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I wrote this post, and the point is to improve discussion of societal risks. As others have pointed out, nuclear war doesn't have to kill everyone to be extreme

I wrote this post, and the point is to improve discussion of societal risks. As others have pointed out, nuclear war doesn't have to kill everyone to be extremely bad and worth avoiding. I spend a lot of my time thinking about risks from nuclear and biological weapons, and downplaying these risks is not my purpose. One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars. While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur! I've written more about risks from nuclear war here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rn2duwRP2pqvLqGCE/does-the-us-nuclear-policy-still-target-cities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rn2duwRP2pqvLqGCE/does-the-u... and here: https://jeffreyladish.com/one-hundred-opinions-on-nuclear-war/ https://jeffreyladish.com/one-hundred-opinions-on-nuclear-wa...

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars It also encourages lazy cynicism. If everyone died in a nuclear war humanity got its just desserts. Mix in the West’s discomfort with death and nuclear holocaust becomes a punch line. But if our choices today will cause millions to suffer for generations, the cost becomes more tangible. The threat becomes detailed and gruesome and that makes it relatable.
codekilla 6y ago
> extremely bad and worth avoiding Shrugs???? What exactly do you mean? Quantify this, how bad...with respect to AGI? > discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). Anything else, and I would classify it as a species wide failure to adapt to technology (In this case EXISTENTIALLY dangerous tech). Further, there is no way to grasp or accurately predict confounding factors of post total nuclear war that would put humankind at further risk.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  > Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). This gets at the heart of existential risk. Should we abandon all technology to avoid the possibility of nuclear war and just wait for an asteroid or climate change or resource exhaustion to kill us? Nuclear destruction only gets easier over time as technology progresses. My cell phone is faster than the supercomputers of the 80's used to model nuclear explosions. Even North Korea can refine uranium. Guided rockets are cheap enough to launch high school science projects. Hypersonic cruise missiles are on the horizon. Generally I would propose we avoid nuclear war being an existential risk by going to the stars as soon as possible. That has other costs that, yes, should be balanced against the costs of nuclear war. AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends, balanced only by the hope that its intelligence grows far faster than the risks and that it's value-aligned with humanity.
  - codekilla 6y ago
    > AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends No, it is not. The reason is this: it is science fiction. This makes it no less, or no more, dangerous than anything else I can make up with a quasi realistic chance of existing in the near term future. When thermonuclear bombs were detonated, they thought there was a possibility that the reaction would get away from them, and incinerate the atmosphere. The first test, they were scared this actually happened as the explosion carried on longer than they expected. The point? They actually assigned a probability (non zero) to this event, and then carried on with the test anyway. So I could say that a hydrogen bomb, using some iteration of technology just beyond our grasp is likely to kill every human on earth in the near future. Am I right? Who knows..but in conjecturing this I am no more or 'less wrong' than anyone saying AGI is the greatest threat.
    - benlivengood 6y ago
chii 6y ago
> try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur! in the case where mitigation is deemed acceptable, it would paradoxically make war more likely! That's why a defensive missile shield technology is not a good investment if you want more peace. The existing MAD mantra is what stops nuclear war. It should continue until humanity unifies into a single world gov't.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > That's why a defensive missile shield technology is not a good investment if you want more peace. That depends on whether you go for a 'weak' shield or a 'strong' shield. A weak shield may defend a dozen or two warheads: something that North Korea would launch. Japan has a 'weak' shield AFAICT: * https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1374.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1374.html A strong one would protect against hundreds: another major power. IMHO only the latter would destabilize peace, while the former would help defend agains crazies and potentially rogue operations. > The existing MAD mantra is what stops nuclear war. There are a bunch of criticism of MAD: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction#Cri...
  - usrusr 6y ago
    But weak shields are only not destabilizing as long as there is complete awareness of its weak nature. Forms of reality denial are standard mode of operations in politics and good luck finding a war that didn't start with one form or another of reality denial. On a tangent that doesn't really change ether we find weak shields bothersome or not: arguably all strong shield projects were just weak shields with reality denial built right into the sales pitch.
  - tachyonbeam 6y ago
    AFAIK anti-missile shields aren't a realistic option. Modern ICBM designs have multiple independently targetable warheads. There are also submarines with nuclear missiles. You can also launch decoys (eg: aluminium foil or flares). And uh. Recently, I was reading a book called Skunk Works. The author explains that, basically, the US was able to keep the existence of stealth fighters a secret from the public (and Russia) for years and years. He also mentions the idea of a stealth ICBM multiple times in the book (which was published in 1995). That's when it hit me. That technology already exists. Russia and the US probably have an arsenal of stealth ICBMs. They're just not publicly boasting about it, but if you think about it, there's no reason that technology wouldn't exist, particularly since military contractors were already thinking about it over 25 years ago.
mynegation 6y ago
The post discusses only first order effects. In case of nuclear war most people will die not from kinetic shock or radiation, but from famine and deceases caused by collapse of supply chain and medical infrastructures, and from unavoidable violence during the fight for scarce remaining resources.
