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Ramrod Hotshot posted:To get a bit conjectural, I fear that the risk of an accident leading to a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia is rising sharply. Trump may act friendly (for now, he has a history of turning against former friends on a dime) toward Putin, but the rest of the government, given the allegations of hacking, a compromised election, and blackmail, is decidedly more hostile. Russia's intervention in Eastern Europe and Syria lead to more risks of confrontation with the west. I feel bad typing this, but I think accidental nuclear war along the lines of this scenario is much less likely under Trump than under Clinton. I'd be more worried that the threshold past which the West will go to war was murky before Trump and is now decidedly more so. Does NATO still work in a world with Trump, Le Pen and a Brexiting UK? If the answer is "yes, but everybody believes it does not", then we might be heading into a world that's very dangerous indeed. On a completely different note, I think the lessons of the Norwegian Rocket Incident are quite different to the ones you've drawn here. I think it means that we should always be worried about nuclear war, because it remains a possibility even in times where there are no international tensions to speak of in the world. I also think it's an important illustration of how we live in a reality where human civilisation can end in non-narrative and absurd ways— your post has some scenarios you've thought of where a nuclear war can happen, but "everyone dies because of the Russian postal system and some research around auroras" is something nobody would come up with that almost happened anyway. "MAD means we can die for reasons that are unintuitive and pathetic" is a point I feel humanity has singularly failed to appreciate, and I worry it's one that will end up killing us all. vegetables fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 18:35
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Nuclear chat seems to continually involve people arguing that systems designed to have no safeguards will have safeguards kick in if need be, but I'm not sure this is actually true. I think our thinking is constructed in a way to resist the idea nuclear war is possible – and to argue towards that belief in a post hoc way – but I'm not sure we necessarily do so in a logical way.
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Jan 20, 2017 16:22
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