Those who witnessed Castle Bravo looked into Armageddon
medium.com
medium.com
"If Bravo had been detonated in Washington, D.C., instead of Bikini, Fields illustrated with a diagram, that lifetime dose in the Washington-Baltimore area would have been 5,000 roentgens; in Philadelphia, more than 1,000 roentgens; in New York City, more than 500, or enough to result in death for half the population if fully exposed to all the radiation delivered. This diagram was classified secret and received very little distribution beyond the Commissioners." [1]
Image reproduced here [2].
Thermonuclear bombs are really terrifying. If one goes off and you're in the fallout zone do not go outside for at least 2 weeks. If you survive the initial blast you have about 10 minutes to get inside where you must stay. If you're still outside and it's 'snowing' ash you're already dead. More tips and tricks in [3].
Though these days, they say it's likely that a single individual or small group can have even worse impact from a basement bioterror lab.
[1] Hewlett and Holl - Atoms for Peace and War around pg 181 (free pdf history book) https://www.energy.gov/management/downloads/hewlett-and-holl...
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/img/castle-bravo-if-on-dc.png
[3] Nuclear War Survival Skills (free pdf book) https://www.oism.org/nwss/
Are you sure? Even from this article - Pacific Islanders came out and even licked the "snow" curious what it is, yet only a single death is attributed to it. Shouldn't they all have died if it's as bad as you say?
But moreover, many of those people likely died due to complications down the road. The US government has done a poor job of accurately tracking the deaths of even US service members years after their exposure to radiation. You might not die right then, but you'll live a significantly abridged life.
> many of those people likely died due to complications down the road
Nitpick - with that interpretation of "already dead" I was "already dead" from the day I was born.
Or cancer 10 years down the road (unless you die of a car accident before that, or are treated with modern transplant/chemo therapies)
Meanwhile, the US performed unethical radiation experiments on its own citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
This one is particularly noteworthy:
> In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of Operation Plumbbob
> determined to have released enough radiation to have caused from 11,000 to 212,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer
> leading to between 1,100 and 21,000 deaths
Do you really need enemies when you have such a government looking out for your well being?
Governments (via their agents) of the 20th century killed more than 7x more people than were murdered by fellow civilians. This is not counting wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide#:~:text=After%20study....
It's difficult to differentiate between "government" and "business", particularly where the two entities are strongly interrelated, as with both the Nazi and Soviet states.
You've omitted the case of Britain, who killed off a quarter the population of a country, largely through business interests:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
Estimates of deaths in the business-operated slave trade run as high as 60 million, at a time when the total global population was 500m -- 1 billion (1/16th to 1/8 of today's population, very roughly 1/6 to 1/2 that of the WWI--WWII period). Recordkeeping was not especialy precise, as contrasted to the IBM-tallied slaughter of Jews by Nazi Germany.
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Reports/Slavedeathtoll/slaver...
https://besacenter.org/ibm-holocaust/
Discussions of who's to blame and fingering "government" gloss over far too much to be especially meaningful except in ideological debate.
Rummel himself described his figures as "little more than educated guesses."
-- Wikipedia, citing Rummel, Rudolph (2003) [1997]. "Statistics of Mexican Democide: Estimates, Calculations, and Sources". Statistic of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (hardback ed.). Charlottesville, Virginia: Center for National Security Law, School of Law, University of Virginia; Transaction Publishers, Rutgers University. ISBN 9783825840105. Retrieved August 31, 2021 – via Freedom, Democide, War at the University of Hawaii System.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Rummel
His numbers for China might also be revised downwards.
Keep in mind that this period involves war (WWII and the Chinese Communist Revolution), as well as famine (the Great Famine of 1959--61). The latter has estimates ranging from 15--55 million lives lost. It should be noted that famine was a frequent visitor to China over the previous century, with famines noted in 1810, 1811, 1846, 1849 1950--73, 1876--79, 1896--97, 1907, 1920--21, 1928--30, 1936--57, and 1942--43, prior to succession by the Communists. Most of those involved a million or more dead, several tens of millions. It might be more accurate to describe Communist China as having stopped the history of famine in the country.
To play devil's advocate some, it's not possible to know but.. how many millions of Americans would have been killed and/or subjugated if America had a timid and weak military in world war 2?
If we gave up our arms after world war 2, would the Soviet Union have tried to spread communism throughout the world and how many millions of Americans would have died as a result?
I think people are inherently tribal and conflict is inevitable. Having a strong, sometimes inept government that is mostly trying to do the right thing for their people seems to be a lot better to me than having a leader with absolute control like stalin who murdered millions intentionally.
None? If the idea is that the US would have been invaded by the Axis seems unlikely, as all of their goals were fairly localized to each of Germany, Italy, and Japan. I don't think the Quirin Gang confounds this speculation, but of course anything is possible when imagining alternate futures of the past. ;)
>I think people are inherently tribal and conflict is inevitable.
