4 ms·

Have to admit, my nuclear war anxiety has never been as high as it is now.

dom96 5y ago
Same. I have already done at least one bit of prep: buying a Geiger counter.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
While I understand your anxiety, it is baseless. This mad person who is so afraid of even his close collaborators that he sits several meters away from them wanted something very different: capturing a country he felt he lost. Who will praise him if there is nobody on the Earth? Also, make no mistake, his inner circle is full of people who know how to calculate risks and will betray their colleagues in a blink. Putin might be cornered but a collective suicide is not exactly the dream of people around him.
- javajosh 5y ago
  The anxiety definitely has a basis: we live in a world where individual humans control powerful nuclear weapons that can be delivered, without real possibility of interception, and with minimal warning, right over every major city. The only real safeguard we have are the chain of human soldiers between the leader, the launch order, and the launch. There are like 10 brains in the world that can order a launch, and best case 10 brains to launch. So the world's nuclear safety is in 110 brains, best case, 10 brains, worst case. Brains, meanwhile, are highly plastic. Emotion, impulse, greed, fear - these are universal human drives. Now attach them to ever growing control over resources, power, to see your will be done, to cheat and get away with it, but only if you keep escalating... How could this possibly end with Putin backing down? My belief: Putin will order a launch. This will result in either nuclear war, if his proxies are loyal to him, or his immediate loss of power, if his proxies are not.
  - mysecretaccount 5y ago
    Why are you so certain that Putin will order nuclear armageddon?
    - javajosh 5y ago
      The odds of ordering nuclear Armageddon are quite different from ordering a limited nuclear strike to show them you mean business and to deter further intervention. The Russians might opt to nuke a carrier. Or a small city. Putin is explicitly holding the world hostage at nuclear knife-point, and you let him take your wallet, let him slice off a finger (Crimea). Now, the nuclear thug shoots you in the arm and nukes a town. What do you do? Do you allow them to mutilate you because if you don't you'll be in a struggle where you could both easily die? Or do you choose to resist, and risk death, because they are going to take more and more of you anyway? As long as the nuclear bully refrains from this behavior, it's all good. Once he starts it though, we're in a new era of nuclear risk. I hope that all of our governments have explicit, mechanical contingencies in place to react to a limited nuclear strike, and that immediate escalation is NOT standard operating procedure. But what is the proportional response for the US if Russia nukes a small city in Western Ukraine? I have no idea. This is all really very terrible and we'll be lucky to get out of it without at least one town glowing in the dark.
      - imbnwa 5y ago
        Wouldn't nuking a small city in Ukraine also affect Russia physically?
robotnikman 5y ago
Your not alone, I feel the same way. Born after the cold war ended, I never thought I would be worrying about nuclear annihilation in my lifetime.
javajosh 5y ago
You must be young. I was very young when "The Day After" came out, and that friggin' movie gave me nightmares for many, many years. Into my twenties. Every time I heard a jet, I was convinced it was an inbound ICBM. My case may be extreme, but the Cuban Missile crisis was by that time well understood, the immorality of the USG was apparent thanks to Vietnam and Nixon, and classic movies like Wargames and James Bond used the threat of nuclear war constantly. Getting nuked by Russia was a real threat for 40 years. But you realize it's out of your hands, and deal with the stuff in front of you. (The real question is: what is the path away from nukes, entirely? It seems to me that a world in which any individual can launch nukes is a world with a very short lifetime. This gets worse the fewer human barriers there are to launch. Even if we get past this conflict, we have this fundamental problem which affects democracies and autocracies both.)
- euroderf 5y ago
  Can recommend "Miracle Mile".
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  "Threads" is also a nice one, I would say it is more brutal and anxiety inducing than "The Day After".
  - Markoff 5y ago
    Yup, The Day After feels like willy nilly optimistic romantic comedy next to Threads, I have same feeling about extremely overrated romantic movie The Shawshank Redemption compared to much more realistic Das Experiment (judging by my military experience which was sort of prison).
q1w2 5y ago
Over the last few decades we've lulled ourselves into a false sense of security. The reality is that the number, deliverability, and distribution of nuclear weapons has continued to increase. It is only a matter of time before we see some degree of nuclear weapons use. If limited, it might cause a major shift in how humans choose to distribute themselves. Living in a city might come to be seen as an unnecessary liability.
maliker 5y ago
I was having dinner with a climate researcher in his 60s a while ago. What he did previously came up, and he said he was a nuclear nonproliferation researcher before, but climate change seemed like a bigger threat. Time has come to switch back, maybe?

