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Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

It is about time US pledges no first use of nuclear weapons. China already did.

It's probably not the US, China, or Russia that we need to be most worried about. I'd be most worried about India and Pakistan.

They both heavily depend on Himalayan glaciers for fresh water, and that supply will be heavily affected by climate change if the world does not act. They could easily end up at war over water rights.

Neither of them has the really big nukes the big players have, but it turns out that you don't need big nukes to cause serious worldwide problems.

This paper [1], summarized in this article [2], looked at a scenario where India and Pakistan have a nuclear war involving 100 nukes of the size as the one used on Hiroshima (15 kiloton blast), directed at the most populated areas. That's about 1/3 of the total number of nukes those two countries have.

They estimated based on the amount of combustible material in the target areas that the resulting firestorms would put about 1.5 Tg of soot aerosol into the upper atmosphere. They then apply climate models to predict the effect of that.

The result is a 1.8 C temperature reduction and 8% precipitation reduction for several years, which would have a serious effect on food crops. They used state of the art crop models to estimate food loss over time. They found the strongest effects would be in temperate regions of the US, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 years.

It's not an end of humanity scenario at that point, but would result in widespread world hunger for a long time, and not just in the poor countries. That could trigger wars involving more of the world's nuclear powers, including ones with much bigger bombs.

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

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

How seriously can we take this pledge? It seems like nuking someone first is already an all-out move and pledges will be ignored.

They have (estimated) 1/10 the nuclear stockpile and limited delivery vehicles, it's mostly credible as second strike. That said, the launch hardware and command structure is mixed with the conventional rocket force so any conventional attack on Chinese rocketry is indistinguishable from first strike since no one can be certain whether attack is on conventional or nuclear assets. This ambiguity is by design. Doubt is when China moves towards nuclear parity.

About as seriously as anything in geopolitics - i.e. not at all, unless enforced by a credible threat from other countries. But it's a nice, zero-cost gesture.

It's a nice, zero-cost gesture US is unwilling to make.

>China already did.

lmao

This is sooooo naive.

So would believing the US would honor it. It doesn’t mean the declaration is entirely without value.

That pledge is as good as toilet paper. Don't be so naive. (And that's not because they're chinese. All governments would immediately disregard such pledges at the time it was deemed necessary to strike first)

Fact remains they have never deployed them. I am no fan of China, but Hey at least they say they won’t deploy as opposed to certain other countries (for eg. India’s immediate neighbor)

If America tried to invade China using conventional weapons, then I believe China wouldn't rule out responding with nukes. But yeah, I doubt they would use nukes in a small stakes dispute.

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