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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long we'll go without another nuclear explosion used in war. I think the armageddon scenario is quite unlikely, simply because so few people have access to the needed amount of nukes to pull it off. It's only a couple of states which can do it. One of those states even survived a regime change without those nukes being triggered. However, there has been a trend of smaller states obtaining nuclear weapon capabilities. The more states you have, the more likely it is that one of them is willing to use the bomb.

So I think rather talking about whether these small states will use nukes, we should talk about when this will happen. 30 years? 50? 100? 500?

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There is a few points that make it worrying but certainly not guaranteed.

MAD policy appears to be effectively over, or at least there is no longer any mention publicly, perhaps it is just assumed. While it can appear crazy, hence the name, it was a rather ingenious way to solve the problem, albeit we know now we have come dangerously close at times, at least we knew the risks and the lines that had to be crossed.

The next point and somewhat related is the change in nature of nuclear weapons. The variable ability of tactical nukes to change their explosive size, has resulted in a modern range of weapons that aren't as destructive as their elder brethren. It may seem like a good idea but the issue is it also opens the possibility of their more active use. A state may consider it acceptable. This could result in the reverting to an older policy of nuclear weapons. The MacArthur plans to use them in active combat, it becomes too easy to dial the Nuke down, target a military base and say "sure it's ok it's a legitimate military target".

That to me is the danger in the modern world. Attitudes, at least Western are still as a weapon of last resort but I can't predict the future and say that will always be the case or that other nations will share the same sentiment.

I should also say that nuclear weapons in dictatorships (more so than oligarchies like Soviet Union) is dangerous. Hopefully there will be those that can prevent its usage but dictatorships are fragile things. A dictator may consider their removal an existential threat.

This hasn't born out in practice. Dictators want to live - that's why they're dictators. They ubiquitously loot their countries widely enough to be able to retire to safer waters but don't.

Nuclear weapons in the modern world are useful deterrants, and that's it: a dictator with nuclear weapons has no external enemies they could consider targeting without guaranteeing total annihilation in response.

The one exception here is that using a nuclear weapon on your own country and people might be a useful exercise of power...but even then, it's abundantly clear that the most likely outcome is still total annihilation - the world won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes against targets in it's own borders much either.

That's very true, I'm usually careful not to fall into the assumption of the 'mad man' since it's usually just an illusion to appear dangerous.

> the world won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes against targets in it's own borders much either.

Why do you think so? Famines seem to work just fine within borders.

Famines don't blow fallout into the air, or have indistinguishable targets when a ballistic launch is detected.

> I should also say that nuclear weapons in dictatorships (more so than oligarchies like Soviet Union) is dangerous.

I'd argue that nuclear weapons are no less safe in representative democracies. The only country to use nuclear weapons against another nation was a representative democracy. The only country to use nuclear weapons against another nation multiple times was a representative democracy. The only country to use nuclear weapons against civilian targets was a representative democracy.

>albeit we know now we have come dangerously close at times

Perhaps accidentally stepping over the line is the most likely use scenario.

The W54 [1] was introduced in 1961, low-yield nukes are not all that new.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54

> MAD policy

MAD is still going strong. It's not military based, but economical.

It's the reason why theories about intentional release of COVID-19 are bunk.

China is worse off than it would have been without the virus.

Same goes for nukes. If Xi or Putin decide to nuke the US , people will assault their palaces in 3-6 months for food and water. Even if the US somehow fails to respond.

The global economy is interconnected to a degree that makes it impossible for a leader to order a nuclear attack and not have his own people remove him violently

> China is worse off than it would have been without the virus.

Only if you measure progress in economic terms. Nothing I've seen contradicts my belief that they are now geopolitically better off than before the pandemic.

Xi (and every leader for that matter) chances to stay in power are intrinsically linked to one metric:

Quality of life of the population

If you leave quality of life on the table because of geopolitical games you are shooting yourselves in the foot.

Even during massive state sponsored hate campaigns (such as the one promoted by Hitler against the Jews) the population spends just a bunch of minutes per day actually fuming and hating...the rest of the 24 hrs they live their lives.

Quality of life is a much more potent motivator to support the leader/party than hatred.

That's why any sane country and leader would never attack an economically important country intentionally.

Violent wars are relegated to Africa and the economically unimportant areas of the Middle East such as Yemen. With some small outbreaks here and there in ethnically hot areas such as Ukraine

The nightmare-inducing 1984 film "Threads" portrays a nuclear holocaust that begins with exactly these kind of small tactical nukes. <Spoilers>The nuclear conflict begins with the USSR using a nuclear-tipped SAM missile to wipe out a US bomber squadron. The US retaliates with a tactical nuke to wipe out a Russian base. After that, things get ugly fast.</Spoilers>

We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink.

