Reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Depending on where we are in the news cycle, you might have anything from a mass shooting, to treatment of economic migrants, to Covid, to climate change, to cops shooting black people, to war, to illegal immigration, to terrorism, to white supremacy, to drugs, etc labeled as THE CRITICAL ISSUE WE MUST TACKLE FOR HUMANITY NOW.
We went from mass societal panic about Covid to mass societal panic about Ukraine basically without skipping a beat and few people notice how their energy was redirected so seamlessly. How many people gave a shit about past Russian incursions into Ukraine or Georgia for land? The rest of the world basically never gave a shit about that only because the media never told them that they had to care about that. It's absurd how much influence the media has over people who are only overly concerned about whether they maintain acceptable public opinions or not.
Otherwise, this is the same conflict escalation as russia's invasion of Georgia and annexation of crimea. It's not like Russia wasn't a nuclear power a few years ago
In the meantime there are many things in this world that have the potential to become very dangerous, but because people notice and do something about that, said terrible event doesn't happen.
It is only comparable to crying wolf if there is no wall or if you are going so slow that you could just calmy reduce the speed instead of alarming people — if you are actually in control of the vehicle. If you are not in a car, but on a huge ship the wall can be further out and the speed can be lower and suddenly crying wolf becomes a high paid job. Climate change is like a big oil tanker: if we want to stop in 30 years we need to hit the break now.
The nuclear crisis is different, because there is no clear defined path, but the risk of nuclear war is not zero.
Could it have to do with the fact that covid is the biggest pandemic in hundred years and that the UN Security Council had to call an emergency special session for the first time in 40 years because of Ukraine.
If these are not good reasons for "fear-porn", what do you think would be?
I don’t trust the media anymore on anything. Every article they print that i have deep knowledge about or insider information on is so wrong as to be malicious.
Read the news to get an idea of what is going on but any opinion they present and most facts are pure bullshit.
I do remember the covid fear being the collapse of the healthcare system due to under-resourced hospitals being stretched to thin from the rate of hospitalization of covid cases. I also know that people did die from being crowded out by covid patients.
To me the fear seemed mostly directed to local health infrastructure being in a position of crumbling down under the case load, which still holds true in many places. Can't speak for every country, but over here we're still one wave large enough away from overloading our ICUs. Each wave brought us extremely close to the cutoff.
I'm starting to distrust any person who claims to distrust the media over covid.
We know more than we ever have about the virus but we’re still pushing bullshit mandates. It’s over, time to move on.
Yes. A summer. Not two years.
You seem unable to comprehend and classify that there are existential threats and that you have to focus on them some but not too much.
...or climate change.
Now? Now my gut feeling is that climate change is mostly going to be OK — bad stuff will still happen, but I don’t expect catastrophic variation from what would’ve happened otherwise, because PV is rapidly growing in quantity (literally exponentially) and batteries are rapidly getting cheaper.
Plenty of other unsustainable things about our economy besides greenhouse gases of course.
But I’m more worried than I used to be about journalists and propagandists both separately A/B testing their ways to the most potent methods to effect specific emotional affects, at which point we all go to war because of something which despite being objectively stupid is also something which enough people feel is a fundamental truth of nature they’re willing to kill and to die for.
A more extreme version of https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
I am saying “I think those cuts are extremely likely to happen, and soon”.
An order of magnitude every 5 to 10 years is faster than I think you’re giving credit for.
I’m expecting the peak capacity of just PV to exceed world electricity demand this decade, and actual output (rain, night, being put on cars parked in shade) to exceed current global electricity demand early next decade as more stuff gets electrified.
I expect a slowdown in growth after that point, but I don’t have any intuition about when exactly.
And of course we need so much reduction that the long term goal is “everything everywhere in every sector except half the livestock methane” or “everything in really all sectors worldwide except for North Korea”; yet halving output doubles the time available to make the next step, so even there I am optimistic.
That said, there is plenty of tech being developed to improve global warming, so that rich mega corporation won't have to abandon their fancy offices and villas on the seaside.
The real ecological catastrophe will be plastic, the recycling scam (approved by governments and paid with oil money) really sold plastic to people and now we have microplastic everywhere - including our body.
Hopefully governments won't stifle innovation too much so that the private sector will come up with a tech solution.