- devy 6y ago
  Exactly! The intangible disruptions of a human society will indirectly cause eventual death due to the nuclear war. Think about it, just the COVID-19 lockdown of a few weeks can cause economy collapsed, people out of jobs, can't paid rent, utilities. A nuclear war will immediate cut off or contaminate essential human necessities, like food, water, shelters, electricity etc., so even without getting harmed by kinetic force, radiation, climate alteration, people still cannot survive long term.
  - EthanHeilman 6y ago
    I always found that more frightening than total extinction. I can't imagine all humans blinking out in a few hours. I can imagine having no food or money, trying to work dangerous odd jobs here and there and starving to death along with 30% of my town during a winter famine a few years later.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      Think of life outside the Western world for a bit. This was the case for most of colonised Asia, and is still is a thing for some places in Africa.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  Those effects won't cause extinction though because they'll diminish as the population shrinks so it'll reach some equilibrium. This is about extinction, not just lots of people dying. Nuclear winter wouldn't get less harmful the fewer people are around.
  - 6y ago
Spooky23 6y ago
With respect, I think that’s a narrowly scoped proposition that ignores obvious perils with significant impacts. Look at COVID-19 impacts on supply chains in the US and China, due to short term disruptions. Any significant nuclear conflict would have huge impacts. Destruction of Long Beach, Chicago and similar hubs would implode the economy in an extreme way. It’s also a loss of control on the societal level that would unleash other horrors.
ChomskyNormal4m 6y ago
> While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur! I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report from the 1980s where the author tried to project that if the US and USSR had a full scale nuclear war, US GNP would be back to normal within five years. Who knows what government bureaucrat had a program requiring an Orwellian report like to justify whatever policy. Who is this we? If you want to store up MREs and tin foil hats and build a bomb shelter, be my guest. Most of our efforts will be to prevent a large-scale nuclear war from happening or needing to happen.
grawprog 6y ago
>One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars. This is what the thinking was during the early part of the cold war, the whole duck and cover era. The decades after that and the knowledge gained during the cold war is what lead to our current fears and justification for focusing on disarmament rather than nuclear war prep. Whether or not humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant. Enough post nuclear fiction has been produced that people are well aware, yes, we may not all die, but life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth. That's the point of preventing nuclear war, that's the point of the world's current attitude towards it.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Whether or not humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant to the questions like whether nuclear war is bad and whether we should work to prevent it. However, the question whether or not humans end up totally extinct is relevant when comparing nuclear war with other very horrible risks, some of which do threaten total extinction. To discuss, prioritize and act on very serious (though, hopefully, unlikely to materialize) risks, we need a scale of "horribleness" that doesn't just give every serious problem a 10 out of 10. We need to reasonably prioritize our actions among many potentially dystopian risks - if consider a single one of them an negative infinity, a literal "AVOID AT ALL COSTS", then those "all costs" include increased vulnerability to other risks, and that's not appropriate.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    What other risks are there that are directly intentionally human driven that could cause such an extreme amount of destruction, death and societal collapse over the span of a few hours?
    - lopmotr 6y ago
      Meteorite strike or supervolcano eruption that we could have protected ourselves against but didn't because of resources spent on nuclear war prevention. Not sure why you added the "within a few hours" qualifier or "intentionally human driven". Have you already thought of something that takes longer, is done by humans accidentally, or is natural? Is it climate change? Does that already answer your question?
hodgesrm 6y ago
It's important to think hard about nuclear war. However the problem to focus on is that nuclear war is a lot more likely than most people think. Accidental launch in reaction to bad intelligence is a constant possibility; also the number of nuclear powers continues to increase. Civil war in any nuclear-arm nation is also something to consider. All of these could result in multiple strikes, which would unleash horrors not seen since WW II or before.
eloff 6y ago
Very few things could actually make humans extinct at this point. It would take an impact like the one that produced the moon to finish us off. We're so adaptable that some of us will survive and rebuild. If we can ever get back to technological civilization without easily accessible fossil fuels is debatable, but I think we'd find a way - it would just be a lot harder and take longer. What worries me is not extinction, but societal collapse. We've seen how disruptive covid19 was, and it was a baby event compared to things that have happened in earth's history. Climate change and nuclear war both seem highly probable causes of societal collapse. Both are preventable if we can just find a way to not be collectively stupid. I don't how we do that, but it's insane we're not trying harder.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  Realistically, if there was a full-scale nuclear war, famine and violence would kill 90-95% of people. It would also destroy a lot of our technological capabilities. There are only a handful of silicon fabs in the world, and they have complex supply chains. It could bring us back to some kind of a technological middle age, except we'd have guns, electricity and radios.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    The ammo and electricity would not last long in most parts of the world. I think a lot of communities would have real trouble even feeding themselves and a few hard winters could wipe them out.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Some electricity is not that hard to generate with late middle-age manufacturing techniques. It won't be a nice stable grid, but you'd likely be able to run e.g. mining pumps with power generated from a nearby water mill. Similarly, some refrigeration is not super difficult to build once you know how it works. That would help quite a bit against starvation from bad harvests because it allows you to have bigger stores of food.
