No worries, but I think we're still dancing around the same point. I think those people would say that they agree that nuclear war is very bad, and that it has many nth-order consequences which are all clearly catastrophic, but that (for example) while disrupted supply of medicine causes a great deal of human suffering and unnecessary deaths, it remains difficult to imagine how it might result in literal human extinction.
It's no strawman. Fiction often depicts nuclear wars as near-extinction events with very few human survivors. Going by similar topics, it's safe to assume many people consider this a realistic scenario beyond just fiction.
The real strawman is in your comment though.
Who said nuclear war wouldn't be bad, just because it likely won't cause human extinction? Most people agree that regular wars are bad, and there never was any threat of extinction with them.
> But I digress, my point is that the rational community seems to have a smarty pants mentality
No, the rational community has a rational mentality. One can be against war without claiming it would be the end of the world. Hitting your toe is also not the end of the world but you probably still consider it a bad thing to happen.
This is just an argument against a straw man. Nuclear war, is bad, any mass killing is bad, any society collapse is bad.
It means actual prolongated suffering for most humans.
Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome, I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse.
It's like the back talk against climate warming, trying to down play it as a non extinction event. Well that's true, We're not killing the planet, we're not even causing human extinction, we're just building a really bad future for our children.
Ofcourse people born into that future would see it as the norm, but we make decision from our view point, and the norm can be terrible when taken in to context.
But I digress, my point is that the rational community seems to have a smarty pants mentality, taking all rhetoric at face value, and usually creating very serious discussions that usually just sidetrack from the important issues.
Oh sorry! I meant that the people to whom you referred above focus on the "one true catastrophe" (whatever that is) without truly thinking what it would mean to have a few dozen nuclear weapons used. It's not just the immediate effect of the explosions. It's also the destruction of power distribution, industrial capacity, food and medicine production, and other things that millions of people depend on.
I wrote this post, and the point is to improve discussion of societal risks. As others have pointed out, nuclear war doesn't have to kill everyone to be extremely bad and worth avoiding. I spend a lot of my time thinking about risks from nuclear and biological weapons, and downplaying these risks is not my purpose.
One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars. While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur!
Yes, the topic of the article is human extinction, and one can be pedantic and say, why stray off topic? However, conceptually close is near-extinction, with unfathomable suffering and waste, destruction of nearly all human culture, nearly all humans, and nearly all plant and animal life. It's worth a sentence or two to mention this in the article, to avoid confusion on the part of the reader that the author wishes minimize the negative effects of nuclear war - which would perhaps make it more acceptable in a way.
That said, the analysis seems sound, and despite the chance that the conclusion could be misconstrued or misused, it is important to remind voters graphically of the horrors of nuclear war. That's a better strategy to avoid both extinction and near-extinction, rather than counting on military planners to not overshoot their goals of near-extinction.
I think it's a good idea to study the traditional notion that nuclear war is so extremely destructive.
I love the word "traditional". As I was saying to my wife the other day, on the occasion of the passing of Les Paul, "it's amazing how many of the inventors of our ancient and venerable traditions were still walking around as of last week."
In this case, the "traditional notion" that nuclear war could destroy all of life of earth dates back only to the 1960s, was by no means universally accepted, and still is not universally accepted. Nuclear survivability has, for obvious reasons, always been of intense interest to our political leaders, and I assure you that the subject is not an "intellectual wasteland": There are reams and reams of research on it. Much of it is classified, of course.
And talk of "what will happen after the nuclear war" used to be popular -- witness all those movies and bomb shelters and plans made during the 1950s and early 1960s, when people held the then-quite-reasonable belief that nuclear war was inevitable. But then the popular notion of global nuclear annhilation took hold -- probably because, like quite a few "traditional notions", it contains a big grain of truth. Perhaps it is hard to kill the whole world in a nuclear war. But it's not so hard to kill my whole world. I can give you a target list of eight cities, all of which contain major US research universities, which (if bombed) would destroy, say, 95% of all the people I've ever known. In a full-scale nuclear exchange involving the United States, odds are that my world would be destroyed. (I, personally, am incredibly likely to die in the initial blast wave, as I live down the street from the Route 128 tech corridor, home to companies like Raytheon.)
So maybe a person who lives in the New Guinea highlands really can afford to laugh at the prospect of the post-apocalypse. (May we never know.) But those of us who live in Boston, San Franci, New York, or Washington can't. Because, for us, bombing all four of those cities would be an apocalypse.
