Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

I went down a rabbit hole of archival recordings (on archive.org) of insane material from the Cold War era, including this gem called "The Complacent Americans" which aimed to instruct Americans on how to survive a nuclear blast. It's really quite mental to listen to: https://archive.org/details/lp_the-complacent-americans_larr...

It inspired me to make an EP about the same topic, utilizing samples from that material plus some others, called Leader of all Nations. You might like it if you're into slower-paced dubstep / Boards of Canada stuff, it's on Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/taaapes/sets/leader-of-all-nations) plus all the usual places.

It's strange to me that some of the basic principles of what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion are no longer taught, despite the fact that the risk of nuclear war is arguably just as high as it once was. For instance, I bet if a bomb went off in the middle distance, most people would look at it: bad move! If you see a big flash, you should actually (it's a cliche, but true), "duck and cover". Duck to avoid flying debris. Cover to avoid burns. I didn't know this until I dug into the archival material making this EP but it's genuinely odd to me that this is not widely known. (I'd heard the phrase before, but had no idea what it really meant.)

The risk of a nuclear war is fairly low compared to historical flash points. From memory there were at least 2 instances where if people followed orders to the T we would have had a nuclear exchange.

First one was cuban missile crisis that had a lot of escalation, but most poignant was probably dropping depth charges against submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis). On that front - thank god Khrushchev chickened out.

Second one was a false detection by Soviet early warning system which should have triggered an immediate retaliation, but was stopped by one person with critical thinking skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...).

And situations like that could happen again. Experts put the odds of a nuclear war at around 1-3% per annum, and that feels about right. The odds of it happening in any particular year is fairly low, but the odds of it happening during a person's lifespan becomes quite high. 70 years of those kind of odds make it more likely than not. We've landed on "not", but the kind of close calls you called out indicates that "more likely than not" feels about right, and that we landed on "not" has a huge component of luck.

I think the closest call we've had since the end of the Cold War was the Russian cruise missile that crashed in Poland near the beginning of the war in Ukraine. There was a world where that hit something more important (or at least the Russians thought it did), which would potentially lead to an Article 5 call, which if the Russians anticipated, the rational move could well be a preemptive strike. But as you said, that's miles from the "One act of open defiance by a subordinate from armaggedon" type scenarios.

An article 5 call wouldn't trigger an invasion of Russia.

Besides the best response is to simply gift more toys to the Ukrainians.

Your second sentence signals a slide into a dangerous mindset pushed by the MAGA lobby.

Weapons and other support are certainly not regarded as "toys" by Ukrainians who are subjected to horrific daily (and nightly) bombardments from Russia and Russian-occupied territories. This is life-or-death seriousness.

Secondly, and more importantly, these are not "gifts". After coercing Ukraine to surrender its nuclear deterrent to Russia, the US took upon itself an obligation to provide for Ukraine's defense.

As many will point out, it's not specified in the Budapest Memorandum. However, the 42nd President of the United States made a promise that should not be taken lightly (https://youtu.be/pC5yYZ_o__s?feature=shared).

The spirit of the Budapest Memorandum was that each party should uphold and enforce every other party's commitment to the memorandum. A violation would cause it to collapse, which would be antithetical to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Upholding and enforcing those commitments is therefore implicit in the memorandum.

Finally, as someone rightfully said: "It's our moral, if not legal, obligation." (https://x.com/JSchneid99/status/1959715219468607529)

Good time to remind everyone that Article 5 does not really commit the member states automatically into a war. It will be insane for any country to sign such a treaty. The language in Article 5 permits each NATO member to decide for themselves what action they want to take when Article 5 is invoked.

This is what it says:

"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one .. shall be considered an attack against them all and ..that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, ...will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."

does "it" refer to the attacked country?

it = country that is evaluating its response to an attack on another member

Except it wasn’t a cruise missile nor was it Russian.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_missile_explosion_in_Po...

It does bother me that people think duck and cover is completely useless. It is if the bomb explodes directly above you, but if you're a few miles away, it's pretty much the same situation as a tornado, and we still have drills for those.

A tornado leaves only local destruction. Duck-and-cover implies that with proper preparation, total thermonuclear war is survivable by a society, which is not the correct mindset.

it is survivable according to the Soviet doctrine, which denied the concept of MAD. Soviets focused on the survival of small military command in hardened bunkers, rather than survival of entirety of civilian population.

