I recently went to the Hiroshima museum. I had originally thought that people simply vaporized when the bomb hit, but that is not the case. The museum shows how people's skin simply sloughed off and some were holding parts in their hands as they walked around to find their loved ones.
But the worst part was radiation poisoning. Many that did not initially get hit and burned directly went towards the center of the city to find their families and over the course of days, months and years, they almost always died a slow, painful death, with their teeth falling out and their skin and organs becoming necrotic.
Truly, everyone should visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki at some point, if only to understand what true horrors nuclear weapons create. And those are only atomic weapons of the 1940s, the hydrogen bombs we have today that fuse instead of fiss are orders of magnitude more powerful, but at least those under their effects (near the epicenter) will die a quick vaporized death instantaneously.
As an addition (and correction) to this, powerful thermonuclear weapons don't vaporize anyone either. They are targeted for high-altitude airbursts and kill through a combination of burns and building collapse, plus secondary fires, infection and breakdown of emergency services. The majority of the victims would not die an instant death.
There are multiple lethal effects from nuclear weapons, and a person inside the 100 million Celsius fireball itself (TK-radius), yes, will be vapourised.
Fireball size depends on weapon yield. For a 1 MT weapon, the radius is roughly 870m, at 5 MT ~1010m, at 150 KT, about 250m.
Most US nuclear weapons yield between 600 to 2,200 KT (0.6 to 2.2 MT).
Whether or not individuals are within the fireball radius depends on the height of detonation, parameters of the nuclear explosion itself (shaped nuclear charges are theoretically possible, though I'm not aware whether any present weapons are designed as such), and of course the local population density.
Outside the fireball, the principle lethal mechanism is the shock wave, though thermal pulse can still provide severe burns, and initial and fallout radiation can also be lethal, though over longer periods (hours, days, weeks, or more).
Effects generally fall with the inverse cube law. Larger weapons also experience an inverse cube effect, such that a one thousandfold increase in weapon yield delivers only a tenfold increase in effects at a given distance.
People may be vapourised, though most within a blast effect area will likely not. They may however be severely burned if directly exposed to the thermal pulse. Near in, other lethal effects, which may be delayed by a few seconds, principally from the blast wave, should predominate.
Air-burst attacks would likely decrease vapourisation. Penetrating / shaped charges would have markedly different and highly directional effects.
Regardless of how big a bomb is, there's going to be a distance at which it's no longer immediately lethal. Inside that radius you die quickly, outside you die slowly.
I had a similar experience, looking at the contorted metal lunchboxes and other household items was more terrifying, I always used to think things just go poof.
I’ll assume that you are American, so you obviously don’t understand how tone deaf that suggestion is to the current thread. Imagine someone commenting on horrible Auschwitz’s is after they visit and someone commenting “you should visit the Reichstag building to understand what lead to it all”, or a thread about 9/11 and someone suggest visiting a museum about the conflict in the Middle East to learn what lead to the events.
Obviously we are talking about completely different types of events and magnitudes of death and destruction, and the very notion that you should try to find justification for murder by events you can correlate to people who share ethnicity or nationality with the victims is just a cruel insult to anyone with a hint of human decency.
Ask what "hint of human decency" the Japanese had to attack a neutral country.
It seems you've fallen for the propaganda that they've been producing ever since. Regardless whether they'd be nuked they would've still suffered horribly.
Indeed. I did find it interesting that the museum made no mention of the atrocities committed by the Japanese military in China as well, or even any discussion of Pearl Harbor beyond a mere mention that Japan attacked it. But then again, that doesn't really have anything to do with the suffering experienced by the populace, as the sins of the government should not be atoned by the governed.
It should be noted that up to 15% of all hibakushas were Koreans, who were seen as second-class citizens in Japan in spite of the government propaganda that annexed Koreans are given same rights as Japaneses. So the lack of statements about wrongdoings of the former Japan empire, including WW2, is certainly relevant here.
(Just in case, Nixon Hidangyo is clearly aware of this and has campaigned for proper recognition of Korean survivors for a long time.)
