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Comment by _vufv | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear weapons likely prevented >100M deaths in the last 50 years. Mutually Assured Destruction is the only reason we didn't have another hot world war since 1945.

If there were no nuclear weapons now, you'd have a full scale NATO/Russia war today and a US/China war in a few months.

Very ironically, Mahnattan Project heads should receive a few Nobel Peace prizes posthoumously.

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Imagine if the US had developed them one year earlier. Would we have used them against Germany rather than lose 100k people in a land invasion? Would the indiscriminate use of nuclear weapons become the norm? There are worse nations and leaders throughout history who would have destroyed the world if they had the same tech. Of course I'm speaking from an American bias.

I should add that I personally find the use of nuclear weapons against Japan unnecessary and immoral.

The US probably would have done something similar a year earlier. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a tech demo for the benefit of the Russians. It was certainly immoral (and racist) but saved many more foreign lives than it cost.

As bad as Hitler was, the Russians killed orders of magnitude more civilians in that war, and were ready to launch into the rest of Europe after Berlin fell.

Unless they changed tactics, they would have run scorched earth campaigns in Western Europe, and Hitler's concentration camps would just be a footnote in most history texts.

Edit: Also, if you haven't seen it, watch Grave of the Fireflies. The US did far worse things to Japan than nuking it. There's a reason the Japanese surrendered well before the nukes.

??? Japan surrendered after the nukes.

People make crazy claims like this all the time lol. They didn't surrender before the nukes or the US government would have been ravaged in the history books. It would have taken a huge invasion force of the USA in order to take Japan and at least 10s of thousands dead on both sides, if not hundreds of thousands. The US would have bombed the entire country into rubble instead of two cities.

US had already made Dresden-scale firestorms in, what, 25 cities IIRC. Military command didn't care. Just blockading the country would have forced a full surrender, soon, as lack of fuel would shut down industry.

Ultimately, using the atomic bombs was an attention-getting device. The attention of Russia was as important as of the Japanese generals and emperor.

The Japanese surrendered before the nukes. The US claimed the message was lost in transit.

A decade or so ago, the relevant stuff was declassified. We got the message. The president decided to go forward with the nukes anyway. We had approximately 1.5 bombs, without more on the way, so it was a massive bluff. Knowing Japan would fold immediately after the bombings was a huge advantage.

Edit: the communications I'm referring to were via closed diplomatic channels. The public surrender announcement and face saving came later.

That is not true by any history I've read about it, and I've read a lot. It would been widely known. It's a conspiracy. Do you have proof of this or just some hearsay from "a high level source" ? Lots of people claim this stuff but never present solid evidence or documents that are verifiable.

During one of the recent declassifications, '05? '15?, reputable national US news networks said the new documents proved the US knew Japan was attempting to surrender before the bomb was dropped.

This page is at an .edu, and is more ambiguous on the issue, saying it is an open question, and as of 2020 still being debated.

It seems to link to databases of primary sources:

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...

This very interesting! Pointing to a reliable source would be most welcome.

The overwhelming majority of things that happened are not widely known. That is necessarily how reality is.

You might be asking the wrong question. An equally valid question would be: If Russia didn’t have nukes, would it have so haphazardly invaded Ukraine?

In fact we have a comparative case study. In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraq at the time didn’t have nukes. The USA and other responded by promptly invading Iraq.

Now with this history in mind. Why wouldn’t NATO respond to Russian hostilities by sending their military to protect Ukrainian sovereignty if Russia didn’t have nukes. And with that in mind would Russia have engaged in this horror if it was sure of its futility. All this horrors could have been prevented if we had eliminated these weapons of terror while we had a chance.

NOTE: My main point with this exercise is to provide an alternate hypothetical situation which leads to the opposite results. This is to prove a point that you cannot for certain speculate that MAD has saved lives. An equally valid hypothetical can speculate that MAD actually costs lives.

