Hacker News Reader

Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

We have lost like a dozen nukes over the years - rhey are on ocean floor or in a glacier or totally unaccounted for. Tactical weapons are horrible, they are not kept safely in a secure silo, they are deployed, moved, they travel, they are near the front line and are more likely to start WW3.

"That never been the case, even at the peak arsenal levels. USSR, and USA bombing each other into the iron age? Yes, but not much more."

I was also surprised to learn that directly killing every person in a country with nukes is impossible.

However, Nuclear Winter might finish off most or all survivors - models predict massive fires triggered by nuclear war, soot in the upper atmosphere leading to major temperature drops and widespread famine. Surviving that after all infrastructure and industry has been obliterated, and with widespread radioactive fallout...

Suffice to say that I agree with OP's overall point, we have the doomsday machine.

View on HN

> We have lost like a dozen nukes over the years - rhey are on ocean floor or in a glacier or totally unaccounted for. Tactical weapons are horrible, they are not kept safely in a secure silo, they are deployed, moved, they travel, they are near the front line and are more likely to start WW3.

Makes me think that future proliferation of them is almost guaranteed, esp if a belligerents goals move away from trying to cause mass destruction in state-state way (doubly so as knowledge become more widespread, and cheaper to gather the materials for home synthesis), but effective deterrence in a individual trying to assert its sovereignty against any given nation/city state (like "hey, if you stop me, the dead-man switch on this mini thermo nuke will take out an area the size of an small/large airport and irradiate it for thousands of years")

"effective deterrence in a individual trying to assert its sovereignty against any given nation/city state (like "hey, if you stop me, the dead-man switch on this mini thermo nuke will take out an area the size of an small/large airport and irradiate it for thousands of years")"

You could do something similar with a car bomb but we've never heard of it happening. I don't think it's the lack of destructive power, the concept itself doesn't make sence.

As individual you rely on the rest of society to buy from them food and shelter.

What if two such people come into conflict over land, do they threaten each other? Are you gonna blow up your family alpng with you?

> You could do something similar with a car bomb but we've never heard of it happening. I don't think it's the lack of destructive power, the concept itself doesn't make sence.

Not yet at least wrt radiation fallout, the AT&T bomb[0] had destructive power, but they could have done more with a bit more planning…

> As individual you rely on the rest of society to buy from them food and shelter.

No doubt this is true, but in the modern age, less than 1% of the people are farmers (and declining) and even things like shelter can be 3d printed (or created out of haphazard assembling of what can be gathered in "nature" if you look at shanty towns in 3rd world countries or tent cities in 1st world ones).

> What if two such people come into conflict over land, do they threaten each other? Are you gonna blow up your family alpng with you?

In the age of metadata drone strikes, this arguably already happens wrt the collateral damage…

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nashville_bombing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com