This doctrine allows unlimited pre-emptive nuclear strikes to achieve decisive victory over the enemy, and avoid attrition-style prolonged nuclear war

Hmm, I remember reading that the Soviets had significantly better preparations for civilian protection in nuclear war than the US (including more bunkers in cities), but I'm struggling to remember where. Possibly Raven Rock (subtitle: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die) by Garrett Graff.

Moscow subway (many other subways and bunkers throughout the country) are the underground bunkers that could shelter the Soviet elites in the event of nuclear war

Moscow in particular has a few low-hanging-fruits that can be mentioned; the Metro bunkers[0] and A-135 system[1]. Both were designed to make the city deeply survivable in the event of a targeted conflict, but it's questionable how well they would have worked.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_s...

Moscow had, at least at one point, 179 DGZs (Designated Ground Zeros) from the US alone - with, I would imagine, at least another 20 or so from the UK and France.

Moscow was the most overkilled places on the planet - doesn't matter if you were in a bunker - all that would do is delay your death a bit.

Got a source for that doctrine?

> Soviets focused on the survival of small military command in hardened bunkers, rather than survival of entirety of civilian population.

How exactly is the focus of the Americans any different? The VIPs[1] will be whisked away into bunkers, you and me will be vaporized.

---

[1] Who have utterly and irredeemably failed in their most important job - of preventing a nuclear war. In a just world, not a single one of them should be allowed to survive such a failure.

We don't live in a just world, though, the captain will run for the VIP life raft at the first glint of sea ice.

the difference is ideology and class difference.

American VIPs want to survive because they are rich and want to enjoy their wealth, they don't want to die.

Soviet VIPs were not wealthy and their goal of survival was purely decisive military win and achievement of political goals.

I assure you, people and VIPs and their desires are more or less the same the world over.

Othering and ascribing alien ambitions to the enemy only fools yourself.

Why do you think their goals differed from those of someone like, say, Kissinger? Or any of the other people who have spent the past century and a half grooming and growing the empire?

who blinked first during Cuban missile crisis? It was JFK who called Khrushev for deescalation.

who blinked first during Ukraine-Russia war? It was Jake Sullivan who redirected military gear from Urkaine to Israel and drip-fed the ammunition shipments, when Russia showed they are ready to use tactical nukes if necessary and formally updated their nuclear doctrine

You're rewriting history.

The actual timeline was that Kennedy blockades Cuba, Soviet vessels turn around rather than start a shooting war, Khruschev makes a secret proposal to de-escalate, Kennedy agrees to it, both side declare victory, Soviet bombers are removed from Cuba, the blockade is lifted, the US removes missiles from Turkey.

That you see all this, and your takeaway is that "Kennedy blinked first because unlike Ivan, he isn't a power-hungry monster" belies an unnuanced, zero-sum, exceptionalist view of the world.

As for Israel and Ukraine, I think all that demonstrated was that the US cared more about kowtowing to Israel, than it did about having a proxy war with Russia. Weirdly enough, though, to this day, weapons and cash (that is immediately spent on weapons) continue to pour into Ukraine. Someone should probably notify Canada and the EU about that new Russian red line, they clearly haven't gotten the memo.

the only secret thing was the agreement from JFK to remove missiles from Turkey, that part was hidden from the public to artificially prop up JFK's image as tough on Soviets, while in reality:

1. Blockade was not full, two American warships, the USS Essex and the USS Gearing, were ready to intercept tanker Bucharest, which could have led to war. Instead, Kennedy ordered to let the Bucharest through the quarantine

2. U-2 plane was shot down and Maj. Rudolf Anderson has died

as for "weapons and cash continue to pour" - it does not conflict with the Russian strategy, you might be surprised, but it is perfectly fine for Russians, that the US's allies are expending their resources on overpriced US military gear, that is dependent on Chinese rare earth exports

Bucharest was a tanker that was not believed to carry nuclear weapons, and the public point of the blockade was to prevent nuclear weapons from being shipped to Cuba.

If Kennedy was a yellowbelly, what was a 'strong man' supposed to do in his place? End civilization over it?

Your hyperfocus on 'winning' every confrontation, no matter the value, and no matter the risk - is destructive and incredibly dangerous.

> U-2 plane was shot down and Maj. Rudolf Anderson has died

Could you remind us what that U-2 plane was doing, and where it was while doing it?

You can't honestly hold the Soviet bloc to blame for shooting down an enemy aircraft over its own territory... Or view Kennedy as weak because he didn't escalate over a clear act of self-defense.

