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This is indeed a very timely award. I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and are still on hair-trigger alert to oblite
by mppm 2y ago
This is indeed a very timely award. I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and are still on hair-trigger alert to obliterate major cities. Maybe the end of atmospheric testing and the success of (now defunct) weapons reduction treaties has blunted public perception to the ongoing threat that they represent, and to the need to tread carefully where nuclear powers are involved.
- vasco 2y agoIf I put a hammer over your head that can fall any minute you'll be worrying, but if you're born with the hammer over your head and your parents before you as well, it becomes less of a thing.
- sandworm101 2y agoOn an individual level, we all have a variety of hammers over our heads. Cancer has killed far more people prematurely than nuclear weapons. Something like 500,000 people a year are murdered. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents also kill more than nuclear weapons. Even compared to a once-in-a-century nuclear war that perhaps kills a billion people, cancer will kill roughly a billion in the next century anyway. So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
- thimabi 2y agoThat depends on where you live. There are people right now in certain places who are terrified of the nuclear threat.
- smokel 2y agoExtrapolating from two samples to "once-in-a-century" does not strike me as rational.
- faggotbreath 2y ago[flagged]
- Ekaros 2y agoWhy does that figure looks really suspicious to me. So in nuclear exchange there is either already fully setup blocks or the responding party will pull in others in?
- squigz 2y agoI'd like to think of myself as a rational person, yet I worry about it. Because it's not just a matter of math; the effects of a billion people dying at once would be far more detrimental than the deaths from cancer over a century. (One might think this line of reasoning that some people apply is a coping mechanism to ignore the reality, but that might be a different conversation)
- timeon 2y agoBut it is not just about coping. We as society, can make policies to decrease chance of getting a cancer and decrease traffic deaths. We just chose not to out of convenience and profit.
- w0m 2y agoit's easier to ignore 100 papercuts than it is to ignore missing a hand.
- EnigmaFlare 2y ago[dead]
- mensetmanusman 2y agoNot really, we all eventually die. No need to worry about how you will die past 70.
- petra 2y agoEverybody dies so there's nothing to fear from war?
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoChaos , without death.
- cynicalpeace 2y agoThose other things are also worth worrying about too. Gee, I hope the people in charge don't think "the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about"
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoIf I fall 1 feet one hundred times, I'll probably be Ok If I fall 100 feet once, I won't. 1m people dying in 1 day is not the same as 1M people dying over a decade. Also. People generally dont fear death itself. This is expressed by people in pallitative care. Its the chaos and uncertainty preceding death that is really feared
- specialist 2y agoDoes your risk assessment methodology also account for near misses? Agency? Morality? Source of risk? Costs of mitigation? Benefits? Something like actuary tables? Mitigation of bike and pedestrian deaths is cheap. Just reform land use, advantage people over vehicles. Oops, now you're into culture and values. Mitigation of cancer deaths is very expensive. Though we didn't invent cancer, we feel the moral imperative to "cure" it. And yet, while we're mitigating it, we're also making it worse. Cross purposes. What's your balance sheet for this conundrum? Drugs kill lots of people. We own that one, right? How's the War on Drugs working out? In conclusion, I wish I could wave away these dilemmas with a cute nominator and denominator. But I can barely reason about them before my head explodes. So I'm not buying what you're selling. Life's a bit more complicated, a bit more empirical, a bit less rational, than your tidy equations.
- w4 2y ago> So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about. Until you have children and future generations to worry about. Then it suddenly seems quite a bit more pressing that their world could be obliterated at a moment's notice by a small handful of decision makers.
- BurningFrog 2y agoSo what value do you get out of worrying about the nuclear threat, that makes it worth it?
- valval 2y agoWhat? I have a son and a wife and I couldn’t care less about nuclear war or climate change or any abstract and distant catastrophe that could face humanity as a whole. Living in the future is a silly affair. There’s only one moment and it’s the present.
- mistrial9 2y agoI once knew an academic who would not fly in an airplane. He was invited to a distinguished conference across the country, but complained to me that he was too scared to fly. "Why?" I ask.. "Terrorists" he replied.. "it is too serious. I just can't do it". so a year or two pass and then I see this Academic again. While talking he mentions that he just returned from a great conference far away. "What? I thought you were afraid to fly in an airplane!" .. He replies "that was true, I was scared of someone carrying a bomb on the flight. But, I calculated the statistical odds of there being TWO bombs on a single plane, and it was infinitesimal..." "So now I carry my own!"
- brightball 2y agoI think for a lot of people, myself included, you try not to worry about things you can't control. "Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere. Write that down." - Van Wilder
- jszymborski 2y agoWhile this apathy is an important coping mechanism to some degree, it's important not to become complacent. It's precisely this apathy and hopelessness that authoritarian regimes cultivate to prevent action.
- dfxm12 2y agoI don't think this registers as apathy in this context. Maybe you live in a country that has nuclear weapons and can vote for one leader or another. This may or may not have some impact on things. Certainly, we cannot influence what other countries do with their arsenals. Our mental stacks can only run so deep & I'd wager for most of us, the things that are in our sphere of influence simply take priority.
- jszymborski 2y ago> This may or may not have some impact on things. Certainly, we cannot influence what other countries do with their arsenals. It demonstrably does. Nuclear arms reduction treaties have been enacted in the past and it is hard to believe that it would have happened without the popular support it enjoyed. Just because we are at a time in history where many of those treatise have been weakened or left by the wayside shouldn't be a reason for us to forget them and the good they did. > Our mental stacks can only run so deep & I'd wager for most of us, the things that are in our sphere of influence simply take priority. It's a challenge to look beyond ourselves, but we must have the courage to do so. Many people here have the resources to act in the interest of their family, their neighborhood, their community, and their country. It's hard not to be selfish. We can't all afford not to be. Most of us can, however.
