouldn't be anymore China or Amazon to order spear part, how many people know how to make diode, transistor or resistor DIY?

I am not saying it is not doable, but thinking about people who got crazy during pandemic just because they were in quarantine for few weeks, and then multiplying that on a bunker environment for few years until long term fallout from nuclear power plants settles down simply does not seems as a feasible for 99.999% of people. Probably only pockets of people would survive at the end Also question is in what form and how badly would be long term DNA damage for human offspring.

Nature would find a way, as it always does, not sure about humans. Literally, it could be as a ancient story of flood but this time with fire...

> It's like the back talk against climate warming, trying to down play it as a non extinction event.

It's quite similar to invoking freedom of speech in order to defend a position -- "Oh, it's not _literally illegal_ to say this? That sure sounds like a compelling argument to me"

It's no strawman. Fiction often depicts nuclear wars as near-extinction events with very few human survivors. Going by similar topics, it's safe to assume many people consider this a realistic scenario beyond just fiction.

The real strawman is in your comment though.

Who said nuclear war wouldn't be bad, just because it likely won't cause human extinction? Most people agree that regular wars are bad, and there never was any threat of extinction with them.

> But I digress, my point is that the rational community seems to have a smarty pants mentality

No, the rational community has a rational mentality. One can be against war without claiming it would be the end of the world. Hitting your toe is also not the end of the world but you probably still consider it a bad thing to happen.

I don't see anywhere in the article that it's no a near extinction event. Just it's not exactly an extinction event.

The article mentions that most human would die just from food production capacity collapse. Just not exactly all of us.

> Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome

Wtf? Strong disagree. Extinction is the end. Anything else is of course preferable as it means live goes on and civilization has the chance to rise again.

> I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse.

That is just because because you're weak, your bloodline is weak, and you will not survive the winter without central heating and Uber Eats. But other people are more resilient.

> That is just because because you're weak, your bloodline is weak, and you will not survive the winter without central heating and Uber Eats. But other people are more resilient.

This is just uncalled for, I don't see any reason for the vitriol.

> Wtf? Strong disagree. Extinction is the end. Anything else is of course preferable as it means live goes on and civilization has the chance to rise again.

Civilization has the chance to rise again regardless. Even if humans go extinct, I find it likely something would rise to take our place (be it an evolution of a creature that survived, or if life were to just begin anew on Earth). Whether you feel any connection to a civilization that isn't human is another question.

Our winters here are pretty easy, and we don't have uber eats.

But seriously, my very near ancestors were strong, they survived the holocaust. Their life were miserable, with lingering effects even after the holocaust. I don't wish anyone to go through anything similar just to prove they're strong.

I agree that when things are tough giving up will kill you. But we should definitely not strive for tough times, these scar you and generations to come.

We should work for a future where we don't need to be extremely tough. We have the means and wits for that.

Seriously!?

Thank Darwin we had ancestors with thicker skin and stronger will.

Nobody wants nuclear war or to live in the aftermath of it.

However, should it ever happen I intend to do everything in my power to survive. Early humans endured terrible hardships so we had the privilege of building great comfortable societies. It's our duty to the future to keep carrying the flame.

Yes, seroiusly. It's our duty to not deteriorate back to the stone age. Why is planning for doom a better avenue than actively working to avoid doom and make the world more sustainably comfortable?

Humans are hard bastards to kill. The biggest and best tool is the one between our ears and the capability to draw a blank expression in the midst of hell is undoubtedly our best asset. It would take much more than nuclear weapons to wipe out humanity. We are the cockroaches of the mammals. The virus of kingdom animalia.

It argues against a 'straw man' that I personally have talked with people that think that nuclear war would certainly destroy all of humankind. As well, its not arguing against the nuclear war being Super-Bad, the conclusion even talks about an idea for making nuclear war less dangerous so that it is less likely to kill off as many people.

> Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome, I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse.

I do happen to disagree with this, but that is a personal decision and I understand why you would prefer that.

>multiple that by 14,000 warheads, and we get 112 million km². That's a lot! It's still less than the 510.1 million km² of earth's land mass, but it's a lot more than the ~10.2 million km² of urban space. Presumably this is enough to cover every human habitation, so in principle, it might be possible to kill everyone with radiation from existing nuclear weapons.

While there is ~500m km2 of land on the planet, only about 60m km2 is habitable (less desert, poles, mountains etc). Not inhabited, habitable. So yes that's not only sufficient to wipe out all population centers, it's double the amount needed to wipe out all locations on earth capable of sustaining human life.