They had every right to shoot him down, and everybody knew it.

American doctrine too. Both countries built thousands of tactical nuclear weapons.

You have agreed with my comment that the event would not be survivable by society. Duck-and-cover drills are for those who you call civilians, who will not survive. At best they invite the misinterpretation that such an event is survivable and capable of generating a “decisive victory over the enemy.”

Would military command really have achieved a decisive victory by glazing the surface of their own country and burying what’s left underground for the foreseeable future? Clearly a failure of strategic thinking by our erstwhile competitors.

the nuclear deterrence is basically a game of Russian roulette, and nobody can play it better than the Russians.

The Soviet bet was that the collective West is more wealthy and hedonistic than Soviets, and has more to lose in the global hot war, and therefore would be less willing to climb up the escalation ladder, thus giving the escalation dominance to the Soviets, as long as technical means of delivering the decisive strike are available (ICBM, IRBM, SLBM, ALBM, MIRV, Perimeter, etc).

examples are numerous:

1. Cuban missile crisis. It was JFK who blinked first in the Caribbean crisis and called Khrushev to deescalate and agreed to remove missiles from Turkey

2. Ukraine war. It was Jake Sullivan that turned off the tap on military shipments to Ukraine, when Russia communicated that they will be using tactical nukes in Kherson

Anyone who finds themselves in a game of Russian roulette is a loser. Perhaps the Soviet elite had less to lose and could rationalize a reckless escalation spiral. But, if your government acts like foaming madmen with— we all should recognize— no actual ability to decisively do anything to great powers, and relying on the rest of the world to act like statesmen and leaders and stop the escalation spiral— no, that government is destined for the dustbin of history. Where the Soviet Union is now. To the extent I’m incidentally describing any modern Western leadership, it’s a shame, we all lose.

it is perfectly rational strategy, given their resources and positioning. There is absolutely nothing "madmen" in this strategy.

It is an edge, a way to exploit an arbitrage on the difference in a will to sacrifice and die between two nations.

When you play heads up poker, and your opponent is not willing to risk his pot, you bully him with your betting strategy and extract value ("big stack bully" strategy)

>> "and relying on the rest of the world to act like statesmen and leaders"

perhaps these "statesmen and leaders" should show more responsibility before unleashing non-stop wars around the world and plunging nations into endless wars, organizing genocides, and faking "muhh weapons of mass destruction" evidence for foreign invasions and occupations

Strange the Soviets would fetishize a strategy they defeated in WWII.

It actually fails in all scenarios. If the West perceived the Soviets as rational— which they did— they would not at all expect the Russians to trigger MAD. In an acute conflict there is no stopping point, both will continue to escalate expecting the other to back down. This happened repeatedly in the “non-stop wars” you reference resulting in conventional proxy conflict, not more, partly because the Soviets did act rationally and not according to your strategy . Conversely, if the Soviets convinced the West they truly were committed to mutual annihilation lest the West surrender incrementally, or worse, convinced the West the Soviets could not be prudent stewards of such weapons by willie-nillie glazing this city or that, this would have also triggered an unconstrained response and unlimited escalation spiral.

Had the Soviets really gambled and gone all-in with your hyper-rational, inhuman bluff, it’s most likely that we would not be here to have this discussion.

Duck and cover doesn't imply any such thing. It is simply a way to protect yourself in a case like nancyminusone described.

A good example is the Chelyabinsk meteor event of 2013. Many people went to look out the window to see what was going on, not realizing that the shock wave would come moments later.

> A fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was hailed as a hero after saving 44 children from imploding window glass cuts. Despite not knowing the origin of the intense flash of light, Karbysheva thought it prudent to take precautionary measures by ordering her students to stay away from the room's windows and to perform a duck and cover manoeuvre and then to leave the building. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when the blast arrived and window glass severed a tendon in one of her arms and left thigh; none of her students, whom she ordered to hide under their desks, suffered cuts. The teacher was taken to a hospital which received 112 people that day. The majority of the patients were suffering from cuts.

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

Exactly. Half a megaton, but high enough up that duck and cover would probably have saved everyone.

Okay, so you survive your initial local blast. Now what?

Nuclear war won't be a local thing. Your country will be hit by hundreds if not thousands of nukes. Not only is your local city devastated, so is literally every other city. Nobody is coming to help: your government and military no longer exist, there is no emergency response possible, the Red Cross isn't a thing anymore. The electric grid has collapsed. The internet is dead. You're rapidly running out of fuel, heating sources, running water, and food.

