The risk of an accident is much lower than the risk of full-on wars w/o them. Nuclear weapons are the reason I can raise my children in a relative peace.
> Nuclear weapons are the reason I can raise my children in a relative peace.
You can raise your children in relative peace because the social contract still holds. The fact that a neighbour you don't like hasn't walked into your house and shot everyone to death, has nothing to do with your goverment/military stockpiling nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons need to be dismantled or stored in neutral territory in case we encounter belligerent aliens.
Social contract didn't magically materialize in the West in 1950s. People have warred since forever, and still do, regardless of the ways they run their societies. But nuclear weapons are the reason major military powers don't go all-in against each other today.
Let's also not forget that social contract survives because of a legal system and people enforcing it with power overwhelming any individual trying to violate it. On an international stage, there's no such top-down enforcement (all nations are sovereign) - there's only mutual policing, and nuclear weapons are the overwhelming power.
> Nuclear weapons need to be dismantled or stored in neutral territory in case we encounter belligerent aliens.
Lifeforms able to travel the universe are unlikely to be vulnerable to our nuclear weapons in a significant way. They might just not care about us and eat our sun. Or they might infect our planet with their spores.
The idea that space-faring aliens would be at a comparable technological development to our species has no base. That we would have a chance to respond to an attack is even more remote. It just makes for a story we can respond to emotionally, which is why these stories are told. Hoarding nuclear weapons for for such an occasion would be like goat-sacrifices to the gods.
A nuke with no way to get it to an alien ship in space is irrelevant. The alien ship will have no problem throwing rocks at us. It's pretty hard to imagine some sort of stardrive that doesn't provide a practical kinetic bombardment capability.
About the closest to a weaponless drive would be the Bergenholm of the Lensman series--but even that was eventually used to throw planets.
Maybe. What if it is like forest fire prevention? The dead timber accumulates, and thus when an uncontained fire breaks out, it is 1000s of times worse as a result.
Fully managed forests, sometimes have controlled burns now, to prevent this.
Are nukes like this? Maybe, for tension can build, and build, and then?
With technology open war became more and more destructive until it passed the threshold of there no longer being a point. Two modern nation states can easily entirely reduce each other to ash in a few hours, and not before the other side can do the same.
Precision weapons also make nukes unnecessary in large ways.
It’s not about tension, big wars are pointless suicide pacts.
The big world wars were about nations feeling powerful with new technology and wanting to build on that power, that’s not the case anymore. No nuclear powers are going to think they’re better off after a war.
There’s not tension building to explosion, war is obsolete between technologically advanced states. Proxy wars, civil wars, and border skirmishes are all that is left or will be until there is a major technological change that changes the cost/benefit of war.
Damn, I wonder about this too. Not to defend nukes (and I know you're not defending them), but I find it hard to believe that the apparent progress enabled by them is sustainable in the long term. And by "progress" here I mean, (a) large countries can no longer engage in total war, and (b) smaller countries are getting their asses kicked in proxy wars (e.g., Korea, Vietnam, Iraq).
Have we really left total war behind? Is it really, finally, to awful to contemplate? That would honestly be a huge step forward for humanity. It seems too good to trust. This isn't the terminal phase of history; 2,000 years from now this may be a blip.
I don’t really understand your forest fire analogy.
One slightly paradoxical thing with nukes is that anti-ICBM systems makes us less safe by making the strategic landscape less stable. If a hypothetical world power trusts their “shield” then they are incentivised to strike their enemies nuclear forces in the hopes that they destroy enough enemy missiles that even if they launch them all they can be reliably soaked up by the “shield”. And it in turn incentivises the other party to strike first or risk loosing their nuclear arsenal. That sucks.
On the other hand having a survivable second strike capability can act as a stabilizing force. Those countries who believe they have this know that their enemy knows that even if they sucker punch them they will suffer. That’s the “assured” part of the MAD doctrine.
So it is not really the number of nukes which makes things more or less stable but other factors. If you are interested in these questions, and want to listen to much better analysis than what I have presented here I can warmly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast.
> do you know how many of them are unaccounted for?
Nuclear weapons have incredibly tight tolerances to be or remain viable, those tolerances degrade over time, so they require frequent maintenance in order to stay usable. Many have been "lost" over the last 70 years, sure, but few if any of them would actually still function without state-level expertise in maintaining them - the kind of capability which could just make new ones anyway.
