[rmcpherson]

This general problem discussed in this article, a technological change affecting the perceived nuclear arsenal balance, is a reminder of the existential peril of nuclear weapons that we have seemingly forgotten since the fall of the Soviet Union. In some ways this peril has never been greater than it is today with unpredictable leaders of nuclear powers and ever-decreasing barriers to entry for nuclear weapons (e.g. North Korea).

As Einstein said in 1955, when the existential threat was both new and real, “You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.”

We are complacent at our species’ peril. How many intelligent civilizations in the universe have ended shortly after the dawning of their nuclear age? That’s one possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

Thus far, humans have been unable to resist use of a technology to gain power and the abstention from use of nuclear power seems only as strong as the current world power structure, which will inevitably fail. There are no easy solutions to this problem but it’s one we must solve to survive. Perhaps we even need to change ourselves biologically, as a species. To engineer ourselves off the paleolithic savannah into one fit to survive in the modern world of nuclear powers and interconnection.

[jjxw]

Command and Control by Eric Schlosser covers many close call nuclear incidents that the US military has had since WWII. The incident which has been seared into my memory is one where an aircraft carrying a nuclear bomb flying over the east coast of the US had a critical engine failure which resulted in the crew bailing out. After the crew bailed out, an object in the cockpit inadvertently armed and dropped the bomb as the aircraft disintegrated. The only thing that prevented the eastern seaboard of the US (including Washington DC and New York City) from being irradiated with fallout was a failsafe switch which prevented a circuit from being completed in the bomb.

It is a wonder that we (still) haven't blown ourselves up yet.

[thansz]

I completely agree that it is amazing we have not blown ourselves up yet. Unfortunately, the risk of a nuclear exchange is only rising...

stress of climate change + 7 billion people + human nature == war (very possibly nuclear)

Nuclear weapons have proliferated from just the US having access, then to only a few super powers, to now 8 or 9 countries. That list will only go up over time, not down. The weaponization of nuclear technology is the first time our species created something that is outright able to kill us all (or most of us).

Couple that with the disturbingly long list of near nuclear accidents publicly made available (who knows what the actual number is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

In the short period of time we have had access to nuclear weapons, we have come very close to nuclear war between superpowers:

* Cuban Missile Crisis - Vasili Arkhipov prevents launching of nuclear torpedo while his Soviet submarine flotilla is being bombarded by depth charges (happened to be signaling depth charges). Turns out the US warships above them just wanted the submarines to surface so they could communicate the end of hostilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

* Computer Malfunction - Stanislav Petrov holds off alerting officials of multiple incoming nuclear ICBMs because he "suspected" they were a glitch, preventing a likely nuclear counter-attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

* Science experiment looks like nuclear attack - Boris Yeltsin correctly decides to wait launching a counter-attack based on an incoming rocket. All the while sitting in front of an activated nuclear briefcase and being pressured by aids to launch within the 12 minute response window. The rocket was meant for atmospheric testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

* Many, many more... (your example just being one)

Now throw in the ramifications of climate change like political instability, infrastructure strain, resource scarcity, and refugee migrations into the mix.

Things do not look good for the human race.

[dboreham]

The more horrifying truth from that book is that time and again, for decades, the military actively blocked the implementation of safety measures. They were concerned about the small increase in chance that a bomb would fail to detonate when intended.

[adrianN]

One bomb going off by accident seems way less scary than the prospect of nuclear war.

[roywiggins]

It depends on what the circumstances are. If communications are disrupted, nuclear forces on alert could mistake it for an attack and launch in retaliation. Daniel Ellsburg's new book details how launch authority, as a practical matter, was delegated to commanders in the field. If they thought that a war had started and they had no communications with their superiors, they would have had authority to launch on their own.

[sgt101]

The problem is that one bomb going of could rapidly lead to 100's - who is to say it's an accident and not a strike? Wouldn't the enemy pretend it was an accident? Why are they moving forces now? (because they realise that a bomb just went off...)

[Retric]

Nuclear weapons are not currently a threat to the existence of the human species. Modern civilization might be at risk, but there are a lot of people spread across vast stretches of land and not enough nukes to kill them all.

Granted they make it vastly easier to kill everyone in a city or even a small country, but people have done similar things for the last 10,000+ years.

[TeMPOraL]

> Nuclear weapons are not currently a threat to the existence of the human species. Modern civilization might be at risk.

Frankly, on almost all metrics meaningful to us today, those are nearly equivalent. If a nuclear exchange causes modern technological society to collapse, then sure - the humanity will likely rebound. After couple thousand to couple million years, which is what it'll take for Earth to regenerate enough of the easily accessible, high-density energy sources to allow for the new industrial revolution.