Yeah, apparently!
How was conquering Russia, Europe, and Africa a local goal? How was conquering all of the indo pacific a local goal?
You honestly think Hitler would have been content to keep Europe, Russia, and Africa forever? You don't think he would have wanted to conquer more? Appeasement and naivety didn't work too well for those that used it.
Power vacuums are not imaginary concepts. Regimes will expand to fill them.
LD50 for prompt exposure is 4-5 sieverts. 1 sievert of exposure translates to about a 1% lifetime cancer risk.
Now, if you're inhaling the ash that's another matter. At that point you're probably dead.
Castle Bravo had huge fallout for two reasons
1) It had natural uranium tamper that had very dirty reaction. Huge amount of radionuclides. Modern weapons use beryllium reflectors and gold.
2) It was ground burst in water. That white "snow" was coral. Neutron activaton of sodium in seawater makes things even worse.
Hydrogen bomb can be made cleaner than fission bomb. In fact bigger bomb, less fallout.
No, definitely not. It really depends strongly on who your opponent is and what their strategy might be. And on whether they stick to their pre-anounced strategy. And how many exchanges (first, second, third strike) you might get to.
Generally, there are two strategies that are usually distinguished in US literature for leading a strategic (i.e. big, as opposed to small, tactical) nuclear war: counter-force and counter-value.
Counter-value means that your nukes target what values the enemy has by destroying enemy cities and the population and goods/industry/infrastructure in those cities. Destroying a large, non-reinforced, "soft" target like a city with humans in it is more efficiently done by airburst, because the overpressure/temperature effect is weaker but spread over a far larger area. Weapons also don't need to be that accurate, if you miss downtown Manhattan by a kilometer, it won't matter much. Most smaller nuclear powers, those with a no-first-use doctrine and those without accurate fast delivery systems (i.e. modern ICBMs or SLBMs) do rely on a counter-value strategy. The goal there is usually something akin to France: They aim to be able to kill more of the enemy population than there are French to kill.
Counter-force means that your nukes target the enemy military infrastructure, most prominently ICBM silos and command infrastructure. Usually this strategy calls for a preventative first strike with very accurate weapons that can destroy heavily reinforced underground structures surrounded by possible anti-missile systems. Meaning you have to hit the target with multiple ground bursts, quickly and as accurately as possible. Since you have only one try at this, some of your warheads might be shot down and some might miss by a few hundred meters, causing the crater to not destroy that ICBM bunker enough, there will be quite a few warheads on the way to each single silo. Meaning that this supposedly "humane" strategy will produce enough fallout to still kill a lot of the enemies population. One example would be https://www.nukestrat.com/china/Book-173-196.pdf p184, where a US counter-force strike against a Chinese missile silo site out in the sticks would kill between 5 and 20 million Chinese just from fallout. And of course, if your counter-force strategy includes command bunkers near capital cities (ground burst), nuclear submarine bases near other harbors (ground/sea burst) or larger military airports (air burst), you are bombing much closer population centers, also with mostly ground bursts. Most prominent in claiming a counter-force strategy is the US.
So most probably, if your opponent is the US, GB or Russia, you'll receive a large number of ground bursts in the first strike. Only if there still were an exchange after that, would there be any significant number of air bursts.
Britain uses Trident SLBMs, so should be capable of such an attack. However, further research reveals similar capabilities of the French M51 SLBM.
All in all I wouldn't give too much on that list of stated or probable strategies anyways. An apparent strategy and the stated conviction to stick to it is necessary for deterrence. But I'm not so sure of what will happen if push comes to shove. I guess every nuclear weapons state has a number of war plans fitting the various possible opponents and strategies, and which one is picked strongly depends on the current mood of the ruler when pressing the red button.
The US, China and Russia have capital command bunkers that survive even ground penetrating nuclear strikes.
Gold has been proposed for radiological bombs due to production of 198Au, which decays with a halflife of 2.7 days and produces a 411 keV gamma photon. I understand the 5 MT W71 warhead contained a lot of gold, due to a desire to reduce fission product production to reduce radar interference (it was to be used in the Spartan ABM).
If it were to, half of Washington-Baltimore would've been blown to pieces, and burnt to the ground first.
No way. Looking at NUKEMAP right now, a 15 megaton surface burst like Bravo, in the center of Washington, wouldn't even deal "heavy blast damage" much past the National Cathedral. Beyond that, you're looking at "moderate" blast damage sufficient to destroy wooden homes afflicting the rest of the District proper; once you're out past Laurel or so (a decent halfway point between Washington and Baltimore) you're not even breaking windows anymore.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=15000&lat=38.895&lng...
