Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons | Hacker News Reader

Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons

nytimes.com

105 pointslxm136 comments

This Cautionary Tales podcast episode talks about him [0].

Both were invented in the service of DuPont. CFC at least helped making refrigeration safer and helped getting it to the masses. Leaded gasoline on the other hand was always known as a bad idea.

In both cases though, DuPont fought back hard to prevent bans of these solutions. They rather kill the planet than their profits.

Suitably enough he killed himself with another one of his inventions that used pulleys to overcome mobility issues due to his Polio infection and helped him get out of bed. I guess health and safety was really not his thing.

[0] https://timharford.com/2022/11/cautionary-tales-the-inventor...

Polio was absolutely terrible for those who had it. I wouldn’t blame him for having it. Or for ending it. However, for other reasons, I agree with you.

http://acshist.scs.illinois.edu/bulletin_open_access/v31-2/v...

I did not mean to blame him for having polio.

I just meant to say that his solution to his mobility problems came with significant tech debt that came to hang him later.

It was not a tech debt issue. He used it to commit suicide.

I thought it was an accident?

Publicly it was an accident. Privately it was a suicide.

Really? So the guy had some sort of conscience after all?

Interestingly most cases are asymptomatic or extremely low acute consequence and the problems only emerge years later. There is nothing to be learned from this and we should not give it any more thought.

Propane is a shockingly better refrigerant. Sure, it's flammable, but is it really unsafe? It's widely used in commercial units.

Propane is a very good refrigerant for many common uses like AC, heat pumps, or refrigerators, yes. But yes, AFAIU initially CFC's were hailed as a significant safety advancement and quickly replaced older refrigerants that were poisonous (ammonia) or flammable (hydrocarbons). But subsequently we've become better at making refrigerant machinery that needs less refrigerant and is less prone to leakage, and the natural refrigerants have made a comeback as subsequent generations of the flourocarbon family refrigerants have been banned (CFC bans, F-gas regulations etc.) and become more and more expensive.

> It's widely used in commercial units.

That right here is the point. With commercial units, you can be relatively sure only trained professionals will touch it, it will be somewhat decently maintained, and installation will be done with decent quality. With anything consumer-retail? As a manufacturer, you'll have to include absolutely ridiculously dumb people into your risk estimation, and you don't want to risk headlines like "Exploding brand XYZ AC unit kills family in house fire" because the father who had installed it caused a leak in the propane circuit - people won't care about that distinction, they'll see your brand as tarnished and unsafe.

Don't forget decades of advancements in manufacturing procedures, engineering, tighter tolerances, improved materials science, and so on that have happened to help ensure the propane remains in the coolant circuit.

Speaking of DuPont, they also were among the first to introduce PFAs with Teflon - although in this case I don't think anybody suspected what implications that may have at the time...

On a high level, this story looks similar to CFC: when environmental issues arise, deny and defend profits. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bilott#Initial_actions_...

I'm going to reiterate a point that needs to be repeated very loudly, as often as possible:

Corporations are malignant paperclip maximizers. We are already in an "AI apocalypse". How many people did leaded fuel kill? Lead exposure makes people stupid and violent - how many wars did it indirectly contribute to, how far back has society been held? That's one corporation. One!!

"Corporations bad" is a sort of tired left wing trope at this point but I think that's because the scale of the problem is difficult to wrap one's head around - it's hard to imagine an alternate world. But we didn't choose to inhabit a world run by corporations, it just happened through a process of blind natural selection, and it will kill us all unless we do something about it now. Our current governments are clearly inadequate - we need to be consciously, deliberately, constructing alternate ways of organizing ourselves, as rapidly as possible, to combat the threat of this new lifeform. And make no mistake, it is combat - they will fight back! They will fight back on a level so subtle and insidious that you will be convinced that there is no fight, or that you are powerless, or that the anti-corporate movement is on the wrong side.

What can you do about it? You're an HN reader, you can probably make websites. Build something designed to facilitate collective action. Bring out the best in people. Make it so that when we all know that something is bad, no fucking corporation can pay off the government to be allowed to do it anyway.

W. Dow Reider's "Doc Future" e-novels went in this direction, particularly the last not yet finished one. Recommended!

https://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/62787551366/stories

Nobility used to have the highest lead levels, while violent tribes used to have the lowest. How do you explain that?