If we want life for people to keep getting better, it's crucial to ensure our deeply interconnected, global technological civilization doesn't collapse. And that civilization is much, much more fragile than survival of our species in general.

[nerpderp83]

A nuclear winter might be arguably better for the long term survival of the human species than an uncontrolled thermal runaway from global warming. Previous ELEs either ejected seeds-of-life into LEO or were Ice Ages, not hot ages. The oncoming arctic methane positive-feedback loop looks "interesting".

[adrianN]

I find it very unlikely that a total collapse of modern civilization in addition to poor, irradiated harvests due to nuclear winter is easier to survive than poor harvests and extreme weather while having access to modern technology.

[nerpderp83]

Survival is that of the Earth, not people. Nuclear winter could stop uncontrolled thermal runaway, which would have a worse outcome than nuclear war.

[adrianN]

I'm not convinced modern civilization could recover from a total collapse.

[amdavidson]

I suppose that's what makes it "total".

[portofcall]

The truth is that we don’t know what the long term impacts of a total exchange would be. Theories range from extreme nuclear winter events, to just the fall of civilization. I sure won’t pretend to know where on that scale the reality is, and hope never to find out.

Here is some food for thought though, about the potential for our civilization to fall; it will not rise again. We’ve accessed far too much petrochemical wealth and burned it, and the same is true of coal, and metal resources. We get around that by using our existing industry and technology to go deeper, refine more, and in general access resources which require advanced technology to exploit.

There is nothing left which can be accessed by primatives, and so no way to claw back from such a reduced state. It will be many millions of years before those resources are reconstituted, far more years than the history of our species so far by orders of magnitude. This is our chance, and if we burn it away in nuclear fire, we are done. It probably won’t happen overnight, but the fall of our civilization is the fall of humanity. Let’s try to avoid that.

The same goes for any cause of systematic civilization-wide collapse, we would be done. The reason we clawed back in the past is that we has only scratched the surface before, but we’ve fully plundered global resources now. It’s onward and upward, or lights out.

[allthenews]

>Here is some food for thought though, about the potential for our civilization to fall; it will not rise again. We’ve accessed far too much petrochemical wealth and burned it, and the same is true of coal, and metal resources...exploit

This is nonsense, for a number of reasons.

First, you ignore that smaller, shallow deposits of petroleum still exist all over the world, in more than enough quantity to support a developing civilization if it were to be reduced to, say, less than 1/10th of its current size.

Second, existing stores of substances necessary to civilization will not simply evaporate. Metals, plastics, and other raw materials will be recoverable and recyclable.

Third, while there may be a couple hundred years or so of dark ages, I think it is extremely unlikely for any substantial amount of our current scientific progress to be eradicated. Unless we cover every mile of civilized earth with bombardment, I imagine it is guaranteed that there will be survivors with minimal technical knowledge required to operate computers and harvest various data that will inevitably be left on servers in random locations. All it takes is a handful of hackers to spread knowledge of operation and recovery. Not to mention books and magazines will likely still exist.

I think you underestimate the resilience that modern technology can offer over decades in terms of recovery after a global catastrophe. A laptop, a generator, and a copy of wikipedia will get you far in preserving enough scientific and technical knowledge. Civilization at this point is hard to permanently wipe out.

[TeMPOraL]

I fear you overstate the resilience of modern technology.

In the case of, even brief, total civilizational collapse, I doubt you'd be able to access any server whatsoever. The Internet is not stable, it's actively maintained and in the state of constant flux. As for accessing individual computers and small computer networks - just how many of the survivors will have enough knowledge to arrange for electricity at appropriate frequency, ensure it doesn't burn out the fragile machines, and then be able to interface with a (likely password-locked, disk-encrypted) system to extract some useful data?

And even if they do that, just for how long will it do them any good? Modern electronics are built with planned and unplanned obsolescence. Their lifetimes under active use are measured in years, and even inactive they'll age. With no industry (requiring a complex, global supply chain of millions of people) to build fresh replacement drives, there will eventually be nowhere to move the data to.

Our civilization is like a living system, in the sense that it constantly works to repair itself everywhere. Disturb that, and it will rot and die.

[allthenews]

GP claimed civilization would be unable to rise again, implying thousands of years of knowledge would disappear.

Wikipedia is available for download and requires less than 15GB of space[1]. This is an unprecedented density of self documenting data, containing thousands of years of advancements in science, mathematics, philosophy, arts.

Consider how many people live in or visit dwellings that are tens or hundreds of miles from large population centers, and how many of these dwellings have emergency gasoline generators and working computers.

