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>not an existential threat to humanity ... [but] it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and re

>not an existential threat to humanity ... [but] it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up. So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. I get it - some people focus on the worst case scenario of a human-species-ending nuclear winter. I'm not actually particularly interested in how likely or unlikely that specific outcome is, as the "lesser" outcomes are plenty horrifying enough, and don't call for a general downplaying of nuclear attacks like this.

jocker12 5y ago
You should try this https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php. Move the map on your location and see the impact radius.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  I've played with the nuke map occasionally for years, though I've never taken it too seriously in terms of estimating realistic damage. I'm not sure what targets would be hit, and by which bombs, and even then, the circles don't provide a holistic, long-term description of damage. But it is a lot of fun.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  This tells you nothing about number of people that would die as a result. Remember what happened to global trade when 1 ship was stuck in Suesz? It takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy all large-scale deepwater ports in the world. Global Trade is crippled. UK and Japan depend on food imports, so people there starve. It only takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy most oil refining capacity in the world. Czech republic has enough gas to last 6 days
leto_ii 5y ago
> So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. My thoughts exactly. Setting the world back 100+ years is a disaster of gigantic proportions. I also find it odd that the author didn't even attempt to provide an estimate of the possible victim count. I'm basically sure it would at least be in the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions. This is to say nothing about a possible future arms race that would increase the numbers of warheads substantially.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  And this would be back hundred+ years in civilization, with the easiest energy extraction sources for coal/oil etc already gone. Humanity would have a very hard time following the same tech/energy ladder back to now.
  - extheat 5y ago
    I don't think so, I think humans would probably be able to build back pretty quickly given the tech and manufacturing capability we have today. Yeah, 95% of it may have been destroyed worst case, but even at <5% capacity, if humanity worked together, we could scale things back up in maybe 10 years. The hardest part I argue isn't necessarily manufacturing, the labor part or even the mineral sourcing, but the technological breakthroughs necessary to advance society. For example, we'd still know how to create electronics with semiconductors and silicon, planes, rockets, missiles and so forth, just not at scale. And all the important books, software and media would be preserved in safe places like the Github code vaults. Of course, this is all assuming we have ego driven passionate people remaining at the helm, ala Elon Musk. But that's not a surefire thing. The biggest problem I see is the amount of habitable land on the Earth. For short periods of time, people wandering in nuclear wastelands will mostly be OK, however it's not safe to inhabit so we'd have to move the remaining infrastructure to safe places on the planet, wherever that may be. But I think it does underscore the need to diversify off of the Earth.
    - cmurf 5y ago
      Absurd. This kind of war destroys the government. You can only speculate what replaces it. And it'll probably be the winners (or non-losers) who dictate. 95% dead is a lot of corpses and demolished infrastructure with no fuel to operate heavy machinery to clean up anything. Europe after WW2 had the Marshall Plan. Who does this for WW3? China? India? Why not just take the intellectual property? There's no longer anyone, person or government force or leverage to protect it. If cities are destroyed expertise is probably not 95% destroyed, but closer to 99%. I think the current geopolitics is wiped out. At least the belligerents. Not only are their governments physically destroyed, but they have no legitimacy. They just allowed the worst failure in human history to occur. There's no assurances what happens next.
coffeefirst 5y ago
Yeah, this is the same type of article that, from the comfort of the author's arm chair, says things like: "well humanity survived the black death, basically no matter what we're going to be fine." You can only shrug it off looking at the abstract numbers. You absolutely do not want to live through a period of history that's anything like that.
- afiori 5y ago
  especially in a period that kills xx% of the population _due to scarcity of resources_. in a black plague situation the following generations are almost guaranteed an economic boom of sort as there are more natural resources per capita, in a nuclear winter scenario I believe that many would die and the survivors would still find themselves with incredible scarcity.
  - discreteevent 5y ago
    > in a nuclear winter scenario Did you read the article? I think you are making its point, which is that it is bad but not as bad as most people think.