You explain that by understanding that nobility had the resources and influence to get utensils and other kitchenware that were ceramics decorated with lead containing glaze and metals that contained lead. You have causality entirely backwards, eating lead does not somehow turn someone into nobility. That's an absurd conclusion

I can't reply to you because you've posted such nonsense that all your comments are dead. Being born into nobility has nothing to do with anything as people who dine with nobility will use the same utensils. I'm not sure how you don't understand something so simple. Almost like it's deliberately disingenuous. Not to mention you haven't posted a shred of evidence that any of your assertions are even accurate

It's almost as if a governing body should exist that's by the people, for the people, wherein corporations are not equivalent to more powerful people....

Yes, and? Yes, governments are supposed to protect us. No, they are not adequate to the task[0] - they were designed before this became an obvious problem. We need to move forward from simply complaining about it, and think structurally.

[0] (although that varies by country and having a government is almost invariably better than not having one)

The absolute terrible thing about leaded gasoline is that they were already aware of several other additives (including ethanol, IIRC) that have the desired anti-knocking properties. But they went with tetraethyl lead anyway because it is cheaper and provided a few cents more profit per gallon.

A cent was worth more back then than it does now, but still :-(

They also were aware very early on of the health risks lead caused. Midgley himself suffered from lead poisoning. Then they poisoned the world for those few cents per gallon.

Note that despite suffering from it he kept doing stunt in public without realising it was a danger.

Local rationality is a thing. It is not all a plot to suck money out. He believed his own shit.

Money tends to do that to people.

The love of money is the root of all evil.

I would also emphasize a more social issue to this. There's also a tendency for society to discount the dangers of something when the impact is sporadically distributed or long-term. Beyond the endless corporate lobbying and sold out scientists/politicians working to convince everybody that leaded fuel was 100% safe, I think there was also probably a mindset of many in society that 'Well, if leaded fuel is so poisonous and I'm breathing it in everyday, then why am I perfectly fine?' And with such "logic" dismiss any concerns about its safety.

The Nation's story on it dives much deeper. There was an out and out panic about lead and leaded gasoline in the 1920s that GM and Ethyl/du Pont had to squash, which Midgely happily participated in. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-history-lea...

> which Midgely happily participated in

Which moves him from the category of buffoon to evil.

It's infinitely more convenient to assume that the leaders in the past were evil and the masses of the past ignorant than it is to assume they weren't let alone assume they were mostly just like us.

It must be nice to be able to make those assumptions and believe them...

Midgley had to be treated for lead poisoning following one of his demonstrations of how safe leaded fuel was. The fact leaded fuel was unsafe would not have come as a surprise to him or anybody else familiar with its development and risks. I don't give much of any consideration to good or evil, but I do to ethics and values. And our society's leaders, corporate and political, have been woefully absent of them for some time, in a trend that seems to be clearly rapidly worsening.

So in that regard I do agree that people of times past were, more or less, the same as today. Yet even the most cursory glance of our history, outside of what is taught in history class, is something that would emphasize that that belief is anything but nice to hold!

It's easy to believe because I see similar things happening in real time, right now.

> There's also a tendency for society to discount the dangers of something when the impact is sporadically distributed or long-term.

Doesn't US regulation still approach novel chemicals with a "Safe until proven otherwise" stance? Surely this doesn't help.

They also knew it was toxic, but deliberately put on displays claiming that it wasn’t, even midgley would pour it over his hands despite knowing the danger and intentionally avoiding it in all other cases.

They also used medical testing to mislead: showing people could consume it and lead wouldn’t be detected in their urine. Apparently that showed it was safe, and no one said “then where did the lead go?”.

Happily he also invented the machine that killed him so at least he was egalitarian in his harm.

The most interesting to me is the correlation between the delinquency among children and teens, and the years of introduction of tetraethyl lead in gasoline for anti-knocking properties.

I read somewhere that Thomas Midgley Jr could be considered, in modern history, to be the organism with highest impactful on earth with his invention of Chlorofurocarbons and their impact on the ozone layers.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesi...

Sort of like the anti Norman Borlaug.

But how many gallons were sold with lead added? I would imagine that is quite substantial number, so in the end we are talking about large sums of money...

The “couple of cents” seemed like an off the cuff remark to indicate that leaded gas was less expensive than alternatives, but I would be interested in hearing about this delta as a percent rather than a fixed cost. Given inflation, gas price fluctuations, and the sheer volume in which fuel was sold, measuring it as a “couple of cents” is completely meaningless.