The ecosystem destruction alone, let alone spectrum social, ecological, agricultural and atmospheric effects that total nuclear war would cause, pretty much guarantee a wipeout of large mammals from the planet a-la the Cretaceous-Paleogene exctinction. In fairness, the impact from that event was equivalent to 100 million of the largest bombs we have ever made, detonated in one spot. But it's destruction was global, total, and immediate. The survivors of the first hours of a total nuclear war won't have such a quick death to look forward to.

If nukes are used for extermination, yes, we don't stand much of a chance. If it is used for warfare, then the story is different. Normally, one does not really care about wiping the enemy's cities but would focus on military installations, military bases, navies, harbors...

A nuclear war would stop when one side can't fight anymore and surrenders. It may happen after deadly exchanges that would cost millions of lives but there is no reason to believe it would last until everyone is wiped out.

In the UK, installation, bases and navies are very close to or embedded in cities. PJHQ is Northwest London. The Royal Navy is based near large cities on the South Coast and Scotland. Thermonuclear attacks on these bases would affect millions of people.

Yes, because the UK is densely populated. Not every country is like that.

My more general point is that it may be harder than the GP suggests to distinguish between a military versus an extermination attack.

The location of the UK's current nuclear submarines bases, surprisingly close to Glasgow - the largest city in Scotland, was mainly due to the preferences of the US Navy.

The UK Government had agreed to US submarines being based here and wanted them somewhere reasonably remote (Scotland) - but the US Navy also wanted to be reasonably close to airfields and other facilities. So a site at the Holy Loch was selected for US Navy use and the Royal Navy decided it should position its bases next to the US base.

Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0171SWRGI/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...

Apparently the Royal Navy originally wanted to use somewhere much further north such as Loch Glendhu - which is fairly empty and nowhere near a major city.

Edit: US Navy stopped having a submarine based in Scotland in '92:

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

> While there is ~500m km2 of land on the planet, only about 60m km2 is habitable (less desert, poles, mountains etc). Not inhabited, habitable. So yes that's not only sufficient to wipe out all population centers, it's double the amount needed to wipe out all locations on earth capable of sustaining human life.

You also have to consider how connected that area is. I.E. How many nukes do you need to kill each valley in Switzerland, each oasis in the desert, etc,

Absolutely, some folks live truly out in the boonies far away from any likely strike target (e.g. Agafia Lykova way out in the Khakassia mountains). That's a double-edged sword however, as very few people live in those fringe areas without outside support and, since there have been no true frontiers remaining on earth for the last few hundred years, those isolated settlements are in areas that cannot sustain the basics of human life in perpetutity and complete isolation at the same time.

James Burke went into this in The Trigger Effect[0] back in the late 1970s. It's an incredible film, if only for the timing on the last in-person voice shot [1].

The amount of lucky breaks you must have to survive even a non-nuclear civilizational collapse event are astounding. Even if you make it out to a remote corner of the world, you'll need a farm with some supplies and no one still sulking about.

The really hard part is starkly obvious though: You need an ox and you need to know how to plow. Without those two things, you're basically kaput, again.

I, for one, have no idea how to plow.

Oh, and the ox eats too.

[0] https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e01 (the whole series is here, and it's all fantastic)

[1] He times his narration to end with a rocket launch, down to the beat! The practice on it must have been incredible, and the luck was out of this world, literally.

You don't need to plow soil to grow crops, and you don't need an ox to draw your plow (it does make it less labor-intensive though). What plowing does is turn the soil over, so that you can make some of the deeper nutrients more available to plants. It's only really necessary if you're doing intensive agriculture.

> He times his narration to end with a rocket launch, down to the beat!

What timestamp?

Oh no, the film is too good to skip through :)

10% of the landmass of the earth is habitable? You got a source for that? That seems unlikely.

For example, the people in Arizona might take issue with "deserts aren't habitable".

When I think about nuclear war leading to human extinction, the first thing that comes to mind isn't any of those 3 mechanisms, but rather economic damage. Not economic damage as in "I lost my retirement investment," but as in "we can't produce enough food." I'd be worried about even much smaller and less deadly nuclear wars leading to massive civil unrest and breakdowns in large-scale social institutions and economies. Mass starvation would be the biggest killer. But I suppose that still wouldn't likely lead to absolute human extinction, but it could certainly lead to a future civilization that is largely unrecognizable to us humans accustomed to industrial or even agricultural societies.

>as in "we can't produce enough food."

