5 ms·

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 196

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.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner is one of the few books that has literally given me nightmares. Imagine reading memos with stuff like "we plan to kill at least 600 million people, probably a lot more, a lot of them our allies"....
  - arethuza 6y ago
    The first part of the book is available online: https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html The exact quote that stunned me being: "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts. I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
  - jackcviers3 6y ago
    There were only 3 billion on the planet at the time, too. Estimates for U.S. casualties were 120 million dead in 1969. Out of 202.7 million That still would have left the U.S. as one of the largest countries on the planet, and fallout would largely have dissipated after two to six weeks. Congress, the president, and the federal reserve agents would likely have survived thanks to top secret bunkers and Looking Glass. The military would have been wiped out. Food production would be largely unaffected for grains and vegetables, but nearly every nonhuman animal in the midwest, coastal cities, and big sky parts of the country would be dead from fallout. Food delivery and distribution would rely largely on coal rail and river barge transport, but it still did mostly at the time. It would take ten years to rebuild a refining capacity and restore the power grid and military Things would eventually return to normal. The cities would be rebuilt and reinhabited. I know it is hard to believe, but look at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, German firebombed cities from WW2 like Dresden; they were rebuilt from the ashes. Germany was nearly entirely destroyed by WW2. It came back. Barring nuclear winter actually occurring (which the Kuwait oil field fires kinda proves won't happen), total nuclear war is something countries can recover from, which makes it even more likely to happen in the future. As Ellsberg put it, "any nonzero chance is crazy."
tsimionescu 6y ago
> Nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war That almost sounds plausible if you don't know the long history of nuclear weapons being almost used and avoided by sheer luck. Your thesis also breaks down once you remember that the USA is building 'small-scale' nuclear weapons with the precise intention of making them usable in current conflicts. Not to mention that the US have recently unilaterally withdrawn from the disarmament agreement with Russia, under a supposedly Russia-friendly president.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >nuclear weapons being almost used and avoided by sheer luck. Sheer luck is an odd way to describe "so much process and procedure and checks that when something does slip through the cracks it is correctly identified as anomalous and nobody gets nuked". Sure it might not make you feel warm and fuzzy inside and near misses show where to improve the system but to pretend it's just "sheer luck" despite god knows how many man hours being spent on the problem is naive, hyperbolic and infantile.

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.

arethuza 6y ago
Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner is one of the few books that has literally given me nightmares. Imagine reading memos with stuff like "we plan to kill at least 600 million people, probably a lot more, a lot of them our allies"....
- arethuza 6y ago
  The first part of the book is available online: https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html The exact quote that stunned me being: "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts. I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
- jackcviers3 6y ago
  There were only 3 billion on the planet at the time, too. Estimates for U.S. casualties were 120 million dead in 1969. Out of 202.7 million That still would have left the U.S. as one of the largest countries on the planet, and fallout would largely have dissipated after two to six weeks. Congress, the president, and the federal reserve agents would likely have survived thanks to top secret bunkers and Looking Glass. The military would have been wiped out. Food production would be largely unaffected for grains and vegetables, but nearly every nonhuman animal in the midwest, coastal cities, and big sky parts of the country would be dead from fallout. Food delivery and distribution would rely largely on coal rail and river barge transport, but it still did mostly at the time. It would take ten years to rebuild a refining capacity and restore the power grid and military Things would eventually return to normal. The cities would be rebuilt and reinhabited. I know it is hard to believe, but look at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, German firebombed cities from WW2 like Dresden; they were rebuilt from the ashes. Germany was nearly entirely destroyed by WW2. It came back. Barring nuclear winter actually occurring (which the Kuwait oil field fires kinda proves won't happen), total nuclear war is something countries can recover from, which makes it even more likely to happen in the future. As Ellsberg put it, "any nonzero chance is crazy."

tsimionescu 6y ago

> Nuclear weapons are weapons of policy, not weapons of war That almost sounds plausible if you don't know the long history of nuclear weapons being almost used and avoided by sheer luck. Your thesis also breaks down once you remember that the USA is building 'small-scale' nuclear weapons with the precise intention of making them usable in current conflicts. Not to mention that the US have recently unilaterally withdrawn from the disarmament agreement with Russia, under a supposedly Russia-friendly president.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>nuclear weapons being almost used and avoided by sheer luck. Sheer luck is an odd way to describe "so much process and procedure and checks that when something does slip through the cracks it is correctly identified as anomalous and nobody gets nuked". Sure it might not make you feel warm and fuzzy inside and near misses show where to improve the system but to pretend it's just "sheer luck" despite god knows how many man hours being spent on the problem is naive, hyperbolic and infantile.