2 ms·
Any "big" war between superpowers is going to be over in a day because it's sheer utter hubris to imagine surviving with any quality of life afterwards. Sure t
by ck2 4y ago
Any "big" war between superpowers is going to be over in a day because it's sheer utter hubris to imagine surviving with any quality of life afterwards.
Sure the the elites will have their billion dollar bunkers but the modern life is over otherwise. Pandemic was a model of 1% of what fallout would be like.
It seems warmongers have found an end-run around that though, proxy wars like Ukraine which is horrifying.
- computerfriend 4y agoThe Ukrainians, whose country was invaded, might take issue with your characterisation.
- ben_w 4y agoWhat counts as big, and what counts as a superpower? By any reasonable measure, Russia is losing in Ukraine, and the USA lost in Vietnam. Really awful for both victim nations, but despite various hawks in both aggressors calling for the use of nukes, that didn't happen. At this point, Russia appears to be cannibalizing their nuclear arsenal into conventional weapons, so I don't think they're a threat. That leaves China and NATO (as a bloc, three nuclear powers), because although I don't know how big Indian and Pakistani militaries are, that isn't going to spread, and North Korea is small enough that if it was dumb enough to strike at the USA I doubt it would manage to be worse than Covid (and similarly with Israel and it's neighbours, but I don't have enough appreciation for their geopolitics to call them dumb even preemptively about a hypothetical like this).