Nuclear weapons can be repurposed for nuclear energy. Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them. These weapons cannot be used ethically, they poison the soil, air, and water.
A quote from Sun Tzu is etched in stone at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just outside the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation:
"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding why you juxtaposed your statement about repurposing nuclear weapons and the quote, but isn't the quote suggesting that nuclear weapons are those ultimate warriors that will bring an end to bloodshed? It seems like an artful allusion to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction and the claim that MAD prevents wars.
It depends on the way you read it. Nuclear bombs cause bloodshed. The blood might be vaporized, cooked, or irradiated - but still shed.
I don't think that's what OP meant; rather I read it literally, to mean one day there might actually be a world without war, or at least, a world without violent wars.
We aren't in a position to answer this one one way or the other.
If things go very wrong they have the potential to take us out. But a non-nuclear WWIII could, also--not by direct kills but by taking down the interconnected stuff that makes society work.
Also, while they serve to prevent direct wars between major powers they cause proxy wars between the major powers.
6. Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
7. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.
and maaaaybe the original text underlying some of that could also be translated as the second sentence in the alleged quotation. But the bit about "an ultimate class of warriors" seems really fishy to me.
[EDITED to add:] Ah, looking at a picture of the thing, it says "adapted from Sun Tzu, The Art of War". Seems like a pretty loose adaptation.
The only way we will, now that the genie is out of the bottle, not need these weapons is when we will have easy and affordable (for nation states) ways to neuter a nuclear attack which is as likely as the earth being peaceful and filled with bonhomie unlike anytime in history ever.
Besides if (and that’s some “if”) that happens that means the world has already found something more deadly and again some people will suddenly grow very mature insights on this and after destroying few cities they would totally focus on an initiative that ensures only they get to keep those weapons and every other nation should voluntarily sign up for it. And this is the main reason we will never get rid of deadliest of weapons and the endless quest for them.
Disagree. You're assuming nothing upsets the balance. I'm thinking of the Hammer's Slammers books. For those who haven't read them: a reasonable extrapolation of future tech with one big change: Cartridge-based energy guns. They are lightspeed weapons, no leading your target or the like. Center it in the optics and you'll hit it. The skies are nobody's friend, no aircraft, ballistic weapons are generally not of much use. The only combat rockets are ultra high acceleration short range stuff that's based on getting through before it can be tracked and engaged by the defense mounts. While nukes exist they don't get used because they're just going to be picked off. Against missiles you can make your warheads salvage fuse (messes up the tracking against the next missile), but you can't detect a lightspeed weapon until it hits.
Nukes come from security competition between nation states. It's the anarchic nature of this security competition that necessitates nukes.
The only way to avoid this is a one world government.
The analogy is: the existence of police is the only reason you don't need to own a gun. Without police, it's anarchy, and therefore you need a gun to survive in that incentive structure.
That would be worse than nukes. We already see what UN and UNSC has become. Even hearing the “one world” government gave strong star wars vibes even though I didn’t need to go that far.
We are designed (or destined, if you want to say so) to be fucked and fuck up everything on this earth faster than we thought maybe even just 20-30 years ago.
The earth will survive humans and we will be nothing but an archeological record. Fucking things up is subjective. The great oxigenation event also really fucked up the planet, subjectively, wiping out millions of species
>The only way to avoid this is a one world government.
Plainly false. But even if that were true, then the cure's worse than the sickness.
Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments. Tiny city-states that neither have the mineral resources to build those nor the wealth to attempt it.
> Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments.
This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this. We had what you wanted in our tribal past, but it was not competitive. Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged. You can't reverse this just by wishing it to be so. A one world government is at least a feasible possible future instead of an impossible one.
> Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged.
Nation states were around long before railroads or the printing press; they were around before the pyramids were built. Arguably the original technology that made them viable as an alternative to hunter-gatherer tribes was agriculture.
Modern technology has made modern nation states harder to dislodge in some ways, but that doesn't mean they're a good idea.
> A one world government is at least a feasible possible future
Yes, but I disagree that it's the only feasible option. For one thing, technology can also make it harder for nation states to lie to their people about what they're up to (the technology that is allowing us to have this conversation being the prime example). And once mation states lose the ability to do that, their viability becomes much more problematic, since without being able to tell and sustain such lies, the extent to which they make things worse instead of better becomes more and more widely known, and people are less and less willing to put up with that. A single government that was supposed to rule the entire world would have even worse problems in that regard.
