[stareatgoats]

The site is down so I can only speculate what it recommends. Whatever it is, I suspect it is not a list of suggestions for how to avoid nuclear disasters altogether. Because that is simply not in vogue. It seems we must all accept as something inevitable to have the specter of millions dead, if not billions, if not life as we know it, hanging over our heads for time eternal.

Because we as humans are seemingly only endowed with creative and innovative thinking when it comes to advertising, crypto scams or new JS frameworks, etc. When it comes to accomplishing something as basic as survival we seem to revert thoughts and prayers, and amassing even more weapons. It's frankly a mystery.

[ravi-delia]

It takes literally 0 imagination to avoid nuclear disasters altogether. A handful of people in the entire world need not to do something extremely stupid. They can leave their special keys at home, overwrite the codes with baseball scores in their mind, and no nuclear apocalypse will happen. The fact that this has not happened is not due to a failure of imagination. That doesn't mean the reason is good, obviously, but doesn't the idea that we should be blaming a pdf seem a little silly to you?

The sword of Damocles is indeed hanging over our heads. Morons hung it there, and morons stand around waiting to prevent anyone from taking it down. We should push towards denuclearization, and we shouldn't compromise. But also, we should have better public transportation. Doesn't mean that anyone mentioning seat belts is just a firm believer in the specter of car accidents. If you take the threat of these morons-in-charge and their nukes seriously (as I do), can't you see why someone might want to maximize their and their family's chances of survival? I'll note you haven't presented a solution any single person can work with either- perhaps it is a difficult problem.

Edit: There's an argument to be made that having a fallout shelter would make you more complacent. But I'd expect the average person who is worried enough about nuclear war to dig a bunker is probably more worried with that bunker than the average person is without it. The opposing viewpoints are "nuclear war is potentially possible and very bad" and "nuclear war won't happen". There are probably people who believe in a MAD-style argument for the latter, but my bet is that most of them just don't think through how scared they should be. Things have been fine so far, after all. Nevermind all the warheads just sitting in silos. This silent majority is not thinking about how to survive nuclear war. They, in their heart of hearts, do not think it is a concern.

[mistermann]

> It takes literally 0 imagination to avoid nuclear disasters altogether. A handful of people in the entire world need not to do something extremely stupid. They can leave their special keys at home, overwrite the codes with baseball scores in their mind, and no nuclear apocalypse will happen. The fact that this has not happened is not due to a failure of imagination. That doesn't mean the reason is good, obviously, but doesn't the idea that we should be blaming a pdf seem a little silly to you?

Have you a gameplan to cause this possible series of actions to manifest in physical reality with zero chance of failure?

[ravi-delia]

Absolutely not! Is this because I have failed to imagine a world without a nuclear threat, or because the problem is very hard? Not the former! As proof see counterexample- I can imagine a nukeless world just fine.

[mistermann]

I'm confused - do you know what it takes to avoid nuclear disaster (in fact) or not?

[ravi-delia]

> Absolutely not!

[stareatgoats]

> you haven't presented a solution any single person can work with either- perhaps it is a difficult problem.

Exactly; it's a tough problem. Much as I admire my own intellect [/s], I hardly think I can come up with a solution by myself, no. If we were an "army of millions" who were thinking hard about the problem then we would have sporting chance I think - but we are not that many (which, again, is frankly baffling).

Other than that, for the record I don't believe this is a problem of morons vs intelligent people. Political leaders, leaders of the military, and the others that we might want to point fingers at in this context are probably highly intelligent. It's just that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The initiative likely needs to come from people that are not already mired in the system.

[ravi-delia]

I absolutely agree, but doesn't that precisely undermine your point? There's nothing about trying to prevent nuclear apocalypse that isn't "in vogue", it's just widely seen as a hard problem. And if it's a hard problem, isn't there a place for looking at the far easier one of reading a few papers and noticing that a few steps taken in advance could make a big difference in survival odds (assuming you aren't one of the many people annihilated instantly and pointlessly in the initial blast).

And yeah, I'd like to believe there's a good reason for nuclear proliferation, and today things are pretty locked in by game theory, but there was absolutely a decision made early on! During WWII Germany was nowhere near finishing a nuclear weapon, and the Soviet Union only worked it out with the help of a spy. Seems like there was at least a shot of no one developing nukes if the Manhattan project hadn't happened.

[aussiesnack]

> Because that is simply not in vogue

The hostile responses you've go this do rather demonstrate your point. Building peace in a world bristling with nukes held by independent sovereignties with limited information about each other and often incongruent self-defined 'interests', is indeed a hard problem. Hard problems require work and thought and research to try to solve. If conditions change to make the problem harder, more resources and work are required.