US nuclear-war planners in the 1970s or 1980s estimated that there was enough food in silos in the US to feed the survivors for about 3 years. I think they assumed that 50% or 60% of Americans would survive. Usually, most of the grains and beans in those silos would go to feeding livestock, but in an emergency they could be used to keep people alive instead.

So, unless the livestock-feed supply chain has tightened up significantly since the 1970s or 1980s, the US would have about 3 years to get mechanized agriculture back up and running.

Also, ISTR that they estimated that most cars and trucks will survive the attack, but since the electrical systems of automobiles have changed drastically since the 1980s, maybe the US's current inventory of automobiles is a lot more sensitive to electromagnetic pulses. (Cars and trucks are relevant because the US would need some way to transport the grain and beans in silos, most of which are on farms or near farms, to where the people are.)

>So, unless the livestock-feed supply chain has tightened up significantly since the 1970s or 1980s, the US would have about 3 years to get mechanized agriculture back up and running.

How would they process into human-usable formats and get it distributed in time in the initial period after the nuclear exchange? Beans are easy, but I would imagine a large proportion of people don't even own a mortar and pestle or other means of improvising a flour mill. It is certainly possible to improvise one, but access to information would also be disrupted immediately after a nuclear war so they couldn't just fire up youtube and watch one of these Primitive Technology videos on how to make a mill. We have forgotten the old ways and I fear many people would simply not be able to cope in a harsher environment without modern conveniences and comforts.

I'm not concerned about food shortages causing human extinction as such. Supermarkets with just-in-time logistics leave no buffer room while the feed is processed, but humans can survive 10's of days or longer without food (as long as they're hydrated, with some variability for body weight, access to vitamin supplements, and so on) and outside of major population centres (which are probably craters by this stage) you'd imagine a good part of the population have decent food stockpiles, and at least some farms would hopefully not be too affected by fallout and could continue producing enough food for at least a small village's worth of people. IIRC you need ~150 genetically healthy breeding pairs of humans to have enough diversity (assuming careful management to avoid inbreeding and so on) to viably repopulate the earth, which should be reasonable - although getting them all into one place might be harder.

Rather, I worry food riots and the associated issues such as blocked roads, torched buildings, looting, and so on could push a civilisation that is already severely damaged over the edge into total collapse.

Good point about the need to process the grains and beans. Here is the author of Nuclear War Survival Skills on the subject:

>Whole-kernel grains or soybeans cannot be eaten in sufficient quantities to maintain vigor and health if merely boiled or parched. A little boiled whole-kernel wheat is a pleasantly chewy breakfast cereal, but experimenters at Oak Ridge got sore tongues and very loose bowels when they tried to eat enough boiled whole-kernel wheat to supply even half of their daily energy needs. Even the most primitive peoples grind or pound grains into a meal or paste before cooking. (Rice is the only important exception.) Few Americans know how to process whole-kernel grains and soybeans (our largest food reserves) into meal. This ignorance could be fatal to survivors of a nuclear attack. Making an expedient metate, the hollowed-out grinding stone of Mexican Indians, proved impractical under simulated post-attack conditions. Pounding grain into meal with a rock or a capped, solid-ended piece of pipe is extremely slow work. The best expedient means developed and field-tested for pounding grain or beans into meal and flour is an improvised 3-pipe grain mill. Instructions for making and using this effective grain-pounding device follow. . . . As soon as fallout decay permits travel, the grain-grinding machines on tens of thousands of hog and cattle farms should be used for milling grain for survivors. It is vitally important to national recovery and individual survival to get back as soon as possible to labor-saving, mechanized ways of doing essential work. In an ORNL experiment, a farmer used a John Deere Grinder-Mixer powered by a 100-hp tractor to grind large samples of wheat and barley. When it is used to grind rather coarse meal for hogs, this machine is rated at 12 tons per hour. Set to grind a finer meal-flour mixture for human consumption, it ground both hard wheat and feed barley at a rate of about 9 tons per hour. This is 2400 times as fast as using muscle power to operate even the best expedient grain mill.

https://info.ornl.gov/sites/publications/Files/Pub57110.pdf

Food rotted in fields this year because the supply chain wasn't even agile enough to switch from supplying restaurants to supermarkets. Given actual disaster, distribution would be even harder because people would definitely attempt to hoard food.

Today, the 1950's era "Duck and Cover" drills [1] are sometimes laughed at. However, in the event of an actual nuclear blast, some simple preparation would save lives. When a bright flash lights up the sky, people indoors will naturally run to the nearest window to see what happened. This is the wrong thing to do, because the bright flash of an explosion is followed a few seconds later by a pressure wave, turning the window glass into a fast-moving cloud of shrapnel.