They are your children so it is your responsibility to make sure they learn to separate panic porn and propaganda from believable prognoses on things like war, natural phenomena, changing climate and its ramifications and more. Get some books on the subject - Michael Shellenberger's "Apocalypse Never", Bjørn Lomborg's "False Alarm", Steven Koonin's "Unsettled" and read up on the facts and fictional narratives around the subject of the changing climate. If you are not in panic-mode they are far less likely to be pulled into the fable of a climate-induced eschaton. Teach them critical thinking skills - that is true critical thinking, not "critical theory" thinking which is actually the opposite of what I'm getting at. Help them on their way of navigating through the rapids of their formative years and they'll be stronger and more self-reliant on the other side.
Thought so.
You did, and you come up with this response? Read them again, but now without those ideologically-tainted glasses. Show me where they're totally off-base and I will listen.
By the way, if you had read them - which you have not - you would have known that none of these authors claim that the climate does not change, nor do they claim that human activity does not have any influence on climate change. What these authors - and many others - do not share is the conviction, nay, the sheer joy of the "climate apocalypse". This I have in common with them and with many others - but you... seem to differ?
Read those books, and others. Think for yourself. Don't just blindly follow the man with the sign "the world is coming to its end, repent!". Don't drink the Kool-Aid.
One of the big things to look at is track record: the reports by real scientists from the 1980s and 1990s have predictions which include the present and those numbers have been pretty accurate. For example, this is fully a decade old:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...
The people saying “no big deal, don't worry about it” have not had the same track record. More importantly, however, is being small-c conservative: if we get rid of high pollution fuel sources it'll definitely mean less profit for the people who fund those authors’ work but for most of us the effects will be better health and living conditions with manageably higher costs in a few areas and savings in others (buying an EV instead of a big ICE SUV is a TCO savings, for example, and ditching my natural gas for a modern heat-pump saved more summer AC than it costs in the winter).
In contrast, the approach of doing as little as as the fossil fuel industry wants is guaranteed to produce much greater costs and in many cases the random nature of those makes it much harder to mitigate, especially since a lot of people who primarily hear from deniers will resist any changes until it's their personal basement flooding.
Sounds like you need to apply a bit more of that "Critical thinking" you're going on about, as if your reading list is anything to go by, you're not really being all that "critical" but rather seeking out sources of information that confirms your existing biases.
I'm fairly sure our "energy footprint" is lower than yours so if anything I should call for you to "repent, sinner!". But I won't and I'll grant you your religion just as long as you grant me the freedom of it.
But many others won't, and the people that lived there will need somewhere else to live, and productivity resources in that area are gone. That's going to be a lot of refugees needing a place in the world that's already struggling to provide for all of us.
All this will make the world a lot more unstable politically and economically. And just look at the news today to see how well we're getting along before any of this really kicked in...
Between this and all the blatant manipulation on social networks, it's a necessity to take a break from all this madness before it sucks you into it.
every 2 weeks its some new crisis in the news. I try to avoid it because it just consumes my energy and im not contributing to helping anyway. Maybe im jaded but it feels like i should experience the life i have before me, instead of constantly being pulled one direction or another based on 2week news cycle.
lately though, i notice that people close to me are soliciting this info to me regardless of whether i ask or not. My whole family, the 2nd topic after "hello" is "X thing happened in the news isnt that crazy!?" and other folks get upset if i dont have an opinion about X thing.
Research shows that hate is the most virulent type of content that spreads on Twitter and there’s a whole cohort of Twitter employees and investors that have an interest in advancing that business. Same thing with Facebook.
There’s a tremendous amount of money to be made by our own industry to drum up this fear and anxiety, we can’t just blame it all on the anchors sitting behind the desks. The platforms are culpable as well.
More Americans have died from COVID than all American soldiers lost in combat in all military engagements combined in our history, and we like our wars. We surpassed that figure last summer, so we’re way past it at this point.
We’re also consciously considering the possibility of nuclear war again, which came very close to happening the last time we engaged with Russia.
What happens to that comparison if you look at years of life lost rather than deaths that coincided with a covid infection?
I don't know, but I have to assume it's not even close. Covid seemed (in the average case, of course there were exceptions) to push people who were near their life expectancy over the edge, whereas war takes young people with full healthy lives ahead of them and either kills or permanently damages them.
