[ipnon]

Military victory has been a precondition to military punishment for all of human history. You had to disable the enemy’s forces before you used the threat of further violence to enact your political will. In fact for all of recorded warfare, it was expected that the victors would be able to commit what we today call war crimes with impunity. The default consequence of defeat was all of your men being killed, all of your women being raped, and all of your children being enslaved.

The advent of nuclear weapons and ICBMs flips this precondition on its head. We no longer need to defeat enemy forces to inflict shocking and monstrous pain upon our enemies, nor upon any nation of the world, nor upon even the entire world. America and Russia both have the hair-trigger capability to launch thermonuclear weapons to any point on the globe. It takes 60 seconds to launch an ICBM, about 10 minutes for SLBMs, and a few hours for strategic bombers to reach their targets. 3,000 thermonuclear weapons can be detonated in anger in the time it takes to commute to work.

Our psychology did not evolve for this environment, and in fact it had not evolved from the previous state of affairs at all because there are still people alive who witnessed the first detonations of nuclear weapons! A single generation!

We don’t know if we can survive this state of affairs. Our time is marked by “for the first time in history” and “unprecedented.”

[Yawrehto]

I always have trouble with claims that our time is unique,because I can quickly construct arguments for just about any other time. So yes, our era is unique, but is it uniquely unique?

[appplication]

We do have the unique ability for a very small number of decision makers (theoretically one, but in practice maybe a few more) to completely eradicate all life on earth, or at a minimum vast swaths of it, within minutes.

Nuclear weapons are uniquely unique. We manage to avoid self-extermination through having relatively cool heads in charge of these decisions, but that is a cultural norm, not a universal guarantee.

If you assume there any chance at all that someone willing to use these ever ends up in control of this capability, on a long enough timeline that is essentially guaranteed to happen.

[srcnkcl]

It depends on who you are. Peasent? nothing different until 1750, Aristocrat? unique pretty much any time humanity invented something.