>This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this.
No, it's not impossible, it's just not extant. It may be true that there is no path from where we are now to that world, and it is certainly true that if there is a path it's not trivially predictable. But this can be said of the "one world government" thing as well. Knowing that people like myself exist and would sabotage attempts at one world government, how do you propose to make that possible?
>We had what you wanted in our tribal past,
No, we had something even better. We had a zero-world-government. That truly is impossible, at least considering that I'm not a fan of human extinction.
It's impossible in the sense of "this goes against an informed understand of history and human nature", which admittedly is a soft analysis not rooted in verifiable fact, but is one that I nevertheless hold to. The last 10,000 years have been a gradual, unceasing trend of increasing centralization, from isolated hunter gatherer tribes, to EU and UN type bodies today. The unceasing nature of this trend isn't an accident. There are underlying causal factors that generate it. Positing that those causal factors will continue in the future, leading to an increase in the size of EU-like entities, to the point of de facto hemispheric/world government type bodies, isn't so radical, even if it is uncertain.
>It's impossible in the sense of "this goes against an informed understand of history and human nature",
No, that's just your narrative. You even acknowledge that there was a point in history where it was the prevailing condition, so clearly it wasn't against human nature.
> The last 10,000 years have been a gradual, unceasing trend of increasing centralization,
Hardly gradual. Incredibly punctuated. In some places in the world the stateless/tribal paradigm survived until modern times. The progressive's version of "the market only ever goes up!"...
>Positing that those causal factors will continue in the future,
So you're bad at prediction too. No, humanity becomes extinct in the next 2 or 3 centuries, because you've all become sterile worker drones and can't even maintain a stable population. Sometimes I hope that part's just an accident, but then I read words written by people like yourself, and you seem all too enthusiastic about it as if you've discovered some divine secret. Oh well.
Defending against a nuclear attack though isn't a desire for peace, it's a desire for freedom of action without consequence.
In a world with nuclear weapons and limited, unreliable defenses against them, you have to actually fully comprehend what "wanting peace" actually means - i.e. negotiation and diplomacy are the actual kings.
In a world without them, you always have the option of resorting to the barrel of the gun again - as happened to prior to WW2.
I don't think reliable defenses against nukes can exist can they? Airbursting nukes high enough causes emp events and the irradiated material still floats around - that's without the assymetry in cost in trying to hit 100% of decoys produced by the nuke, stopping a single nuke is at least an order of magnitude more expansive than sending one - I don't think it could really be done!
>I don't think reliable defenses against nukes can exist can they? Airbursting nukes high enough causes emp events and the irradiated material still floats around
With enough anti-missile technology, it's possible (though challenging) to defend against that.
But good luck trying to stop them from smuggling a multi-kiloton device across your border and detonating it at a time calculated to cause the most casualties.
> "Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
With such power asymmetries, the "bleeding" might merely be displaced to after the battle is settled. Look at the history of how colonialism played out.
> Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them.
We already live, and have since forever, in a world that does not need nuclear weapons.
> A quote from Sun Tzu
The logical outcome of which being that whoever controls that class of warriors controls the world. I’m not convinced, despite what the quote seems to imply, that is better than never again shedding blood.
With all due respect to ancient Chinese wisdom, Sun Tzu had no concept of atomic bombs, autonomous drones, and weaponised diseases.
I disagree. Our most dangerous enemies aren't even human. On the off chance the little green men show up, let's have something with a bit more oomph than polite rebuke. Just in case.
>"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
This is just silly. What if those warriors want to ban abortions and library books? Will you be satisfied that their fighting prowess grants them the power to dictate that to you? Do you believe that there's some mystical connection between that strength and your particular ethical perspective?
It's pretty much impossible to come up with a stardrive that doesn't have a weapon potential that makes nukes look like firecrackers.
1) The direct Kzinti Lesson: Anything that can push a ship to relativistic velocity produces incredibly energetic exhaust. The efficiency of the drive is directly related to how well you can point it in one direction, thus making it very hard to make something that isn't a weapon. And in a population-attack scenario such a starship throwing rocks is devastating. At 86% of lightspeed a rock hits with it's annihilation energy. At 94% of lightspeed it hits as hard as if it were antimatter.