I went to Korea after Japan and they in fact do have museums dedicated to this fact. It's quite enlightening to visit various countries who've been subject to the same historical events and see where each ones bias lies. I felt the same in Vietnam with their museums.
This is indeed a very timely award. I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and are still on hair-trigger alert to obliterate major cities. Maybe the end of atmospheric testing and the success of (now defunct) weapons reduction treaties has blunted public perception to the ongoing threat that they represent, and to the need to tread carefully where nuclear powers are involved.
If I put a hammer over your head that can fall any minute you'll be worrying, but if you're born with the hammer over your head and your parents before you as well, it becomes less of a thing.
On an individual level, we all have a variety of hammers over our heads. Cancer has killed far more people prematurely than nuclear weapons. Something like 500,000 people a year are murdered. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents also kill more than nuclear weapons. Even compared to a once-in-a-century nuclear war that perhaps kills a billion people, cancer will kill roughly a billion in the next century anyway. So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
I'd like to think of myself as a rational person, yet I worry about it. Because it's not just a matter of math; the effects of a billion people dying at once would be far more detrimental than the deaths from cancer over a century.
(One might think this line of reasoning that some people apply is a coping mechanism to ignore the reality, but that might be a different conversation)
But it is not just about coping. We as society, can make policies to decrease chance of getting a cancer and decrease traffic deaths. We just chose not to out of convenience and profit.
If I fall 1 feet one hundred times, I'll probably be Ok
If I fall 100 feet once, I won't.
1m people dying in 1 day is not the same as 1M people dying over a decade.
Also. People generally dont fear death itself. This is expressed by people in pallitative care. Its the chaos and uncertainty preceding death that is really feared
Does your risk assessment methodology also account for near misses? Agency? Morality? Source of risk? Costs of mitigation? Benefits? Something like actuary tables?
Mitigation of bike and pedestrian deaths is cheap. Just reform land use, advantage people over vehicles. Oops, now you're into culture and values.
Mitigation of cancer deaths is very expensive. Though we didn't invent cancer, we feel the moral imperative to "cure" it. And yet, while we're mitigating it, we're also making it worse. Cross purposes. What's your balance sheet for this conundrum?
Drugs kill lots of people. We own that one, right? How's the War on Drugs working out?
In conclusion, I wish I could wave away these dilemmas with a cute nominator and denominator. But I can barely reason about them before my head explodes. So I'm not buying what you're selling. Life's a bit more complicated, a bit more empirical, a bit less rational, than your tidy equations.
While this apathy is an important coping mechanism to some degree, it's important not to become complacent. It's precisely this apathy and hopelessness that authoritarian regimes cultivate to prevent action.
I don't think this registers as apathy in this context. Maybe you live in a country that has nuclear weapons and can vote for one leader or another. This may or may not have some impact on things. Certainly, we cannot influence what other countries do with their arsenals. Our mental stacks can only run so deep & I'd wager for most of us, the things that are in our sphere of influence simply take priority.
> This may or may not have some impact on things. Certainly, we cannot influence what other countries do with their arsenals.
It demonstrably does. Nuclear arms reduction treaties have been enacted in the past and it is hard to believe that it would have happened without the popular support it enjoyed.
Just because we are at a time in history where many of those treatise have been weakened or left by the wayside shouldn't be a reason for us to forget them and the good they did.
> Our mental stacks can only run so deep & I'd wager for most of us, the things that are in our sphere of influence simply take priority.
It's a challenge to look beyond ourselves, but we must have the courage to do so. Many people here have the resources to act in the interest of their family, their neighborhood, their community, and their country. It's hard not to be selfish. We can't all afford not to be. Most of us can, however.
I'm not sure what you mean by "ours" as this is the internet, but yes, to the extent that there are authoritarian elements in every government, most governments do this to some degree. It's important to fight against these authoritarian elements as best as one can, especially if you are in a position of influence.
It's also important, however, not to equivocate between totalitarian regimes like Russia and (albeit imperfectly) open democracies like the USA in instances like this. Just because no government is without sin does not mean they are all the same.
Cancer isn't something that humans develop and control. It's also very unlikely to kill 20-year-olds. On the other hand, it's almost guaranteed if you happen to live long enough. Finally, getting cancer doesn't mean that everybody around you also gets one. Getting hit by a nuke is something that is totally under human control, it's not going to discriminate by age or gender, and is likely to wipe out most of the humans you care about along with you.