There are many odd thing with the numbers, eg. no-one died of the flu during covid because they were all counted as covid, not to mention the emergency measures (I know of at least 2 european countries where this happened) that allowed even just presumption of covid to be counted as covid deaths, without a proper autopsy or the financial incentive that some hospitals / state actors had in having a certain number of covid deaths in order to get compensation.
The age at which people died also matters. If covid just sped up the death of old people we lost significantly less years of life as a society than when young soldiers die.
Overall if we focused on improving cardiovascular diseases or traffic related deaths instead of scrambling making emergency vaccines for covid, I believe we would have saved more years of life as a whole.
Nuclear threats are just threats - if anyone actually fire nukes both sides would die.
They're great for making your enemy panic and don't bother you during invasions, though.
If anyone with clairvoyance predicted in 2018 that one million Americans would die from a contagious disease, while a third of the population would go on protesting anti-spread measures and wouldn't even let their kids vaccinated ...
... it would have been widely panned as unrealistic disaster porn aiming to undermine Americans' social trust.
Sometimes a disaster is actually a disaster.
You seem to be of the mind that you can somehow stop the spread of Covid, you can't. We have not been able to stop any respiratory virus from spreading EVER. Your vaccines will only limit the effects of the virus on you if you get it. It will in no way stop you from spreading it.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
The high-end of yearly flu deaths is in the low 50,000s, while the low-end is just over 10,000. COVID has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.
You're not just misinformed about vaccines, you're outright lying about numbers that can be easily Googled.
We're currently on the tail end of en engineered media panic about an epidemic of shoplifting.
That's just how things are going to be now, people are so cynical about all media that they don't believe anything that comes from anywhere other than their own personal fandoms. But their own fandoms are just injecting the same propaganda directly into their veins.
The thing that's been most astounding to me is that the most militant about Ukraine in the US seem to completely overlap with the most Democratic/Republican hyperpartisan types, and each characterize extreme concern about the sovereignty of Ukraine as something that their respective parties own, and identify lack of appropriate concern about the sovereignty of Ukraine with the opposite party; the Republicans are traitorous Trumpian Soviet spies who deserve execution or exile, and the Democrats are peacenik anti-interventionist cowards who are holding back the military.
I suspect that's an incidental observation - because the main thing that hyperpartisans and Ukraine hysterics have in common is extreme consumption of television news.
Which is why they're so much less concerned about Yemen (which has been pointed out a ton), and why they have no historical background on the situation (because you had to read to know about the constant attempts of NATO expansion to Ukraine and the obvious problems with that, it wasn't something you could just pick up while changing channels.) The analogies between NATO expansion to Ukraine and the Cuban Missile Crisis are lost on people who don't know why NATO exists, and who don't actually know about the Cuban Missile Crisis other than it had something to do with Cuba, missiles, and the Soviet Union.
This world is still the same world where decisions are made by royalty, and normal people die to help oligarchs jockey for relative position, but the degree to which murderous nationalistic/partisan rage can be stirred up in a plurality of the populace is intense, and instant.
Capitalism is great, but unrestrained pure profit motive capitalism in some sectors - like journalism - does not look like it’s in public interest. Companies like Twitter just serve up content that can rile people up, with no concern for what it’s leading to. All they care about is engagement.
GW Carver Poseidon C-3 missiles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmgY85tLdAY
Would you fire the missiles if you knew it had started? Make the world unlivable for Russian kids? Effectively there's no US anymore, do you still follow the orders?
I always thought if was fictional because a drill surely wouldn't require to actually shoot an uncooperative officer, and an unloaded/loaded with blanks gun would give the test away.
1.) The very slim chance of a very devastating incident
2.) The difficulties of storing burnt out fuel modules (this could include protecting them from dangerous too, as used modules could be used to create a dirty bomb)
3.) The economic problems with highly centralized power grids.
I am definitely not an expert though, and also I am not necessarily against nuclear, I just don't think that weapons of mass destruction are the main concern around nuclear power plants (although they are a part of it).
As with oil, coal or gas - externalities were not factored in and payed for by society. Just not with the price per kWh. While the gains were privatized.
So no. While somewhat cleaner nuclear power actually isn't a viable solution. Neither ecological nor economically from a society's standpoint.
