But, those fretting about the necessity of war need not have worried, as subsequent events proved. War between nuclear powers doesn't happen any more, but instead we've had endless proxy wars. Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine....
EDIT: also the Sino-soviet war of 1969
According to Paine, Washington responded with a firm no. Paine didn't specify the targets the Kremlin wanted to nuke: I'm guessing Beijing's new (and consequently small) nuclear stockpile and nuclear production facilities rather than cities.
It didn't happen yet, but there are no is reasons for nuclear war to be avoided indefinitely.
Not that they didn’t make one hell of a dent sometimes, mind you.
We’d more likely end up with an extra mutation or two, similar to the Moties [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye] and some solid species level PTSD from the whole mess.
Why do you think the doomsday prepper genes haven’t been bred out yet? I’m guessing because sometimes, they were the only ones left standing!
To do that would likely require liquifying the mantle entirely, or some similar scale event.
The last big one was approximately 66 million years ago due to perhaps the Chicxulub impact, and it wiped out most of the dinosaurs - but modern birds are descended from them, and the crocodiles and alligators survived (well, VERY similar looking ancestors) /just fine.
None of them could build space stations, nuclear reactors, bunkers, etc. That we know of at least. None of them could grow hydroponic food, or communicate at near light speed to the other side of the planet, or even know what any of that means.
The entire span of time something vaguely resembling human has been around is also 1/10th of that time, but there have been MANY smaller events with large scale extinctions.
I'm not saying it would be a good time, but there is no way every single human is getting wiped out by anything except a nearby Gamma Ray burst/Supernova, surprise planetary collision, or something of similar destructive scale. Things way beyond even our wildest dreams of destructive power.
Even if we launched every nuke every country has ever produced, while civilization as we know it would be done for, humanity would definitely persist. Even if the next war would be fought with clubs instead of nukes.
And even if all the oxygen in the atmosphere turned to cyanide - guess what, we do (technically) know how to deal with that, there are populations of people who are currently protected from that, and while most of humanity would die while we scrambled to adapt, humanity itself would not perish. At least not just from that.
I said good luck exterminating humans.
Hell, not that long ago the most technologically advanced society of the time (Nazi Germany) with a massive and state of the art army tried to exterminate a subset of humans (Jews, Homosexuals, Roma) using massive force, the latest technology, and with a near single minded focus.
And while they did kill a lot of people and perpetrate terrible crimes, they also failed rather completely at the task. Even in areas where they were literally burning everything to the ground.
What makes you think they would have been more successful if they’d also been trying to kill themselves at the same time? Hence impeding their abilities?
And humans are, near as we can tell, the most lethal animals on the planet overall.
Humans survive implausibly terrible situations on the regular, and are currently living in every major ecological niche in the environment except perhaps the very deepest parts of the ocean. Though if we count military submersibles and oil rig diving bells, they too are ‘occupied’.
Would lots of people die, and would it be terrible if an environmental catastrophe occurred? You bet. But killing all humans is even less plausible than killing all ticks, or all roaches. Humans, the most lethal species on the planet, keeps trying and failing to do so.
Short of melting the mantle underneath us anyway. We do have some folks living in a space station. Probably not enough though.
That is why eating too much Tuna will give you mercury poisoning. And the Nazis literally used nerve agents (Zyklon B) among other things. Nasty nerve agents (and most household pesticides) came out of WW2 research largely done by the Nazis (through Bayer, as it turns out).
And the moment anyone got wind of an attempt to try to do such a thing, enough humans would go to ground you’d never actually succeed. Hell, enough are probably already under ground for whatever reason you’d never succeed even if you did manage to catch the whole world by surprise and somehow actually release it all at scale.
The Nazi’s did not fail because they failed to try to kill humans at scale. Frankly, they did it at the largest scale since probably Ghenghis Khan. Certainly in a far more industrial fashion.
The issue is that it’s actually really hard to kill a lot of humans. Something that personally warms the cockles of my very human heart.
Embrace your ancestry of murderous (and loving) hominids, and aim to use it to make things better. Rejecting it is a false path.
Your comment made me notice that the motto was recently removed from the ZH Wikipedia page, so I just restored it - thanks.
70 years is a blip. Compare that to the 6 known close calls where all-out nuclear war was narrowly averted and we’re not looking great. (What is that about once a decade?)
I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll see a nuclear war in my lifetime. And if it gets out of hand billions of people will die.
I’m not sure the invention of nuclear weapons was a net positive for the world.
It was never an option that nuclear weapons wouldn't be invented. The only question was who will invent and use it first.
The fact that we’ve had conflicts that didn’t go nuclear is even more to my point.
This is also why online commenters thinking that the Ukraine war will not go nuclear are misguided.