This is why they made films to teach kids to duck and cover. The bombs weren't survivable at ground zero, but most kids wouldn't be at ground zero.
"Radioactive contamination of the experimental field with a radius of 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 mi) in the epicenter area was no more than 1 milliroentgen / hour, the testers appeared at the explosion site 2 hours later, radioactive contamination posed practically no danger to the test participants" [1].
The ideology at the time was that a larger blast was more important, since at the time nuclear weapons were still to be dropped by bombers (No ICBMs for another decade). You wanted the bomb to take out the target even if you couldn't quite reach it.
The Soviets estimated that using the same technique would have produced a yield of 100 Mt, but for testing, lead was used to limit the fallout to something they deemed manageable.
Ground bursts also increase the overall amount and concentration of fallout: First, with the explosion closer to ground, more neutrons can reach the ground and activate material there, producing radioactive isotopes from previously harmless earth. The "fireball" is a shell of expanding lower-density plasma which doesn't dampen neutrons as much as gas (especially water vapour) in non-plasma air. So that fireball touching ground produces more activated elements increasing overall fallout. Second, all newly created active elements and more fusion/fission products get bound to ground particles like dust, coral or water droplets if the explosion stirs up more of that. Those particles are larger and heavier, producing a more concentrated fallout closer to ground zero, whereas unbound products would be dispersed higher in the atmosphere without producing too much of a distinctive fallout pattern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
A theme for example in Nevil Shute's On the Beach. Where people in Australia spent their last days waiting for the cloud to eventually reach them.
"If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with Cobalt-Thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety-three years!"
It's a fantastic movie that I highly recommend to anybody that hasn't seen it yet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb#In_popular_culture
The idea being, produce a nuclear weapon that has a extreme radiation pulse during detonation but generates no long lived nuclides. Detonate over enemy territory, everyone dies from radiation sickness from the detonation, then you can move in and all the infrastructure is still in place.
Not much development ever took place, considering such a thing could only ever be an offensive/invasion weapon.
About ten years ago Chinese general stated that in a nuclear war they would use a curtain of ground bursts on the Western coast of the US (and presumably also the UK) to destroy the population.
There are semi-classified maps from the late 50s which show that most of the UK would have been turned into a desert in an old fashioned fission bomb war. (They were posted online about fifteen years ago. I downloaded them but lost them in a drive crash.)
It's also known strategy to target power reactors with ground bursts to spread even more fallout and kill even more people for longer.
Anyone suggesting "Nuclear war - not so bad actually" is delusional.
Tsar Bomba was very clean relative to the yield.
Even then, it release more radionucleonides than any bomb before it (airburst). They limited the yield to 50 megatons, because fallout in Europe would have been catastrophic from a bigger 100 mt bomb that was allowed by the design.
As it is, Tsar Bomba was air-dropped from a specially modified Tu-95 Bear, the Tu-95V, which had its engines, bomb bay, suspension and release mechanisms redesigned and fuel tanks and bomb bay doors removed to lighten it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Development_of_the_...
The bomb was dropped at 10,500 metres altitude and descended by parachute to 4000 metres before detonation, by which time the carrier aircraft had travelled 39 kilometres. Even so, when the shockwave from the bomb caught up with it the plane dropped a kilometre, although the pilots managed to recover. A US aircraft in the vicinity had its paint scorched.
And that was the ~50Mt version.
It's highly unlikely that a carrier aircraft could have survived a 100Mt bomb. Or that it could have reached targets in CONUS when flying from Warsaw Pact territory. Or that a parachute-retarded bomb gently descending towards a target in US airspace during a shooting war could have survived for several minutes without being blown apart by a surface to air missile (which would almost certainly have disrupted its ability to deliver a full, or even partial, explosion).
And as the weapon weighed 27,000kg the USSR would have had problems building an ICBM able to carry a re-entry shielded version (to avoid being shot down).
So: not a practical weapon, but it really gave Nikita Kruschev something to wave in JFK's face.
50 mt weapon and 100 mt weapon were the same design, same size. The yield was just tuned down with lead. Not enough range for the bomber to be useful.
If you read Sakharov's memoirs, the whole thing was a dog and pony show for international politics. No technical side was consulted before the decision was made and better proposals were turned down. There was no military use or scientific need to make it. When the US and Brits started testing in 1958, Khrushchev wanted Big Bomb to show off.
They still have a role for an EMP attack or even a thermal pulse attack. A gigaton range bomb in orbit will fry electronics to the horizon and light fires to the horizon.
Tsar Bomba was detonated at an altitude of 4Km, the shock wave prevented the fireball from reaching the ground and producing a crater, so it produced less fallout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
Ok..how different? What would Australia do?
It was a very different time.
