Dr John C. Clark, a scientist who disarmed atomic bombs twice
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https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
A quote from Sun Tzu is etched in stone at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just outside the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation:
"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
This is my solution.
With such power asymmetries, the "bleeding" might merely be displaced to after the battle is settled. Look at the history of how colonialism played out.
The problem with that is that it changes the incentive on nukes into using them in more concealed, non-attributable ways, like smuggling a suitcase nuke into Manhatten and have everybody wonder which nations or terrorist organization it was.
1) EMP strike. The device is a big h-bomb peacefully sitting in orbit, pretending to be something else. Push the button and basically everything to the horizon (which is a very long ways) gets fried. Some of the hardened military stuff might survive, but the country is gone. The survivalists might hang on for a while, but they can't rebuild.
2) Salvage fuse. You put a proximity sensor on the missile that detonates it if something comes sufficiently close. All the antennas and missile seekers looking at the area are dazzled if not destroyed. The defenses have a very hard time engaging the next missile. The next missile doesn't need to be looking at anything, it doesn't get fried.
3) Suppose it "works"?? Nope, the reality of missile defense is that you spend more on the interceptors than your enemy spent on the missiles. Iron Dome is last I knew $50k/shot. And note what happened in the aftermath of 10/7--Hamas bled the launchers dry with rockets that were at least an order of magnitude cheaper. Last I knew Iron Beam was only test-deployed (shooting at real inbounds but not considered fully operational) and even it can be swamped. And it's only a short range defense. And it takes dwell time--salvage fuse becomes an issue even though it's an energy weapon. Point defense, yes. Country defense, no.
I don't think that's what OP meant; rather I read it literally, to mean one day there might actually be a world without war, or at least, a world without violent wars.
No they prevent and drastically reduce bloodshed.
Would Russia have spent the last 11 years attacking Ukraine if it were still a nuclear power?
(Maybe. Dictators are not reknowned for their sanity and good decision-making skills.)
If things go very wrong they have the potential to take us out. But a non-nuclear WWIII could, also--not by direct kills but by taking down the interconnected stuff that makes society work.
Also, while they serve to prevent direct wars between major powers they cause proxy wars between the major powers.
Besides if (and that’s some “if”) that happens that means the world has already found something more deadly and again some people will suddenly grow very mature insights on this and after destroying few cities they would totally focus on an initiative that ensures only they get to keep those weapons and every other nation should voluntarily sign up for it. And this is the main reason we will never get rid of deadliest of weapons and the endless quest for them.
In a world with nuclear weapons and limited, unreliable defenses against them, you have to actually fully comprehend what "wanting peace" actually means - i.e. negotiation and diplomacy are the actual kings.
In a world without them, you always have the option of resorting to the barrel of the gun again - as happened to prior to WW2.
With enough anti-missile technology, it's possible (though challenging) to defend against that.
But good luck trying to stop them from smuggling a multi-kiloton device across your border and detonating it at a time calculated to cause the most casualties.
The only way to avoid this is a one world government.
The analogy is: the existence of police is the only reason you don't need to own a gun. Without police, it's anarchy, and therefore you need a gun to survive in that incentive structure.
We are designed (or destined, if you want to say so) to be fucked and fuck up everything on this earth faster than we thought maybe even just 20-30 years ago.
I expect it would evolve to something like current day China.
Plainly false. But even if that were true, then the cure's worse than the sickness.
Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments. Tiny city-states that neither have the mineral resources to build those nor the wealth to attempt it.
This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this. We had what you wanted in our tribal past, but it was not competitive. Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged. You can't reverse this just by wishing it to be so. A one world government is at least a feasible possible future instead of an impossible one.
No, it's not impossible, it's just not extant. It may be true that there is no path from where we are now to that world, and it is certainly true that if there is a path it's not trivially predictable. But this can be said of the "one world government" thing as well. Knowing that people like myself exist and would sabotage attempts at one world government, how do you propose to make that possible?
>We had what you wanted in our tribal past,
No, we had something even better. We had a zero-world-government. That truly is impossible, at least considering that I'm not a fan of human extinction.
No, that's just your narrative. You even acknowledge that there was a point in history where it was the prevailing condition, so clearly it wasn't against human nature.
> The last 10,000 years have been a gradual, unceasing trend of increasing centralization,
Hardly gradual. Incredibly punctuated. In some places in the world the stateless/tribal paradigm survived until modern times. The progressive's version of "the market only ever goes up!"...
>Positing that those causal factors will continue in the future,
So you're bad at prediction too. No, humanity becomes extinct in the next 2 or 3 centuries, because you've all become sterile worker drones and can't even maintain a stable population. Sometimes I hope that part's just an accident, but then I read words written by people like yourself, and you seem all too enthusiastic about it as if you've discovered some divine secret. Oh well.