Nuclear can be extremely cost effective. France is currently generating 70% of their power using nuclear and is significantly cheaper than US nuclear power seeing wholesale prices around 5 cents per kWh. US just has stupid expensive plants with 100% unique parts and old designs. This is why French consumers are paying 1/3 as much as Germans. In addition France is burning their waste in breeders.
You can blame most of the costs and problems of Nuclear in the US with an obsession over protecting private interests. Especially Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas companies. Meanwhile, nationalized energy companies in France are making us all look like idiots.
The problem with nuclear is that smart people sit around thinking up all the 1% ways that the plant could meltdown and making iterative changes to designs to mitigate them. Managers generally approve them since its better not to be the person making the call on something that caused a meltdown as long as the increase in the cost is marginal. The sum total of a lot of marginal increases in the cost though is a negative learning curve.
Solar and wind don't have this because nobody worries about a solar plant blowing up and contaminating the surrounding countryside and cost a trillion dollars to clean up, so it keeps getting cheaper.
There have been also some improvements on the research side but China was the largest effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrystalline_silicon#/media...
Economically viable nuclear power plants for the future will require liquid metal, liquid salt, or gas cooling. Likely these will also involve some innovation in fuel processing. Research on advanced nuclear energy was stopped almost completely in 1977 in response to racist nuclear proliferation fears.
Subsidies are provided to coal / natural gas in the same proportion of generation capacity within the US.
"Renewables" are subsidized at 10x other sources.
If you think this is unrealistic, it's currently happening in the US.
Maybe it will take a little longer but I’m optimistic it will not fail.
My big issues with nuclear fission are the powerful nuclear-capable government required to manage the reactors, the risk of catastrophic meltdown and the national security target reactors become. Fusion just needs duterium from seawater and can’t melt down.
You're saying at 40% of current energy needs they've entirely maxed out Germany's solar and wind potential? That there's no more acreage left for new panels and turbines?
So sure, renewables are great, and it's good that Germany is doing so much to reduce carbon emissions. Because that's the point of renewables: reducing carbon emissions. And if that's the point, why on earth would you shut down nuclear power plants and switch to burning lignite???
The claim upthread was "American and Europe deprioritized carbon energy". Germany has also grown green energy dramatically faster than they've reduced nuclear. It's a pity they didn't get a couple more years on it; I suspect that plays into Putin's timeline a bit.
If all countries with nuclear weapons agree to convert all warheads into nuclear fuel, we could power humanity, reduce CO2, and eliminate the threat of nuclear armageddon.
I don’t know how to “reduce the risk of nuclear war” other than giving each nuclear power what it wants - the freedom to exercise regional hegemony. This means the US letting Russia dominate Eurasia and reassemble the Soviet Union, and letting China dominate Asia.
The betrayal and suffering that would cause for hundreds of millions of humans from Taiwan and Japan to Lithuania and Romania is frankly unconscionable.
Allowing nuclear countries to threaten the use of nukes in order to successfully commit atrocities with conventional weapons is not distinguishable from "might makes right". The U.N. charter and Geneva Conventions were created to avoid those very things. Setting them aside, in particular without a replacement, does everything possible to put us on the path to another world war. Everything starts to unravel.
TL;DR appeasing current nuclear powers will greatly accelerate proliferation and paradoxically increase the risk of nuclear war. Quite the conundrum…
But I also see no plausible way at all to ever get rid of nuclear weapons. They are just too effective as a deterrent.
One requirement for MAD to work is two key properties of ICBMs:
* their launch is easily detectable * they take a long time to reach the target, long enough to respond with your own ICBMs
this incentivizes both sides to avoid a launch. It's like two people, each locked in a separate room, each with a button that will kill the other person. But when you push the button, the other person is notified, and they are not killed until after a 10-min countdown.
This gives them 10minutes to respond on spite. So if you push your button, consider yourself dead.
But what if the buttons were instantaneous, with no delay? Or what if the buttons did not trigger an alert in the other room?
Your only option for self-preservation is to push your button immediately.
Hyper glide entry nukes. If you can't detect them, and there's no warning, your only option is to strike first. That's the fear, anyway.
It seems strange, but because you can nuke me, and i can nuke you, we need to live peacefully for good or for worse.
I know that Ukraine is in a bad situation, but you think this would happen if Ukraine had nuclear power? Actually, the United States wanted Ukraine to give up on their nuclear weapons.