>The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce issued a calendar for tourists, listing the scheduled times of the bomb detonations and the best places to view them. The Sky Room at the Desert Inn, offering a panoramic view of the Nevada horizon, was a favorite watch spot of tourists, as was nearby Mount Charleston. Many tourists packed "atomic box lunches" and had picnics as close to ground zero as the government restrictions would allow. On the eve of detonations, many Las Vegas businesses held "Dawn Bomb Parties." Beginning at midnight, guests would drink and sing until the flash of the bomb lit up the night sky.
>For twelve years, an average of one bomb every three weeks was detonated, at a total of 235 bombs. Flashes from the explosions were so powerful that they could reportedly be seen from as far away as Montana.
Not going to, I would've gone to see it.
"Starfish Prime" was detonated 250 miles into space where there is no atmospheric fallout, and it was a mere 1.4 megatons... Castle Bravo was detonated at sea level and was 15 megatons! It was completely insane. We are lucky they didn't accidentally make it even larger (they intended for it to be much smaller).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands#History
Unlike many of its Pacific island posessions, the Marshalls were not aquired under the Guano Islands Act (which I'd suspected when seeing the above comment):
A book by Cresson H. Kearny presents data showing that for the first few days after the explosion, the radiation dose rate is reduced by a factor of ten for every seven-fold increase in the number of hours since the explosion. He presents data showing that "it takes about seven times as long for the dose rate to decay from 1000 roentgens per hour (1000 R/hr) to 10 R/hr (48 hours) as to decay from 1000 R/hr to 100 R/hr (7 hours)."[41] This is a rule of thumb based on observed data, not a precise relation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#The_seven-ten_...
The 7x intervals are:
- 7^1 (7) hours: 1/10 initial radiation
- 7^2 (49) hours, about 2 days: 1/100
- 7^3 (343) hours, about 2 weeks: 1/1,000
- 7^4 (2401) hours, about 2 months: 1/10,000
- 7^5 (16,807) hours, about 2 years: 1/100,000
7^6 is about 15 years, 7^7 is about a century.
The empirical data is based on values to 7^4 (two months). See:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/336049/can-the-7...
I think it was that "Not what you think" Youtube channel, saying that today weapon systems are powerful enough that there is no amount of armor that you can put on a ship that would protect it on a direct hit (so ships are actually becoming less armored and more agile to prevent being hit).
Of course, both torpedos and antishipping missiles can carry nuclear warheads, which rather changes the equation. When a friend worked the Outer Air Battle problem back in the day, a projected worry was a regimental-sized Blackjack raid firing AS-16 diving hypersonic missiles with at least some fitted with 300 kt nuclear warheads (AS-16 was/is the Soviet equivalent to the SRAM). Combine that with missiles from Oscar II submarines and Backfire bombers and you've got a party.
"The crew suffered acute radiation syndrome (ARS) for a number of weeks after the Bravo test in March. During their ARS treatment, the crew was inadvertently infected with hepatitis through blood transfusions."
I'm still mind bogglingly confused at how badly the San Onofre nuclear power plant got butchered that I really think there was sabotage involved. It's hard to believe what happened to the place is all because of sheer stupidity.
You probably know this, but nuclear reactors, despite how well known various incidents are, are still among the safest, cleanest, and lowest carbon ways to make electricity we know [1]
Nuclear weapons don't last forever and need to be dismantled/replaced at some point, so dismantling them all doesn't add additional risk as long as it's done over a long enough period that they would have needed to be replaced anyway.
Have you any link to a good summary? The Wikipedia is interesting but doesn’t make us sound as malicious/scandalous as you suggest.
Maybe. What if it is like forest fire prevention? The dead timber accumulates, and thus when an uncontained fire breaks out, it is 1000s of times worse as a result.
Fully managed forests, sometimes have controlled burns now, to prevent this.
Are nukes like this? Maybe, for tension can build, and build, and then?
Note: I don't know an alternative.
Have we really left total war behind? Is it really, finally, to awful to contemplate? That would honestly be a huge step forward for humanity. It seems too good to trust. This isn't the terminal phase of history; 2,000 years from now this may be a blip.
From the Cuban Missile Crisis portion of Fog of War
"Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today."
I'm all for arms reduction that maintains strategic deterrence. Everyone knows that MAD is, well, mad -- but the real question is whether it is more or less mad than the alternatives, and the leading alternative is to trust a bunch of sovereign nations to act together against their best interest, and that's even more mad than MAD.
Russia detected something rising off the coast of Norway. The performance looked like an older US SLBM. It was heading towards Russia and north--not towards anything important but a viable trajectory for an EMP decapitation attack. What it really showed is how poor their systems were.