Imagine this scenario: the war in Ukraine goes for some more time, Russia starts to have economic problems and is desperate to settle it (without having to compromise), force Ukraine to surrender and demand sanctions to be lifted. So he uses a couple of small tactical nukes along the frontline to cripple Ukrainian forces. Civilian deaths are in tens of thousands.
Ukraine can't respond, but apparently some threat has been declared from US to prevent this scenario - NATO / US launches conventional strikes on Russian military installations within Ukraine. Russia is not able to respond symmetrically, so it drops a tactical nuke on a military base within NATO territory (in Eastern Europe, far from major population center) as a kind of last warning to step back. There are multiple ways how this can go from then on, but there are scenarios ending in a major or all-out nuclear exchange. Without the need for misunderstanding and madmans.
USA Policy is that all nukes are nukes. The idea being that we've never wargamed a scenario where small nukes were used that didn't turn into the treadmill of larger and larger nukes anyway. (Well, they used a 50 ton nuke. We should respond with a 500ton nuke, then they respond with a 10,000 ton nuke. Then we respond with a 100kTon nuke. Then they respond with a 1Mton nuke....)
So the minute a 'Small Nuke' is used, we should just respond with the biggest nuke. No point dilly dallying, if we are all going to die we might as well get it over with faster and in a way that is to our advantage.
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The issue is that Russia or China may not see it that way. They might see the small nukes as a different thing that doesn't deserve the response of the larger nuke.
It's not that the world is composed of madmen. It's that the world is composed of people with different points of view.
As such, Russia stockpiles tactical (aka: small) nukes. USA stockpiles strategic (aka: large) nukes.
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Also note: we stopped making larger nukes for political reasons. There seemed to be no end to the size of 'Large' nukes. The H-Bomb seemed to scale as large as we ever wanted.
A collection of 10x 10 MTon nukes would deal more damage than a single 100MTon nuke anyway. But there's nothing stopping us from making 10x 100Mton nukes.
There's a difference between stated policy, actual policy, and what people will actually do when in a given scenario. For example, the PRC has a stated nuclear no first use policy, but I don't think anyone really believes that if the Indian army were advancing on Beijing that nukes would actually be off the table.
> The idea being that we've never wargamed a scenario where small nukes were used that didn't turn into the treadmill of larger and larger nukes anyway. (Well, they used a 50 ton nuke. We should respond with a 500ton nuke, then they respond with a 10,000 ton nuke. Then we respond with a 100kTon nuke. Then they respond with a 1Mton nuke....)
> So the minute a 'Small Nuke' is used, we should just respond with the biggest nuke. No point dilly dallying, if we are all going to die we might as well get it over with faster and in a way that is to our advantage.
The French nuclear doctrine is actually the exact opposite of this: they have a small nuke (the ASMP-A) that's explicitly designed as a nuclear warning shot to make everyone stop and think for a second before escalating into full scale nuclear war.
In any case the U.S. has stated that it won't do that unless it was a close strike against a very close ally (NATO partner or similar, or their deployed units). Most likely won't reciprocate to a nuclear strike against just Ukraine (provided it were of "limited" scope such as a warning or sequence of tactical shots).
Yeah, it's one of those crazy nuclear doctrines. Another is Launch on Warning, or the idea you can use nukes tactically without escalation.
Now, think about what's the point of publishing such strategic information? Isn't it a huge disadvantage when the enemy can anticipate how you will respond? In reality, you declassify information which you want that your enemy knows. These mentioned policies are meant as a deterrence, they're a bit of "playing madman" captured as a policy, because they're thought to provide an advantage when the enemy believes them.
I believe that the US has war game scenarios where one side uses a nuke, without the situation escalating into an all-out war, but these are extremely sensitive and thus highly secret. You don't want your enemy to believe there is some way where they can get away with using nukes, so in public you only mention the doomsday scenarios.
So, overall, I believe that the actual nuclear doctrine differs from the one published and should be less crazy. Note also that the head of states are not bound by the doctrine.
> The issue is that Russia or China may not see it that way. They might see the small nukes as a different thing that doesn't deserve the response of the larger nuke.
Part of it is again the deterrence aspect. Russia has a clear conventional disadvantage in comparison to US / NATO, so threatening with tactical nukes is a way to deter NATO from directly engaging Russia. It is in Russia's advantage to at least pretend that they think that tactical nukes can be used without major escalation. Just like US wants others to think there's no way to win a nuclear exchange, Russia wants you to think there's no way to win a conventional conflict (because it will soon escalate to nukes).
I'm not saying it means they're completely bullshi*ing, but there can be again a gap between what they think and what position they're trying to project.
> Also note: we stopped making larger nukes for political reasons. There seemed to be no end to the size of 'Large' nukes. The H-Bomb seemed to scale as large as we ever wanted.
Nukes become impractically large / heavy in that size, and as you mention, more numerous smaller nukes do more damage.