    - howlgarnish 6y ago
onecommentman 6y ago
This is mostly Herman Kahn redux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn When there were 3 TV channels in the 1960s, in prime time programming you would often hear discussions just like this, from Kahn himself at times. Topic and people inspired the movie Dr. Strangelove and was at the forefront of the national consciousness in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. As a set of ideas and concerns, it was beaten to death at the time, revived a bit during the “nuclear winter” thesis of the 1980s, and always was and continues to be an active issue at the Federal level. Mismanage nukes and you can be booted out even if you are the Secretary of the Air Force. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-airforce-idUSWAT00960720080606 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-airforce-idUSWAT00960... It is a very, very deep rabbit hole. Could be fun to see how far you can get with unclassified sources, for various peculiar values of “fun” until you turn into a character from Strangelove yourself. The classic starting point is On Thermonuclear War, 1960, Kahn. Now that I think of it, Kahn died in the early 1980s. If he reincarnated immediately, he’d be in his mid 30s. How old are you, landfish? Is that you, Kahn? For everyone else, repeat after me, nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war. Nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war...
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  > For everyone else, repeat after me, nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war. Some Japanese people would disagree with you.
  - loopz 6y ago
    It shows that people from WW2 doesn't live anymore. People forget: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
- jackcviers3 6y ago
  Kahn actually ran studies to come up with his numbers of a nuclear war causing a ten year economic regression and only killing 50% of a country. His point was that on a long enough timeline it would/will eventually happen, and with adequate preparation a country could ensure both objective victory and survival for the majority of its populace and civilization. Someone has to think about the unthinkable. Wishing nukes away won't make them disappear, and as shown in Daniel Ellsberg's the Doomsday Machine, nuclear weapons have been used as weapons of war in U.S. foreign policy for decades as indirect threats and bluffs. They will eventually be used again as explosive ordinance. Civil defense was lambasted and deprioritized in the west because people thought with their hearts instead of their minds with regard to the destructive power of nuclear weapons. Decades of poor science on nuclear winter based off of the terrible TTAPS climate model have engendered the notion that nuclear war is a death sentence to humanity. It's not true, academia knows it is not, but nobody will push the subsequent corrective nuclear winter stories because the fear of nuclear winter keeps nuclear hawks at bay in political office. The top answer in this quotation question has a ton of links on this: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax They are weapons of war. They are effective weapons of war. They will eventually be used as explosive ordinance and not just threats and bluffs. Calling them unthinkable and anyone who plans for survival following their use a horrible person is bad emotional rhetoric. We should have an implementable plan for civil defense like China and Russia do. We should not allow fear to prevent the survival of our way of life.
numpad0 6y ago
ok so no one has yet to comment this: another problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that a nuclear warhead becomes a permanent get out of jail free card. Everyone knows about few Russian invasions, Chinese Uighur genocide or Nagorno-Karabakh war and total inaction against these observed in various international communities, especially between nuclear capable nations. Incidents of this scale were enough in the past to start a World War or at least years long regional conflicts. While a global (thermonuclear) war not occurring is good, genocides and invasions are generally not; I fear the fear of former is causing latter never to be held accountable.
User23 6y ago
The hysteria over nuclear war has definitely done great harm to civil defense and preparedness in the USA. I have a print copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills[1] that I review regularly because an hour a year seems worth it to me. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Expanded/dp/094248701X https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Expanded/...
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Well I suggest you delete that post ASAP. I do not like notion of giving ideas how to solve Climate Change and cool down the planet Trump's way, 2 months before he left office.
mikepalmer 6y ago
Yes, the topic of the article is human extinction, and one can be pedantic and say, why stray off topic? However, conceptually close is near-extinction, with unfathomable suffering and waste, destruction of nearly all human culture, nearly all humans, and nearly all plant and animal life. It's worth a sentence or two to mention this in the article, to avoid confusion on the part of the reader that the author wishes minimize the negative effects of nuclear war - which would perhaps make it more acceptable in a way. That said, the analysis seems sound, and despite the chance that the conclusion could be misconstrued or misused, it is important to remind voters graphically of the horrors of nuclear war. That's a better strategy to avoid both extinction and near-extinction, rather than counting on military planners to not overshoot their goals of near-extinction.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars It also encourages lazy cynicism. If everyone died in a nuclear war humanity got its just desserts. Mix in the West’s discomfort with death and nuclear holocaust becomes a punch line. But if our choices today will cause millions to suffer for generations, the cost becomes more tangible. The threat becomes detailed and gruesome and that makes it relatable.