That readers here find that requirement incomprehensible for this specific hard problem is exactly the point. Peacebuilding (as an activity, an actual diplomatic project, not a hope) has indeed fallen out of vogue and out of the collective political imagination. Little being permanent in international relations, it could yet return.

[stareatgoats]

Thanks, good to hear some agreement, and I share your hope even if I'm growing more pessimistic by the day.

It always creates a stir to point out the absurdity of our current predicament. If I was a psychologist I might conclude that this is because many actually share my deep sense of despair, but can see no other solution that to trod on "in the machine" so to speak. I can sympathize, but we need to start doing something, to prod the diplomats in the right direction if nothing else.

[aussiesnack]

I'm an abjurer of optimism and pessimism equally, but hope can be useful. In a way the situation is even worse than your original comment suggested. More than just the indifference of being 'out of vogue', there's a lot of active hostility to the very notion of peacebuilding, as some responses suggested. But in the end, the main alternatives to active institution-and-culture-building are either to passively await a randomish fate, or pure militarism (whether defensive or aggressive). It's entirely predictable, given the growth in technology, that either of those alternatives does lead deterministically to catastrophe. Peacebuilding, frustratingly intractable though the problems may seem, is really all there is.

[stareatgoats]

> Peacebuilding (...) is really all there is.

Completely agree.

[bulbosaur123]

The reason this problem is so hard is because it's tragedy of the commons. That might just be our great filter.

[aussiesnack]

There have been plenty of viable commons over human history. Peacebuilding is in large part the process of building institutions to manage them. The failure to put in the work to build such institutions, or to maintain them once created, is what the TOTC consists in.

[ptr]

Where in the world are nuclear disasters “in vogue”?

[stareatgoats]

Lists of suggestions on how to avoid them are not in vogue.

[simonh]

1. Elect competent politicians

2. Pray

[HL33tibCe7]

What’s your alternative? Everyone agreeing to sit round the campfire, hold hands and sing kumbaya? You can’t possibly be this naive.

There’s something uniquely frustrating about seeing somebody like you, who has a completely naive and childlike worldview, assuming that YOU are just a genius and everyone else is an idiot.

[sammalloy]

> What’s your alternative? Everyone agreeing to sit round the campfire, hold hands and sing kumbaya? You can’t possibly be this naive.

I can’t speak for the OP, but this is an issue I’ve been interested in for some time. I think the alternatives are many, but it involves a multipronged approach, starting with reforming the financial sector, which helps fund warmongering in several different sectors, followed by slowly converting the defense industry into a civilian engineering sector (climate change remediation, infrastructure rebuilding and development, space based energy, transportation and habitation) combined with tearing the heart out of the arms sector and enforcing the law against so-called "lords of war" who help arm both sides. That’s just to start. The idea that peacetime can be more profitable than wartime needs to be a new mantra supported by financial incentives and large scale engineering projects that help benefit everyone instead of diverting resources to build more weapons and make a few companies wealthy while squandering the wealth of public treasuries that could otherwise support their people. The idea that war is a still a legitimate solution to a problem is the psychological hurdle that needs to be overcome. Nobody has to accept that this is the way it is. It requires courageous acts of individuals to stand up and say one word: no. I ain’t gonna study war no more. It’s really that simple. The hard part is getting the momentum for everyone to stop doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

[mistermann]

> There’s something uniquely frustrating about seeing somebody like you, who has a completely naive and childlike worldview, assuming that YOU are just a genius and everyone else is an idiot.

Also frustrating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...

[stareatgoats]

I may be an idiot, but you seem confused: first you assume that I can not be this naïve, then you conclude that I am? Let me assure you, I'm not that naïve, but I don't presume to have the solution either. I agree that would have been better, but there you go. Maybe if we were more people than the vanishing few that I encounter, maybe then we would have something we could try.

More weapons that are likely to start a third world war by mistake is not a satisfactory solution IMO.

[HL33tibCe7]

I was expressing disbelief.

As I suspected, you have no alternative.

[stareatgoats]

The alternative to millions upon millions of intelligent people strapping their blinders on every day and refusing to see where we are heading is that a tiny fraction of these get together and start thinking out solutions.

Then maybe we'll get somewhere. That's all.

[tomjen3]

Russia smashed a missile 10km into Poland, killing 2 and wounding some more.

Poland is a NATO member, so that is the likely context of the submission.

[Markoff]

Russia also blown up ammo storage in Czechia killing two years ago, guess what happened... And mind that was intentional act far away from Russian or Ukrainian border, not some misguided missile right across border fence.

[chasd00]

heh i think you mean two missiles. investigations still happening so who really knows at this point but not looking good.