2) Jump drives (whatever you call them) still need to get somewhere without waiting years. While it doesn't have nearly the planet-killing potential of a relativistic starship it's still quite capable of throwing city-killers.
3) Intertialess (Lensman series). No direct weapon potential but they knew they couldn't crack the defenses of Jarvenon--so the slapped inertialess drives to a couple of planets and used them as a nutcracker.
Known physics only leaves the first scenario as possible, I threw out the others to cover the various sci-fi drives. I can't think of any story that uses something that doesn't fit one of these three categories.
On that note: Trumps golden dome has the chance to end this paradigm, since with it the US can now Nuke countries that it likes without direct payback (which is probably the point of the whole thing in the first place).
The problem with that is that it changes the incentive on nukes into using them in more concealed, non-attributable ways, like smuggling a suitcase nuke into Manhatten and have everybody wonder which nations or terrorist organization it was.
1) EMP strike. The device is a big h-bomb peacefully sitting in orbit, pretending to be something else. Push the button and basically everything to the horizon (which is a very long ways) gets fried. Some of the hardened military stuff might survive, but the country is gone. The survivalists might hang on for a while, but they can't rebuild.
2) Salvage fuse. You put a proximity sensor on the missile that detonates it if something comes sufficiently close. All the antennas and missile seekers looking at the area are dazzled if not destroyed. The defenses have a very hard time engaging the next missile. The next missile doesn't need to be looking at anything, it doesn't get fried.
3) Suppose it "works"?? Nope, the reality of missile defense is that you spend more on the interceptors than your enemy spent on the missiles. Iron Dome is last I knew $50k/shot. And note what happened in the aftermath of 10/7--Hamas bled the launchers dry with rockets that were at least an order of magnitude cheaper. Last I knew Iron Beam was only test-deployed (shooting at real inbounds but not considered fully operational) and even it can be swamped. And it's only a short range defense. And it takes dwell time--salvage fuse becomes an issue even though it's an energy weapon. Point defense, yes. Country defense, no.
On the one hand, it sounds very stressful. On the other hand, if you screwed up, you wouldn't even notice because your brain would be obliterated before it would register.
Several countries used their men as guinea pigs for nuclear tests.
Most notably was a video I watched of British soldiers going through the same thing, the anecdote of seeing bones through your hand when you try to cover your eyes is haunting.
I have to say, including that detail was outstanding writing. It really upped the suspense and sense of horror even though you knew they’d make it out alive.
He would most likely have been there with those 1000 soldiers. The tests were intended to put you close enough to see and hear the blast but not close enough to be either scorched or significantly irradiated.
Specifically the tests were aimed at training soldiers on what to expect from a nuclear blast and to see how those soldiers would react.
Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected.
> Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected.
There's other cases to consider:
- the enemy drop bombs near our men
- we drop bombs near enemy men
In each case how the impacted soldiers react would be interesting and somewhat predictive of the other cases.
Of course they aren't close enough to get obliterated - however there are well documented occasions where soldiers were placed so scientists could study the effects of radiation exposure ( among other things ).
Everyone will die at some point anyways and instant nuclear obliteration seems like the better way to go compared to slowly vegetating away in a hospital bed or the infinite number of painful ways to die.
It's absolutelty an irreversible hysteresis. That's more about not wanting to have fear for dying. After the actual dying, you (probably) don't have a desire to be alive, so the only real problem is the fear leading up to it.
I would prefer not to die soon, not only because it would be unpleasant but also because my death would be inconvenient for my employer, distressing for my friends and family, bad for charities I donate to, etc. And also because there are various things I would like to do that, if I get hit by a car tomorrow, I will never get to do.
(The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)
> (The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)
Your current preferences matter now. You currently don't want to die tomorrow in your sleep, therefore dying tomorrow in your sleep is already bad now. Independently of other things you want to do tomorrow or next week.
That is also my opinion. I would also say that because I have a persistent preference for not dying if I needn't, dying tomorrow in my sleep is bad then too even though I will be asleep/dead at the time and therefore any preferences I have won't be actively motivating me at that point. And -- this is I think clearly more debatable -- that if I prefer now that I eat a slice of chocolate cake tomorrow, then to that extent it's a bad thing if tomorrow I don't eat any chocolate cake, even if tomorrow I prefer not to have any. Not a bad thing on balance; if I make a choice tomorrow, then tomorrow's preferences are rightly more important than today's in most circumstances. But, still, the fact that today I preferred chocolate-cake-tomorrow makes no-chocolate-cake-tomorrow a worse thing than if I hadn't had that preference yesterday. And, similarly, if today I prefer that tomorrow I eat chocolate cake, or kiss my wife, or conquer Spain, and I die tonight, then one reason why that's bad is that those preferences don't get satisfied, even though by the time they fail to get satisfied the person who had those preferences is gone.