Nation states were around long before railroads or the printing press; they were around before the pyramids were built. Arguably the original technology that made them viable as an alternative to hunter-gatherer tribes was agriculture.
Modern technology has made modern nation states harder to dislodge in some ways, but that doesn't mean they're a good idea.
> A one world government is at least a feasible possible future
Yes, but I disagree that it's the only feasible option. For one thing, technology can also make it harder for nation states to lie to their people about what they're up to (the technology that is allowing us to have this conversation being the prime example). And once mation states lose the ability to do that, their viability becomes much more problematic, since without being able to tell and sustain such lies, the extent to which they make things worse instead of better becomes more and more widely known, and people are less and less willing to put up with that. A single government that was supposed to rule the entire world would have even worse problems in that regard.
The speed of light is still finite, so a lightspeed weapon still has to lead its target by some amount.
I'm not familiar with the books, but I have a very hard time believing that the simple presence of lightspeed weapons would make all forms of combat other than ground combat obsolete.
We already live, and have since forever, in a world that does not need nuclear weapons.
> A quote from Sun Tzu
The logical outcome of which being that whoever controls that class of warriors controls the world. I’m not convinced, despite what the quote seems to imply, that is better than never again shedding blood.
With all due respect to ancient Chinese wisdom, Sun Tzu had no concept of atomic bombs, autonomous drones, and weaponised diseases.
6. Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
7. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.
and maaaaybe the original text underlying some of that could also be translated as the second sentence in the alleged quotation. But the bit about "an ultimate class of warriors" seems really fishy to me.
[EDITED to add:] Ah, looking at a picture of the thing, it says "adapted from Sun Tzu, The Art of War". Seems like a pretty loose adaptation.
I disagree. Our most dangerous enemies aren't even human. On the off chance the little green men show up, let's have something with a bit more oomph than polite rebuke. Just in case.
>"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
This is just silly. What if those warriors want to ban abortions and library books? Will you be satisfied that their fighting prowess grants them the power to dictate that to you? Do you believe that there's some mystical connection between that strength and your particular ethical perspective?
It's pretty much impossible to come up with a stardrive that doesn't have a weapon potential that makes nukes look like firecrackers.
1) The direct Kzinti Lesson: Anything that can push a ship to relativistic velocity produces incredibly energetic exhaust. The efficiency of the drive is directly related to how well you can point it in one direction, thus making it very hard to make something that isn't a weapon. And in a population-attack scenario such a starship throwing rocks is devastating. At 86% of lightspeed a rock hits with it's annihilation energy. At 94% of lightspeed it hits as hard as if it were antimatter.
2) Jump drives (whatever you call them) still need to get somewhere without waiting years. While it doesn't have nearly the planet-killing potential of a relativistic starship it's still quite capable of throwing city-killers.
3) Intertialess (Lensman series). No direct weapon potential but they knew they couldn't crack the defenses of Jarvenon--so the slapped inertialess drives to a couple of planets and used them as a nutcracker.
Known physics only leaves the first scenario as possible, I threw out the others to cover the various sci-fi drives. I can't think of any story that uses something that doesn't fit one of these three categories.
> The 701st soldiers were guinea pigs for evaluating the bomb’s flash, burn and shock-wave effects under field conditions.
Most notably was a video I watched of British soldiers going through the same thing, the anecdote of seeing bones through your hand when you try to cover your eyes is haunting.
https://www.forcesnews.com/nuclear/britains-nuclear-bomb-gui...
For example, they use only insensitive explosives. The trigger is purely electric and needs a lot of power.
Just pull the battery and it’s a solid inert lump.
Also the plutonium “physics package” is less radioactive than you would think. It’s safe to handle with just gloves for short periods.
If you sawed into one with a metal cutting saw, it would just quietly turn itself into a brick.
Nuclear weapons are designed to be both tough and delicate (meaning: they like to brick themselves) at the same time. An extraordinary amount of clever engineering across decades has made them this way.
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
> “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
A significant concern with nuclear weapons is that they're small enough to steal.
You definitely do not want thieves or terrorists to be able to trigger a nuke.
So the trigger systems for nuclear weapons are encrypted and require a decryption key to be functional.
A key requirement for a successful (nuclear) detonation is nanosecond-level timing control of the explosion. Anything else will result in a fizzle with the conventional explosives just scattering the nuclear material in a small area.
It's possible that some nukes had deliberate self-destruct modes where the circuitry would react to tampering by triggering an asymmetric explosion, causing a fizzle, which is relatively harmless to city-sized targets.
But an anti-tamper destruct is a reasonable explanation for the K-129 incident.
These days it's easy enough for a bomb to fry it's electronics to brick it, but that was before electronics were so easy to fry.
Yet somehow the story is about a hero that disarmed a bomb - not that he had tried to set off and test the effects on almost 1000 soldiers....
A cool customer in more ways than one....
