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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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?

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.

"if central command is taken out"

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

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

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

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.

likely refers to successive preemptive strikes in this context

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