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Comment by hdjjhhvvhga | Hacker News Reader

To everybody reading this. Maybe in the 50s or 60s it made sense when Russians had 50 nukes or so. Now they claim they have a few thousand. I believe 10% of these will nuke them during takeoff, based on the deplorable state of their equipment we see now. Maybe a few ICBMs will be shot "down" in the last moment but I'm not sure how much this will help. When the world around you dies, do you really want to survive? I would prefer to live in the city and quickly die with my friends rather than move 200 miles away from civilization and experience inevitable illness, famine, nuclear winter and painful death.

Also, I don't believe a nuclear war will happen because those who actually push the buttons proved in the past they are far more rational than their leaders.

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I'm with you in the "prefer instant annihilation" camp.

Here's all the places that a nuclear strike would hit: https://i0.wp.com/www.armenpogharian.com/wp-content/uploads/...

Looks like the only survival strategy is "live in the west, away from major cities and away from nuclear launch sites."

Neat map. It's easy to think "NYC, DC, SF will get hit, stick to a smaller city to improve your odds", but there are tons of worthwhile targets. However, this map is also very US-centric, and if Putin loses his mind, might he attack many NATO countries? Or would e.g. Spain and Greece be largely unscathed? Or maybe South America and Africa and Asia would mostly be intact.

Now, ~5k warheads is certainly enough to hit the top 10 cities in every country, which might cause chaos that we can't recover from, but I doubt they would be distributed that way.

> When the world around you dies, do you really want to survive?

Yes.

> I would prefer to live in the city and quickly die with my friends rather than move 200 miles away from civilization and experience inevitable illness, famine, nuclear winter and painful death.

I despise this attitude. Almost everyone who gets old dies painfully. Are you going to kill yourself at 45 to avoid aging?

And this idea that only life in a city is worth living -- what the hell? Of course life lived hand to mouth outside a city is worth living.

> I despise this attitude. Almost everyone who gets old dies painfully. Are you going to kill yourself at 45 to avoid aging?

FWIW I agree with the parent comment, and comparing "living in a barren nuclear winter wasteland" with "living past age 45 in the country" is a strawman and not really what the comment you replied to was talking about.

I've got my "nuclear war survival plan", and it involves a big fucking bag of weed, some super expensive wine, and having sex with the person I love until the nuclear fallout gets us.

Obviously I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but depending on the scope of a nuclear conflict I don't think it's irrational at all to decide on a comfortable end.

It's not a strawman (can we retire that term? Just make your argument), the parent wrote:

> I would prefer to live in the city and quickly die with my friends rather than move 200 miles away from civilization and experience inevitable illness, famine, nuclear winter and painful death.

Some of those things are virtually guaranteed (inevitable sickness, painful death). Aging, culimating in death, is everyone's own personal apocalypse.

We don't know what a "nuclear winter wasteland" looks like. It has never happened. That aside, you and the parent are the wife in The Road (who kills herself rather than face life post civilization). To me it's very obvious that life stripped of almost everything is still worth living. People who don't understand that are, sorry, shallow.

It is a strawman. Why would we retire a term that describes the exact logical fallacy you were/are making?

The original argument was essentially "I would prefer to die quickly than go through a nuclear holocaust". Your response was to put up a much weaker form of pain or suffering (i.e. living past 45 or in a rural area) so you could bat that down: "Are you going to kill yourself at 45 to avoid aging?"

That is literally the exact definition of a strawman argument.

It doesn't matter if it's 45 or 55 or 85, at some point you're going to suffer, and quite a lot. I mentioned 45 to head off most suffering (i.e. most of us are relatively healthy at 45).

Aging aside, there are millions of people alive today whose lives are worse than you and the original commenter's hypothetical lives following a nuclear holocaust. Are their lives not worth living?

As far as "strawman" goes I've never seen an internet argument improved by someone calling out "logical fallacies". There's a reason people disagree over things and it's worth thinking about why rather than posting some stupid gotcha.

>Aging aside, there are millions of people alive today whose lives are worse than you and the original commenter's hypothetical lives following a nuclear holocaust. Are their lives not worth living?

I don't think you need to establish the value of the lives of others to make your own self-determination, nevermind a nuclear wasteland being an altogether distinct frontier of suffering and survival than growing up in a slightly more uncomfortable place than middle class America; nevermind surviving such an environment as an actual elderly person

I think it's clearly relevant that lots of people live in conditions of terrible privation and still enjoy life and don't think of killing themselves. Your argument is that suffering is relative, which is true to some extent, but suffering is also absolute and people can adjust to new circumstances quickly.

"Barren nuclear winter wasteland" is not a likely outcome of even a major nuclear war.

WHat would you do, if you had (small) kids, murder them?

The apparent disregard of the risk of nuclear war that is evident in a lot of the internet commentary around the Ukraine war can only be worrying.

Many people are willing to at least declare in internet posts that they think the risk of a nuclear war is worth taking in order to better help the people of Ukraine.

Thankfully the people running countries are treating the issue more seriously. But it is still concerning that such a careless and foolish attitude is being aired. It is inarguable that there is more political pressure on leaders now to act rashly with regard to a topic that needs the most careful handling.

Check out this graphic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/t4hyik/oc_...

Russians had about as many warheads in the 60s as they do now. In the 50s they had twice as many as China does now.

You should read the Myths and Facts sections in chapter 1.

> inevitable illness, famine, nuclear winter

Each one of these myths are debunked in that section to an extent.

By mid cold war, RAND calculated that it will take 20 years for the US to reach full reconstruction to pre-war level in an even of a Total Nuclear War

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