It's hard to have any conclusive number on this, it's not only about inflation etc. but also the cost of alternative ways of achieving the required octane (e.g. increasing production of reformate or alkylate, or the refinery buying external blendstocks like ethanol or MTBE), which varies a lot over time (due to technical advancements) and place (what kind of equipment does a refinery have installed), etc.

From a 1998 article (https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/d3706d00-3d97-495d-8b8c-.... ) it estimates between $0.01-$0.03/liter for lead removal. US gasoline prices in 1990-2000 were at around $1.20/gallon which works out to about $0.32/liter. Taking the middle value of $0.02/liter for lead removal that would be around 6%. Just as a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I think in reality in many places that cost delta at pump the is lower since the usage of ethanol as an octane enhancer shifts the cost to various agricultural subsidy programs.

Wapo article from 1984 [0] asserts that 85-octane nonleaded gasoline was consistently about 2 cents cheaper to make than 87-octane leaded gasoline.

That said, that was with numerous advancements over the preceding 60 years which most likely would never have happened if we hadn't developed engines capable of taking advantage of high-octane fuels.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1984/04/01/c...

"But, as DeMuth noted, the EPA study is concerned about total costs and benefits to society, not just to one group. The study makes no attempt to predict what would happen to prices at the pump. It points out instead that the cost of manufacturing 87-octane unleaded gasoline, according to market prices, is consistently less than 2 cents a gallon more than for making 89-octane leaded gasoline. Average pump prices are about 7 cents more, however."

I believe this is the EPA study: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=9100YK16.TXT (I clicked the "download as pdf" adobe acrobat icon on the right)

"The DOE model estimates that at current lead levels (1.10 gplg) the marginal manufacturing cost differential between unleaded and leaded regular grades of gasoline is less than two cents per gallon. Retail prices, however, diverge by an average of about seven cents per gallon (Weekly Petroleum Status Report, 1984, various issues)."

7 cents per gallon is right around that 2 cents per liter that you cite, naturally.

A gallon of gasoline back in 1930 (or 1925 for that matter, pre-depression) cost about 20 cents. So, even 2 cents per gallon would be a 10% savings.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/om030621b has some points of comparison (as well as a lot more historical context of the research that led Midgley & co to leaded gasoline if you're interested).

For what it's worth, per Table 1, ethanol is not anywhere near as effective as tetraethyllead -- it has an effectiveness of 0.1 per mol, vs TEL having a value of 118. Even when normalizing by molar mass (since TEL is a much heavier compound), TEL is still ~100x more effective than ethanol.

"... iodine had a few slight drawbacks. It added over a dollar to the cost of a gallon of fuel and we were afraid that would be considered a trifle excessive by most motorists."

"Further studies with more dilute solutions showed that a one-fortieth of one percent solution of tetraethyllead was equivalent in knock inhibition to 1.3% aniline in kerosene."

"The first public sale of Ethyl gasoline (the name given it by Kettering) occurred on February 1, 1923 in Dayton, OH at 25 cents per gallon (regular gas cost 21 cents per gallon) (Figure 8) before large-scale production had started."

A cent was worth more back then, but I guarantee you any oil company today that could save a cent per gallon at the cost of human lives would do it without hesitation.

I wrote about this fellow back in 2007[1]. In 1935 he was asked to make predictions about what chemistry/science will accomplish by 2035. Some are pretty wild, but others are spot-on, such as:

• Interplanetary travel, involving the production of a substance that will produce more energy per pound than is required to lift that pound out of the Earth’s gravitational field.

• The end of visiting; people will stay at home and call on their friends by television.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/

That substance: ordinary methane.

Unfortunately only barely. It would be nice to have a better ratio of fuel to payload.

At least gravity isn't high enough to keep all chemical rockets earthbound.

Hkw bout hydrogen

> Interplanetary travel, involving the production of a substance that will produce more energy per pound than is required to lift that pound out of the Earth’s gravitational field.

Arthur C. Clarke had some words to say about this persistent idea in The Promise Of Space.

You don't actually want to lift your pound of fuel <out of earth's gravitational field>, that would be useless. You actually want to burn it as early as possible to lift a pound of something else (preferably cargo).

Every second you burn it sooner, the less high you need to lift it. Ideally you'd burn all your fuel on the ground in second 0. Sadly, releasing that much energy all at once tends to lead to Rapid Undesired Disassembly. Hence space rockets burn for a little longer (but still as quickly as possible).

>Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.