Just getting under a desk or table away from any windows improves your chances of survival. The advice is useful even if the flash is not caused by a nuclear weapon. Most of the injuries from the Chelyabinsk meteor [2] in 2013 were caused by window shrapnel.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKqXu-5jw60&t=81s

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

Watching people react to city-level disasters like the ammonia nitrate explosion is why we should still be teaching this. There is way too much YouTube of camera phone footage being taken from right up against glass windows.

If you see anything that looks like that, you absolutely should not be near a window.

I remember reading a Russia analogue of Twiter at the time, and it was just exploding with “You idiot, you've killed us all!” towards Putin.

Exactly. Duck and cover won't help much if you're out in the open less than a km from ground zero. But it will help a lot if you're 25 miles away from a several hundred kiloton blast and indoors.

And the Lebanon explosion more recently.

Between the Kuwaiti oil fires of the first gulf war, and many more country-sized forest fire events, we've learned that Nuclear Winter is not a likely scenario. In fact, the very scientists who coined the term in the 1980s have backed away from it.

Nuclear war would be awful, and certainly the radioactive fallout would be bad, and the damage to thriving historical cities, not to mention the human toll. But extinction level? Unlikely.

One thing this pandemic has taught me is the resilience of the modern supply chain to huge unexpected disruption. It's much stronger in that dimension than I initially feared in early March.

I dunno if I would describe the supply chain as "resilient" -- I honestly think we just got lucky that things so far haven't been worse.

To be fair, large grocery store chains were beginning preparations as far back as December 2019, which gave them time to cut out less-essential SKUs and increase production for more essential products. Big businesses with contacts in China had plenty of heads up before the disease went global.

Depending on the radioactive exposure caused by a nuclear war, the impact on the supply chain could theoretically be much more catastrophic than a pandemic. If major water supplies or agricultural infrastructure were tainted, for example, the results would be devastating.

Given how much crop land would be ruined, it is likely that global starvation would end most of humanity and not much of civilization would survive. Sure there would be people wondering around a hundred years later, but they might not know how to read, write, speak real languages, or reason abstractly. 99% of humans starving would make for some crazy times.

Yep, see the bronze age collapse for an example of this.

Reading and writing lost. People living in cities that had flourished for a thousand years just a couple centuries before, but the current inhabitants didn't know the name of.

are you really comparing COVID to a hypothetical nuclear war?

COVID barely disrupted the supply chain because people who actually work those mission critical jobs had to continue working on site. This wouldn’t be the case if nukes were dropping

In my mind, the most likely candidate for a nuclear war right now comes in a chaotic escalation of the conflict between Pakistan and India. I think this scenario would be horrible, but its damage to the rest of the world's supply chains? Probably less than COVID?

The other conflict that worries me is a major provocation by China towards Taiwan. This is the foreign policy scenario that frightens me most, and feels like the most likely potential 'Franz Ferdinand execution'-type event that could lead to a global world war. But in such a war, would we be likely to see a total nuclear back-and-forth between factions? I think this is less likely than in current day India v. Pakistan. But I could be totally wrong. As Francis Fukuyama illustrates, it's hard to predict future foreign policy scenarios with any accuracy.

Of note, India and China also have a simmering conflict with each other. My understanding of it is meager, but it seems to me while unlikely to boil over on its own, conditions could change if a conflict you mentioned happens.

you talk about localized conflicts far off US mainland, and what most here talk about is more on scale of global all out nuclear war

Nuclear Winter was the scenario most widely used to justify a hypothetical total worldwide collapse, but we now know that this particular scenario is unlikely, even in the case of the most violent possible global exchange.

> I think this scenario would be horrible, but its damage to the rest of the world's supply chains? Probably less than COVID?

Punjab is one of world largest food production regions.

There are more factors in a realistic nuclear war:

- Quite a few nuclear weapons will be spent on military sites, which are often in low-population density areas.

- Quite a few nuclear weapons will be used to destroy other nuclear weapons.

- Nuclear fratricide, or nukes from the same side damaging each other in ill-coordinated explosions

- Air defence destroying at least some missiles and especially planes.

- Some bombs will be duds and fail to detonate due to bad maintenance.

What a lot of people seem to gloss over is that the southern hemisphere is, for the most part, blissfully uninvolved in nuclear politics and unlikely to be targeted. Global wind patterns would dump most of the fallout in the northern hemisphere. Google and Facebook would be gone because there are too many primary data centers in the northern hemisphere but Wikipedia might not even go down. Humanity on the historical level would notice a strange blip.