- mistermann 2y ago
- LeifCarrotson 2y agoWorry is unproductive in the sense of feeling anxiety, sure, but it's noble to worry at the various hammers in the archaic definition to "move, proceed, or progress by unceasing or difficult effort, to shake or pull at with the teeth." Some of the hammers such as the hammer representing nuclear weapons - are caused by people and can be solved by people. There's a big game theoretic hill to climb over, but social pressure and advocacy have been effective at making progress. Others, like cancer and general senescence, are more of a looming threat that's a fundamental characteristic of biology, we can (and should) worry at them to make incremental progress but we're unlikely to suddenly eliminate them. The murder rate is enormously dependent on individual location and individual relationships. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents are enormously dependent on individual behavior. Of those threats, addressing the problem of nuclear weapons - especially for a member of Nihon Hidankyo, with a personal and persuasive story of the damages these weapons caused - is probably near the top of the list for actions which can have the greatest positive change.
- klibertp 2y agoCancer isn't something that humans develop and control. It's also very unlikely to kill 20-year-olds. On the other hand, it's almost guaranteed if you happen to live long enough. Finally, getting cancer doesn't mean that everybody around you also gets one. Getting hit by a nuke is something that is totally under human control, it's not going to discriminate by age or gender, and is likely to wipe out most of the humans you care about along with you. A better comparison would be climate change vs nukes. If you have the time to worry about the former, you should also worry about the latter since if the nukes go off, we won't even get a chance to get killed by the environment.
- vkou 2y agoMy parents had no problem reminding us that we all live with a nuclear sword hanging over our heads. It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them. And nuclear war is so much more horrifying and its consequences are so much beyond the pale, that people can't even think of what it would mean.
- Arrath 2y agoOh I can imagine it happening. I'm currently working in Pearl Harbor and find myself hoping that I'll be on-base if the balloon goes up, thus avoiding any post-apocalyptic survival bullshit in a brilliant flash.
- macintux 2y ago> It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them. One of my great disappointments after 9/11 was that U.S. citizens were not, by and large, asked/expected to make any sacrifices (other than our liberties). It felt that if we were at war, we should all be contributing, but it seemed to me that our value as consumers was more important than as citizens.
- jsbg 2y agomaybe your parents aren't old enough to remember how much of the population could expect to die in wars before nuclear weapons (i.e. mutually assured destruction) existed
- layer8 2y agoNo, it’s simply the end of the cold war that made it a possibility less present in the media. The cold war was cold because making it hot would have meant going nuclear. So the possibility was always closely linked to the state of cold war. Globalization has blurred the picture considerably.
- cchi_co 2y ago[dead]
- mc32 2y agoTotally agree this is very relevant today. We have heads of state in the EU and to some degree people in the USG with very cavalier approaches to the ideological war between the West and the BRICS. I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist. Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
- mppm 2y agoI'm not sure why this got downvoted. The point is not to bow to Putin in all matters, but to treat the matter with extreme seriousness: Take time to do proper background research, evaluate your sources, give serious consideration to the Russian narrative -- without necessarily agreeing of course, allow for a margin of error both in your own judgement and for stray missiles entering the detection radius, etc. If it still seems like a good idea to take a stand afterwards, OK. But let's please not cause a nuclear war over Facebook likes and political brownie points.
- seabass-labrax 2y agoI haven't downvoted it, but one issue with parent's post is that it applies double standards to our nations' responses to those of the Cold War. During the 20th century, the public impression of diplomacy was the very same 'wild west of bluster and provocation' - only nowadays, we get to see more behind the scenes of the Cold War as files are declassified and then-current affairs become history. The propaganda from the American and Soviet leadership was no more nuanced historically than it is now from contemporary leaders like Putin and Trump (and since parent mentioned the EU, we could include European figures such as von der Leyen here as well). I predict that future history books will observe a certain amount of care and diplomatic engagement in our era that isn't visible from the press releases and the ways in which politicians want to be seen.
- wdr1 2y ago> I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist I don't understand this. Between Iran and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, they seem to be very top of mind for many.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoThe entire purpose of nuclear armaments is to make certain wars too nasty to fathom engaging in. If their organization didn't exist at all, we'd still have exactly the same number of nuclear war casualties since the 1940s.
- Hammershaft 2y agoInterdependence via global trade makes it unlikely that without nuclear weapons we would have nearly the number of wars we had in the 1940s.
- WillPostForFood 2y agoIn 1913, Norman Angell published a book called "The Great Illusion" in which he argued that the use of military force had become economically futile due to the interconnectedness of international finance and trade. World War I started one year later. Trade and interconnectedness probably have a net positive effect on reducing war, but not a reliable guarantee.
- valval 2y agoThats not a thing though is it? Sanctions aren’t affecting Russia in any capacity.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoSanctions are hurting Russia financially. Putin doesn't care because he can extract wealth from oligarchs in whatever manner he sees fit. That's the benefit of being a dictator who has a wealth of knowledge on how to watch his own back after his career in intelligence work. He'll just tell his people to create some propaganda and everyone will fall into line.
- aguaviva 2y agoSanctions aren’t affecting Russia in any capacity. Definitely false. They were never the slam dunk that they were supposed to be, and it's true to say their effect has been significantly blunted. But that's not the same as "no effect". It's just turned out to be a comparatively mild one (but important nonetheless).