TIL that was the same person. What a legacy. Whole-world-altering inventions (both in being spread literally everywhere because they were so effective, and in the negative ways) that close together is amazing.

I sometimes wonder if such coincidences are because the person was a time traveler, or alien, or some such, trying to alter things, steer things in some way..

Well, you know what they say, the future affects the past[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35197227

It’s just because there are a lot of people in the world, so things with billion-to-one odds do happen.

He also managed to kill himself with another of his inventions. Karma exists?

Friendly reminder that leaded gas is still used all over the United States today in airports (avgas).

And if you live near an airport you are probably affected by elevated lead levels.

https://news.sccgov.org/news-release/study-commissioned-coun...

This is what people really mean when they say "regulations are written in blood". If there isn't visible blood, we're usually happy to hurt people.

FAA refuses to act here. Regulations are written in blood. And no one is bleeding yet.

The people who live near airports are. Guess who usually lives near airports though.

you picked a very bad news source. this reporting has been debunked. they failed to control for increased lead in environment. neighborhoods NOT under flight paths but in the same area also have higher lead levels. this is sponsored by land developers hoping to close KRHV

It's not like it's a controversial topic. It's a well known, well studied, and well documented effect.

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/1/pgac285/69797...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AEAT-05-...

https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/60c74f2...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

Avgas is unnecessarily putting more lead into the air. Any amount of lead in the air is bad.

Do you have a citation for the debunking? The WA state legislature is trying to push through a bunch of unfunded mandates of dubious effectiveness on airports based on this study.

Always be skeptical of individuals who claim things are debunked without citing their sources.

Also, it is true that neighborhoods near the airport not in the flight path also have higher lead levels than average, but I'm not sure how that helps the case - there is elevated lead levels near airports, which can adversely affect your health.

Blood lead levels are overwhelmingly affected by local exposure, basically the history of lead use where you live, work and your food is from.

While leaded avgas is not great the FAA just approved a replacement and I'm sure it will be in use quickly because "hurr durr muh lead" is the rallying cry of obnoxious suburbanites who just bought a house beside an airport and now want it shut down and everyone involved in general aviation has a large incentive to silence that screeching.

Now, before any jerks show up to strawman me as endorsing lead exposure so they can bust out their favorite "no safe level" quip that they love to circle jerk it to, I'm not. I'm saying that while the effect is measurable it's not meaningful in light of the fact that you or anyone else's lead exposure is overwhelmingly dominated by local sources.

The problem with this line of plausible but non-scientific thought is that you base it solely on 'blood lead levels' as though they would be constant, without explaining the process taken to test. The latter part is critically important with heavy metals.

Heavy metals in general never stay in the blood very long, the body binds them as quickly as it can, and the only way to accurately test involves taking a chelator first (to cause it to release into the blood stream) and then testing for acute poisoning (by causing it). There may be newer methods that have been developed since, but as of 2008 that was true.

Anyone who has suffered mercury or lead poisoning that was diagnosed by a medical professional would be aware of this, which is why there is no safe level, it bioaccumulates, and is a time-bomb for acute poisoning if it ever gets released.

Incidentally cilantro is a powerful chelator, and is used in food. Many people who have suffered poisoning get powerful headaches and other poisoning symptoms which can mimic many symptoms on the ADD/Autism/ADHD spectrum when eating this food, and often themselves don't know why.

For some reasons, every area in close proximity to airports with moderate to high piston engine aircraft traffic have exceptional high local exposure (according to EPA). There could be a correlation or even a causation link. EPA at least think so, which is why they changed the rules in 2008 by issuing a new minimum standard.

The new replacement fuels are good, but they have one general large drawback. They require a recertification of the engine/frame of the plane. According to the lobby group AOPA, it will cost the industry in excess of $150 billion annually in the US alone.

In response, EPA issued an statement that there will be no phase-out date for planes to meet the new minimum standard, saying that it is the FAA responsibility to issue a process so that airplanes fulfills the new minimum standard. The FAA in turn said that regulating lead in avgas is an EPA responsibility, and they will not issue a phase-out date for planes to meet the new minimum standard.

That has been the last word from both agencies since 2010.

> The new replacement fuels are good, but they have one general large drawback. They require a recertification of the engine/frame of the plane. According to the lobby group AOPA, it will cost the industry in excess of $150 billion annually in the US alone.