The bird was real. It really was an older US SLBM--repurposed as a scientific launcher. It was launched from an island off the coast of Norway--but the Russian systems weren't good enough to figure that out. They also weren't good enough to figure out it was really heading mostly north, basically following the coast. And their bureaucracy had lost the launch notification, probably related to the fact that it didn't have a time on it. The bird was prepped (a good reason to use a solid rocket, it can sit there on the pad for a long time) awaiting the conditions it was meant to study.
With technology open war became more and more destructive until it passed the threshold of there no longer being a point. Two modern nation states can easily entirely reduce each other to ash in a few hours, and not before the other side can do the same.
Precision weapons also make nukes unnecessary in large ways.
It’s not about tension, big wars are pointless suicide pacts.
The big world wars were about nations feeling powerful with new technology and wanting to build on that power, that’s not the case anymore. No nuclear powers are going to think they’re better off after a war.
There’s not tension building to explosion, war is obsolete between technologically advanced states. Proxy wars, civil wars, and border skirmishes are all that is left or will be until there is a major technological change that changes the cost/benefit of war.
Now Pakistan perhaps less so, but apparently the US believes it's at least secure. North Korea definitely less so, but their capabilities are comparatively very limited
The real threat from North Korean nuclear weapons (other than empowering North Korea geopolitically) is in proliferation. And that's probably one (albeit minor) reason everybody tends to look away when they skirt the embargo.
https://www.dw.com/en/pakistans-indirect-role-in-north-korea...
There is also evidence of Pakistan sharing nuclear weapons technology with Saudi Arabia.
The reality of modern world is that nuclear powers get to push around every other nation without consequences, whether overtly (like US getting away with invading two countries in the recent years) or covertly (proxy wars). But the world sees the use of nuclear weapons as qualitatively different from conventional ones, so having even one nuke you can threaten other countries with seems like an effective way to deter other powers from bullying you too hard.
I only see it as a deterrent for invasion. The US and South Korea will think twice before drone striking Kim if they know there could be a nuke in the air.
For any other diplomatic purpose the other party must surely just walk away when the "or we'll nuke you" argument comes out?
On the negotiation table, there's only so far one nation can push another before the other one starts considering military options. There's no sharp line here - economics and war are parts of the same spectrum. Usually, it's in the best interest of every party to stay on the "economics" side of the talks. Both parties having nukes makes both of them try harder.
IOW, if NK lobbed a nuke anywhere they would cease to exist. I'm pretty sure Mr. Kim understands that.
That's what they said after WW1, the "war to end all wars", yet we had another and (in my opinion) rather narrowly avoided a third between the '50s-'80s.
A foolish belief that no-one would dare start another large-scale war allows nations to indulge in grand posturing and ever closer brinkmanship which will inevitably to (surprise) another war.
Interestingly enough the US has been retrofitting their nuclear arsenal with better targeting systems, making it much more effective. The Russians don't like this, which is why you hear talk of hypersonic missiles, autonomous submersibles carrying nuclear warheads, etc.
Perhaps some kind of neutron-based weapon could be developed to counteract large numbers of incoming ICBMs in the upper atmosphere, or to destroy an enemy nuclear arsenal in place. There we concepts like this, and the US even built some for defense against ICBMs (The W66 warhead).
One slightly paradoxical thing with nukes is that anti-ICBM systems makes us less safe by making the strategic landscape less stable. If a hypothetical world power trusts their “shield” then they are incentivised to strike their enemies nuclear forces in the hopes that they destroy enough enemy missiles that even if they launch them all they can be reliably soaked up by the “shield”. And it in turn incentivises the other party to strike first or risk loosing their nuclear arsenal. That sucks.
On the other hand having a survivable second strike capability can act as a stabilizing force. Those countries who believe they have this know that their enemy knows that even if they sucker punch them they will suffer. That’s the “assured” part of the MAD doctrine.
So it is not really the number of nukes which makes things more or less stable but other factors. If you are interested in these questions, and want to listen to much better analysis than what I have presented here I can warmly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1C75RVHDMY&ab_channel=DonRi...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-02-ca-1276-s...
>‘STAR WARS’ BACKERS TO AIR TV AD
>BY JAY SHARBUTT, NOV. 2, 1985 12 AM PT, TIMES STAFF WRITER
>Last May, a scientists’ group took to TV in Washington to oppose the Reagan Administration’s “Star Wars” proposal for a space-based missile defense system. Now, a group supporting the Strategic Defense Initiative, as the concept is formally known, will make its case as did the scientists--with a TV commercial.
>The two opposing sides are the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Coalition for the Strategic Defense Initiative. The former contends that a space-based missile defense system can’t be perfected, would militarize space and increase the possibility of nuclear war. The latter argues that such a system would work and prevent nuclear war.
>Although light years apart in their beliefs, the two organizations have one thing in common: Their 30-second commercials each use the powerful emotional appeal of a child facing a nuclear holocaust.
[...]