Same. I have already done at least one bit of prep: buying a Geiger counter.

While I understand your anxiety, it is baseless. This mad person who is so afraid of even his close collaborators that he sits several meters away from them wanted something very different: capturing a country he felt he lost. Who will praise him if there is nobody on the Earth? Also, make no mistake, his inner circle is full of people who know how to calculate risks and will betray their colleagues in a blink. Putin might be cornered but a collective suicide is not exactly the dream of people around him.

javajosh 5y ago
The anxiety definitely has a basis: we live in a world where individual humans control powerful nuclear weapons that can be delivered, without real possibility of interception, and with minimal warning, right over every major city. The only real safeguard we have are the chain of human soldiers between the leader, the launch order, and the launch. There are like 10 brains in the world that can order a launch, and best case 10 brains to launch. So the world's nuclear safety is in 110 brains, best case, 10 brains, worst case. Brains, meanwhile, are highly plastic. Emotion, impulse, greed, fear - these are universal human drives. Now attach them to ever growing control over resources, power, to see your will be done, to cheat and get away with it, but only if you keep escalating... How could this possibly end with Putin backing down? My belief: Putin will order a launch. This will result in either nuclear war, if his proxies are loyal to him, or his immediate loss of power, if his proxies are not.
- mysecretaccount 5y ago
  Why are you so certain that Putin will order nuclear armageddon?
  - javajosh 5y ago
    The odds of ordering nuclear Armageddon are quite different from ordering a limited nuclear strike to show them you mean business and to deter further intervention. The Russians might opt to nuke a carrier. Or a small city. Putin is explicitly holding the world hostage at nuclear knife-point, and you let him take your wallet, let him slice off a finger (Crimea). Now, the nuclear thug shoots you in the arm and nukes a town. What do you do? Do you allow them to mutilate you because if you don't you'll be in a struggle where you could both easily die? Or do you choose to resist, and risk death, because they are going to take more and more of you anyway? As long as the nuclear bully refrains from this behavior, it's all good. Once he starts it though, we're in a new era of nuclear risk. I hope that all of our governments have explicit, mechanical contingencies in place to react to a limited nuclear strike, and that immediate escalation is NOT standard operating procedure. But what is the proportional response for the US if Russia nukes a small city in Western Ukraine? I have no idea. This is all really very terrible and we'll be lucky to get out of it without at least one town glowing in the dark.
    - imbnwa 5y ago
      Wouldn't nuking a small city in Ukraine also affect Russia physically?

robotnikman 5y ago

Your not alone, I feel the same way. Born after the cold war ended, I never thought I would be worrying about nuclear annihilation in my lifetime.

javajosh 5y ago

You must be young. I was very young when "The Day After" came out, and that friggin' movie gave me nightmares for many, many years. Into my twenties. Every time I heard a jet, I was convinced it was an inbound ICBM. My case may be extreme, but the Cuban Missile crisis was by that time well understood, the immorality of the USG was apparent thanks to Vietnam and Nixon, and classic movies like Wargames and James Bond used the threat of nuclear war constantly. Getting nuked by Russia was a real threat for 40 years. But you realize it's out of your hands, and deal with the stuff in front of you. (The real question is: what is the path away from nukes, entirely? It seems to me that a world in which any individual can launch nukes is a world with a very short lifetime. This gets worse the fewer human barriers there are to launch. Even if we get past this conflict, we have this fundamental problem which affects democracies and autocracies both.)

euroderf 5y ago
Can recommend "Miracle Mile".
faeyanpiraat 5y ago
"Threads" is also a nice one, I would say it is more brutal and anxiety inducing than "The Day After".
- Markoff 5y ago
  Yup, The Day After feels like willy nilly optimistic romantic comedy next to Threads, I have same feeling about extremely overrated romantic movie The Shawshank Redemption compared to much more realistic Das Experiment (judging by my military experience which was sort of prison).

q1w2 5y ago

Over the last few decades we've lulled ourselves into a false sense of security. The reality is that the number, deliverability, and distribution of nuclear weapons has continued to increase. It is only a matter of time before we see some degree of nuclear weapons use. If limited, it might cause a major shift in how humans choose to distribute themselves. Living in a city might come to be seen as an unnecessary liability.

maliker 5y ago

I was having dinner with a climate researcher in his 60s a while ago. What he did previously came up, and he said he was a nuclear nonproliferation researcher before, but climate change seemed like a bigger threat. Time has come to switch back, maybe?