Nuclear energy is also the best way to perform nuclear de-proliferation and has been by far the most successful means to date.[0]

> A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU (equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in Russia to nearly 15,000 tonnes tons of LEU (low enriched uranium) and sold to the US for use as fuel in American nuclear power plants. The program was the largest and most successful nuclear non-proliferation program to date.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

Mutually assured destruction is analogue to the martingale betting strategy. You can raise your chances of winning a small amount as close to 100% as you can afford by just risking everything if you lose.

I think it's kind of a reach to say that nuclear weapons saving lives through the deterrence of MAD can also be included in nuclear power saving lives. I think they can be relatively distinct.

For example there have been many instances where countries have specifically stopped at nuclear power, but not begin research or further refinement into creating nuclear weapons (because of possible sanctions, international backlash, etc). IIRC there are roughly 20ish countries that have nuclear power, but no nuclear weapons.

After WW2 Europe learned its lesson: another war would destroy the entire region, even with conventional arms. But nuclear weapons did not prevent this war.

The manner which the weapons were used certainly precludes them from a peace prize IMO

I don't understand how you can think that logic would work in Europe, but didn't work in the many parts of the world that went on to have full on wars WW2 style. Vietnam, Iran/Iraq, Many Arab/Israeli conflicts, etc, etc. What's special about Europe that would have made it immune?

The answer is profuse nuclear weapons that made any direct conflict in Europe unthinkable for either side. Ukraine demonstrates clearly that when conventional war is thinkable, it only takes one side to feel they have the upper hand to make it happen. Nukes are the only reason Russian tanks aren't already dipping their treads in the sea along the coast of the Baltic States, or at least trying to.

Nuclear weapons aren't protecting baltic states, they are protecting Russia's imperial ambitions. It's army performanc is so abysmall european powers alone could steamroll all of it's offensibe force without US getting involved

If the recent conflict has shown us anything, is that Russian military is overhyped, complacent and corrupt, and performs terribly in confrontation with much smaller, poorly eqipped, and also somehwat corrupt military.

Russians have always had trouble with their offensives. But I doubt anyone thinks a pan european army can just roll into russia. The country is big. Supply lines breaks down. The winter is terrible. The russians are tough as hell and fierce when defending.

> But I doubt anyone thinks a pan european army can just roll into russia

Actually, that's quite easy as history demonstrates though you can indeed also easily become overstretched. One reason the Russians have stockpiled nuclear weapons is that they do not want this to happen again! They do like to act tough but they know that without nukes they are at a huge disadvantage against the West.

I mean their country is fading away fast. Instead of trying to fix it, they're trying to bring in new population, talent, and resources by trying to attack and absorb Ukraine.

Oh yeah U am not advocating invasion of Russia, the logistics and moral situation will totally flip.

Why do you think the conflicts in Asia, the middle-east etc. happened? Because the nuclear superpowers are fighting their wars there. One could very well argue that nuclear powers have created such an imbalance that the nuclear powers could act towards other powers like they did, because they knew the others would never directly intervene because of the danger of a nuclear war.

Did the fact they were nuclear powers have any effect on their sponsorship of foreign conflicts? I don't see how it's relevant, they'd have done it anyway. Also the nuclear powers often did intervene directly, as China and the USA did in Korea, and the USA did in Vietnam and Iraq, and Russia and later the USA did in Afghanistan.

The Korean war would not have happened if China had been a nuclear power with significant perceived military power.

In Europe, the threat of the USSR did bring the West together but quite apart from that the big powers, especially France and Germany decided very consciously that they could not go on having more and more destructive wars every generation or so (remember that for France and Germany WWII is actually no. 3 since the first was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870).

So this is a specific context in Europe and specific "paradigm shift" born from that specific context. Indeed, Europe 'learned' that they could not continue to slaughter each others and that led to the EU today (so not just fear of nuclear weapons but decision to bury the hatchet and cooperate on friendly terms instead).