A better comparison would be climate change vs nukes. If you have the time to worry about the former, you should also worry about the latter since if the nukes go off, we won't even get a chance to get killed by the environment.
Worry is unproductive in the sense of feeling anxiety, sure, but it's noble to worry at the various hammers in the archaic definition to "move, proceed, or progress by unceasing or difficult effort, to shake or pull at with the teeth."
Some of the hammers such as the hammer representing nuclear weapons - are caused by people and can be solved by people. There's a big game theoretic hill to climb over, but social pressure and advocacy have been effective at making progress. Others, like cancer and general senescence, are more of a looming threat that's a fundamental characteristic of biology, we can (and should) worry at them to make incremental progress but we're unlikely to suddenly eliminate them. The murder rate is enormously dependent on individual location and individual relationships. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents are enormously dependent on individual behavior.
Of those threats, addressing the problem of nuclear weapons - especially for a member of Nihon Hidankyo, with a personal and persuasive story of the damages these weapons caused - is probably near the top of the list for actions which can have the greatest positive change.
> So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
Until you have children and future generations to worry about. Then it suddenly seems quite a bit more pressing that their world could be obliterated at a moment's notice by a small handful of decision makers.
What? I have a son and a wife and I couldn’t care less about nuclear war or climate change or any abstract and distant catastrophe that could face humanity as a whole.
Living in the future is a silly affair. There’s only one moment and it’s the present.
I once knew an academic who would not fly in an airplane. He was invited to a distinguished conference across the country, but complained to me that he was too scared to fly. "Why?" I ask.. "Terrorists" he replied.. "it is too serious. I just can't do it". so a year or two pass and then I see this Academic again. While talking he mentions that he just returned from a great conference far away. "What? I thought you were afraid to fly in an airplane!" .. He replies "that was true, I was scared of someone carrying a bomb on the flight. But, I calculated the statistical odds of there being TWO bombs on a single plane, and it was infinitesimal..."
Why does that figure looks really suspicious to me. So in nuclear exchange there is either already fully setup blocks or the responding party will pull in others in?
My parents had no problem reminding us that we all live with a nuclear sword hanging over our heads.
It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them.
And nuclear war is so much more horrifying and its consequences are so much beyond the pale, that people can't even think of what it would mean.
Oh I can imagine it happening. I'm currently working in Pearl Harbor and find myself hoping that I'll be on-base if the balloon goes up, thus avoiding any post-apocalyptic survival bullshit in a brilliant flash.
> It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them.
One of my great disappointments after 9/11 was that U.S. citizens were not, by and large, asked/expected to make any sacrifices (other than our liberties). It felt that if we were at war, we should all be contributing, but it seemed to me that our value as consumers was more important than as citizens.
No, it’s simply the end of the cold war that made it a possibility less present in the media. The cold war was cold because making it hot would have meant going nuclear. So the possibility was always closely linked to the state of cold war. Globalization has blurred the picture considerably.
maybe your parents aren't old enough to remember how much of the population could expect to die in wars before nuclear weapons (i.e. mutually assured destruction) existed
The entire purpose of nuclear armaments is to make certain wars too nasty to fathom engaging in. If their organization didn't exist at all, we'd still have exactly the same number of nuclear war casualties since the 1940s.
The net result of this has enabled nuclear powers to engage in asymmetric wars against countries that don't have nukes, or to engage in proxy wars between nuclear superpowers. Meanwhile, we heave come perilously close to nuclear armageddon, with Stanislav Petrov standing in the way.
(Considering what's been happening in Ukraine and Palestine I would like for the Netherlands to obtain nukes. If we ever get invaded we can at least take out 50 million of the enemy with us to hell).
In 1913, Norman Angell published a book called "The Great Illusion" in which he argued that the use of military force had become economically futile due to the interconnectedness of international finance and trade. World War I started one year later. Trade and interconnectedness probably have a net positive effect on reducing war, but not a reliable guarantee.
Sanctions aren’t affecting Russia in any capacity.