Also (at least in the UK), UL91 (the unleaded-alternative for some aeroplanes) is more expensive than 100LL. E.g. looking at a nearby (GA) airport, the price for 100LL is £2.22/litre and UL91 is £2.60. You can sometimes use Mogas (literally automotive unleaded) but this has some temperature restrictions due to the vapour point.

That's not surprising when you factor in fuel procedures for pilots dealing with mechanical or other malfunctions that require the plane to land with a mostly full tank.

https://simpleflying.com/aircraft-fuel-dumping/

Veritasium has a great video on him, his inventions, and their impact on the world: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA&vl=en

Not so one-sided, Fritz Haber [0] is another very interesting chemist. Got a Nobel prize for the process to synthesize ammonia (modern fertilizer production), but then also got side tracked with the 1st world war and became the father of chemical warfare

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

For people in to historically themed power metal, the Swedish metal band Sabaton have a song about him - https://youtu.be/DxkeOkaVRLo and their collab with a historian, Indy Neidell (of The Great War and WW2 fame) to tell the history behind their songs also has a video about him https://youtu.be/UadfxEJKVM8 .

Nobel, inventor of dynamite, created the Nobel prizes to whitewash his name. It sure worked.

"by his death, his business had established more than 90 armaments factories, despite his apparently pacifist character."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel

How ‘merchant of death’ Alfred Nobel became a champion of peace https://www.thelocal.se/20101004/29406/

One ancestor of modern good hearted billionaires

The Memory Palace episode on him was really good: https://thememorypalace.us/butterflies/

But, as a joke, on potential EA cause area would be banning everything Thomas Midgely invented, just to be sure.

Or, if you prefer the comedy panel show format, Citation Needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4og8wG8VQWM

There’s a line of thought that connects the use of leaded gasoline with US crime rates. [1]

The idea is that exposure to lead causes people to have problems that lead to violent behavior later in life. The evidence presented includes the correlation observed between the removal of lead from gasoline and a sharp fall in crime rates 20 years later.

1. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

A similar link has been suggested for abortion. The drop in crime rate starting in 1993 happened pretty much exactly 20 years after Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973. It is called the "Donohue–Levitt hypothesis".

Interesting that there's a particular political party in the US who likes to bang the drum about crime and law and also wants to ban abortion. Gotta have something to get you votes!

Since this is HN, there’s always the contrarian comment that goes “actually these things are awesome and you should be ashamed for not respecting them” — even if the topic is leaded gasoline and CFCs.

You can never know if that comment will be at the top, or showdead-only at the very bottom. That’s what makes it so exciting to open the comments.

If you're interested in this kind of narrative of brilliant scientists accidentally making things worse, I strongly recommend When We Cease to Understand the World [1] by Benjamin Labatut. A brilliant hybrid fiction/non-fiction book that goes into the story of Fritz Haber and other scientists whose inventions had an unexpected and negative impact on history.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/10/when-we-cease-...

I really liked Malcom Gladwel’s take on Thomas Midgely Jr.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/the-invento...

> Midgley and his employers didn’t set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer with CFCs – but while these dire consequences were unintended… could they have been anticipated?

Strange to think almost all people over ~40 or so still suffer consequences from his work.

If you had a time machine, would you go back in time to kill Hitler or this guy?

I’d go back and show this guy the consequences and convince him to use other additives.

He knew the negative effects. He also knew that other additives worked just as well (eg ethanol). Still he lobbied hard for using his additive

Some people think WW2 would have happened anyway.

He was horrible... but the fact anyone actually listened to him is what really creeps me out.

One evil man I can understand, you ignore him or put him in jail if he does a crime, it doesn't keep people up at night the same way, although it's disgusting.

That same tendency just kind of lurking dormant in millions, means even democracy might not stop it.

I read a short story (don’t remember the author), the gist of which was an a future where time travel is possible and accessible. There was a group tasked with cleaning up time travel mistakes. Their motto was Everyone always tries to kill Hitler. But this leads to a future armageddon so they have to keep undoing it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35171357

The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes

Biggest ever? more than nuclear weapons? A bit of a stretch to say ever. I think this is disputable.

Nuclear weapons were not a mistake.

Neither is leaded gasoline. As the FAA is eager to point out, it's not safe to do anything else.

Can you imagine? Most aviation would never have happened if this guy hadn't invented leaded gasoline.

> Most aviation would never have happened if this guy hadn't invented leaded gasoline.

Duh, of course it would. Aviation gasoline would have used other methods of increasing octane, and/or then we'd have made do with slightly lower octane avgas. And engines would have been designed accordingly.