Who are the people that actually claimed "that a full-scale nuclear war is likely to cause human extinction?" I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that. It would cause societal collapse, perhaps even an extinction of civilization, but not a literal extinction of our species.
Straw man. Anyone who actually studies this for a living is well aware that nuclear war is very unlikely to lead to full extinction. But the popular impression is that nuclear war could lead to everybody dying. Partly this is because if you are Joe Average, the difference between everyone dying and you and all your friends and family dying is not very important.
Note: I wrote this post and cross-posted it to the EA Forum, and there are some good comments there discussing the longer-term risks of nuclear war that I didn't include in the original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mxKwP2PFtg8ABwzug/...
I'm not sure how to respond to that comment, which I find profoundly shocking and depressing. I've read some HN comments before which for some reason suggest a large-scale nuclear "war" wouldn't be so bad, but..this one seems even much worse, for some reason. I don't get it. I don't get how anyone could believe or write that.
Anything I could write seems so obvious. I can't think. I think I need a break from HN for a while. You don't seem to have been downvoted in 5 hours.
It argues against a 'straw man' that I personally have talked with people that think that nuclear war would certainly destroy all of humankind.
As well, its not arguing against the nuclear war being Super-Bad, the conclusion even talks about an idea for making nuclear war less dangerous so that it is less likely to kill off as many people.
> Nuclear caused extinction is actually a preferable outcome, I'd rather just instantly die than live in a brutal post sociatle apocalypse.
I do happen to disagree with this, but that is a personal decision and I understand why you would prefer that.
Interesting article, I've heard argument that nuclear war could cause human extinction, but never thought about it twice. Once you put it like this, it's almost obvious that those claims are hugely exaggerated. Great exercise in critical thinking! Though it's of no practical use, since it's obvious that no financial, territorial or political gains would be enough to justify a nuclear war.
I could be totally off base here but my impression, based on the staggering amount of nuclear warheads that could be deployed in a war, is that this line of thinking is wildly optimistic. I expect that any humans who survive a nuclear war will be focused primarily on staying alive and preventing human extinction, not continuing whatever geopolitical conflict led to the war.
I’m surprised by the bad response this article received. All media I’m aware of speak of nuclear war in very vague terms and suggest an outcome similar to that which we see in entertainment science fiction. Long before the war in Ukraine I have been occasionally trying to dig a little deeper into the actual possible outcome of a nuclear war, but found only vague or outdated information and I’m very grateful to the author of the article for doing good research.
Yes, it is based on major assumptions, but those truly are the best thing we have since the discussed situation is genuinely unprecedented.
I’m also surprised by the disgust people here express towards the supposed “normalisation of nuclear war”. Much like the general public was taught by films such as Terminator that AI is something that will end the world, the perception of nuclear warfare was similarly shaped by media. When AI started seeing widespread use in daily life it became important to address the ingrained misconceptions. In the same way, now that there’s a war in Europe and Russia is threatening the use of nukes it is important for people to have a reasonably accurate idea of what such use would entail.
The idea of “nuclear war is simply unacceptable and we must avoid it at all costs” is good very getting upvotes on social media, but truth is that taking all available steps to prevent such a war is equivalent to appeasing Russia in all cases.
Yeah, I phrased that poorly. I meant to say that the the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the likelihood of full out nuclear war causing the total collapse of civilization is considered hyperbole now..?
This article is written in response to articles/claims proclaiming that nuclear war will cause people to become extinct (or similarly overblown claims).
If they are downplaying nuclear war - can you recommend articles of a similar quality presenting claim that nuclear war is worse than presented here?
And this article still presents it as an horrific disaster - and maybe it assumes that people are aware that millions would die in just opening of the nuclear war, it would be worst disaster in history. And that such thing happening would be bad. And unwanted.
And focused on countering "we will all die" perspective.
For example they are taking as given that USA shooting down Russian planes over Ukraine is nonstarter because it increases risk of nuclear war,
This reminds me of a recent NYT op-ed where the premise was "a little nuclear war is okay." The reality is that any amount of nuclear war is the end of humanity, there is no post-nuclear war civilization, at least not for very long.
In several decades of seeing stray discussions online about nuclear war, including here on HN, I've yet to see a discussion where human extinction wasn't a commonly assumed outcome.
It's almost always thrown out as a matter-of-fact inevitability, it's assumed. It appeals to the self-hating cult of 'humans deserve it.' I'd wager the people that float that theory more often than not tend to hate humanity and are lusting for its destruction, so that appeals to them, they want it to happen and are projecting irrationally outward.
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