[bdbenton5255]

Nuclear weapons can be repurposed for nuclear energy. Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them. These weapons cannot be used ethically, they poison the soil, air, and water.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

A quote from Sun Tzu is etched in stone at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just outside the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation:

"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."

[wahern]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding why you juxtaposed your statement about repurposing nuclear weapons and the quote, but isn't the quote suggesting that nuclear weapons are those ultimate warriors that will bring an end to bloodshed? It seems like an artful allusion to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction and the claim that MAD prevents wars.

[junon]

It depends on the way you read it. Nuclear bombs cause bloodshed. The blood might be vaporized, cooked, or irradiated - but still shed.

I don't think that's what OP meant; rather I read it literally, to mean one day there might actually be a world without war, or at least, a world without violent wars.

[leesec]

>Nuclear bombs cause bloodshed.

No they prevent and drastically reduce bloodshed.

[LorenPechtel]

We aren't in a position to answer this one one way or the other.

If things go very wrong they have the potential to take us out. But a non-nuclear WWIII could, also--not by direct kills but by taking down the interconnected stuff that makes society work.

Also, while they serve to prevent direct wars between major powers they cause proxy wars between the major powers.

[junon]

Tell that to the families of everyone who's died in the Russian war on Ukraine.

[dsr_]

You know that Ukraine had nuclear weapons, and gave them up for the promise of never being attacked?

Would Russia have spent the last 11 years attacking Ukraine if it were still a nuclear power?

(Maybe. Dictators are not reknowned for their sanity and good decision-making skills.)

[LorenPechtel]

It wouldn't change anything, Ukraine doesn't have the infrastructure to maintain those bombs.

[snake42]

Until they don't.

[crossroadsguy]

The only way we will, now that the genie is out of the bottle, not need these weapons is when we will have easy and affordable (for nation states) ways to neuter a nuclear attack which is as likely as the earth being peaceful and filled with bonhomie unlike anytime in history ever.

Besides if (and that’s some “if”) that happens that means the world has already found something more deadly and again some people will suddenly grow very mature insights on this and after destroying few cities they would totally focus on an initiative that ensures only they get to keep those weapons and every other nation should voluntarily sign up for it. And this is the main reason we will never get rid of deadliest of weapons and the endless quest for them.

[XorNot]

Defending against a nuclear attack though isn't a desire for peace, it's a desire for freedom of action without consequence.

In a world with nuclear weapons and limited, unreliable defenses against them, you have to actually fully comprehend what "wanting peace" actually means - i.e. negotiation and diplomacy are the actual kings.

In a world without them, you always have the option of resorting to the barrel of the gun again - as happened to prior to WW2.

[dmbche]

I don't think reliable defenses against nukes can exist can they? Airbursting nukes high enough causes emp events and the irradiated material still floats around - that's without the assymetry in cost in trying to hit 100% of decoys produced by the nuke, stopping a single nuke is at least an order of magnitude more expansive than sending one - I don't think it could really be done!

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>I don't think reliable defenses against nukes can exist can they? Airbursting nukes high enough causes emp events and the irradiated material still floats around

With enough anti-missile technology, it's possible (though challenging) to defend against that.

But good luck trying to stop them from smuggling a multi-kiloton device across your border and detonating it at a time calculated to cause the most casualties.

[XorNot]

I'd say that's debatable, but whether its possible isn't really the point: it's important to have both eyes open on the actual ramifications of nuclear weapons not being a reality anymore. Because the idea that that is "the peaceful option" isn't one borne out by history - past or present.

[LorenPechtel]

Disagree. You're assuming nothing upsets the balance. I'm thinking of the Hammer's Slammers books. For those who haven't read them: a reasonable extrapolation of future tech with one big change: Cartridge-based energy guns. They are lightspeed weapons, no leading your target or the like. Center it in the optics and you'll hit it. The skies are nobody's friend, no aircraft, ballistic weapons are generally not of much use. The only combat rockets are ultra high acceleration short range stuff that's based on getting through before it can be tracked and engaged by the defense mounts. While nukes exist they don't get used because they're just going to be picked off. Against missiles you can make your warheads salvage fuse (messes up the tracking against the next missile), but you can't detect a lightspeed weapon until it hits.

[pdonis]

> They are lightspeed weapons, no leading your target or the like.