>Its commercial, which had a local TV test run in Washington on Oct. 12, opens with a child’s stick-figure crayon drawing of a family and a house, with a large sun shining above.
>A little girl is heard saying that she had “asked my Daddy what this ‘Star Wars’ stuff is all about. He said that right now we can’t protect ourselves from nuclear weapons and that’s why the President wants to build a peace shield.
>“It would stop missiles in outer space so they couldn’t hit our house. Then nobody could win a war . . . and if nobody could win a war, there’s no reason to start one.”
>As she speaks, a dome is drawn over the house and family. Incoming missiles strike the shield and are destroyed. The dome turns into a rainbow. Frowning faces become smiles, and the girl concludes with: “My daddy’s smart. Support the peace shield.”
[...]
>He says the coalition’s ad has three aims--the first a contention that a defense-in-space system is feasible right now. Another is to drum up public support for congressional backing of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or the “peace shield” as he calls it.
>The group also wants to air its ad, he says, “to offset the anti-SDI propaganda, such as has come from the Union of Concerned Scientists with their 30-second thing, which says what SDI is about is blowing up little children.”
>He referred to the union’s TV effort last May. That $10,000 commercial showed a little boy watching the night sky, singing a snatch of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Suddenly, a star explodes like a nuclear blast and an announcer says: “Heavens are for wonder, not for wars. Stop ‘Star Wars.’ ”
[...]
i don't except that this number is greater than 0. i hope the cia and the kgb know.
Nuclear weapons have incredibly tight tolerances to be or remain viable, those tolerances degrade over time, so they require frequent maintenance in order to stay usable. Many have been "lost" over the last 70 years, sure, but few if any of them would actually still function without state-level expertise in maintaining them - the kind of capability which could just make new ones anyway.
Sure, they could still be used as fodder for "dirty bombs" but so could a lot of things and it's much less of a concern.
Dirty bombs basically just make a mess, they are not a realistic threat.
You can raise your children in relative peace because the social contract still holds. The fact that a neighbour you don't like hasn't walked into your house and shot everyone to death, has nothing to do with your goverment/military stockpiling nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons need to be dismantled or stored in neutral territory in case we encounter belligerent aliens.
Let's also not forget that social contract survives because of a legal system and people enforcing it with power overwhelming any individual trying to violate it. On an international stage, there's no such top-down enforcement (all nations are sovereign) - there's only mutual policing, and nuclear weapons are the overwhelming power.
My god, what an arrogant statement. Your faith in overwhelming force is misguided.
The social contract holds because an individual makes a choice to choose peace. That is all the law can do - give us options of consequence. The law can't stop anyone from slaughtering their neighbours or running a bus through a full schoolyard. Thats why despite the US being one of the best armed and equipped police states - school shootings, which are unheard of in most countries - have continued to exist and continue to be perpetrated by teenagers.
Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.
No, that's not all. The crucial missing ingredient here is the individual being able to assume others will make a peaceful choice too. The law offers incentives and disincentives that very strongly promote making peaceful choices - and it's because of that everyone gets to hold the belief that almost everyone else will be mostly peaceful.
(By "everyone" I of course mean "strangers" - laws and governments are not needed when communities are small and everyone personally knows everyone else. It's the scaling up that made formal governance necessary.)
> That is all the law can do - give us options of consequence.
Yes. The "consequence" part comes from the law being backed by a system of enforcement that wields overwhelming force.
> The law can't stop anyone from slaughtering their neighbours or running a bus through a full schoolyard.
It can't stop anyone who's bent on it, but it is an effective deterrent, and this is why, in fact, it does significantly reduce occurrence of such events in the population.
> Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.
Individual responsibility is a measure of how good you are at following incentive structures in your environment for longer-term benefit. It neither creates nor maintains those incentive structures.
Crimes like rape and sexual assault still happen in cases where everyone knows one another (90% of cases). Even when everyone involved is family! The law and government are still needed to give strength and redress to these victims. What recourse would they otherwise have?
People are mostly peaceful, but emphasis on the mostly. The mostly doesn’t go away when then community size decreases - people will still mostly be peaceful, but others sometimes won’t. And when they won’t, that’s what law and government are for.
No, you are the one who is misguided here for having any faith in personal responsibility. Humans are inherently greedy, and if left to their own devices without consequence they will absolutely attack their neighbors.
Of course, I'm arguing a tautology. And ignoring that while most animals in a social species are socially motivated, certainly some of them will 'cheat'.
Meanwhile, the other strong drive that both humans and other animal species share is competition between the groups. Over the course of history, humans started to form groups of hundreds, then thousands, and eventually millions of people. In such groups, the drive to subdivide and compete dominates - the history of social development is one of inventing social technologies - cultural and legal mechanisms that keep those large groups whole and defeat our competitive instincts.