But, again, a reasonable person could disagree with most of that.
Getting blown up by enough high explosives to detonate a nuclear device is not painful at all. You’ll be about as dead as the Deepwater Horizon people.
IIRC from a Tom Clancy novel that dealt with that (Sum of All Fears?) the precise mix of isotopes in the fallout can pinpoint exactly where the material was refined, which can help pinpoint where it might've been lost
Isotopic origin analysis is a very real technique, and it can be used for more than just nuclear materials. For example, it's often possible to pinpoint which mine a sample of metal ore came from. It's not foolproof, of course, and it requires a lot of data to pull off usefully, but it sure isn't fiction.
Yes, looking at a sample of material it's feasible to match it up with known samples. But after the detonation that makes no sense at all. Everything's been vaporized and mixed with what's around. And a lot of stuff has been transmuted.
Identifying it if they found the bomb would be one thing, identifying it after detonation makes no sense at all to me.
I think the idea is that you mostly sample the decay products, which are either going to be descended from neutron-activated non-radioactive material from the surrounding area and can be filtered out in analysis, or are going to be more exotic decay products from the nuclear material, which will have isotopes in proportion to those in the original nuclear material. But yeah, IDK how feasible it would be to filter out the immense amount of fallout from the remnants of the bomb
> Kessler Syndrome is a hypothetical scenario, proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, where a chain reaction of collisions between space debris and satellites leads to a catastrophic increase in debris, potentially rendering Earth's orbit unusable. This increase in debris would make space travel and communication more dangerous and difficult.
Can countries actively plan strategies to use Kessler Syndrome to their advantage? Can Starlink satellites be destroyed easily by this method since they are present in the same orbit?
It’s strange how the brain works. In terms of your personal survival if something goes wrong, there’s no difference between disarming a nuclear bomb and, say, a 500lb conventional bomb. But the nuke feels much scarier, at least when reading about it from the comfort of my home.
What saddens me is that I can't find hardly any information about this guy. John Charles Clark. Nuclear triggerman, and one very brave person. Very little written about him.
I’ll happily admit if I was asked to do this I’d run away screaming.
That being said, once it’s failed detonation (and you’ve cut off any possible signals to the detonator), wouldn’t you roughly expect it to be as dangerous as transporting one?
They mention the large chunk of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary* explosive in there, but the key attribute of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger. So the only failure mode is “somehow the detonator itself has entered a state that did not detonate with the initial signal, but will eventually detonate after >1hr”, which you’d _hope_(!) it was wired to prevent.
Again, I’d shit myself immediately in this scenario. Just interesting from an engineering perspective
*see comment below, `high` explosive does not mean "hard to detonate". Cursory searches for the [limited] information on the trigger-explosive used in nuclear weapons suggest they were mostly secondary explosives, and also will probably have put me on a new watchlist!
Primary explosive: Sensitive, used in very small quantities to initiate the main charge.
Secondary explosive: Takes quite a bit of energy to initiate and therefore reasonably stable.
High explosive: I forget the exact technical distinction from low explosive, but it refers to how it goes off, not how energetic it is.
In the real world nobody but a terrorist uses any more of a primary explosive than is needed to set off the secondary, and they are kept apart for as long as possible. You put the charge in place then you insert the detonator cap.
However, these are nukes. Obviously, we don't know details but there's another technology in use: exploding blast wires. A blast wire has no primary explosive, it is set off by pushing a huge current through a tiny wire. This is done both for timing reasons (you need great precision in imploding the plutonium) and because primary explosives cook off in fire. Secondary explosives often do not. While the heat causing a detonator to cook off isn't going to produce a nuclear yield it would still make an awful mess.
> They mention the large chunk of high explosive in there, but the key attribute of high explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger.
I think the term you might mean is "secondary explosive"? Because as stated this is _very_ wrong. Nitroglycerine is a high explosive. Nitrogen triiodide is a high explosive. Not really compounds known for being hard to trigger, unless you consider a light featherdusting to be rough treatment.