Not discounting the terrible loss of life (I'd be dead along with everyone I know and love) but lesswrong is generally concerned with existential risk, not whether global GDP will be X in 100 years.

> Google and Facebook would be gone

Oh horror

What we don't really understand is the lethality of the second and third order effects. People who can't be fed (because industry has collapsed) don't just sit and die peacefully. Foraging is unlikely to work, since our natural ecosystems are not large enough to support large-ish human populations and would soon be destroyed by overuse (damage to them from the actual nuclear war being beside the point). A huge immigration crisis in the rest of the world could have its own highly disastrous consequences.

Finally, I wonder how bad the effects on reproductive health would be from the various radiation effects be? Humans who had trouble reproducing, with a much degraded medical system might face further downstream problems from that. Same thing with animal species, which might cause more food troubles.

Point is, there is significant survival trouble just from a violent collapse of civilisation, that estimating the probability of human survival is fairly impossible. Finally, if humanity becomes so critically weakened, even (by today's standards) minor disasters might become extinction events.

At first I was thinking there is no historical precedence for the thing you are describing, but then again there was the fall of the Roman Empire succeeded by the medieval times. So hopefully that pattern does not repeat

> The nuclear winter model at its simplest: Nuclear detonations → Fires in cities → Firestorms in cities → Lofted black carbon into the upper atmosphere → black carbon persists in upper atmosphere, reflecting sunlight and causes massive cooling > > Each step is required in order for the effect to occur.

Why cities in particular? Are cities more flammable or more likely to produce the wrong kind of smoke than, say, a forest fire? (I'm assuming there exist at least some military targets in heavily forested areas.)

Also, is the nuclear blast itself a key component in the effect? For instance, does the mushroom cloud create an updraft larger than what you'd have with a regular forest fire?

Note: I wrote this post and cross-posted it to the EA Forum, and there are some good comments there discussing the longer-term risks of nuclear war that I didn't include in the original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mxKwP2PFtg8ABwzug/...

It may not wipe out human life, but it will severely disrupt the natural processes of human beings for a while, especially those who remain close to the nuclear zone.

This may be unconventional but if an exchange ever happens I predict there will be between 0 and 1 warhead detonated

The people tasked with the counterattack will like their predecessors when falsely convinced of an impending attack, fail to counterattack because their obligations to humanity are greater than they are to a nation.

A follow-up attack from the belligerent will be political suicide and there would be great political pressure from the belligerents own citizens and the global population at large to somehow disable or destroy any inflight warheads.

I thought I had read somewhere during the Norwegian rocket incident that US officials encouraged Russia to take necessary action on the rocket if they believed it to be an accidentally fired offensive warhead but I may be thinking of another time.

Anyways, despite the blustering of MAD and first strike and all the planning of how it would go down, I think the hard evidence of how humans have responded to close calls in the past 70 years points to zero - one detonations followed by global dismantling and abolition.

An interesting logical property about this prediction is either it's right or there will be no evidence it was ever made.

Can we get an "official" remark on what specifically causes the opinionated editorialization of some titles with a question mark? I know I'm not the only one who finds it off-putting.

Does there exist any scholarship that argues that nuclear war could cause human extinction, or is this just a refutation of a sort of folk knowledge that "obviously" nuclear war could lead to extinction? The author engages a bit with the scholarship surrounding the idea of nuclear winter, which is nice, but reference to an argument in favor of the possibility of extinction, it's tough for me as lay person to judge whether the author is refuting the best case for extinction, or just a straw man.

Straw man. Anyone who actually studies this for a living is well aware that nuclear war is very unlikely to lead to full extinction. But the popular impression is that nuclear war could lead to everybody dying. Partly this is because if you are Joe Average, the difference between everyone dying and you and all your friends and family dying is not very important.

> if you are Joe Average, the difference between everyone dying and you and all your friends and family dying is not very important.

I'm Joe Average. I don't want to die, but if I do, I'd like my family to survive. If they die too, I'd like my friends to survive. If they die too, I'd like people from my region/country to survive. If they die too, I'd like some humans to survive. If they die too, it would be nice if some primates or mammals or something warm blooded survived.

My ranking of how much I care about something is almost directly the same as my genetic similarity to it, which I suspect is no coincidence.

I believe the statement was more political than actual science. Let's not blow the world up ok? Radiation is bad. Let's just agree to keep some semblance of respect for human life.

Nice to know, but lets not test this theory out. Maybe the odds of human extinction from nuclear war isn't 100%, but the odds of human suffering from nuclear war is 100%.