So what exactly did the whole "duck and cover" do for you? Is surviving the initial blast worth the week or two of complete horror which will inevitably follow?

Duck-and-cover maybe makes sense if a nuclear war is going to be a single hit and the rest of society survives to help you recover. But that's not what nuclear war will be like.

The US nuked itself literally thousands of times, and that never happened. You’re assuming a far more competent and omnipotent enemy with far more destructive weapons than exists.

Location, location, location!

The US didn’t nuke its critical infrastructure…

For example, how many fewer water plants can your city survive on?

There are easily 10x more fresh water plants in the US than nukes in both countries arsenals combined.

Not to mention fresh water wells on private property, which are 100x or more.

I’m not saying Nukes won’t cause damage - just that there is zero chance they can cause the pervasive, complete destruction of ‘everything’ that movies portray. There just aren’t enough of them. And no one knows enough or is competent enough to identify everything of value.

Don’t live in a high value target area though, or next to a major military base.

Duck and Cover was just one of many aspects of the culture of Cold War - another was indeed, for American families to dig their own survival bunkers.

The jingle at school was for the kids, the Sears catalog bunker section, adults.

Not sure. My understanding is that it made sense before the hydrogen bombs. After Teller did his magic, the bomb shelter (etc.) became laughable.

It depends on how far from the bomb you are. For any reasonable bomb there's a distance where duck and cover helps. It takes less overpressure to kill you with flying debris than to kill you directly.

When the bomb is big enough this no longer applies, but in this realm adding more power to the boom doesn't do much to increase the damage area. There's no point in such a bomb unless you detonate it at high altitude--that means rockets, and you need a lot of rocket to lift such a bomb.

It's not simple; with large bombs the lethal blast radius grows faster than the lethal prompt radiation radius, but the thermal damage grows fast too. You can duck and cover to survive flying glass and falling roofs, but if you're in line of the thermal pulse you're cooked.

In any case, massive bombs being used in "counter-value attacks" (euphemism for targetting civilians) aren't the most likely way for a nuclear war to start. Both the Soviet Union/Russia and America invested heavily in tactical nuclear weapons, designed for battlefield use (e.g. "counter force".) Additionally, other nuclear powers like France have counter-force first strike as part of their nuclear doctrine. Any semi-rational way to start a nuclear war would be to target the oppositions ability to respond in kind, not to attack cities right off the bat. Strikes against cities are a reaction, a threat meant to deter, but starting the war out that way is just an elaborate form of suicide. Point is, it's a good idea to assume that civilians will have at least some period of disturbing escalation as warning to get the fuck out of urban areas. When you hear about the US military setting off nukes in the Fulga Gap to stop Soviet tanks, that's when you GTFO.

As someone who normally would not take such anti-life positions, I legitimately cannot understand why anyone would want to survive a nuclear attack.

You'd survive just to starve. From that perspective, duck and cover is trading a quick death for a long one.

Only if you assume a single nuclear attack leads to escalation into nuclear holocaust. It's certainly the prevailing wisdom, but it's not an actual guarantee.

If you survive the war, you can always chose suicide later if conditions become intolerable. Best to not be too hasty, leave your options open.

I'm getting quite off-topic, but this reminds me of the original Fallout game manual: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/38400/manuals/...

It contains a section describing the effects of a nuclear explosions. There was a cartoon I really liked with the caption "if you see the flash, duck and cover!". I interpreted it as clearly tongue-in-cheek, but I was never sure whether that was intended to be an accurate representation of what was thought to be best practice in the '50s, or just made up in imitation of it.

Looking at it now, it might even have just been good advice with a silly picture!

Edit: Just re-reading, I'm surprised how much detail they went into on the effects of nuclear explosions. Also, did anyone ever cook the recipes from either the Fallout or Fallout 2 manuals? :)

There have been a lot of great manuals over the years that included huge amounts of info that was entirely unnecessary for the game, but really added to the experience. As well as the small instructions for the game, Hellcats over the Pacific included a huge manual with info which Wikipedia tells me was taken from the F6F pilot's manual or an FAA flight training manual.

cool music, somehow reminiscing me of http://poudoum.free.fr/Stupid.mp3

Thanks for the kind words I appreciate it. That was a great listen. Unexpected ending, especially at the volume I was listening at! What artist is that?

i can't say really, i know this website with those 4 songs since forever, it has never been updated...

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