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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear war seems like the most plausible end to humanity, yet popular culture hasn't thought about it much since the end of the cold war. It's not a part of the zeitgeist anymore.

Nuclear armed nations are back to increasing and modernizing stockpiles rather than diminishing them. New delivery mechanisms that are impossible to track and counter. Proliferation of nuclear weapons is becoming an issue too. Everybody's getting in on the party.

Nuclear weapons are a type of great filter if there ever was one.

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> It's not a part of the zeitgeist anymore.

More crucially, neither is preventing warfare. After WWII, the victors believed that another large war could destroy humanity - not necessarily because of nuclear weapons, but due to the incredible damage their WWII technology did, and considering future improvements. The UN and (the predecessor of) the EU were founded especially to prevent another major war.

Also, they knew, after WWI and WWII (and all the prior wars) that without serious effort and dedication, warfare can happen whether or not anyone really wants it.

One side clearly wanted WWII. Not sure about the first one.

I think WWI started because everyone involved felt backed into a corner.

And arguably WW2 started because Germany especially felt backed into a corner even harder than before.

Bioweapons are increasingly more likely to be the end of humanity. With fancier tools like CRISPR you're getting closer and closer to having one person in a basement making something that can propagate across the whole world. Nuclear weapons are inherently limited by the fact that you need huge institutions to generate and deliver large numbers of them, and without large numbers of them you can't destroy humanity because of the large size of the planet.

https://cco.ndu.edu/Portals/96/Documents/prism/prism_4-4/Str...

Although in the case of nuclear, all it takes is for someone to trigger a chain reaction. That could even be done with stolen material. (Or have I read too much Tom Clancy?)

what sort of chain reaction are you referring to?

likely refers to successive preemptive strikes in this context

Mutually Assured Destruction; if one country thinks the other country is nuking them, they will retaliate.

As we speak, there are submarines from multiple countries lying in wait with enough nukes to take out most of humanity; they are (were?) instructed to launch if central command is taken out, like a world-ending dead man's switch. These go on 3-6 month missions, their only limit being food for the crew, and they will survive all out nuclear war just to pop up and finish the job if needs be.

Honestly why would soldiers do such a thing if central command is out?

I think that fears of all countries using nuclear weapons on each other at the same time is frequently inflated with the fear governments will just become kill everyone for no reason or will behave madly.

There is plenty to fear even when we keep everybody rational, let's stick to that

Personally, I don't doubt that the crews would follow their training and orders.

Now I wouldn't do it, but nobody is going to let me near that kind of position.

I don't know. We came extremely close to nuclear war several times, and each time it was people refusing to obey their training and follow orders that has saved us.

Soviets had two notable examples: Submarine captain refusing to launch a nuclear torpedo despite clear orders to do so: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/you-and-a...

And then one man has saved us all by refusing the launch nuclear strike on US despite Soviet satellites confirming multiple launches from US heading to CCCP. He decided to wait for radar confirmation first despite everyone above him(and next to him) approving the counterstrike. If he followed his training we'd all be dead now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

Since when people and governments are guaranteed to behave rationally? We should account for every possibility.

After losing contact with Moscow for several days and being unable to detect civilian radio the captain of the B-59 wished to launch a nuclear strike.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_B-59

"if central command is taken out"

Or in the case of the UK, if Radio 4 Today programme goes off air....

Have we found diseases that could propagate across the world either (1) with virality greatly in excess of modern diseases, i.e. R0 >> omicron or (2) untreatable/curable and potentially latent for weeks to months?

A disease capable of coming close to ending civilization would need to have properties far beyond any disease observed so far. Either it needs to infect massive populations before we detect it, or it has to transmit over long distances (miles) despite e.g. moderate precautions like masking, air filtering. I think there's good reason to doubt such a pathogen could exist. The closest I could imagine would be an HIV-like immunodeficiency virus that can be transmitted via aerosol - but even that would have to cause disease much more severe than HIV without resistance among even .01% of the population.

Nuclear war seems like a plausible dramatic end. That or a big asteroid, or some nasty volcano stuff. But I feel like it's gonna be something with a long decline and no dramatic ending. Like we kill off some important ecosystem and it takes 20 years to realize and then 80-100 years to wind things up. Or like bacteria starts digesting copper or steeel and we can't do anything about it and there goes industry.

A nuclear war is unlikely to end humanity.

Indeed, if we're on the brink of a Venus style runaway hothouse, a nuclear war would be the better alternative. The reduction in population and thus carbon emission combined with the increased atmospheric dust would most likely arrest warming altogether, if not even undo some of the damage.

For the record no I'm not a psycho and I don't endorse nuclear war, I just doubt it would be an human extinction event.

Maybe not extinction, but it will likely destroy industrial civilization. And that may not be reversible since we’ve extracted many of the natural resources that can be reached without industrial technology.

I would say that exceptions are/were excellent Fallout games, especially the original and the sequel (the best in the series).

Something which Noam Chomsky is speaking about, almost exclusively right now, along with warnings about the environmental crisis.

They aren't, really. Even the nuclear winter is but a hypothesis that could very well turn out to be false.

Nowadays, mechanization and automation make large-scale nuclear first strikes pretty much pointless. Add to that the improvements in missile defense and the result is a different scenario. If we ever see nuclear weapons used in anger again it will probably take the form of artillery used against armored formations, fleets, and satellites.

This might turn a particular theater into a nuclear wasteland and throw global economy back into the 70s, but it wouldn't cause the kind of mass fires needed for nuclear winter.

>Nowadays, mechanization and automation make large-scale nuclear first strikes pretty much pointless. Add to that the improvements in missile defense and the result is a different scenario. If we ever see nuclear weapons used in anger again it will probably take the form of artillery used against armored formations, fleets, and satellites.

I don't think BMD has really improved enough in the last 40 years to make "limited nuclear war" (at least between the US and Russia or maybe China) a real possibility. I also can't find, in my 30 minutes of research, anything supporting the idea that the US/NATO has any small tactical nuclear devices hanging around anymore.

No? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing

From there on to B61 Mod 12. Tactical enough?

The thing is the US is trying to make first strike a feasible reality by ringing their enemies with missile defense systems, which are understood to be an offensive weapon, because they could plausibly be used to deny a counter strike from an enemy after a first strike, this giving the US impunity to attack.

>popular culture hasn't thought about it much since the end of the cold war

And thank God for that! Fear of nuclear war is a terrible scourge, and reduces quality of life. And I'm not convinced that the fear did anything to reduce risk - so it was all cost, and no benefit. Good riddance to "The Day After" style fear, and do not return!

It seems more likely these days that we'll have a bad nuclear accident, or a terrorist attack, than a world-ending event. TBH I'm fine with that, as it's nothing compared to the Cold War MAD doctrine.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have raised the alarm, as have other respected and Conservative voices. There is definitely a heightened risk right now, particularly because of the lack of respect of Russia.

I really can't do anything about it, so my fear is particularly useless.

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