Actually because nations have the power to destroy humanity multiple times with their arsenal we live in a more peaceful world (although there are multiple wars, none of them compare to WW2 or WW1, there's a good video from Kurzgesagt on that topic.)
(we didn't)
Edit: just look it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
Nothing in that document obliges the US or UK to intervene. It obliges them to go to the Security Council (done; Russia vetoed). They've gone beyond their obligations by providing arms and sanctions.
Edit: More specifically, under the control of the Kremlin. Assuming they have properly implemented nuclear codes that are non-trivial to circumvent. Given the US's track record on that, I'd be nervous.
They could have, at the very least, used them as raw disasembled nuclear material for their own program, if they had wanted. As the recording industry discovered, once your stuff is in someone else's physical posession, it's hard to stop them from figuring out how it works.
It's referred to as the Stability-instability paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability%E2%80%93instability_...
Deterrence works both ways. If it really deters a military action against you, then perhaps you can be the aggressor and be safe from retaliation as long as you threaten your nukes.
I don't like either idea. Being civil to one another simply because the other party might respond with incredibly disproportionate violence is not a civilised way to live.
If I had a gun and you had a gun, I can kill you with said gun before you fire your weapon. That's not the case with nukes. With nukes, I see that you've fired yours, so I will fire mine. And due to the amount of nukes owned by the world, we know that said firing of all nukes will lead to the destruction of most if not all life on earth.
> Being civil to one another simply because the other party might respond with incredibly disproportionate violence is not a civilised way to live
Nature doesn't care about civility. Don't let the means get in the way of results. The world has been much more peaceful since the invention of nuclear weapons. In any case, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. We have no choice but to live with it.
Nuclear weapons are the same. It would be irresponsible to disarm fully while you have enemies that seek to take advantage of you.
Making appeals to what is "civilized" or not is just fluff, it means nothing. At one point in "civilized" society people would duel to the death over insults.
China and Persia old empires, Greek, Egypt, Roman Empire, The Muslim expansion. In America the Incas and Mayas. The Spanish Empire, then the French and British. Then the American Empire.
The only exception to that have been the Phoenicians, then Carthage, that started as pacific merchants, but they were forced into war by the Romans.
A reasonable actor wouldn't counter attack a first strike because annihilation of mankind is not an option.
If the options are: yield the planet over to some nuclear hardened species to chill out and recover for a few hundred thousand years while other novel (radiation hardened) lifeforms develop, or yield the planet over to the people who have demonstrated willingness to absolutely obliterate their enemies and will likely continue initiating mass extinction events far into the future… I certainly don’t think one option is 100% off the table.
Interestingly, those radiation hardened life forms might actually be better suited to be earth-seed than us — space is an unfriendly environment for human kind, making us ill suited to be the planet’s intergalactic ambassadors.
(Now I want to read some sci fi book where it turns out all the intergalactic species come from planets where the original intelligent inhabitants blew themselves to smithereens and created a nuclear winter, causing the next intelligence to develop a deep rooted desire for world peace and scientific exploration…)
If you are christian you believe mankind lives on in a happy afterlife event, nobody really dies. So no biggie if you shoot back.
If you are atheist, it's not clear why you should care about the continued existence of a species evil enough to murder your friends and family. Seeking justice for them makes more sense. At any rate it's not reasonable for an atheist to believe our species would live forever. We were going to eventually die anyway.
And justice is meaningless if no one is left.
People find meaning when they are alive. The person firing the missle- being alive- has as much as anyone else.
Vladimir Putin watched the movie with Oliver Stone. Putin said not much has changed, except the situation is more dangerous today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdxls8uC4DA
Discussing the Ukraine war the other day, I brought up the movie and learned that people have no idea what MAD is. It is possible that the only thing more insane about the MAD doctrine is that people living under it have no idea they do. What a world we live in!
I know it may look naive at first, but intelligence services are super advanced these days. If some country would try to develop one, we should know immediately.
Here's an existing worldwide ban that a bunch of countries already signed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_N...
But nuclear powers like United States, Russia, China, North Korea didn't sign it.
Now what? What's the game theory logic that would incentivize a country to disarm its nuclear weapons? Even if a country signs it, how do you monitor every underground missile silo or submarine in the ocean for compliance?
An equally powerful/cost effective weapon that left no radiation damage and no burning city afterwards even if there is still only a crater left.