Modern corporations contradict that claim.
Corporations are strongly structured internally. They usually have a "spine" of bog-standard hierarchical organization[0], and some form of secondary, graph-like, functional organization, different in every big company. Like e.g. (roughly real structure, but fictional names):
- Hierarchical spine: I currently work for team Awesome, under business unit BU1, under department D1; I report to manager Eve (Awesome), who reports to Fred (BU1), who reports to Greg (D1) who reports to Helen (CEO).
- Secondary organization: My team (Awesome) closely works with teams Invincible (BU1) and Jazzy (BU2), all with slightly different reporting chains.
There are dozens other teams in the corporation and several more BUs. I almost never interact with them directly. My social cooperation instinct covers my team and other teams in the "secondary organization" section. Separation of responsibilities and complex structure prevents my team from actively competing with other teams - we either cooperate with them, or don't know they exist.
This is how corporations scale. If you want to see a scaled-up system demonstrating competitive tendencies, that's... the market itself. And it needs the strong, top-down, hierarchical regulatory system to prevent that competition from immediately turning bloody[1].
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[0] - Which is the fundamental social technology we've invented that allowed us to scale the societies and build a civilization. It's why every large (> ~100) group of people you can find has some form of hierarchical governance.
[1] - As a social technology, the modern symbiosis between the market and governments is a marvel. It's by no means perfect, but the fact still is: we didn't just suppress our competitive tendencies while scaling societies up - we've harnessed them and put them to work, and it mostly turned out OK.
Having to distrust your business partners is not uniquely American in the slightest.
The only major exception is perhaps for certain limited sectors of the finance industry where derivatives contacts are understood to be a zero sum game. So everyone looks for clever ways to screw their trading partners. But European financial firms are just as ruthless as their American counterparts. In fact the Europeans have often been more willing to cross ethical lines.
Honestly, you're both wrong. It's obvious that overwhelming force doesn't work as a deterrent, at least in the context of the modern US, as you point out, and it's not great as a response. But as the other poster says, you need to be able to assume that most of the time, everyone else will choose peace, and in the modern US, that's not at all a safe assumption.
Both of you are ignoring two factors: culture, and material conditions. I'm only going to address material conditions, because while culture is important, there's not actually a lot you can do about it except through changing material conditions. In the modern US, people generally live in "atomized" conditions — you may know your neighbors, but you're not interdependent with them in any way. Most people don't really have any say in what their community is like, other than the individual act of voting once in a while. Most people work for a living, but don't really have any say in what their work life is like, because that's decided by managers, and people don't have much incentive to identify with their work or take pride in it, because the conditions of their work are decided by someone else, and the product of their work goes to someone else. People are encouraged to identify with their consumption choices, but in the end that just increases the framing of human social interactions as commodity exchanges.
In that context, it's not surprising that the social contract breaks down and that force is not terribly effective in enforcing it. If you want to change that, you have to change the underlying material conditions producing that alienation. Doing so is left as an exercise for the reader.
TL;DR: It no longer pays off. Before the industrialization, the way to improve your countries productivity was to acquire more land, more people, more resources - annex your neighbor. After the industrialization, that is no longer true. Any war against a power that is roughly approaching your power is likely to be net negative: You'll loose more of your economical improvements than you'll gain by annexing lands that are probably destroyed by war. It's what makes guerrilla warfare so powerful. The author also convincingly argues that the first and second world war were a product of people still stuck in the old, per-industrialization mindset while the economics and destructive power of post-industrialization applied.
(very selective) Quote:
Historically speaking, there is actually something to this. As Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization (2006), for most of human history, war ‘paid,’ at least for the elites who made decisions. In pre-industrial societies, returns to capital investment were very low. ( ...) For antiquity, the Roman Empire (...) one estimate, by Richard Saller, puts the total gains per capita at perhaps 25% over three centuries.
But returns to violent land acquisition were very, very high. In those same three centuries, the Romans probably increased the productive capacity of their empire by conquest 1,200% (...). Consequently, the ‘returns to warfare’ – if you won – were much higher than returns to peace. The largest and most prosperous states tended to become the largest and most prosperous states through lots of warfare and they tended to stay that way through even more of it.
As Gat notes, the industrial revolution changed this, breaking the agricultural energy economy. Suddenly it was possible, with steam power and machines, (...) to do work (...) – for the first time, societies could radically increase the amount of energy they could dispose of without expanding. Consequently – as we’ve seen – returns to infrastructure and other capital development suddenly became much higher. At the same time, these new industrial technologies made warfare much more destructive (...). Those armies were so destructive, they tended to destroy the sort of now-very-valuable mechanical infrastructure of these new industrial economies; they made the land they acquired less valuable by acquiring it. So even as what we might term ‘returns to capital’ were going wildly up, the costs of war were also increasing, which mean that ‘returns to warfare’ were going down for the first time in history.