codekilla 6y ago

> extremely bad and worth avoiding Shrugs???? What exactly do you mean? Quantify this, how bad...with respect to AGI? > discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). Anything else, and I would classify it as a species wide failure to adapt to technology (In this case EXISTENTIALLY dangerous tech). Further, there is no way to grasp or accurately predict confounding factors of post total nuclear war that would put humankind at further risk.

benlivengood 6y ago
> Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). This gets at the heart of existential risk. Should we abandon all technology to avoid the possibility of nuclear war and just wait for an asteroid or climate change or resource exhaustion to kill us? Nuclear destruction only gets easier over time as technology progresses. My cell phone is faster than the supercomputers of the 80's used to model nuclear explosions. Even North Korea can refine uranium. Guided rockets are cheap enough to launch high school science projects. Hypersonic cruise missiles are on the horizon. Generally I would propose we avoid nuclear war being an existential risk by going to the stars as soon as possible. That has other costs that, yes, should be balanced against the costs of nuclear war. AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends, balanced only by the hope that its intelligence grows far faster than the risks and that it's value-aligned with humanity.
- codekilla 6y ago
  > AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends No, it is not. The reason is this: it is science fiction. This makes it no less, or no more, dangerous than anything else I can make up with a quasi realistic chance of existing in the near term future. When thermonuclear bombs were detonated, they thought there was a possibility that the reaction would get away from them, and incinerate the atmosphere. The first test, they were scared this actually happened as the explosion carried on longer than they expected. The point? They actually assigned a probability (non zero) to this event, and then carried on with the test anyway. So I could say that a hydrogen bomb, using some iteration of technology just beyond our grasp is likely to kill every human on earth in the near future. Am I right? Who knows..but in conjecturing this I am no more or 'less wrong' than anyone saying AGI is the greatest threat.
  - benlivengood 6y ago