Very often the problem doesn't seem to be the disaster itself, it's how unprepared we are to deal with it and the fact it's economically unfeasible. People can't just move to a healthy, habitable planet nearby because there is no such (known?) thing.

Think about how devastating nuclear war would be on our lifestyle, when things such as viruses and a higher frequency of cold and heat waves are already disrupting it.

More widespread homesteading would partially mitigate these kinds of disruptions. And make people more prepared in general.

To really stand a chance of killing everyone you need to contemplate much larger weapon designs - inevitably Edward Teller did just that with 1Gt and 10Gt designs:

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-big...

NB That's not a typo, I did mean gigaton

I'm not sure I agree with the arguments against this article. Obviously we want to avoid it as much as possible but it's still interesting from a philosophical point of view to know it will not be the extinction of all human life. For me it seems very likely there will be some nuclear conflict at some point in the next 10,000+ years, and it's nice to know some fragment of humanity will survive

Off topic: is there a reason why lesswrong.com needs an Intercom button? Shortly after opening the page, the button expanded and asking me "need help?". I understand how that might be desired for a SaaS landing page, but a blogging platform? What "help" can you possibly need while reading an article?

(LessWrong.com team lead here) It's actually really useful for getting bug reports for the site, and we have a number of authors who we help a lot with doing various custom HTML and javascript integrations for their posts, and having a live-chat option for that is quite useful.

I think the "Need help?" text is just the default text Intercom comes with. I should maybe look into seeing whether we can replace that, though not sure what other text would be better.

Agree it's a bit weird for a blogging platform, but it really drastically increased the number of bug reports we get, and a lot of our most active users really like it. We also sometimes get people who ping us about moderation questions, or other issues with the platform they have. They could technically do that via the PM system, or email, but experience has shown that having Intercom really quite drastically increases people's willingness to message us.

Thanks for explaining!

You're welcome! :)

I don’t think anyone ever thought human extinction would happen from a nuclear war.

But what will likely happen is a societal collapse.

Governments just cannot handle the scale of a thermonuclear detonation on multiple population centers.

The people in the epicenter of the detonation will be vaporized, God bless their souls, since they are the lucky ones. But the people on the fringe of the detonation will suffer from radioactive fallout, and will eventually succumb to diseases and leukemia.

And with MIRV ICBMs, a single missile can easily target multiple distant locations, population centers, and food production centers, to ensure that the enemy is thoroughly eliminated with extreme prejudice. Thus, the society and country, as you know it, will crumble apart.

Food, sanitation, refrigeration, anti-biotics, etc. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219173/

So many things we take for granted, would simply not exist.

>There simply aren't enough nuclear warheads to kill everyone directly with kinetic force,

This assumes nuclear warheads only and not a doomsday device. If Teller Ulam scales with additional hydrogen stages needed only, and not fissile ones beyond the primary, then a doomsday device is possible that does kinectic damage to the entire earth, wiping everyone out.

A smaller country that can't develop warheads and delivery systems could potentially none-the-less develop a doomsday device, and it may be rational for them to do so if they think they will otherwise be annihilated and they value others much less than themselves like practically every other nation state in history.

> This assumes nuclear warheads only and not a doomsday device. If Teller Ulam scales with additional hydrogen stages needed only, and not fissile ones beyond the primary, then a doomsday device is possible that does kinectic damage to the entire earth, wiping everyone out.

There is an upper limit on the power of a bomb. At some point the radiation pressure starts to blows away the new fuel faster than it can detonate.

However, the defense establishment has access to classified information and models that we civilians do not have, in addition to all the public material. I’m confident that nuclear war planners have thought deeply about the risks of climate change from nuclear war, even though I don’t know their conclusions or bureaucratic constraints.

This blinkered statement is near the conclusion of the piece.

It would be better placed near the start, so readers have a sense of the author's level of critical thinking.

Interesting article, I've heard argument that nuclear war could cause human extinction, but never thought about it twice. Once you put it like this, it's almost obvious that those claims are hugely exaggerated. Great exercise in critical thinking! Though it's of no practical use, since it's obvious that no financial, territorial or political gains would be enough to justify a nuclear war.

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" --Einstein (b. 1879)

Human extinction from nuclear war hinges on whether or not there would be a nuclear winter. I'm not convinced the article successfully refutes the possibility of a nuclear winter. The linchpin of this article is that the matter is under scientific debate, but I don't see any new evidence to support or refute the possibility of a nuclear winter being presented

Who are the people that actually claimed "that a full-scale nuclear war is likely to cause human extinction?" I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that. It would cause societal collapse, perhaps even an extinction of civilization, but not a literal extinction of our species.