10 * 10 Mt is more destructive than 1 * 100 Mt, but 1000 * 100 Kt is much more destructive still.
It may be wishful thinking, because in reality in may drive these countries even closer, especially if using nukes will help Russia achieve its goals.
Stop repeating your propaganda.
Stop repeating Russian propaganda.
Also if we are here: Do you Russian think, Russian soldiers like to die in meat waves?
Yes, I have a few Ukrainean friends, initially they liked Zelensky, but now they hate him. I also visited Kiev in 2020
Stop repeating western propaganda.
> Do you Russian think, Russian soldiers like to die in meat waves?
I don't think they like or want to die, but SOME of them really want to participate in the war. This applies to both sides.
Not sure if you just tried to assume my nationality by using "Do you Russian think", but you are wrong.
In the end, Russia made their own decision to invade, and the Ukrainians' own decision to resist.
This doesn’t mean the Ukrainians don’t have agency or don’t make their own decisions, but the US and to some extent EU have a huge amount of influence.
By the way, South Korea has already sent hundreds of thousands of artillery shells to Ukraine at the request of the US. They’re now considering sending weapons and this might trigger Russia to send missiles or nuclear tech to North Korea.
Russia is as far as the world knows is just buying weapons from North Korea.
By calling Ukraine proxy you deny its own agency.
It's actually the other way around. North Korea getting new tech is prompting South Korea to respond in turn. That's why Russia and Ukraine became 'proxies' for the Koreans, North or South.
That might change as more nations acquire nuclear weapons. Or maybe the pathway to world peace is to give every country nukes.
As a result, conventional war only takes place now on tier 2 (non-nuclear) lands. If there are sabers to be rattled between two tier 1 powers, the rattling will happen on tier 2 land, usually with tier 2 powers being the primary warring parties (proxy war). You also see tier 1 powers making the occasional move but always against tier 2 powers only, e.g. Russia -> Ukraine. If Ukraine had nukes there would be no war in Ukraine. Notice how it’s war IN Ukraine: on tier 2 land. If Ukraine managed to make it a war IN Russia, they’d be nuked to oblivion.
And as for consequences I do not think the West would do anything about that. US won't go on full scale nuclear war with Russia over some insignificant country at the end of the world, that isn't even a NATO member. So the worst outcome of nuking Ukraine for Russia is to get even more economic sanctions, that's all.
The worst outcome of nuking Ukraine for Russia is to get even more economic sanctions, that's all.
The response won't be nuclear, per its stated posture on this. But it's hard to imagine the United States would do basically nothing of substance in response, and it hasn't ruled out a violent conventional response. And at least back in 2022, Biden took care to put this messaging out indicating there would be a "consequential" response, per his interview with Scott Pelley:
"And I wonder, Mr. President, what you would say to him if he is considering using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons?"
"Don't. Don't. Don't. You will change the face of war unlike anything since World War II," Mr. Biden said.
When Pelley asked what the consequences would be if Putin crossed that line, the president wouldn't say.
"You think I would tell you if I knew exactly what it would be? Of course, I'm not gonna tell you. It'll be consequential," Mr. Biden said. "They'll become more of a pariah in the world than they ever have been. And depending on the extent of what they do will determine what response would occur."
US won't go on full scale nuclear war with Russia over some insignificant country at the end of the world
First, while it isn't a NATO partner or of similar status, Ukraine is absolutely not "insignificant" to the at least the current administration in the U.S., and the whole Atlanticist crowd. It would not have stuck its neck out (and expended its political capital) as far as it has on Ukraine's behalf thus far, if that were the case.
And while it won't go nuclear over Ukraine -- it is definitely concerned about its strategic posture and global stability, and the detrimental consequences of giving Russia perceived "pass" to use nukes in any offensive context. And would basically have to make some kind of genuinely serious response. Which some people close to the administration have quietly hinted could be a conventional military response.
Russian military doctrine includes nuclear first strike when there's an "existential threat" to Russia, even if that threat is from conventional military attack. If Russia can use nukes against Ukrainian army entering the Russian territory, then for sure it would use them against NATO troops doing the same.
Also, in such a dire situation, Putin and other Russian leaders are crazy enough to use not just tactical nukes but to start full scale nuclear war without any hope of winning, just to "go with a bang".
One can imagine scenarios of varying effectiveness, but this a separate matter. The point is -- the Biden administration has made it clear to the Russians that there would be a significant response, with strong hints that it would be military in nature and not limited to extra sanctions.
If Russia can use nukes against Ukrainian army entering the Russian territory, then for sure it would use them against NATO troops doing the same.
The response doesn't need to involve NATO troops in Ukraine.
Meanwhile it'd be kind of hard to use nukes against stealth bombers, cruise missiles, drones and SF operations.