Otherwise I suspect you have a good point, just the terminology seems wrong to me.
Yes, I am wrong it seems. I am unsure where I got the high<->secondary mixup from, I'm sure I saw something talking about high explosive and defining it strictly as "needs supersonic shock wave to initiate", but have just checked and can't find anything saying that. Will edit my prior comment, thanks
I'm far from an expert (I just like fun parts of youtube xD) but I'm wondering if the terms just get conflated because the only high explosives anyone will use a large amount of by choice are the stable ones, so they're (almost?) all secondaries too.
Ironically, compared to — say — landmines, nuclear weapons are very “safe” by design. Many things need to be triggered “just so” to blow one up even conventionally, let alone as a proper nuclear weapon.
For example, they use only insensitive explosives. The trigger is purely electric and needs a lot of power.
Just pull the battery and it’s a solid inert lump.
Also the plutonium “physics package” is less radioactive than you would think. It’s safe to handle with just gloves for short periods.
If you banged on a modern nuclear weapon for an hour with a 2 kg hammer, you'd have a sore arm. Soak it in warm water and take an aspirin.
If you sawed into one with a metal cutting saw, it would just quietly turn itself into a brick.
Nuclear weapons are designed to be both tough and delicate (meaning: they like to brick themselves) at the same time. An extraordinary amount of clever engineering across decades has made them this way.
Disagree on the just part. A metal cutting saw into plutonium wouldn't exactly be good for your health. So long as it sits there as a sphere it's not going to hurt you, but it's way down there on the periodic table where basically everything is pretty toxic. You do not want to inhale the dust!
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
> “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
I'm curious why they don't add a second, conventional, explosive to the device that detonates a few seconds later and destroys the primary trigger system and makes it less likely that anything will detonate later in case of a malfunction of the primary trigger.
Think of nuclear bomb design as the direct inverse of landmine design. With the latter you want it to blow up under a wide range of circumstances, including if it is "tampered" with. You want sensitivity, within some wide range.
A significant concern with nuclear weapons is that they're small enough to steal.
You definitely do not want thieves or terrorists to be able to trigger a nuke.
So the trigger systems for nuclear weapons are encrypted and require a decryption key to be functional.
A key requirement for a successful (nuclear) detonation is nanosecond-level timing control of the explosion. Anything else will result in a fizzle with the conventional explosives just scattering the nuclear material in a small area.
It's possible that some nukes had deliberate self-destruct modes where the circuitry would react to tampering by triggering an asymmetric explosion, causing a fizzle, which is relatively harmless to city-sized targets.
Yes, what I mean is that the anti-tampering self-destruct mode could also be activated after the main device is triggered. That way, if the main device does not detonate, at least you know it will never detonate on its own (since all of the circuitry has been destroyed).
What I came to say too. It won't matter to YOU if it doesn't go well... and honestly the family would be well compensated, likely (well after 45 years in this life - probably not).
I remember an awkward TED interview with Victor Vescovo when he was talking about being in a submersible miles down and what could go wrong in such situation's. He made a good point: those kind of situation's, when something goes wrong, you wouldn't even know it.
The majority of any given point in the world’s oceans are deeper than the crush depth of any submarine. Submersibles, not so much (modulo Oceangate’s).
I don't know what's worse: a gradual realisation that there's going to be nothing that anyone can do to prevent your sudden, violent death or a gradual realisation that you're going to be slowly asphyxiated.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
A quote from Sun Tzu is etched in stone at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just outside the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation:
"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
I don't think that's what OP meant; rather I read it literally, to mean one day there might actually be a world without war, or at least, a world without violent wars.
No they prevent and drastically reduce bloodshed.
If things go very wrong they have the potential to take us out. But a non-nuclear WWIII could, also--not by direct kills but by taking down the interconnected stuff that makes society work.
Also, while they serve to prevent direct wars between major powers they cause proxy wars between the major powers.
Would Russia have spent the last 11 years attacking Ukraine if it were still a nuclear power?
(Maybe. Dictators are not reknowned for their sanity and good decision-making skills.)
6. Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
7. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.
and maaaaybe the original text underlying some of that could also be translated as the second sentence in the alleged quotation. But the bit about "an ultimate class of warriors" seems really fishy to me.