I don't think that there is a similar history anywhere else in the world.

I suspect the existence of nuclear weapons and e.g. France having them actually had a significant impact on them forming that realisation.

Not really. France got its first nukes in 1960 and what had happened in both world wars was enough to change everyone's perception nukes or no nukes: The same would had happened if nukes had not even existed.

Nukes are a guarantee against invasion and in the context for France and the Cold War especially aimed against the USSR. But they don't mean you need to be friendly and cooperate. France and Germany (and others in Europe) really made a decision quite irrespective of the existence of nukes to stop European self-destruction and to work peacefully together from then on.

> After WW2 Europe learned its lesson...

From what I gather, there were no lessons learned in Europe. Huge majority of current European leaders seem to be itching to enhance the current conflict even with nuclear weapons being a thing.

We didn't evolve since WW2. I have no doubts that we're still as partisan, as greedy, as vengeful, as self-righteous as our predecessors of the 20th century.

The problem I see is that war is a very natural element of civilization that regularly relives population stress. It's been a part of human society likely before we even left the trees.

It's simply not natural to go for many generations without a significant culling of your male population.

I think it's not so much that humans haven't evolved since WWII, but that society hasn't evolved any kind of new pressure release valve.

This is often said, but the data shows it is false. Even WWII's millions had hardly any effect on the population curve.

>From what I gather, there were no lessons learned in Europe.

The 14 years - since Georgia 2008 - of trying to appease a tyrant is the best proof that no one learned anything from Chamberlain debacle.

People in general do not understand how nuclear strategy works. Almost everyone just goes "nuclear weapons bad remove them pls" (especially in Germany). The ignorance and misunderstanding is almost comical.

Perhaps you might want to read Command and Control, a book about the terrifying history of near misses in terms of nuclear weapons. It may well be true that nuclear weapons have reduced hot wars. But it can be equally true that had a few small things gone a different way, the world could have been subjected to an even more horrible nuclear war. And this is still very much the situation.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Ill...

Also worth reading: Daniel Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine.

Ellsberg's job was nuclear strategy, and most of the classified documents he snuck out of his office were related to that. He published the Pentagon Papers first because he felt that if he started with the nuclear papers, nobody would even care about the Vietnam stuff.

He gave the nuclear papers to his brother, who hid them in a garbage bag on the edge of the town dump. Then a storm washed away that whole corner of the dump. They spent a year trying to find them and finally gave up. Ellsberg wrote that his wife considered that a miracle from God, because he got a pass on the Vietnam leak but would have certainly spent the rest of his life in prison for the rest.

Until recently he didn't talk about this stuff because he couldn't substantiate it, but now, enough has been declassified that he could back up his claims, which are horrific. US nuclear strategy in the '50s and '60s included the destruction of every city over 25K people in Russia and China in response to surprisingly minor conventional provocation, and acceptance of the death by radiation of everyone in Europe.

An especially startling point was that the authority to launch nukes was not just at the top. Theater commanders could do it on their own. According to Ellsberg that is still the case today.

At the cost of our ability to imagine a future, giving rise to the poverty called "postmodernism".

There is a whole world of thought surrounding the nuclear shadow that needs to be the context of any discussion on hypersonic weapons. ABM against those is automated warfare and the rise of the machines.

The situation on Earth is called Einstein's Prison, which is why antigravity is a matter of life or death for we who are stuck in this oubliette.

You mean it has prevented a hot war between the US and Russia, instead we had lots of substitute wars were mostly only brown people died (sarcasm!). Essentially nuclear weapons meant that all nuclear powers could act with impunity toward non-nuclear powers who were not directly aligned with any of the blocks. I mean Ukraine is like a prime exhibition, Putin would have likely never invaded if he didn't have nuclear weapons, and the west would have likely reacted much earlier.

The arguments are definitely not as straight-forward.

True, but has nothing to do with the article/tweet's topic?

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