Fun Thought Experiment For Fun (no meanness only fun)

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thehandtruck: Mar 5, 2006; the thing about the jews is,

Through science magic an alien comes down to Earth and disables all currently existing nuclear weapons permanently.

Through science magic the alien makes it so if anyone wants to make more nukes it will take a minimum of 29 years before one is operational. This delay is known to every human on Earth.

Through science magic the alien makes it so nobody knows they were there, or questions the situation in such a way that they would blame other countries. It's simply accepted as fact that nukes stopped working and finding out why it not something anyone cares about.

How would the world in its current state unfold?

edit: If you find it more interesting, you can omit the 2nd line.

# ? Sep 6, 2022 23:36

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 20:05

GoutPatrol: Oct 17, 2009; *Stupid Babby*

Not to sound pessimistic but I do think there would be more conventional wars over the next 29 years. If everyone believed that the nukes were going away forever, I don't think that war would stop.

# ? Sep 7, 2022 02:04

thehandtruck: Mar 5, 2006; the thing about the jews is,

GoutPatrol posted:

Not to sound pessimistic but I do think there would be more conventional wars over the next 29 years. If everyone believed that the nukes were going away forever, I don't think that war would stop.

Totally! I agree. Maybe it would be the WW3 that people were thinking was inevitable. I wonder also about countries like Russia that are dwindling on collapse. It could be a possibility that western powers are even keeping (or less directly, hoping) that Russia stays alive because at any moment Putin's swan song could be pressing a bunch of buttons that end the world. If that vanished instantly, and the US has the biggest army, would they invade Russia? Any China would step in? It feels so sure that there'd be war.

# ? Sep 7, 2022 05:10

Stereotype: Apr 24, 2010; College Slice

every nation on earth has a sizable and well funded scientific organization whose primary purpose is to prove to the rest of the world that their nukes still work and that they still know how to build, maintain, and detonate them. You can't blow them up anymore, so who's to say that we aren't lying and all our nukes stopped working decades ago? They totally do normal civilian science too, stuff a scientist can publish without being morally tainted for their work on nuclear weapons, but the work they are doing is also clearly applicable to nuclear weapons and their papers prove to the world that the nation funding them also knows how nukes work.

I enjoy the thought experiment, but the idea that you can just handwave away a significant amount of effort that most people even don't realize is happening at all, and then also suggest that no one would try to figure out why all of a sudden none of these facilities can reproduce previous experiments, is so far out there that it is difficult to answer. It's like asking what would happen if guns stopped working. It would take some time for people to recognize that all of them don't work, during which everything would be status quo, after which I expect there to be a bunch of chaos.

Also if fission stopped being exothermic a lot of stuff would stop working. Like nuclear reactors. And the Earth's core would cool down a lot (maybe, science isn't clear on that).

# ? Sep 7, 2022 05:26

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

Stereotype posted:

every nation on earth has a sizable and well funded scientific organization whose primary purpose is to prove to the rest of the world that their nukes still work and that they still know how to build, maintain, and detonate them.

lol how many countries on earth do you think have icbms aimed at each other

# ? Sep 7, 2022 06:16