    - pharke 5y ago
      > I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up This is the part you should be concerned about even if a nuclear winter doesn't or can't occur. Ask yourself how many people were alive at the end of the 19th century / early 20th and then compare that to today. Remember that it wasn't for lack of trying and that this was pre-birthcontrol. Then imagine what would happen if you saddled that technology level with 2x, 3x, or 4x the number of mouths to feed. After a nuclear war the biggest killer would likely be famine. We never think about it since we have escaped it's clutches for so long but it is one of the biggest killers in human history. A nuclear war would destroy our current global supply chain and likely much of the national supply chain as well. Billions of people around the world would starve.
      - 5y ago
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
I encounter a lot of people with the "species-ending nuclear winter" false belief, and their attitudes are usually something like, "Oh, what can you do? Just have a drink and enjoy the fireworks." I get the sense the author is working against this line of thinking, because there is in fact a lot you can do (both in terms of preparing and in terms of responding).
- chakalakasp 5y ago
  How do you prepare for the complete breakdown of society and 200 million survivors competing for resources that will support maybe 15 million people in a blasted, utterly destroyed landscape with no infrastructure or production.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    The same way you win a gun fight when you only have a knife: be elsewhere. America isn’t the only place in this world where someone can have a good life. That said, how (200-15) million people can all simultaneously enact the same plan, that’s much harder.
    - chakalakasp 5y ago
      Ha! Good point. Good time to take a lifecation to Africa.
  - chipsa 5y ago
    Besides "be somewhere else", make it harder for other people to turn your country into a blasted landscape. Support ballistic missile defense.
    - chakalakasp 5y ago
      ABM is hard. Evading ABM is much easier. Russia has some amazing tech for space based ABM interception evasion. ABM stuff works okayish against very small numbers of incoming warheads. ABM is completely ineffective against large numbers of inbound warheads.
trhway 5y ago
>and start back up it willn't be back up to and not even in the direction where we are today. The surviving population will be afflicted with a lot of decease, even several generations later. The minority capable of at least some level of being productive wouldn't be able to provide for and care for all the disabled/ill in their communities. Thus communities successfully surviving in say 100 years will have very different social "norms", at best at the level of hunter-gatherers of 20K+ years ago.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  This is a huge logical leap and not backed up by any actual data
- ben_w 5y ago
  Why do you expect that? Nagasaki and Hiroshima were both rebuilt, cancer levels in those cities in people conceived after the bombs is indistinguishable from places that weren’t nuked: https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Much dirtier and more powerful bombs have been developed since 1945.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      While explicitly high-fallout weapons have been made, most of the more powerful bombs are less dirty, both because fusion boosting is inherently so, and because the maximum destruction radius is a different function of altitude than fallout, so destroying a city is incompatible with poisoning it.
yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago
If we go back to 19th/20th century tech it'll be a problem because all the resources which are easy to extract have already been got. Much of the resource extraction done today is only possible because modern technology enables it. We may not ever be able to get back to where we're at now if we have a setback like that.
- Retric 5y ago
  Economies adapt to their resource constraints. A huge drop in global population means stuff like iron becomes less valuable as there is so much to extract from the remnants of our civilization. People talk about the lack of fuel, but Hydro power was initially built in September 30, 1882. It further scales to plenty of energy to bootstrap a civilization to modern extraction techniques. 15.8% of total global electricity comes from hydropower there is a vast amount of it even if oil and coal where somehow unavailable. It’s likely they would end up with a strange mix of technology in the short term and a different mix of infrastructure long term. Stuff like steel sailboats with small wood fired steam engines for radios.
  - lin83 5y ago
  - kortex 5y ago
    Don't forget the billions of solar cells that would be literally all over the place, ready to be scavenged. Biofuel can provide most of the roles of coal and oil. The rest could be obtained from cracking the gigatons of plastic trash. We could be doing all this now, it's just not economical.
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      Biofuel is not really sustainable and requires fuel to harvest. Pretty much all major infrastructure equipment runs on fuel. The difficulty of shifting off of fuel is incredibly large.
amelius 5y ago