Specifically the tests were aimed at training soldiers on what to expect from a nuclear blast and to see how those soldiers would react.
Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected.
There's other cases to consider:
- the enemy drop bombs near our men
- we drop bombs near enemy men
In each case how the impacted soldiers react would be interesting and somewhat predictive of the other cases.
Look up Operation Desert Rock.
Is it though? You either succeed, or nothing is ever your problem again.
I would prefer not to die soon, not only because it would be unpleasant but also because my death would be inconvenient for my employer, distressing for my friends and family, bad for charities I donate to, etc. And also because there are various things I would like to do that, if I get hit by a car tomorrow, I will never get to do.
(The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)
_first?!_
I believe you have your priorities wrong. Most regret not spending enough time with their loved ones. You only get one life after all.
Prove it :)
Your current preferences matter now. You currently don't want to die tomorrow in your sleep, therefore dying tomorrow in your sleep is already bad now. Independently of other things you want to do tomorrow or next week.
But, again, a reasonable person could disagree with most of that.
I prefer to die a vegetable at 80 than die from a nuclear blast at 40. All those years can be spent existing happily
Eh, I’m the exact opposite. I don’t want to spend a single day as a vegetable.
>Clark averted his eyes and lowered the car’s sun visor in case the device did go off and its flash caught him by surprise.
1. Disabling a terrorist weapon. When you find a mysterious box in NYC making ticking noises and emitting radiation, who you gonna call?
2. Forensics and attribution. When 1 fails how do you figure out what happened and who is responsible?
Yes, looking at a sample of material it's feasible to match it up with known samples. But after the detonation that makes no sense at all. Everything's been vaporized and mixed with what's around. And a lot of stuff has been transmuted.
Identifying it if they found the bomb would be one thing, identifying it after detonation makes no sense at all to me.
I do think you can get a reasonable estimate of the ratio of the plutonium isotopes that made up the bomb because the natural occurrence rate of plutonium is exceedingly low and we have a good understanding of what would happen to it in the detonation.
I think Clancy simply needed a smoking gun as to the origin.
This analysis is quite difficult, and I don't know that it has ever been done on an actual detonation (at least, no one admits to doing it; not that there have been terribly many opportunities to practice this), but there is no reason it can't be done.
(You're probably right that Clancy took some authorial license, though.)
For an example of what is possible, see the ruthenium mess in Europe from a few years back: https://cen.acs.org/safety/industrial-safety/caused-plume-ra... or https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16316-3 among others.
Watch at 0:40 @ Space War is Real, Here's How it Works
> Kessler Syndrome is a hypothetical scenario, proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, where a chain reaction of collisions between space debris and satellites leads to a catastrophic increase in debris, potentially rendering Earth's orbit unusable. This increase in debris would make space travel and communication more dangerous and difficult.
Can countries actively plan strategies to use Kessler Syndrome to their advantage? Can Starlink satellites be destroyed easily by this method since they are present in the same orbit?
That being said, once it’s failed detonation (and you’ve cut off any possible signals to the detonator), wouldn’t you roughly expect it to be as dangerous as transporting one?
They mention the large chunk of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary* explosive in there, but the key attribute of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger. So the only failure mode is “somehow the detonator itself has entered a state that did not detonate with the initial signal, but will eventually detonate after >1hr”, which you’d _hope_(!) it was wired to prevent.
Again, I’d shit myself immediately in this scenario. Just interesting from an engineering perspective
*see comment below, `high` explosive does not mean "hard to detonate". Cursory searches for the [limited] information on the trigger-explosive used in nuclear weapons suggest they were mostly secondary explosives, and also will probably have put me on a new watchlist!
I think the term you might mean is "secondary explosive"? Because as stated this is _very_ wrong. Nitroglycerine is a high explosive. Nitrogen triiodide is a high explosive. Not really compounds known for being hard to trigger, unless you consider a light featherdusting to be rough treatment.
Otherwise I suspect you have a good point, just the terminology seems wrong to me.
Secondary explosive: Takes quite a bit of energy to initiate and therefore reasonably stable.
High explosive: I forget the exact technical distinction from low explosive, but it refers to how it goes off, not how energetic it is.
In the real world nobody but a terrorist uses any more of a primary explosive than is needed to set off the secondary, and they are kept apart for as long as possible. You put the charge in place then you insert the detonator cap.
However, these are nukes. Obviously, we don't know details but there's another technology in use: exploding blast wires. A blast wire has no primary explosive, it is set off by pushing a huge current through a tiny wire. This is done both for timing reasons (you need great precision in imploding the plutonium) and because primary explosives cook off in fire. Secondary explosives often do not. While the heat causing a detonator to cook off isn't going to produce a nuclear yield it would still make an awful mess.
https://www.ted.com/talks/victor_vescovo_what_s_at_the_botto...