[EDITED to add:] Ah, looking at a picture of the thing, it says "adapted from Sun Tzu, The Art of War". Seems like a pretty loose adaptation.
Besides if (and that’s some “if”) that happens that means the world has already found something more deadly and again some people will suddenly grow very mature insights on this and after destroying few cities they would totally focus on an initiative that ensures only they get to keep those weapons and every other nation should voluntarily sign up for it. And this is the main reason we will never get rid of deadliest of weapons and the endless quest for them.
The speed of light is still finite, so a lightspeed weapon still has to lead its target by some amount.
The only way to avoid this is a one world government.
The analogy is: the existence of police is the only reason you don't need to own a gun. Without police, it's anarchy, and therefore you need a gun to survive in that incentive structure.
I expect it would evolve to something like current day China.
We are designed (or destined, if you want to say so) to be fucked and fuck up everything on this earth faster than we thought maybe even just 20-30 years ago.
Plainly false. But even if that were true, then the cure's worse than the sickness.
Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments. Tiny city-states that neither have the mineral resources to build those nor the wealth to attempt it.
This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this. We had what you wanted in our tribal past, but it was not competitive. Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged. You can't reverse this just by wishing it to be so. A one world government is at least a feasible possible future instead of an impossible one.
Nation states were around long before railroads or the printing press; they were around before the pyramids were built. Arguably the original technology that made them viable as an alternative to hunter-gatherer tribes was agriculture.
Modern technology has made modern nation states harder to dislodge in some ways, but that doesn't mean they're a good idea.
> A one world government is at least a feasible possible future
Yes, but I disagree that it's the only feasible option. For one thing, technology can also make it harder for nation states to lie to their people about what they're up to (the technology that is allowing us to have this conversation being the prime example). And once mation states lose the ability to do that, their viability becomes much more problematic, since without being able to tell and sustain such lies, the extent to which they make things worse instead of better becomes more and more widely known, and people are less and less willing to put up with that. A single government that was supposed to rule the entire world would have even worse problems in that regard.
No, it's not impossible, it's just not extant. It may be true that there is no path from where we are now to that world, and it is certainly true that if there is a path it's not trivially predictable. But this can be said of the "one world government" thing as well. Knowing that people like myself exist and would sabotage attempts at one world government, how do you propose to make that possible?
>We had what you wanted in our tribal past,
No, we had something even better. We had a zero-world-government. That truly is impossible, at least considering that I'm not a fan of human extinction.
No, that's just your narrative. You even acknowledge that there was a point in history where it was the prevailing condition, so clearly it wasn't against human nature.
> The last 10,000 years have been a gradual, unceasing trend of increasing centralization,
Hardly gradual. Incredibly punctuated. In some places in the world the stateless/tribal paradigm survived until modern times. The progressive's version of "the market only ever goes up!"...
>Positing that those causal factors will continue in the future,
So you're bad at prediction too. No, humanity becomes extinct in the next 2 or 3 centuries, because you've all become sterile worker drones and can't even maintain a stable population. Sometimes I hope that part's just an accident, but then I read words written by people like yourself, and you seem all too enthusiastic about it as if you've discovered some divine secret. Oh well.
In a world with nuclear weapons and limited, unreliable defenses against them, you have to actually fully comprehend what "wanting peace" actually means - i.e. negotiation and diplomacy are the actual kings.
In a world without them, you always have the option of resorting to the barrel of the gun again - as happened to prior to WW2.
With enough anti-missile technology, it's possible (though challenging) to defend against that.
But good luck trying to stop them from smuggling a multi-kiloton device across your border and detonating it at a time calculated to cause the most casualties.
With such power asymmetries, the "bleeding" might merely be displaced to after the battle is settled. Look at the history of how colonialism played out.
This is my solution.
We already live, and have since forever, in a world that does not need nuclear weapons.
> A quote from Sun Tzu
The logical outcome of which being that whoever controls that class of warriors controls the world. I’m not convinced, despite what the quote seems to imply, that is better than never again shedding blood.
With all due respect to ancient Chinese wisdom, Sun Tzu had no concept of atomic bombs, autonomous drones, and weaponised diseases.
I disagree. Our most dangerous enemies aren't even human. On the off chance the little green men show up, let's have something with a bit more oomph than polite rebuke. Just in case.
>"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."