I've heard a lot of people say this. Wikipedia has a decent summary of the history of this position: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#Origins_and_...

In several decades of seeing stray discussions online about nuclear war, including here on HN, I've yet to see a discussion where human extinction wasn't a commonly assumed outcome.

It's almost always thrown out as a matter-of-fact inevitability, it's assumed. It appeals to the self-hating cult of 'humans deserve it.' I'd wager the people that float that theory more often than not tend to hate humanity and are lusting for its destruction, so that appeals to them, they want it to happen and are projecting irrationally outward.

The IPPNW and PSR are the main organisations stating that human extinction is a possibility. e.g.

https://www.ippnw.org/statements/2006-helsinki-congress-decl...

I'm sure I've heard the idea that nuclear arsenals can kill us all a hundred times over, or similar. Obviously my half-remembering isn't evidence, but if other people had heard this sort of thing, it would be evidence of a popular idea, however wrong. Even allowing for the larger arsenals at the height of the cold war.

Today arsenals are so much smaller than during the Cold War. Both the US and the USSR had almost 70K warheads; today they have 1600 each. Reading about SIOP plans makes you realize how hard the US planned to hit the USSR; I have no doubts the Soviets had similar plans. Today, 3200 warheads can ruin your day; but 140K warheads (discounting the relatively small number of Chinese/French/UK warheads) would ruin all but the Southern Hemisphere.

The thing is 70,000 wouldn’t get launched because both sides would be targeting nuclear facilities in a first strike.

Ok, say 10% fails upon launch or fails to detonate. Now you're down to 63K per side. Say each side reserves 50% for targets of opportunity, they've each launched 31K warheads. Goodbye civilization.

The UN reports that there are currently 580 cities in the world with populations greater than 1M. Doesn't take many warheads or launchers to wipe those out.

There are very few things that will cause total extinction of homo sapiens, but quite a few things that will end human civilization as we know it. The Sentinelese may nevertheless persist.

> I have investigated this issue in depth and concluded

Well it is not deep enough. This kind of articles are detrimental trying to a reduce severity of nuclear war. There are opposite views http://www.grisanik.com/blog/nuclear-war-explained/

Basically each "deep enough" forgets something, and most importantly what I personally distaste is leaving room for "let's try it then, because hey maybe I am the one who will survive".

Someone said that humans are naturally so much optimistic that if scientists said there is 1% of chance to survive, 99% of the people would think they are in that 1%.

While it might be true that nuclear war will not end the human genome, it could set may communities back to the bronze age in a relatively short amount of time.

Which wouldn't matter much in the grand scheme of things - we'd get back to where we are (if we wanted to) faster than we did the last time around.

I would not try and I just hope we do not even talk about trying even 1 more atomic bomb. Just coward I suppose not to experiment with humanity.

Not even changing gene ... I am bad.

Always look at the bright side of life: not too severe nuclear winter lasting a few years will surely reverse the effects of the global warming.

No. Carbon dioxide will still be in the air when the aerosols settle.

The collapse of the global economy will limit the addition of more carbon dioxide though.

I really am tired of my tech career, and don't think I would mind trying to learn subsistence farming whilst trying to avoid radiation poisoning.

For more information, please consult "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson H. Kearny.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/094248701X

Also, FTA: "The Robock group’s models are probably overestimating the risk [of nuclear winter]." Citation needed, maybe?

Well the good news is that you can start right now and don't even have to deal with radiation poisoning.

PDF version is free online too. https://www.oism.org/nwss/ :)

The citation for "The Robock group’s models are probably overestimating the risk [of nuclear winter]." are the Reisner et al. articles I linked. My conclusion is just my opinion after reading the back and forth in the literature, but I encourage other people to go through it and come to their own conclusions!

Why are we entertaining this utterly wrong article? It is myopically naive on a very dangerous topic.

Maybe so people like you can point out why it is utterly wrong?

What if in the future your could make a nuclear bomb in your kitchen? Thats the part thats scary. It conceivable that technology will make destroying the planet trivial, where anyone disgruntled could do it. How long will the world last then ... duh duh duhhh

Perhaps - but life will truly suck for the survivors

To be honest, this article reads more like one of Randall Munroe's "what if?" posts than anything that should be taken seriously.

Is there any point in investigating the maximalist claim that a nuclear war would kill literally every person on Earth? Hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of deaths wouldn't be bad enough? How about the almost certain collapse of what we currently understand as "human civilization"?

What's the point of all the pedantry around calculating kinetic or radiation damage? Or the various scenarios for nuclear winter?