That way you can have mutual destruction without destroying the rest of the world as collateral. It will be a technology replacement.
You will not loose any strategic capability, meaning you can make progress without the "timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment" thing that is never going to happen with the incentive structure as its now.
There is no incentive for weapons that can destroy the entire world if the entire world is not aligned, only for weapons that can destroy nations.
That said, this line of thinking makes me sick, while at the same time it seems impossible to me without something similar, you have to make them obsolete.
We need to talk about it more. With 9/11 (and some American attempts to establish nuclear 1st strike doctrine), it sort of fell off the radar. Noam Chomsky always mentions nuclear weapons as the biggest threat to humankind, along with global warming.
We need to emphasize the uselessness/cost of nuclear weapons for rational/moral actors and the risk of irrational actors taking control.
The two largest nuclear arsenals (Russian and American) have been steadily decreasing over past 30 years, but it could happen faster.
I doubt this will ever happen. But maybe in a post-Putin, more democratic (or subdued) Russia we could get there. Not sure how enforcement would work, but a global inspection organization combined with national intelligence capabilities might be sufficient to detect any significant build up. One can dream I guess.
Still safer for the world in general though.
I'm inclined to put this one on the "shrug and accept it" pile and focus on other things. It's not like we have a shortage of other problems to contend with.
Like present day North Korea and Iran? Intelligence services let us know that development is underway. But as GI Joe would remind us, knowing is only half the battle. Who enforces the ban, and who pries nukes out of US, Russia and China's cold dead hands without setting any of them off?
Because you will become the slave of some country that does not ban those?
I mean, it does not require a tremendous amount of imagination after you can see it for yourself in Ukraine.
>I know it may look naive at first. >If some country would try to develop one, we should know immediately.
I don't know what "we" means, the US of America? Certainly small countries have not such bast resources and intelligence as the US to control the rest of the world. But even the US is not omniscient, and if it were and could know everything it is not omnipotent to tell the other countries what to do.
No country is going to give up their nukes. Ukraine did exactly that yet here we are...
If that were true, how do you reconcile every Western intelligence agency being 100% wrong about the likelihood of Russia invading Ukraine?
https://mobile.twitter.com/rnaudbertrand/status/149849110790...
No. You seem to forget that many strategists also thought Russia wouldn't launch a full scale war against Ukraine.
Predicting the next war now prior to any such planning/moves is a silly expectation of people, even if they're experts.
Russia threatened Finland with invasion if they join NATO. Are the Russians actually going to invade Finland when the later joins NATO?
If Russia starts moving troops towards Finland, and intelligence agencies start getting indications from electronic and human intelligence, and the rhetoric starts ramping up, you start being able to make more educated predictions.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/25/us-intel-predicted-russias-i...
> For months, the White House made highly unusual releases of intelligence findings about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to attack Ukraine. Hoping to preempt an invasion, it released details of Russian troop buildups and warned repeatedly that a major assault was imminent.
> Critics of U.S. intelligence — including Russian officials who dismissed invasion allegations as fantasy — had been pointing to past failures like the false identification of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But Russia’s invasion so far has played out largely as the Biden administration said it would back in December, with nearly 200,000 troops striking from several sides of Ukraine.
Dec 4, 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/us/politics/russia-ukrain...
Dec 23, 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/us/politics/russia-ukrain...
Jan 19, 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/biden-putin-r...
Feb 11, 2022: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-ukraine-invasion-any-tim...
Down to the day of the invasion, it was as if the western intelligence services were two steps ahead throughout the build up and actual invasion, dispelling the Russian misinformation campaign in real time.
Considering the fact that most wars - stated or not - are about natural resources (and the control there of), if these war wefforts (i.e., lives, money, time, etc.) were channeled into productive things, there would be plenty to go around.
The USA alone has an annual DoD budget close to three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Even if that was cut in half, that frees up resources for good (e.g., nuclear fusion).
What funds? The US is what it is because it forces the world to buy dollars.
If a European country wants to buy gas from Saudi Arabia, the deal must be done is dollars.
Why? Because the US forces that to happen, by force.
The moment the US stops using military force outside their borders, the world does not need dollars anymore, and the US becomes way poorer, because they can not print dollars anymore.
Ron Paul (per End The Fed) would say that it's the unthrottled printing of dollars than enables the USA's warmongering.