This is just silly. What if those warriors want to ban abortions and library books? Will you be satisfied that their fighting prowess grants them the power to dictate that to you? Do you believe that there's some mystical connection between that strength and your particular ethical perspective?
It's pretty much impossible to come up with a stardrive that doesn't have a weapon potential that makes nukes look like firecrackers.
1) The direct Kzinti Lesson: Anything that can push a ship to relativistic velocity produces incredibly energetic exhaust. The efficiency of the drive is directly related to how well you can point it in one direction, thus making it very hard to make something that isn't a weapon. And in a population-attack scenario such a starship throwing rocks is devastating. At 86% of lightspeed a rock hits with it's annihilation energy. At 94% of lightspeed it hits as hard as if it were antimatter.
2) Jump drives (whatever you call them) still need to get somewhere without waiting years. While it doesn't have nearly the planet-killing potential of a relativistic starship it's still quite capable of throwing city-killers.
3) Intertialess (Lensman series). No direct weapon potential but they knew they couldn't crack the defenses of Jarvenon--so the slapped inertialess drives to a couple of planets and used them as a nutcracker.
Known physics only leaves the first scenario as possible, I threw out the others to cover the various sci-fi drives. I can't think of any story that uses something that doesn't fit one of these three categories.
The problem with that is that it changes the incentive on nukes into using them in more concealed, non-attributable ways, like smuggling a suitcase nuke into Manhatten and have everybody wonder which nations or terrorist organization it was.
1) EMP strike. The device is a big h-bomb peacefully sitting in orbit, pretending to be something else. Push the button and basically everything to the horizon (which is a very long ways) gets fried. Some of the hardened military stuff might survive, but the country is gone. The survivalists might hang on for a while, but they can't rebuild.
2) Salvage fuse. You put a proximity sensor on the missile that detonates it if something comes sufficiently close. All the antennas and missile seekers looking at the area are dazzled if not destroyed. The defenses have a very hard time engaging the next missile. The next missile doesn't need to be looking at anything, it doesn't get fried.
3) Suppose it "works"?? Nope, the reality of missile defense is that you spend more on the interceptors than your enemy spent on the missiles. Iron Dome is last I knew $50k/shot. And note what happened in the aftermath of 10/7--Hamas bled the launchers dry with rockets that were at least an order of magnitude cheaper. Last I knew Iron Beam was only test-deployed (shooting at real inbounds but not considered fully operational) and even it can be swamped. And it's only a short range defense. And it takes dwell time--salvage fuse becomes an issue even though it's an energy weapon. Point defense, yes. Country defense, no.
| Once at the base of the 300-foot-tall shot tower with a live atomic bomb on its top, the three men got ready for their ascent.
> The 701st soldiers were guinea pigs for evaluating the bomb’s flash, burn and shock-wave effects under field conditions.
Most notably was a video I watched of British soldiers going through the same thing, the anecdote of seeing bones through your hand when you try to cover your eyes is haunting.
https://www.forcesnews.com/nuclear/britains-nuclear-bomb-gui...
Yet somehow the story is about a hero that disarmed a bomb - not that he had tried to set off and test the effects on almost 1000 soldiers....
A cool customer in more ways than one....
Specifically the tests were aimed at training soldiers on what to expect from a nuclear blast and to see how those soldiers would react.
Presumably if the US (or some other nation) was to drop a bomb in an area with deployed soldiers, they wanted to make sure the soldiers would still be able to perform as expected.
There's other cases to consider:
- the enemy drop bombs near our men
- we drop bombs near enemy men
In each case how the impacted soldiers react would be interesting and somewhat predictive of the other cases.
Look up Operation Desert Rock.
Is it though? You either succeed, or nothing is ever your problem again.
I prefer to die a vegetable at 80 than die from a nuclear blast at 40. All those years can be spent existing happily
I would prefer not to die soon, not only because it would be unpleasant but also because my death would be inconvenient for my employer, distressing for my friends and family, bad for charities I donate to, etc. And also because there are various things I would like to do that, if I get hit by a car tomorrow, I will never get to do.
(The last sentence is debatable. You might say that my preferences just evaporate and stop mattering at all when I die. I wouldn't agree, but I don't have a knock-down counterargument.)
_first?!_
I believe you have your priorities wrong. Most regret not spending enough time with their loved ones. You only get one life after all.
