Is capitalism greed the only thing saving us from mutually assured destruction?
Also the point where, if one starts throwing them, likely others will follow and that will basically kill us all
Which is why I’m so fucking terrified of the religious death cult guys in charge of the US government
Say what you want about the USSR (it was a shit place), but at least they had some cool heads there that on more than one occasion avoided WWIII
Yeah greedy capitalist and power hunger bureaucrats are at least invested in the world existing, fundamentalists really will give up reality for their particular fantasy
Some power of negotiation is wrapped up in making your opponent believe you really will kill everyone even if it kills you too…
Yeah I mean the Evangelical Christians believe helping Israel commit genocide is part of how to bring about the end times. Which they want.
Cause then all the people who didn’t believe them will get owned.
Imagine wanting Armageddon to prove your bigotry and hate was the right way to live.
That’s some incredible insecurity in one’s beliefs right there.
the perfect WMD is one that kills the population but leaves all the infrastructure untouched. luckily nothing like that exists, yet
Bio weapons and chemical weapons exist.
So does the Neutron bomb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
rebuilding after war is insanely profitable though
This is semi-related so spoilers for the Fallout show: this right here is the reason I stopped being invested in the plot of Fallout. When they revealed that Vault Tec dropped the bombs that created the post apocalyptic setting I was dumbfounded. I can accept silliness and characters being nonsensical sometimes, but in that moment every person in that room was proven to be outright stupid. They tried to say that it would let them “corner the market” in the aftermath, but how could they not see that they were destroying their own marketshare too?
Most of the vaults from Vault Tec have some kind of dark experiment going on, experiment that can only be performed when people are in the vaults and have a huge reason to stay in the vaults. A nuclear armageddon is such a reason. The corporation is, in my eyes and there are hints and clues in the games for that, only a facade not really interested in profits and market shares but in a bigger goal. Colonies on other planets could be such a goal, and the results from nearly all of the experiments (at least in the way planned) would be very helpful for planning and crewing generation ships and colonist groups. Having to rebuild society on a harsh and harmful planet (like the radioactive hellhole earth is in the fallout universe ) too would very much fit the criteria of an experiment to colonize other planets. If you can’t rebuild on a broken earth, how could you on a harmful alien world out there?
It all makes sense, in a twisted and insane way.
There is a tension that it is going to happen anyways some in the show, or at least anyways unless those corporations and the CCP come to equal terms (likely at loss of standard of living that they are both burning through the world to maintain).
Its also a bit of the “effective altruism” mind virus where at the scale of forever it’s a wash to have most of the planet destroyed today so that they each can have a playground for the “cool” futures they imagine leading humanity down.
They are stupid, but it is also very based in real people.
Have you looked at what the US corpos are doing? Shooting themselves in the foot for short term profits is extremely believable.
Yeah, that crossed my mind, but I do think there’s a difference. US corporations shoot themselves in the foot to pursue short term profits because the people in charge believe they can get out of the business with that profit before those decisions come back to bite them.
In the show though, they’re doing the opposite. They’re giving up their short term profitable corporations for some nebulous future “market monopolization” in the long term, despite there no longer being a market for them to monopolize. I think that makes them even more stupid.
That’s probably part of it, but also the “mutually assured destruction” is saving us from the mutually assured destruction. No one wants that horror in their own country, and no one believes their defenses are good enough to prevent it if missiles start flying.
This is probably realistic. Modern ICBM designs carry multiple independently targeting warheads, plus decoy warheads, but can’t travel fast enough to reach a rival nation before they can launch their own missiles. If launched, every nation with such weapons has the capacity to completely overwhelm any anti-missile defenses, but not to prevent retaliation.
This situation becomes unbalanced when:
- Someone develops a practical method for shooting down 10 actual warheads per missile while correctly identifying the decoys and either avoiding or shooting them down too.
- Someone develops a faster delivery system and/or a reliable way to blind early warning systems (unlikely because you would need to blind multiple space and ground observation platforms at the same time).
- Someone rises to power who doesn’t care about the consequences to their own nation.
Personally I think the fear of dying horribly is still the largest factor. The US has probably invested the most in developing a practical ICBM interception system:
https://www.mda.mil/system/system.html
…and that pretty much just gets you to “we can probably prevent half the warheads from reaching their targets”.
Red Joan is a fun watch if you like post WWII nuke tales.
Someone rises to power who doesn’t care about the consequences to their own nation.
Uuuh, about that.
yeah.
Add to this that dropping 100 city scale bombs total equals the end of everyone via nuclear winter.
These can’t be used infinitely, there’s a hard limit on their usage that’s truly mutually assured for all life on earth. That’s REALLY bad for profits.
Don’t forget submarines
I believe they’re included in the aegis systems.
I mean the US and Russia are pretty fuckin sprawled out. As long as you dont live in a city or major grid intersection you prolly good.
Yeah du duoy.
No one is building vacation resorts in Chernobyl.
But they do in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is a huge difference between a badly managed catastrophic nuclear reactor malfunction/explosion and a nuclear bomb. The results are vastly different.
I’m pretty sure this is why Israel isn’t using nukes on gaza.
They plan to develop that land. I mean they are constantly selling off the properties they steal. Won’t be worth much if it’s radioactive.
Having your country nuked back will also make a lot of your assets less valuable - and it’s also likely that your country is dependent on some big actor who’s really invested in the nuclear taboo.
Like, one of the many reasons Russia won’t use nukes in Ukraine, is probably because it would seriously piss off India and China, who both have a troubled relationship with a nuclear-armed neighbor.
The fact that mutual dependence contributes to stability and peace is something we don’t talk so much about these days… I hope the lesson that reminds us won’t be too brutal :\
Modern war with guns and tanks has shown to be very difficult to “win” and still be in power. Vietnam war. Middle east wars. The multiple coups. Usually within 10-30 years, something else happens.
The winner always seems to be the ones who profit the most and are able to plant themselves inside the country and get rich from it.
But I’d there is radioactive wastes, all the other resources become more valuable because there are around. Using supply and demand as a basic bad model, lower supply means they can charge more for the demand.
I’d think it’s because most people don’t have nukes.
Ironically, that’s why they invented the neutron bomb: kills everything in its radius, but leaves no radiation behind.
I think you need to go back and read about it again…
Straight from the wiki, the neutron bomb:
is a low-yield thermonuclear weapon designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the blast while minimizing the physical power of the blast itself.
So it’s literally the exact opposite of whatever the fuck you thought; it’s designed to kill with maximum quantity of radiation that a bomb is capable of producing.
I believe he meant to say no lasting nuclear debris, ie not a dirty bomb. The bomb explodes and releases lethal radiation, but the resulting irradiated terrain will be comparatively safe comparatively quickly