Now, presuming that most of the destruction happens in major cities, and the rest of the earth generally remains livable, there will still remain millions of people, and if just a small sampling of competent technically minded people survive, there will be billions of abandoned, unused, solid state devices, and millions of generators to power them, ripe for picking. What are the odds that not a single competent survivor will have backed up a copy of wikipedia to be able share with other survivors in the decades after catastrophe?

When a single human can hold in his hand all of the science and mathematics necessary to derive the technologies upon which modern civilization is based, rebuilding is easily within the realm of possibility. Not to mention, artifacts of modern technology will remain as examples for engineering and even use with sufficient technical knowledge.

Further, I encourage all of you to download and keep a copy of wikipedia for this very, however farfetched, purpose.

[1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/lifehacker.com/how-to-download-...

[TeMPOraL]

Fair enough. Access to some amounts of computing may be initially available, but I still believe it would not last more than a few years.

It all boils down to supply chains and the economy, basically. Electronics capable of working with today's data storage media is incredibly complex, and manufacturing replacements will require large and insanely expensive fabs. Those fabs themselves are full of precise tools and exotic materials, every one of which requiring other specialized fabs, using tools requiring other fabs... The whole pipeline from dirt to CPU involves many thousands of people directly, and itself can only exist in an advanced civilization like ours - where lots of other people do everything from agriculture to catering to logistics to law and law enforcement. To build a CPU, you first need to build a civilization like ours. And to build a civilization like ours, you need cheap energy sources - it literally wouldn't be possible without them.

> GP claimed civilization would be unable to rise again, implying thousands of years of knowledge would disappear.

Our best bet to retain all that knowledge after total civilizational collapse is to form orders - not unlike medieval monks - whose sole purpose would be to make exact paper copies of that knowledge. Otherwise, after computers eventually die, a lot of that knowledge would disappear (because it wouldn't be used), and what would stay would get increasingly distorted over time.

[adrianN]

Modern technology is build on a mind boggling dependency chain. Just think about how many steps and technologies are necessary to turn sand and ore into a computer. Or even an electric generator. Simple things like reliable, low resistance ball bearings require precision tools to manufacture.

[irrational]

>survivors with minimal technical knowledge

You mean, like knowing how to go to youtube and search for a video? Those primitive technology videos on youtube will be a fantastic resource come the end of civilization.

Okay, that was sarcasm, but the percentage of the population that is both knowledgeable and healthy/strong enough to survive a massive global fall of civilization is so small that it might not be enough to make a difference. I'm afraid we'd quickly revert back to survival of the fittest where being intelligent would no longer be valued over pure strength.

[Retric]

Coal is still easy to access in many areas even with just hand tools and can be converted to liquid fuel or used directly for ships / trains. Hydropower and wind power are both easy to access and can scale up to cover modern needs even without coal.

Metal resources are a complex issue. They are arguably much easier to access now as people can just mine old city's.

[portofcall]

Coal in the quantities needed to rebuild a shattered civilization are not easily accessed unless you’re thinking of existing mines (which without maintenance would be inaccessible before we were done desperately trying to stay alive as a species). Hydropower and wind power both require advanced industry to work at any useful scale beyond the individual, and there would be no industry. Mind you, I’m ignoring the loss of knowledge, and just how people would remember to do these things, and I’m assuming a “best case” nuclear apocalypse.

I’d prefer that our fate as a species not rely on begging the question of industry and technology.

[Retric]

There is still crazy amounts of coal around WV very near the surface for example. Easily enough to bootstrap an industrial revolution multiple times. It's not a question of mining you can pick coal up from open top mines on the surface with your hands. You even see coal seams where they simply cut down to build roads a little.

We don't use it because the high sulfur content requires more expensive scrubbers to meet modern air quality standards. And due to the drop in solar / wind energy plus concerns about climate change it's likely to be available long term.

PS: US coal supply is estimated around 350 years at current production levels. Though that's also a low estimate based on proven reserves. Further, if you consider the Oxigen in the atmosphere needed to be separated from Carbon in the first place you should realize there is quite a bit of fossil fuels sitting around.

[username223]

> a reminder of the existential peril of nuclear weapons

Yeah, this was a real walk down memory lane. I haven't read an article discussing the strategy of all-out nuclear war since the fall of the Soviet Union. The idea of the US launching a preemptive strike against the USSR's... er, I mean Russia's siloed ballistic missiles and command structure is absurd and terrifying. Trading nukes with North Korea would be bad enough, but at least they don't have hundreds of sub-launched missiles carrying MIRVs. Maybe it's time to watch "Dr. Strangelove" again.