Different perspective: at least they will delay the singularity, which could be a life-saver, overall.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  The singularity is science fiction at best
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Any particular singularity scenario is (and “we’re doomed!” is in that category), but the general idea “something unpredictable will happen” seems like an unavoidable conclusion to me. (Although that might just be a reverse Epimenides).
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Sadly part of a general trend I've noticed post Ukrainian invasion to "sell" nuclear war as a viable response (or at least not a deterrent for "going in there and fixing things dammit") These people have never been in a supermarket and looked at the countries where their food comes from apparently since shipping would pretty much be a dead industry with all port cities (and their port facilities) basically blown to smithereens. Everyone who lives on the coast is going to be "food challenged" in under a month, (likely sooner as hoarding would really kick in) and then starving and fighting their neighbors for food. There would be no "third party" that would be able to ship in food aid, it would be every person for themselves. If nothing else, this one effect would kill billions of people.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  There's a trend where a nuclear attack on Russia is being encouraged as a response to invading Ukraine? Or am I misreading your first sentence?
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    It seems more likely that Russia would use them - Putin has talked of deploying them as a threat, and tactical usage has come up in recent days (though from an American source). https://www.reuters.com/world/us-cannot-take-lightly-threat-russia-could-use-nuclear-weapons-cia-chief-2022-04-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-cannot-take-lightly-threat-...
  - ChuckMcM 5y ago
    Not exactly. There is a lot of noise that NATO should intervene directly in the war. An example of that is calling for a NATO enforced "No Fly Zone" (NFZ). Of course NFZs have to be enforced to actually be NFZs and that means NATO shooting down Russian jets/helicopters/missiles that violate the NFZ. This would be a direct attack by NATO forces on Russian forces. Such an attack, would give the Russian's a legitimate "out" for attacking NATO forces (say in Poland) where a lot of refugees and material is being shipped through to Ukraine. That would trigger Article 5 which says, briefly, "an attack on one is an attack on all." and we would be in a full hot war with Russia. At that point, Russia can legitimately claim they "feared for their existence" and launch a nuclear strike (tactically or globally) against NATO countries (including the US) and that ends up with the US and Russian destroying a lot property using nuclear weapons. There is an argument being made that Putin desperately wants to get attacked by NATO so that hey can threaten nuclear war, and cause NATO to back down. It certainly looks better at home if Russia is on the ropes because NATO is attacking it rather than being on the ropes because a former satellite state of the old USSR is handing it it's ass on a platter. There is a lot riding on the outcome of the current conflict and it reached a point, quickly enough, that I believe it will reshape geopolitics for decades. Throughout the Cold War there were people, on both sides, who felt "we could win such a war." Their definition of "winning" was somewhat twisted (as a full out war would result in knocking the world into a very very bad place civilization wise) and it was the subtext of the movie Dr. Strangelove. We have been exceptionally fortunate that we haven't tested their theories. I am, somewhat obviously, in the camp that full on nuclear hostilities would reduce the planet to a population of perhaps one or two million humans, mostly in South America and the Pacific island nations. But I am not anywhere close to being an expert on these things, just a systems analyst type. So my observations have been: Call: "We should go in there an kick the Russian's asses." Response: "We won't because that would start a nuclear war, and we don't want that." Response: "What if we would 'win' the resulting Nuclear war? Still not going to go kick there asses?" If you watch any sort of "large conversation" like this, where part of a group wants some action and another part of the group doesn't want that action, you will see this sort of interplay. It happens in companies, it happens in counties, states, countries, and the world at large. Various voices attempting to achieve a sufficiently high level of consensus from the group in order to take an action. Failing to achieve a high enough level consensus results in "group antibodies" which are basically people who become so offended at the action proposed the switch to becoming active members of resistance and start trying to generate counter action consensus. I have exploited this effect to create change in large organizations that were stagnant. You start by pushing just enough on the change to 'surface' the people who had been acting through intermediaries to act directly. Then you can identify them and have a one on one conversation to get them signed up for the change. Do that enough times to surface all the resistance, and then at some point the change just "goes through" because "everyone seems to think it is the right thing to do."