Prove it :)
Your current preferences matter now. You currently don't want to die tomorrow in your sleep, therefore dying tomorrow in your sleep is already bad now. Independently of other things you want to do tomorrow or next week.
But, again, a reasonable person could disagree with most of that.
1. Disabling a terrorist weapon. When you find a mysterious box in NYC making ticking noises and emitting radiation, who you gonna call?
2. Forensics and attribution. When 1 fails how do you figure out what happened and who is responsible?
Yes, looking at a sample of material it's feasible to match it up with known samples. But after the detonation that makes no sense at all. Everything's been vaporized and mixed with what's around. And a lot of stuff has been transmuted.
Identifying it if they found the bomb would be one thing, identifying it after detonation makes no sense at all to me.
Watch at 0:40 @ Space War is Real, Here's How it Works
https://youtu.be/JZqa2wQdORo
> Kessler Syndrome is a hypothetical scenario, proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, where a chain reaction of collisions between space debris and satellites leads to a catastrophic increase in debris, potentially rendering Earth's orbit unusable. This increase in debris would make space travel and communication more dangerous and difficult.
Can countries actively plan strategies to use Kessler Syndrome to their advantage? Can Starlink satellites be destroyed easily by this method since they are present in the same orbit?
That being said, once it’s failed detonation (and you’ve cut off any possible signals to the detonator), wouldn’t you roughly expect it to be as dangerous as transporting one?
They mention the large chunk of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary* explosive in there, but the key attribute of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger. So the only failure mode is “somehow the detonator itself has entered a state that did not detonate with the initial signal, but will eventually detonate after >1hr”, which you’d _hope_(!) it was wired to prevent.
Again, I’d shit myself immediately in this scenario. Just interesting from an engineering perspective
*see comment below, `high` explosive does not mean "hard to detonate". Cursory searches for the [limited] information on the trigger-explosive used in nuclear weapons suggest they were mostly secondary explosives, and also will probably have put me on a new watchlist!
Secondary explosive: Takes quite a bit of energy to initiate and therefore reasonably stable.
High explosive: I forget the exact technical distinction from low explosive, but it refers to how it goes off, not how energetic it is.
In the real world nobody but a terrorist uses any more of a primary explosive than is needed to set off the secondary, and they are kept apart for as long as possible. You put the charge in place then you insert the detonator cap.
However, these are nukes. Obviously, we don't know details but there's another technology in use: exploding blast wires. A blast wire has no primary explosive, it is set off by pushing a huge current through a tiny wire. This is done both for timing reasons (you need great precision in imploding the plutonium) and because primary explosives cook off in fire. Secondary explosives often do not. While the heat causing a detonator to cook off isn't going to produce a nuclear yield it would still make an awful mess.
I think the term you might mean is "secondary explosive"? Because as stated this is _very_ wrong. Nitroglycerine is a high explosive. Nitrogen triiodide is a high explosive. Not really compounds known for being hard to trigger, unless you consider a light featherdusting to be rough treatment.
Otherwise I suspect you have a good point, just the terminology seems wrong to me.
For example, they use only insensitive explosives. The trigger is purely electric and needs a lot of power.
Just pull the battery and it’s a solid inert lump.
Also the plutonium “physics package” is less radioactive than you would think. It’s safe to handle with just gloves for short periods.
If you sawed into one with a metal cutting saw, it would just quietly turn itself into a brick.
Nuclear weapons are designed to be both tough and delicate (meaning: they like to brick themselves) at the same time. An extraordinary amount of clever engineering across decades has made them this way.
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
> “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
Ref: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
A significant concern with nuclear weapons is that they're small enough to steal.
You definitely do not want thieves or terrorists to be able to trigger a nuke.
So the trigger systems for nuclear weapons are encrypted and require a decryption key to be functional.
A key requirement for a successful (nuclear) detonation is nanosecond-level timing control of the explosion. Anything else will result in a fizzle with the conventional explosives just scattering the nuclear material in a small area.
It's possible that some nukes had deliberate self-destruct modes where the circuitry would react to tampering by triggering an asymmetric explosion, causing a fizzle, which is relatively harmless to city-sized targets.
>Clark averted his eyes and lowered the car’s sun visor in case the device did go off and its flash caught him by surprise.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hkH9BHS-ph4
https://www.ted.com/talks/victor_vescovo_what_s_at_the_botto...