The article states: "large columns of smoke and soot rise up [...] to the stratosphere. There it [...] blocks the sun [...] The nuclear winter [...] is expected to lead to temperature declines of 20 or even 30 degrees Celsius (60–86° F)"
So "smoke and soot" placed in the stratosphere lowers the earth's temperature, yet C02 in the atmosphere raises earth's temperature? Why?
Follow up naive question: can we strategically place smoke in the stratosphere to counter global warming? What are the consequences of that?
The sun is a very hot (~5500K) blackbody that emits radiation in a broad spectrum, but that spectrum peaks in the visible. Some of that light is incident on Earth and warms it up. Earth also emits its own blackbody radiation, but it's much cooler (~300K), so it emits much less power over all and its spectrum peaks somewhere in the long infrared. The system is in equilibrium when the sun has heated the Earth enough that the total energy radiated away from Earth is equal to the fraction of the sun's radiation that is absorbed by Earth.
Earth's atmosphere can change this equilibrium temperature by changing the fraction of incident energy that is absorbed by Earth, or changing its emissivity. Moreover, these changes can be wavelength dependent. Greenhouse gasses are gasses that are transparent in the visible spectrum but are reflective in the infrared, which allow in most of the sun's energy, but "trap" infrared energy that is being emitted by earth. Smoke and soot, by contrast, are very reflective in visible light (we can see them!) and so "block" much of the sun's energy from heating the Earth.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
Neal Stephenson's latest book "Termination Shock" portrays such a program, and emphasizes some of the complexities; global mitigations tend to have very local effects at times.
In theory, I suppose, it's possible. The reality is, humans too often over-estimate their understanding and then muck X or Y up even more. Given that we're talking about a scale encompassing the whole planet and the future there of...well, you see it's risky.
There are proposals to use this to reduce warming, of varying seriousness. It's seen as a rather extreme measure though: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190220-how-artificially...
That all said, the degree of cooling predicted by nuclear theorists was overstated—not that overstating the destructiveness of nuclear weapons is so bad: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-th...
Yeah, and even if it wasn't, the effects wouldn't be from nuclear weapons themselves, it would be from every single city burning down. Nuclear winter is pretty far down on the list of problems that a full blown nuclear war would cause.
It doesn't. The only study that seriously explored the possibility of nuclear winter and coined that term also showed that any cooling effects would be temporary and very likely insignificant to begin with.
E.g. complete reversion to normal within 3-5 years, and continuation of global warming.
Year without a summer: https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/mount...
I guess we need new ultimate defense against nuclear bombs. May be some intercepting drones which are cheap and impossible to avoid. That might render those nukes useless.
The major point made in the story is that putting people in space just changes the types of conflicts we have, it won't eliminate them.
The article doesn’t note perhaps the most common and likely way the world reduces that chance, appeasement. If not for the remarkable fight of the Ukrainians and logistical failures of Russia, the West would already have washed their hands of it after passing weak sanctions and token condemnation.
What do we do about it? In my view Russia is outside the U.N. charter and Geneva Convention, the multilateral system for peaceful resolution of disputes. And they should not profit at all until they leave every inch of Ukraine and pay restitution. Until they do that, they are out of the the global free trade system. Sanctions should be a complete and total. And it will take time to get there because the spigot can't be turned off over night. By extension I think it is necessary to completely cut off from global free trade any country that continues to to business with Russia.
Every single dollar I spend on a product in country A or B who then does business with Russia, is a resource in the pocket of Putin to drop bombs on Ukrainians today and Europe, or even America, tomorrow. His word is worth less than nothing. He has renegged on all of the most important international agreements of this time.
We have to stop looking for cheap oil and gas as the excuse for weakening the best thing the world has invented so far, however imperfect it is. And that's our obligations under the agreements signed after the last world wars. No amount of profit and comfort is worth that. This is lost on too many people who think it is. They think it's acceptable to come out on top and it will be just the peons who will suffer, and that's OK with them. Well FUCK those people.
The smaller the set and the greater the power the set holds, the higher the risk of bad outcomes. The set is composed from human beings, therefore mental health, extremist or nihilistic tendencies will negatively affect the outcomes. Nuclear war is an existentially threatening outcome, but only one of many whose likelihood is determined by a small group of (fragile) individuals.