The only reason why getting rid of leaded avgas has been a 40 year saga is that they have been chasing the dream of a 1:1 replacement that would require no changes to 100% of existing aircraft. Now it seems they finally have such a fuel in G100UL, we'll see if and how quickly usage of it expands to replace leaded avgas.

There are a substantial number of existing aircraft that are safe to operate on a subset of automotive gasoline (93 octane, ethanol-free). The FAA says to do so legally requires the purchase of a supplemental type certificate for thousands of dollars.

There's no inspection or modification of the aircraft. It's just a piece of paper. The FAA could fix the problem for those aircraft with the stroke of a pen.

Mistake was anti-proliferation. If every country had nukes wold would be much more peaceful place. Would Iraq or Afganistan got involved if they had capability to deliver nuke to fight enemy combatants in NYC or DC?

What would the Iran - Iraq war look like with nukes? What would a falling dictator à la last days Saddam or Ghadaffi or the Shah do with nukes?

That's a very stupid idea if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.

> That's a very stupid idea if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.

Which you can use as a reply to like 90% of comments on this benighted site.

> If every country had nukes wold would be much more peaceful place.

It does not work. Countries would still fight conventional wars, because not everything is worth escalating. Even in your example. They are being invaded and are at risk of losing their country (well, they were at some point anyway). Do you reckon they’d throw a nuke at the US and so be absolutely certain to lose everything they have rather than fight a conventional war and having a chance at taking their country back?

On the other hand, proliferation has real risks in terms of radionuclides ending up in things like terrorist groups.

Overall, it makes as much sense as the “if teachers had guns schools would be safer” talking points.

Question is would USA risk direct conflict with a country if they could actually suffer some actual losses of combatants on their own soil? They might, but I think it would substantially lower the risk.

Same applies to most current conflicts.

And about non traditional fights, maybe there would be less of those as big countries would be more careful about their actions.

Also I believe that if every school kid had a gun there would be lot less bullying. As they would be able to instantly produce credible self-defence when the society entirely fails to protect them. And they would be fully in moral right to answer with reasonable force to such actions.

> Also I believe that if every school kid had a gun there would be lot less bullying

Yes, and a lot more shootings. IMO the same applies to nukes. If every country had nukes then they'd be less conventional warfare, but a lot more nuclear bombings. It only takes one person to decide it's a good idea.

> would USA risk direct conflict with a country if they could actually suffer some actual losses of combatants on their own soil?

That’s a very interesting question! So much of the US foreign policy is predicated on the fact that there will never, ever be a war on American soil. It would definitely change the risk dessinent and the political acceptability of aggressive foreign policy.

[flagged]

> Nuclear weapons really have not killed that many people.

... so far.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/public-awareness-of-nucl...

I'm not sure how to respond to that comment, which I find profoundly shocking and depressing. I've read some HN comments before which for some reason suggest a large-scale nuclear "war" wouldn't be so bad, but..this one seems even much worse, for some reason. I don't get it. I don't get how anyone could believe or write that.

Anything I could write seems so obvious. I can't think. I think I need a break from HN for a while. You don't seem to have been downvoted in 5 hours.

> I find profoundly shocking and depressing

Indeed, it is. There is nothing more depressing than what we are doing to ourselves and to our own world.

> I've read some HN comments before which for some reason suggest a large-scale nuclear "war" wouldn't be so bad

No mistake, it would be absolutely terrible, country- if not civilisation-ending. None of this is any good. It is just that nuclear weapons and our current way of life are on two opposite sides of a risk spectrum: nuclear apocalypse is a very improbable event with huge consequences; our industry is a fact of life that has been more or less silently killing indiscriminately, almost innocent because we don’t see its effects as huge, memorable events. A nuclear winter might kill hundreds of millions if it happens; we’ve already killed much more than that with non-nuclear means.

So yeah, nuclear weapons are terrible, and I completely disagree with the other poster who said everyone should have them. I just wish we would see the harm we do every day as clearly as the harm we could do in exceptional circumstances.

> You don't seem to have been downvoted in 5 hours.

I think the post has been downvoted. I don’t have all the detail but I think the score has fluctuated a bit. If it can be of comfort to you.

Arguably nuclear weapons have saved lives by suppressing conventional WW3, WW4, etc. At least, so far.

Thomas Midgley Jr is currently the record holder for most damage done to the planet by one person.

I reckon the Bitcoin guy is in second place. Proof of work was a terrible idea.

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