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It might be hard for younger people to understand - but when films like The Terminator [1984] were made, this kind of thing had battered the news for decades, p
by brc 13y ago
It might be hard for younger people to understand - but when films like The Terminator [1984] were made, this kind of thing had battered the news for decades, probably since the cuban missile crisis. The movies talked about a near future that many fully expected to happen. The endless hysteria and doom-mongering were enough to make many weary of the always-about-to-happen nuclear war, or devastating consequences of just having nuclear weapons around.
In fact game theory informs us quite correctly why it was never a really serious threat.
Anyone who grew up in that era will quite rightly be highly cynical about the advent of nuclear war.
I'll leave it to the curious reader to perhaps imagine what hobgoblins are used to scare the young and naive these days, now that global thermonuclear war is worn out, and only useful for spoof spy movies plot points.
- dm2 13y agoA missile will probably not be launched, but a nuclear device smuggled in a cargo container or airplane (in a US harbor or airport) is a very real scenario. There would be no way to tell where the bomb came from or even what aircraft was carrying it. Even if we knew the cargo or plane came from a hostile nation, would we immediately launch nuclear weapons at them? They would deny any involvement and I'm not sure that we could ever prove otherwise.
- aldous 13y agoIndeed. It seems reasonable to postulate that a more 'unconventional' use of a nuclear weapon is the more likely scenario today. The documentary 'Count Down to Zero' discusses such scenarios (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769/) at length and the impression left is somewhat terrifying. The solution? I haven't the foggiest as global disarmament seems unrealistic but the aspiration to progress beyond these ghastly devices as a global community is surely a sensible and just one.
- iand 13y agoI grew up in the seventies and my greatest fear was nuclear attack. That might be because I'm British and we're only 4 minutes from the USSR. I didn't feel weary of the doom mongering and I'm not at all cynical about the current risks. I believe they are very small but non zero for certain areas of Asia.
- leandrod 13y agoWhy say ‘probably since the Cuban missile crisis’, when it is common knowledge, easily accessible, that the nuclear scare is even older, since Stalin had the Soviet bomb test and mounted on viable vectors in the early to mid fifties?