Why do people here think that historically the personality cult of leadership became so prevalent? And why are the existential risks of power concentration still so accepted given the evidence we see right in front of us?
The idea of a no-fly zone is being bandied about. They wave away the nuclear concern while advocating shooting down Russian planes (killing the pilots) and destroying anti-aircraft weapons (killing the soldiers operating them) in Ukraine and just over the border in Belarus and Russia. People are asking if we should "do nothing" while a 40-mile column of troops and equipment is heading for Kyiv.
And by "people" I don't mean randos on Twitter or even media personalities. I mean sitting US Senators[1] and former NATO commanders[2].
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/republican-senator-urges-u-s-to-impose-no-fly-zone-over-ukraine/
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/27/breedlove-nato-commander-russia-ukraine-war/So, what does he think about our resolve to use nuclear weapons? MAD only works as a deterrent if everyone is convinced the other side will follow through. Nuclear weapons are such a terrible weapon, I personally believe some politicians would not have the courage (or insanity) to push the button when they must, if they think the game is already lost either way.
Maybe Putin thinks he can use nukes as long as they don't hit someone in NATO. I don't know what goes through his mind, but I do know that nuclear weapons are just about the one single thing humanity has ever created that is unambiguously evil. If they are ever used again (and I expect eventually they will be), I hope whomever lives through the experience has the courage to eliminate any remaining ones through whatever means necessary, and then institutes monitoring sufficient to prevent them ever being created again.
I will say it is the other way around. The US considered Russia "done" and expanded NATO without concern about Russia.
It was the US the one that broke the deal of preserving the status quo. That was extremely evident when the US started maneuvering to take Sevastopol from Russia(via Maidan coup d'etat supported by the US), something extremely dangerous as Russia could not let that happen as we have seen.
the only country to drop nukes on enemies is the US.
our fear of enemies using nukes has set us back half a century in energy.
why do we focus on hypotheticals when there’s no evidence for 80 years?
I think it's a by-definition thing at this point, that if a nuclear war occurs it will be due to irrational actors. The only rational thing to do with nukes is not use them.
> the only country to drop nukes on enemies is the US
True, the first time they were used in warfare was by the US in 1945. There's no reason to think that's the end of the list.
> our fear of enemies using nukes has set us back half a century in energy.
I don't understand this. What nuclear power plants have not been built, due to fears of thermonuclear weapons? I'm sure there are a few instances (i.e. Iran), but the vast majority of sluggish nuclear power plant building is due to local opposition for reasons both misguided and not.
> why do we focus on hypotheticals when there’s no evidence for 80 years?
Well, because there's been nothing to sample in the extremely short time-span of 80 years! 80 years isn't even a century. It's minuscule in terms of human history. We've gone longer than that between major pandemics, volcanic eruptions that cause a never-ending winter. Solar flares that destroy all electrical grids, etc.
Existential events don't happen every day ya know :)
> There's no reason to think that's the end of the list.
i agree with both. my point is rational/irrational actor has nothing to do with it. i think retaliation would be irrational but many would make a case otherwise. a case could be made for initiating conflict as well if weighing against hypothetical lives saved. that's frequently how ww2 usage is justified.
> What nuclear power plants have not been built, due to fears of thermonuclear weapons?
fair point. while i agree there is a distinction between weapons and energy, i think the branding applies to both. also, if we didn't fear nukes in the wrong hands, every country would have the tech for energy. wikipedia says 32 countries have nuclear power plants. i understand our fear, but i'd say it's also why nuclear power isn't ubiquitous.
> Well, because there's been nothing to sample in the extremely short time-span of 80 years!
absolutely. very short time. there were ample opportunities to use nukes in warfare even in that short time. my comments were focusing on the fact we use hypotheticals of irrational actors when the only evidence we have is counter. there's no telling what happens going forward.
There have been many times where we have come very close to global nuclear war and it had been adverted by chance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
Also take a look at past 'broken arrow' events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
One day we are going to roll a critical failure.
i'm in favor of getting rid of weapons. if nuclear power is ubiquitous, i don't know how that would be possible though.
Now, I'm much more "F** that S**" and would take a quick painless death over long drawn out misery.
Don't take things too seriously. Remember all the movies about the internet in the 1990s.
Would Australia/NZ/South Africa/Argentina etc. be livable ? After how long ?