jocker12 5y ago

You should try this https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php. Move the map on your location and see the impact radius.

happytoexplain 5y ago
I've played with the nuke map occasionally for years, though I've never taken it too seriously in terms of estimating realistic damage. I'm not sure what targets would be hit, and by which bombs, and even then, the circles don't provide a holistic, long-term description of damage. But it is a lot of fun.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
This tells you nothing about number of people that would die as a result. Remember what happened to global trade when 1 ship was stuck in Suesz? It takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy all large-scale deepwater ports in the world. Global Trade is crippled. UK and Japan depend on food imports, so people there starve. It only takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy most oil refining capacity in the world. Czech republic has enough gas to last 6 days

leto_ii 5y ago

> So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. My thoughts exactly. Setting the world back 100+ years is a disaster of gigantic proportions. I also find it odd that the author didn't even attempt to provide an estimate of the possible victim count. I'm basically sure it would at least be in the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions. This is to say nothing about a possible future arms race that would increase the numbers of warheads substantially.

dv_dt 5y ago
And this would be back hundred+ years in civilization, with the easiest energy extraction sources for coal/oil etc already gone. Humanity would have a very hard time following the same tech/energy ladder back to now.
- extheat 5y ago
  I don't think so, I think humans would probably be able to build back pretty quickly given the tech and manufacturing capability we have today. Yeah, 95% of it may have been destroyed worst case, but even at <5% capacity, if humanity worked together, we could scale things back up in maybe 10 years. The hardest part I argue isn't necessarily manufacturing, the labor part or even the mineral sourcing, but the technological breakthroughs necessary to advance society. For example, we'd still know how to create electronics with semiconductors and silicon, planes, rockets, missiles and so forth, just not at scale. And all the important books, software and media would be preserved in safe places like the Github code vaults. Of course, this is all assuming we have ego driven passionate people remaining at the helm, ala Elon Musk. But that's not a surefire thing. The biggest problem I see is the amount of habitable land on the Earth. For short periods of time, people wandering in nuclear wastelands will mostly be OK, however it's not safe to inhabit so we'd have to move the remaining infrastructure to safe places on the planet, wherever that may be. But I think it does underscore the need to diversify off of the Earth.
  - cmurf 5y ago
    Absurd. This kind of war destroys the government. You can only speculate what replaces it. And it'll probably be the winners (or non-losers) who dictate. 95% dead is a lot of corpses and demolished infrastructure with no fuel to operate heavy machinery to clean up anything. Europe after WW2 had the Marshall Plan. Who does this for WW3? China? India? Why not just take the intellectual property? There's no longer anyone, person or government force or leverage to protect it. If cities are destroyed expertise is probably not 95% destroyed, but closer to 99%. I think the current geopolitics is wiped out. At least the belligerents. Not only are their governments physically destroyed, but they have no legitimacy. They just allowed the worst failure in human history to occur. There's no assurances what happens next.

coffeefirst 5y ago

Yeah, this is the same type of article that, from the comfort of the author's arm chair, says things like: "well humanity survived the black death, basically no matter what we're going to be fine." You can only shrug it off looking at the abstract numbers. You absolutely do not want to live through a period of history that's anything like that.

afiori 5y ago
especially in a period that kills xx% of the population _due to scarcity of resources_. in a black plague situation the following generations are almost guaranteed an economic boom of sort as there are more natural resources per capita, in a nuclear winter scenario I believe that many would die and the survivors would still find themselves with incredible scarcity.
- discreteevent 5y ago
  > in a nuclear winter scenario Did you read the article? I think you are making its point, which is that it is bad but not as bad as most people think.
  - pharke 5y ago
    > I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up This is the part you should be concerned about even if a nuclear winter doesn't or can't occur. Ask yourself how many people were alive at the end of the 19th century / early 20th and then compare that to today. Remember that it wasn't for lack of trying and that this was pre-birthcontrol. Then imagine what would happen if you saddled that technology level with 2x, 3x, or 4x the number of mouths to feed. After a nuclear war the biggest killer would likely be famine. We never think about it since we have escaped it's clutches for so long but it is one of the biggest killers in human history. A nuclear war would destroy our current global supply chain and likely much of the national supply chain as well. Billions of people around the world would starve.
    - 5y ago