chii 6y ago

> try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur! in the case where mitigation is deemed acceptable, it would paradoxically make war more likely! That's why a defensive missile shield technology is not a good investment if you want more peace. The existing MAD mantra is what stops nuclear war. It should continue until humanity unifies into a single world gov't.

throw0101a 6y ago
> That's why a defensive missile shield technology is not a good investment if you want more peace. That depends on whether you go for a 'weak' shield or a 'strong' shield. A weak shield may defend a dozen or two warheads: something that North Korea would launch. Japan has a 'weak' shield AFAICT: * https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1374.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1374.html A strong one would protect against hundreds: another major power. IMHO only the latter would destabilize peace, while the former would help defend agains crazies and potentially rogue operations. > The existing MAD mantra is what stops nuclear war. There are a bunch of criticism of MAD: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction#Cri...
- usrusr 6y ago
  But weak shields are only not destabilizing as long as there is complete awareness of its weak nature. Forms of reality denial are standard mode of operations in politics and good luck finding a war that didn't start with one form or another of reality denial. On a tangent that doesn't really change ether we find weak shields bothersome or not: arguably all strong shield projects were just weak shields with reality denial built right into the sales pitch.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  AFAIK anti-missile shields aren't a realistic option. Modern ICBM designs have multiple independently targetable warheads. There are also submarines with nuclear missiles. You can also launch decoys (eg: aluminium foil or flares). And uh. Recently, I was reading a book called Skunk Works. The author explains that, basically, the US was able to keep the existence of stealth fighters a secret from the public (and Russia) for years and years. He also mentions the idea of a stealth ICBM multiple times in the book (which was published in 1995). That's when it hit me. That technology already exists. Russia and the US probably have an arsenal of stealth ICBMs. They're just not publicly boasting about it, but if you think about it, there's no reason that technology wouldn't exist, particularly since military contractors were already thinking about it over 25 years ago.

mynegation 6y ago

The post discusses only first order effects. In case of nuclear war most people will die not from kinetic shock or radiation, but from famine and deceases caused by collapse of supply chain and medical infrastructures, and from unavoidable violence during the fight for scarce remaining resources.

devy 6y ago
Exactly! The intangible disruptions of a human society will indirectly cause eventual death due to the nuclear war. Think about it, just the COVID-19 lockdown of a few weeks can cause economy collapsed, people out of jobs, can't paid rent, utilities. A nuclear war will immediate cut off or contaminate essential human necessities, like food, water, shelters, electricity etc., so even without getting harmed by kinetic force, radiation, climate alteration, people still cannot survive long term.
- EthanHeilman 6y ago
  I always found that more frightening than total extinction. I can't imagine all humans blinking out in a few hours. I can imagine having no food or money, trying to work dangerous odd jobs here and there and starving to death along with 30% of my town during a winter famine a few years later.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Think of life outside the Western world for a bit. This was the case for most of colonised Asia, and is still is a thing for some places in Africa.
lopmotr 6y ago
Those effects won't cause extinction though because they'll diminish as the population shrinks so it'll reach some equilibrium. This is about extinction, not just lots of people dying. Nuclear winter wouldn't get less harmful the fewer people are around.
- 6y ago

Spooky23 6y ago

With respect, I think that’s a narrowly scoped proposition that ignores obvious perils with significant impacts. Look at COVID-19 impacts on supply chains in the US and China, due to short term disruptions. Any significant nuclear conflict would have huge impacts. Destruction of Long Beach, Chicago and similar hubs would implode the economy in an extreme way. It’s also a loss of control on the societal level that would unleash other horrors.