Exponential tech and social peace of a basically unaltered species do not go well together. Atomic capabilities are basically just one of the thousands of facets of this problem.

Imagine air-borne-electric taxis being prevalent in a future city. A 9/11 event might just look like a hack into traffic control and rerouting a thousand flying batteries to smash into buildings. With great power, comes great incapability for responsibility.

>We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink.

I wonder if there isn't a massive difference of likelihood between remote (IT) and physically deployed terrorism. For example, it may be easy to mess with smart cars by tampering with electronic billboards or leaving devices by the road to "fake out" cameras. But it's always been easy to leave dangerous things on a hidden part of a road (over a hill, around a sharp turn). It doesn't happen because very few people want to hurt random people, and those that might do it impulsively have plenty of time to rethink while going to the location, waiting for a chance, and then placing the trap. So I'm not worried the future will have more location-based terrorism or dangerous pranks. Even biological.

I'm worried about easy and remote terrorism. Where people don't have to see or even think about the victims, and there's little time for reconsideration between planning and acting.

Needs citation: I wonder if the need to be sneaky in a location is itself a guard rail. It requires the would-be terrorist to imagine how other people might catch them and react, which maybe triggers the social part of our nature. And maybe it only works if they imagine people being present and with faces, instead of disembodied actors on a network.

Everyone could craft their own bombs at home for a century, and have them detonated remotely for decades. Very few actually did it.

Its much more complicated and dangerous than you seem to imagine though. There all all kinds of ways nuclear weapons could still be used (including accidentally), and a lot more instability there (Samson option from a non NPT signing Israel, who by the way, used a Hollywood mogul with ties to Epstein to steal timing devices for use in manufacture, or what about an inceasingly unstable Pakistan, etc)

These days the threat model is broken because its preciously not needed to be a nation state to develops some major biological/chemical/drone etc attack with new technologies that on the battlefield would be called force multipliers.

So for those of you who also care about surveillance, I try to explain this is part of the reason for its increases... now when the threat model has evolved but you havent caught up, the rational response is (not saying right, but it makes logical sense on the surface to MICCIMAC) to surveil everything.

I have a great book on the post nuclear world I keep picking up to reread sections of that talks about the political transitions that will happen because of this that is worth a look: "The Shield of Achilles" tldr - corporations are going to take over the gaps left by increasingly ineffective government.

Gain of function research is a lot cheaper than nuclear weapons. It also doesn't radiologically pollute the world, can, theoretically, be genetically tailored, and can even be denied. These factors will make it the preferred means of waging world war scale war in the future if it's not already being used for that presently.

Minor point, not brought up by other posters.

The armageddon scenario might be much easier to trigger than von Neumann believed.

Even 'just a few' 'small' nukes could kick up enough dust to the stratosphere to severely disrupt sunlight and weather, where 'severely disrupt' means (probable) total global social collapse.

We have detonated 2000 bombs in testing. So "just a few small nukes" is not enough to start any atomic winter.

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

But not over forests or cities - which burn.

We have tested that also. During 1945 we burned down 69 cites and killed 800 000 in Japan. The two small nukes was only 5% of the smoke.

The result was at most an cooling of the global temperature of 0.1-0.2 Celsius. But the "multiple uncertainties mean we cannot say for sure".

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-did-bombing-during-se...

So we need about 5-10 times larger bombings when ww2 to cool the global temperature with one degree. But we have increased the global temperature with one degree thanks to global warming. So you need at least 10-20 times larger bombings then ww2 to get a tiny atomic winter. And probably a lot larger to get any catastrophic cooling.

Well we’ve done 2 over cities closely spaced with each other and also following a firebombing campaign that burned a lot more cities. If a burning city or forest was all that was required for a nuclear winter we’d have had one long ago. Forests burn without the aid of nuclear weapons.

To get to nuclear winter levels of ash and dust you probably need dozens to hundreds of detonations and burning cities.

I suggest you take a look at "Climate Impact of a Regional Nuclear Weapons Exchange: An Improved Assessment Based On Detailed Source Calculations" [1] or similar papers. Scientists have run nuclear bomb simulations (and these codes are rather good), used them as input to fire simulations (well validated through forest fires) and then done climate models and radiation (in the sense of "light") transport calculations of the atmosphere. The result is "fucks with the polar regions, but humanity is going to be fine".

[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/2017...

Even if you assign a low probability to an Armageddon, why you assume that a more "tactic" explosion will come from a small state instead of the states that have the vast majority of weapons in the planet?

Besides states, an intresting question is how soon it'll become cheap enough for underground orgs or religious fanatics to do it privately.

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