It’s not clear exactly where the two lines cross, but it seems abundantly clear that for the most developed economies, this happened sometime before 1914 because it is almost impossible to argue that anything that could have possibly been won in the First World War could have ever – even on the cynical terms of the competitive militarism of the pre-industrial world – been worth the expenditure in blood and treasure.
. Underestimation of the cost of an early 20th C. war. Some glorious charges, you win, get home in time for dinner.
. A game theory problem in that once you start mobilizing you can't stop. Not starting the war is more dangerous than simply drawing down.
. The simple fun (for leadership) and profits in a war. Pushing pieces around a map is an enjoyable endeavor.
. Interlocking treaties with single points of failure.
etc.
Probably not at all, although it's hard to think/talk in a general fashion about such large systems.
The Axis Powers strike me as fighting a more reasonable war than (for instance) their WWI aggressor predecessors if you view it as simply a grab for land and resources. It's a thing that a Khanate or a Roman governor would understand and appreciate. I'd say that the actions of the Germans and Japanese would make perfect sense to the ruling class of most pre-modern states.
It's hard work to avoid Historian's Fallacy.
If they've traveled across the stars to find us, I suspect nukes ain't going to save the day.
If you replace inter-stellar with inter-continental, that might just be something that a (misguided) Aztec wise man would say when he met Cortez.
Another take at this is from Charles Stross in Singularity Sky [2], where a whole human fleet is again destroyed by aliens like a flick of a switch.
I know these two are science fiction, but like comment, a nuke won't save the day when aliens have been forced to live in the void for the travel time and have engines capable of taking them here.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168817-the-dark-forest
2. https://www.goodreads.com/series/189931-remembrance-of-earth...
3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81992.Singularity_Sky
It still blows my mind that it’s 53 years old.
Lifeforms able to travel the universe are unlikely to be vulnerable to our nuclear weapons in a significant way. They might just not care about us and eat our sun. Or they might infect our planet with their spores.
The idea that space-faring aliens would be at a comparable technological development to our species has no base. That we would have a chance to respond to an attack is even more remote. It just makes for a story we can respond to emotionally, which is why these stories are told. Hoarding nuclear weapons for for such an occasion would be like goat-sacrifices to the gods.
A nuke with no way to get it to an alien ship in space is irrelevant. The alien ship will have no problem throwing rocks at us. It's pretty hard to imagine some sort of stardrive that doesn't provide a practical kinetic bombardment capability.
About the closest to a weaponless drive would be the Bergenholm of the Lensman series--but even that was eventually used to throw planets.
The idea that nuclear war are mad but lets keep normal wars seems really insane to me.
Said South Africa...
Tribal dynamics are still a very real thing there, and it's not inconceivable that a leader might decide to slime those jerks across the way that have been rivals since well before colonists showed up.
You also have to remember why the apartheid government developed the nuclear/bio/chemical programs in the first place, and who they considered to be their enemies - looking at the range of the respective payload delivery platforms (or lack thereof) should give you a hint.
> Tribal dynamics are still a very real thing there[...]
...and the apartheid intelligence apparatus fanned those flames of division to the bitter end, by supporting, and providing training for the IFP militia[1] to put the ANC on the back foot.
> [...] it's not inconceivable that a leader might decide to slime those jerks across the way that have been rivals since well before colonists showed up.
The apartheid government didn't consider black people to be citizens of South Africa, instead, they were regarded as citizens of balkanized Bantustans which were supposedly sovereign enclaves, divided by tribe, and forcibly moved (by the apartheid government). I have great difficulty believing the same apartheid government was motivated to denuclearize in order to avoid inter-tribal strife.
They had zero interest in detonating a nuclear weapon just to kill black people, especially not on their own territory. RSA intelligence services certainly investigated things like race-specific diseases, but that's not what the nuke program was for.
https://books.google.com/books?id=PnfnDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT91&lpg=P...
It's remarkable how world-changing (and potentially world-ending) this technology is and how infrequently most of us think about it.
Based on this article, it sounds like the bomb scientists were using lithium deuteride fuel just as a solid form of deuterium, and didn't realize the lithium would breed tritium and fuel a more powerful reaction.
Now I'm wondering whether this unfortunate event was the seed for today's reactor designs.
This is a general explanation of what went wrong and its consequences, like a well done amateur documentary.
https://medium.com/insane-before-the-sun/3-nuked-sinking-the...
Loads perfectly, then after loading reloads and displays a 500 error and tells me to find something else to read on Medium :-]
It's one of the sad ironies of history that it's now virtually impossible to read a line like "We left Bikini and have wandered through the ocean for 32 years" without snickering, because sexy ladies amirite hurr durr.