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago

I encounter a lot of people with the "species-ending nuclear winter" false belief, and their attitudes are usually something like, "Oh, what can you do? Just have a drink and enjoy the fireworks." I get the sense the author is working against this line of thinking, because there is in fact a lot you can do (both in terms of preparing and in terms of responding).

chakalakasp 5y ago
How do you prepare for the complete breakdown of society and 200 million survivors competing for resources that will support maybe 15 million people in a blasted, utterly destroyed landscape with no infrastructure or production.
- ben_w 5y ago
  The same way you win a gun fight when you only have a knife: be elsewhere. America isn’t the only place in this world where someone can have a good life. That said, how (200-15) million people can all simultaneously enact the same plan, that’s much harder.
  - chakalakasp 5y ago
    Ha! Good point. Good time to take a lifecation to Africa.
- chipsa 5y ago
  Besides "be somewhere else", make it harder for other people to turn your country into a blasted landscape. Support ballistic missile defense.
  - chakalakasp 5y ago
    ABM is hard. Evading ABM is much easier. Russia has some amazing tech for space based ABM interception evasion. ABM stuff works okayish against very small numbers of incoming warheads. ABM is completely ineffective against large numbers of inbound warheads.

trhway 5y ago

>and start back up it willn't be back up to and not even in the direction where we are today. The surviving population will be afflicted with a lot of decease, even several generations later. The minority capable of at least some level of being productive wouldn't be able to provide for and care for all the disabled/ill in their communities. Thus communities successfully surviving in say 100 years will have very different social "norms", at best at the level of hunter-gatherers of 20K+ years ago.

edgyquant 5y ago
This is a huge logical leap and not backed up by any actual data
ben_w 5y ago
Why do you expect that? Nagasaki and Hiroshima were both rebuilt, cancer levels in those cities in people conceived after the bombs is indistinguishable from places that weren’t nuked: https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Much dirtier and more powerful bombs have been developed since 1945.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    While explicitly high-fallout weapons have been made, most of the more powerful bombs are less dirty, both because fusion boosting is inherently so, and because the maximum destruction radius is a different function of altitude than fallout, so destroying a city is incompatible with poisoning it.

yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago

If we go back to 19th/20th century tech it'll be a problem because all the resources which are easy to extract have already been got. Much of the resource extraction done today is only possible because modern technology enables it. We may not ever be able to get back to where we're at now if we have a setback like that.

Retric 5y ago
Economies adapt to their resource constraints. A huge drop in global population means stuff like iron becomes less valuable as there is so much to extract from the remnants of our civilization. People talk about the lack of fuel, but Hydro power was initially built in September 30, 1882. It further scales to plenty of energy to bootstrap a civilization to modern extraction techniques. 15.8% of total global electricity comes from hydropower there is a vast amount of it even if oil and coal where somehow unavailable. It’s likely they would end up with a strange mix of technology in the short term and a different mix of infrastructure long term. Stuff like steel sailboats with small wood fired steam engines for radios.
- lin83 5y ago
- kortex 5y ago
  Don't forget the billions of solar cells that would be literally all over the place, ready to be scavenged. Biofuel can provide most of the roles of coal and oil. The rest could be obtained from cracking the gigatons of plastic trash. We could be doing all this now, it's just not economical.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    Biofuel is not really sustainable and requires fuel to harvest. Pretty much all major infrastructure equipment runs on fuel. The difficulty of shifting off of fuel is incredibly large.

amelius 5y ago

Different perspective: at least they will delay the singularity, which could be a life-saver, overall.

edgyquant 5y ago
The singularity is science fiction at best
- ben_w 5y ago
  Any particular singularity scenario is (and “we’re doomed!” is in that category), but the general idea “something unpredictable will happen” seems like an unavoidable conclusion to me. (Although that might just be a reverse Epimenides).