> The most likely outcome is that most people starve to death. Many would freeze too, but starvation is likely the greatest risk. Even in this model, it appears that in equatorial regions, some farming would still be possible, enough for some populations to survive. After a 10-15 years, agriculture in most of the world would be possible at reduced capacity.

Thank goodness, after a decade of starvation, the remaining population would be able to start growing food again :))

> There appear to be several interventions possible for reducing existential risk from nuclear war. At the policy level, a commitment from the largest nuclear powers to refrain from targeting the majority of cities would reduce risk of accidental omnicide.

The idea of a nuclear war that doesn't target cities seems, to my mind, completely implausible. Why would somebody bother to use weapons that can obliterate cities strictly on military targets? Isn't that simply overkill? Not to mention that a commitment from the largest nuclear powers to refrain from targeting the majority of cities would most likely be broken once nuclear weapons start being used. What would such a commitment even look like? We promise to only destroy Moscow and Beijing, you promise to only destroy New York and Los Angeles? Preposterous.

> Improving the maximum resilience capacity of human populations best positioned to survive a nuclear winter would also make humanity less vulnerable to nuclear winter, and could also protect against other existential threats.

I have never understood this line of reasoning. Should I be consoled by the fact that, even though billions might perish, somebody somewhere will manage to scrape by and survive the holocaust? Are we supposed to be so collectivist in thought as to disregard the obliteration of a significant part of our species, just because some other part of it might live on?

Not sure extinction would be worse than the amount of suffering living through a full scale nuclear war would entail.

The person who posted this went to the bother of creating an account specifically to do it, and modified the title to add a question mark, in order to exert editorial influence. That's dedication.

What about the Nuclear Winter effect? I would think going like 100 years without being able to grow food would cause everything but the heartiest life forms to die out including humans who are much harder to keep going than simple bacteria.

It's mentioned in the article: their point is basically that it's unlikely, and even if it happened some people somewhere would survive.

It would only take a couple years for the dust to fall/rain out of the sky, and not everywhere will experience as great a temperature drop.

The post discusses nuclear winter briefly, but I'll cover that in more detail here:

The theory of nuclear winter is predicated on a specific chain of events:

* The mass use of nuclear weapons causes massive firestorms in large cities.

* These firestorms pump soot in unprecedented amounts into the stratosphere.

* The stratospheric soot causes massive, persistent climatic cooling.

If any of these claims fail to be true, then the entire thesis breaks down. And there is some reason to doubt all of them, especially the hyperbolic versions of the hypothesis (e.g., "going like 100 years without being able to grow food").

Let me tackle just the last one. Volcanic eruptions are the most effective stratospheric soot pumps we know of: the eruptive columns of even smallish eruptions (like the 2018 summit explosions of Kilauea) routinely reach the stratosphere. In modern history, the most powerful eruption would be the 1815 eruption of Tambora, which is calculated to have erupted about 41 km³ of tephra. The result was a well-documented global cooling (the Year Without a Summer). Now ask yourself how likely it is for even several simultaneous nuclear explosions to inject that into the stratosphere. Now also consider just how much impact the eruption had in history: it doesn't merit a mention in many history books--a far, far cry from "100 years without being able to grow food".

This paper [1] looks at a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with 100 Hiroshima sized nukes on the most populated urban areas in the country. Taking into account the amount of combustible material in the target areas, they estimate 5 Tg of soot aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere.

They apply climate models to that and get a mean 1.8 C temperature reduction and 8% precipitation reduction for at least 5 years. Using state of the art crop models they estimate the food loss over that time, with the strongest effects in temperate regions of the US, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 years.

It's not an end of humanity scenario, but it seems it would be a lot worse than any past volcanic eruptions. A lot of people would go hungry, and not just in the poorest countries.

This particular scenario seems particularly worrisome because both India and Pakistan depend on Himalayan glaciers for a large part of their fresh water, and climate change is hitting those. India and Pakistan already hate each other, so it is not hard to imagine a fight breaking out over dwindling regional water supplies.

Here's an article about that paper that summarizes it well [2].

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/13/7071

[2] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-india-...

To be cynical, we're not far off from a scenario where a 1.8 C temperature reduction would simply mean getting back to normal temperature range to which our agriculture is well suited.

Extinction of the human race, maybe not BUT it would be the end of life on planet Earth as we know it. It would be a shame if extinction is not the outcome, any species _stupid_ enough to attempt to dominate its political and national 'ego' in such a manner deserves elimination from the gene pool of possible species choices.

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