The speed of light is still finite, so a lightspeed weapon still has to lead its target by some amount.

[LorenPechtel]

Yeah, but we are talking ground combat. Lightspeed lag is not going to matter.

[pdonis]

> we are talking ground combat

I'm not familiar with the books, but I have a very hard time believing that the simple presence of lightspeed weapons would make all forms of combat other than ground combat obsolete.

[energy123]

Nukes come from security competition between nation states. It's the anarchic nature of this security competition that necessitates nukes.

The only way to avoid this is a one world government.

The analogy is: the existence of police is the only reason you don't need to own a gun. Without police, it's anarchy, and therefore you need a gun to survive in that incentive structure.

[BurningFrog]

A single world government that you can't possibly escape from is vastly worse than nuclear weapons.

I expect it would evolve to something like current day China.

[crossroadsguy]

That would be worse than nukes. We already see what UN and UNSC has become. Even hearing the “one world” government gave strong star wars vibes even though I didn’t need to go that far.

We are designed (or destined, if you want to say so) to be fucked and fuck up everything on this earth faster than we thought maybe even just 20-30 years ago.

[hoppp]

The earth will survive humans and we will be nothing but an archeological record. Fucking things up is subjective. The great oxigenation event also really fucked up the planet, subjectively, wiping out millions of species

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>The only way to avoid this is a one world government.

Plainly false. But even if that were true, then the cure's worse than the sickness.

Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments. Tiny city-states that neither have the mineral resources to build those nor the wealth to attempt it.

[energy123]

> Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments.

This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this. We had what you wanted in our tribal past, but it was not competitive. Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged. You can't reverse this just by wishing it to be so. A one world government is at least a feasible possible future instead of an impossible one.

[pdonis]

> Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged.

Nation states were around long before railroads or the printing press; they were around before the pyramids were built. Arguably the original technology that made them viable as an alternative to hunter-gatherer tribes was agriculture.

Modern technology has made modern nation states harder to dislodge in some ways, but that doesn't mean they're a good idea.

> A one world government is at least a feasible possible future

Yes, but I disagree that it's the only feasible option. For one thing, technology can also make it harder for nation states to lie to their people about what they're up to (the technology that is allowing us to have this conversation being the prime example). And once mation states lose the ability to do that, their viability becomes much more problematic, since without being able to tell and sustain such lies, the extent to which they make things worse instead of better becomes more and more widely known, and people are less and less willing to put up with that. A single government that was supposed to rule the entire world would have even worse problems in that regard.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this.

No, it's not impossible, it's just not extant. It may be true that there is no path from where we are now to that world, and it is certainly true that if there is a path it's not trivially predictable. But this can be said of the "one world government" thing as well. Knowing that people like myself exist and would sabotage attempts at one world government, how do you propose to make that possible?

>We had what you wanted in our tribal past,

No, we had something even better. We had a zero-world-government. That truly is impossible, at least considering that I'm not a fan of human extinction.

[energy123]

It's impossible in the sense of "this goes against an informed understand of history and human nature", which admittedly is a soft analysis not rooted in verifiable fact, but is one that I nevertheless hold to. The last 10,000 years have been a gradual, unceasing trend of increasing centralization, from isolated hunter gatherer tribes, to EU and UN type bodies today. The unceasing nature of this trend isn't an accident. There are underlying causal factors that generate it. Positing that those causal factors will continue in the future, leading to an increase in the size of EU-like entities, to the point of de facto hemispheric/world government type bodies, isn't so radical, even if it is uncertain.

[gjm11]

I can't find this in The Art of War (but maybe I missed it?). Nearest I can find in this translation https://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html is:

6. Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.

7. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.

and maaaaybe the original text underlying some of that could also be translated as the second sentence in the alleged quotation. But the bit about "an ultimate class of warriors" seems really fishy to me.

[EDITED to add:] Ah, looking at a picture of the thing, it says "adapted from Sun Tzu, The Art of War". Seems like a pretty loose adaptation.

[nssnsjsjsjs]

Yes those victorious warriors will find a way to split into 2+ warring factions.

[elmomle]

If that were to happen then they would not be this ultimate class of warriors.

[nssnsjsjsjs]

They may be great warriors but bad diplomats

[wrasee]

Presuppose that the following argument contains the solution.