Sure, they could still be used as fodder for "dirty bombs" but so could a lot of things and it's much less of a concern.
vagrantJin|4 years ago
You can raise your children in relative peace because the social contract still holds. The fact that a neighbour you don't like hasn't walked into your house and shot everyone to death, has nothing to do with your goverment/military stockpiling nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons need to be dismantled or stored in neutral territory in case we encounter belligerent aliens.
TeMPOraL|4 years ago
Let's also not forget that social contract survives because of a legal system and people enforcing it with power overwhelming any individual trying to violate it. On an international stage, there's no such top-down enforcement (all nations are sovereign) - there's only mutual policing, and nuclear weapons are the overwhelming power.
lolc|4 years ago
Lifeforms able to travel the universe are unlikely to be vulnerable to our nuclear weapons in a significant way. They might just not care about us and eat our sun. Or they might infect our planet with their spores.
The idea that space-faring aliens would be at a comparable technological development to our species has no base. That we would have a chance to respond to an attack is even more remote. It just makes for a story we can respond to emotionally, which is why these stories are told. Hoarding nuclear weapons for for such an occasion would be like goat-sacrifices to the gods.
rl3|4 years ago
If they've traveled across the stars to find us, I suspect nukes ain't going to save the day.
LorenPechtel|4 years ago
A nuke with no way to get it to an alien ship in space is irrelevant. The alien ship will have no problem throwing rocks at us. It's pretty hard to imagine some sort of stardrive that doesn't provide a practical kinetic bombardment capability.
About the closest to a weaponless drive would be the Bergenholm of the Lensman series--but even that was eventually used to throw planets.
nradov|4 years ago
refurb|4 years ago
TheGigaChad|4 years ago
[deleted]
b112|4 years ago
Maybe. What if it is like forest fire prevention? The dead timber accumulates, and thus when an uncontained fire breaks out, it is 1000s of times worse as a result.
Fully managed forests, sometimes have controlled burns now, to prevent this.
Are nukes like this? Maybe, for tension can build, and build, and then?
Note: I don't know an alternative.
colechristensen|4 years ago
With technology open war became more and more destructive until it passed the threshold of there no longer being a point. Two modern nation states can easily entirely reduce each other to ash in a few hours, and not before the other side can do the same.
Precision weapons also make nukes unnecessary in large ways.
It’s not about tension, big wars are pointless suicide pacts.
The big world wars were about nations feeling powerful with new technology and wanting to build on that power, that’s not the case anymore. No nuclear powers are going to think they’re better off after a war.
There’s not tension building to explosion, war is obsolete between technologically advanced states. Proxy wars, civil wars, and border skirmishes are all that is left or will be until there is a major technological change that changes the cost/benefit of war.
sonofhans|4 years ago
Have we really left total war behind? Is it really, finally, to awful to contemplate? That would honestly be a huge step forward for humanity. It seems too good to trust. This isn't the terminal phase of history; 2,000 years from now this may be a blip.
krisoft|4 years ago
One slightly paradoxical thing with nukes is that anti-ICBM systems makes us less safe by making the strategic landscape less stable. If a hypothetical world power trusts their “shield” then they are incentivised to strike their enemies nuclear forces in the hopes that they destroy enough enemy missiles that even if they launch them all they can be reliably soaked up by the “shield”. And it in turn incentivises the other party to strike first or risk loosing their nuclear arsenal. That sucks.
On the other hand having a survivable second strike capability can act as a stabilizing force. Those countries who believe they have this know that their enemy knows that even if they sucker punch them they will suffer. That’s the “assured” part of the MAD doctrine.
So it is not really the number of nukes which makes things more or less stable but other factors. If you are interested in these questions, and want to listen to much better analysis than what I have presented here I can warmly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast.
baq|4 years ago
i don't except that this number is greater than 0. i hope the cia and the kgb know.
sho|4 years ago
Nuclear weapons have incredibly tight tolerances to be or remain viable, those tolerances degrade over time, so they require frequent maintenance in order to stay usable. Many have been "lost" over the last 70 years, sure, but few if any of them would actually still function without state-level expertise in maintaining them - the kind of capability which could just make new ones anyway.
Sure, they could still be used as fodder for "dirty bombs" but so could a lot of things and it's much less of a concern.
xornox|4 years ago