ChomskyNormal4m 6y ago

> While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur! I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report from the 1980s where the author tried to project that if the US and USSR had a full scale nuclear war, US GNP would be back to normal within five years. Who knows what government bureaucrat had a program requiring an Orwellian report like to justify whatever policy. Who is this we? If you want to store up MREs and tin foil hats and build a bomb shelter, be my guest. Most of our efforts will be to prevent a large-scale nuclear war from happening or needing to happen.

grawprog 6y ago

>One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars. This is what the thinking was during the early part of the cold war, the whole duck and cover era. The decades after that and the knowledge gained during the cold war is what lead to our current fears and justification for focusing on disarmament rather than nuclear war prep. Whether or not humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant. Enough post nuclear fiction has been produced that people are well aware, yes, we may not all die, but life sure is going to suck a whole lot for literally every living thing on Earth. That's the point of preventing nuclear war, that's the point of the world's current attitude towards it.

PeterisP 6y ago
Whether or not humans end up totally extinct is irrelevant to the questions like whether nuclear war is bad and whether we should work to prevent it. However, the question whether or not humans end up totally extinct is relevant when comparing nuclear war with other very horrible risks, some of which do threaten total extinction. To discuss, prioritize and act on very serious (though, hopefully, unlikely to materialize) risks, we need a scale of "horribleness" that doesn't just give every serious problem a 10 out of 10. We need to reasonably prioritize our actions among many potentially dystopian risks - if consider a single one of them an negative infinity, a literal "AVOID AT ALL COSTS", then those "all costs" include increased vulnerability to other risks, and that's not appropriate.
- grawprog 6y ago
  What other risks are there that are directly intentionally human driven that could cause such an extreme amount of destruction, death and societal collapse over the span of a few hours?
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    Meteorite strike or supervolcano eruption that we could have protected ourselves against but didn't because of resources spent on nuclear war prevention. Not sure why you added the "within a few hours" qualifier or "intentionally human driven". Have you already thought of something that takes longer, is done by humans accidentally, or is natural? Is it climate change? Does that already answer your question?

hodgesrm 6y ago

It's important to think hard about nuclear war. However the problem to focus on is that nuclear war is a lot more likely than most people think. Accidental launch in reaction to bad intelligence is a constant possibility; also the number of nuclear powers continues to increase. Civil war in any nuclear-arm nation is also something to consider. All of these could result in multiple strikes, which would unleash horrors not seen since WW II or before.

eloff 6y ago

Very few things could actually make humans extinct at this point. It would take an impact like the one that produced the moon to finish us off. We're so adaptable that some of us will survive and rebuild. If we can ever get back to technological civilization without easily accessible fossil fuels is debatable, but I think we'd find a way - it would just be a lot harder and take longer. What worries me is not extinction, but societal collapse. We've seen how disruptive covid19 was, and it was a baby event compared to things that have happened in earth's history. Climate change and nuclear war both seem highly probable causes of societal collapse. Both are preventable if we can just find a way to not be collectively stupid. I don't how we do that, but it's insane we're not trying harder.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
Realistically, if there was a full-scale nuclear war, famine and violence would kill 90-95% of people. It would also destroy a lot of our technological capabilities. There are only a handful of silicon fabs in the world, and they have complex supply chains. It could bring us back to some kind of a technological middle age, except we'd have guns, electricity and radios.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  The ammo and electricity would not last long in most parts of the world. I think a lot of communities would have real trouble even feeding themselves and a few hard winters could wipe them out.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Some electricity is not that hard to generate with late middle-age manufacturing techniques. It won't be a nice stable grid, but you'd likely be able to run e.g. mining pumps with power generated from a nearby water mill. Similarly, some refrigeration is not super difficult to build once you know how it works. That would help quite a bit against starvation from bad harvests because it allows you to have bigger stores of food.
  - howlgarnish 6y ago