This is my solution.

[ssivark]

> "Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."

With such power asymmetries, the "bleeding" might merely be displaced to after the battle is settled. Look at the history of how colonialism played out.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>These weapons cannot be used ethically,

I disagree. Our most dangerous enemies aren't even human. On the off chance the little green men show up, let's have something with a bit more oomph than polite rebuke. Just in case.

>"Someday, an ultimate class of warriors will evolve, too strong to be contested. They will win battles without having to fight, so that at last, the day may be won without shedding a single drop of blood."

This is just silly. What if those warriors want to ban abortions and library books? Will you be satisfied that their fighting prowess grants them the power to dictate that to you? Do you believe that there's some mystical connection between that strength and your particular ethical perspective?

[LorenPechtel]

Disagree, Kzinti Lesson.

It's pretty much impossible to come up with a stardrive that doesn't have a weapon potential that makes nukes look like firecrackers.

1) The direct Kzinti Lesson: Anything that can push a ship to relativistic velocity produces incredibly energetic exhaust. The efficiency of the drive is directly related to how well you can point it in one direction, thus making it very hard to make something that isn't a weapon. And in a population-attack scenario such a starship throwing rocks is devastating. At 86% of lightspeed a rock hits with it's annihilation energy. At 94% of lightspeed it hits as hard as if it were antimatter.

2) Jump drives (whatever you call them) still need to get somewhere without waiting years. While it doesn't have nearly the planet-killing potential of a relativistic starship it's still quite capable of throwing city-killers.

3) Intertialess (Lensman series). No direct weapon potential but they knew they couldn't crack the defenses of Jarvenon--so the slapped inertialess drives to a couple of planets and used them as a nutcracker.

Known physics only leaves the first scenario as possible, I threw out the others to cover the various sci-fi drives. I can't think of any story that uses something that doesn't fit one of these three categories.

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Minutema...

[latexr]

> Maybe, just maybe, one beautiful day we will live in a world where there are no nuclear weapons nor need for them.

We already live, and have since forever, in a world that does not need nuclear weapons.

> A quote from Sun Tzu

The logical outcome of which being that whoever controls that class of warriors controls the world. I’m not convinced, despite what the quote seems to imply, that is better than never again shedding blood.

With all due respect to ancient Chinese wisdom, Sun Tzu had no concept of atomic bombs, autonomous drones, and weaponised diseases.

[FridayoLeary]

The russians managed to find some constructive uses. Check up how they used them to put out burning oil wells and diverting a river.

[atoav]

On that note: Trumps golden dome has the chance to end this paradigm, since with it the US can now Nuke countries that it likes without direct payback (which is probably the point of the whole thing in the first place).

The problem with that is that it changes the incentive on nukes into using them in more concealed, non-attributable ways, like smuggling a suitcase nuke into Manhatten and have everybody wonder which nations or terrorist organization it was.

[LorenPechtel]

And it's more than the fantasy of a madman??

1) EMP strike. The device is a big h-bomb peacefully sitting in orbit, pretending to be something else. Push the button and basically everything to the horizon (which is a very long ways) gets fried. Some of the hardened military stuff might survive, but the country is gone. The survivalists might hang on for a while, but they can't rebuild.

2) Salvage fuse. You put a proximity sensor on the missile that detonates it if something comes sufficiently close. All the antennas and missile seekers looking at the area are dazzled if not destroyed. The defenses have a very hard time engaging the next missile. The next missile doesn't need to be looking at anything, it doesn't get fried.

3) Suppose it "works"?? Nope, the reality of missile defense is that you spend more on the interceptors than your enemy spent on the missiles. Iron Dome is last I knew $50k/shot. And note what happened in the aftermath of 10/7--Hamas bled the launchers dry with rockets that were at least an order of magnitude cheaper. Last I knew Iron Beam was only test-deployed (shooting at real inbounds but not considered fully operational) and even it can be swamped. And it's only a short range defense. And it takes dwell time--salvage fuse becomes an issue even though it's an energy weapon. Point defense, yes. Country defense, no.

[flyinglizard]

Nuclear explosions leave traces that you can link to a specific country's nuclear program. Check "nuclear fingerprinting".

[ceejayoz]

Any such tech will be highly destabilizing for the decade or two it takes to build and deploy.