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Sadly part of a general trend I've noticed post Ukrainian invasion to "sell" nuclear war as a viable response (or at least not a deterrent for "going in there and fixing things dammit") These people have never been in a supermarket and looked at the countries where their food comes from apparently since shipping would pretty much be a dead industry with all port cities (and their port facilities) basically blown to smithereens. Everyone who lives on the coast is going to be "food challenged" in under a month, (likely sooner as hoarding would really kick in) and then starving and fighting their neighbors for food. There would be no "third party" that would be able to ship in food aid, it would be every person for themselves. If nothing else, this one effect would kill billions of people.

happytoexplain 5y ago
There's a trend where a nuclear attack on Russia is being encouraged as a response to invading Ukraine? Or am I misreading your first sentence?
- lostlogin 5y ago
  It seems more likely that Russia would use them - Putin has talked of deploying them as a threat, and tactical usage has come up in recent days (though from an American source). https://www.reuters.com/world/us-cannot-take-lightly-threat-russia-could-use-nuclear-weapons-cia-chief-2022-04-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us-cannot-take-lightly-threat-...
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  Not exactly. There is a lot of noise that NATO should intervene directly in the war. An example of that is calling for a NATO enforced "No Fly Zone" (NFZ). Of course NFZs have to be enforced to actually be NFZs and that means NATO shooting down Russian jets/helicopters/missiles that violate the NFZ. This would be a direct attack by NATO forces on Russian forces. Such an attack, would give the Russian's a legitimate "out" for attacking NATO forces (say in Poland) where a lot of refugees and material is being shipped through to Ukraine. That would trigger Article 5 which says, briefly, "an attack on one is an attack on all." and we would be in a full hot war with Russia. At that point, Russia can legitimately claim they "feared for their existence" and launch a nuclear strike (tactically or globally) against NATO countries (including the US) and that ends up with the US and Russian destroying a lot property using nuclear weapons. There is an argument being made that Putin desperately wants to get attacked by NATO so that hey can threaten nuclear war, and cause NATO to back down. It certainly looks better at home if Russia is on the ropes because NATO is attacking it rather than being on the ropes because a former satellite state of the old USSR is handing it it's ass on a platter. There is a lot riding on the outcome of the current conflict and it reached a point, quickly enough, that I believe it will reshape geopolitics for decades. Throughout the Cold War there were people, on both sides, who felt "we could win such a war." Their definition of "winning" was somewhat twisted (as a full out war would result in knocking the world into a very very bad place civilization wise) and it was the subtext of the movie Dr. Strangelove. We have been exceptionally fortunate that we haven't tested their theories. I am, somewhat obviously, in the camp that full on nuclear hostilities would reduce the planet to a population of perhaps one or two million humans, mostly in South America and the Pacific island nations. But I am not anywhere close to being an expert on these things, just a systems analyst type. So my observations have been: Call: "We should go in there an kick the Russian's asses." Response: "We won't because that would start a nuclear war, and we don't want that." Response: "What if we would 'win' the resulting Nuclear war? Still not going to go kick there asses?" If you watch any sort of "large conversation" like this, where part of a group wants some action and another part of the group doesn't want that action, you will see this sort of interplay. It happens in companies, it happens in counties, states, countries, and the world at large. Various voices attempting to achieve a sufficiently high level of consensus from the group in order to take an action. Failing to achieve a high enough level consensus results in "group antibodies" which are basically people who become so offended at the action proposed the switch to becoming active members of resistance and start trying to generate counter action consensus. I have exploited this effect to create change in large organizations that were stagnant. You start by pushing just enough on the change to 'surface' the people who had been acting through intermediaries to act directly. Then you can identify them and have a one on one conversation to get them signed up for the change. Do that enough times to surface all the resistance, and then at some point the change just "goes through" because "everyone seems to think it is the right thing to do."