onecommentman 6y ago

This is mostly Herman Kahn redux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn When there were 3 TV channels in the 1960s, in prime time programming you would often hear discussions just like this, from Kahn himself at times. Topic and people inspired the movie Dr. Strangelove and was at the forefront of the national consciousness in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. As a set of ideas and concerns, it was beaten to death at the time, revived a bit during the “nuclear winter” thesis of the 1980s, and always was and continues to be an active issue at the Federal level. Mismanage nukes and you can be booted out even if you are the Secretary of the Air Force. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-airforce-idUSWAT00960720080606 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-airforce-idUSWAT00960... It is a very, very deep rabbit hole. Could be fun to see how far you can get with unclassified sources, for various peculiar values of “fun” until you turn into a character from Strangelove yourself. The classic starting point is On Thermonuclear War, 1960, Kahn. Now that I think of it, Kahn died in the early 1980s. If he reincarnated immediately, he’d be in his mid 30s. How old are you, landfish? Is that you, Kahn? For everyone else, repeat after me, nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war. Nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war...

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> For everyone else, repeat after me, nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war. Some Japanese people would disagree with you.
- loopz 6y ago
  It shows that people from WW2 doesn't live anymore. People forget: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
jackcviers3 6y ago
Kahn actually ran studies to come up with his numbers of a nuclear war causing a ten year economic regression and only killing 50% of a country. His point was that on a long enough timeline it would/will eventually happen, and with adequate preparation a country could ensure both objective victory and survival for the majority of its populace and civilization. Someone has to think about the unthinkable. Wishing nukes away won't make them disappear, and as shown in Daniel Ellsberg's the Doomsday Machine, nuclear weapons have been used as weapons of war in U.S. foreign policy for decades as indirect threats and bluffs. They will eventually be used again as explosive ordinance. Civil defense was lambasted and deprioritized in the west because people thought with their hearts instead of their minds with regard to the destructive power of nuclear weapons. Decades of poor science on nuclear winter based off of the terrible TTAPS climate model have engendered the notion that nuclear war is a death sentence to humanity. It's not true, academia knows it is not, but nobody will push the subsequent corrective nuclear winter stories because the fear of nuclear winter keeps nuclear hawks at bay in political office. The top answer in this quotation question has a ton of links on this: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax They are weapons of war. They are effective weapons of war. They will eventually be used as explosive ordinance and not just threats and bluffs. Calling them unthinkable and anyone who plans for survival following their use a horrible person is bad emotional rhetoric. We should have an implementable plan for civil defense like China and Russia do. We should not allow fear to prevent the survival of our way of life.

numpad0 6y ago

ok so no one has yet to comment this: another problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that a nuclear warhead becomes a permanent get out of jail free card. Everyone knows about few Russian invasions, Chinese Uighur genocide or Nagorno-Karabakh war and total inaction against these observed in various international communities, especially between nuclear capable nations. Incidents of this scale were enough in the past to start a World War or at least years long regional conflicts. While a global (thermonuclear) war not occurring is good, genocides and invasions are generally not; I fear the fear of former is causing latter never to be held accountable.

User23 6y ago

The hysteria over nuclear war has definitely done great harm to civil defense and preparedness in the USA. I have a print copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills[1] that I review regularly because an hour a year seems worth it to me. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Expanded/dp/094248701X https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Expanded/...

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

Well I suggest you delete that post ASAP. I do not like notion of giving ideas how to solve Climate Change and cool down the planet Trump's way, 2 months before he left office.

mikepalmer 6y ago

Yes, the topic of the article is human extinction, and one can be pedantic and say, why stray off topic? However, conceptually close is near-extinction, with unfathomable suffering and waste, destruction of nearly all human culture, nearly all humans, and nearly all plant and animal life. It's worth a sentence or two to mention this in the article, to avoid confusion on the part of the reader that the author wishes minimize the negative effects of nuclear war - which would perhaps make it more acceptable in a way. That said, the analysis seems sound, and despite the chance that the conclusion could be misconstrued or misused, it is important to remind voters graphically of the horrors of nuclear war. That's a better strategy to avoid both extinction and near-extinction, rather than counting on military planners to not overshoot their goals of near-extinction.