Definitely false. They were never the slam dunk that they were supposed to be, and it's true to say their effect has been significantly blunted. But that's not the same as "no effect". It's just turned out to be a comparatively mild one (but important nonetheless).
Sanctions are hurting Russia financially. Putin doesn't care because he can extract wealth from oligarchs in whatever manner he sees fit. That's the benefit of being a dictator who has a wealth of knowledge on how to watch his own back after his career in intelligence work. He'll just tell his people to create some propaganda and everyone will fall into line.
Totally agree this is very relevant today. We have heads of state in the EU and to some degree people in the USG with very cavalier approaches to the ideological war between the West and the BRICS.
I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist.
Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
BRICS? What ideological war is South Africa, India, and Brazil waging against the west? Members of Brics such as India and China are closer to war with each other then they are to war with the West.
You're exposing the whole Russian narrative about a new "multipolar world", which has already existed since globalization was a thing, from the oppressed "Global South"... which is a:
- a geographical misconception - for example, India is part of the Northern Hemisphere and a lot of Western aligned countries are in the Southern Hemisphere like Australia, New Zealand, Argentina;
- a population size misconception, where the propaganda states the majority of the world population is in the south - 850 million people live in the southern hemisphere;
- It's a sign of imperialism - no countries from the actual Southern Hemisphere elected Russia as their representatives and to speak for them about their ideas, grievances, or ideology.
I'm not sure why this got downvoted. The point is not to bow to Putin in all matters, but to treat the matter with extreme seriousness: Take time to do proper background research, evaluate your sources, give serious consideration to the Russian narrative -- without necessarily agreeing of course, allow for a margin of error both in your own judgement and for stray missiles entering the detection radius, etc. If it still seems like a good idea to take a stand afterwards, OK. But let's please not cause a nuclear war over Facebook likes and political brownie points.
Ah... NATO expansion? Alleged discrimination against the Russian majority in Eastern Ukraine? Alleged foreign interference in the Maidan revolution? Not that I'm trying to start a discussion here, but dismissing the other side's arguments as "not even meant to be sensical" is exactly what I was arguing against.
None of this is a legitimate casus belli in any sense of the term. You’re suggesting we ought to take seriously the geopolitical equivalent of “he looked at me funny”.
I would you say the Cuban missile crisis was made up by the Kennedy admin? The establishment was ready to war if the missiles were not removed. Being in our “backyard” and sphere of influence (LatAm) we didn’t take to it too kindly.
I would say that the Cuban Missile Crisis, indeed, would not have constituted a good reason to invade Cuba. US foreign policy during the Cold War was often pretty indefensible.
But there’s still a number of things about this situation that make the comparison flimsy. The relationship between the west and Russia was - and actually still is - significantly less tense than the relationship between the Soviets and the west during the Cold War, for one.
But moreover, the way everything went down was very different.
In the CMC, the Soviets installed their missiles, the US caught wind of this, and pursued a diplomatic solution. The public was, generally, made aware of what was going on and what was at stake.
Ukraine was not made a member of NATO - it hadn’t even applied. At no point did Russia even rattle any sabres, offer red lines, or pursue diplomacy. Russia built up its forces along the border in secret and launched a surprise invasion. From the jump they’ve been offering shifting explanations for the “special military operation” - is it about NATO expansion or “de-Nazification”? - which is one reason why we shouldn’t take any of those explanations especially seriously.
> Ukraine was not made a member of NATO - it hadn’t even applied. At no point did Russia even rattle any sabres, offer red lines, or pursue diplomacy.
I don't think you're paying attention. Bush's invite of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO in 2007 (against the opinion of France and Germany) was probably a cause of Russian invasion into South Ossetia.
And just about recently a newly chosen top NATO chief has been promoting path for Ukraine to enter NATO (and so-called "West Germany model"), despite that Putin clearly demanded Ukraine neutrality and NATO's own rule about not admitting members with an ongoing territorial disputes.
I can hardly imagine how could Russians be clearer about opposing NATO expansion.
> I can hardly imagine how could Russians be clearer about opposing NATO expansion.
That's a very confusing statement because Russia signed agreements, charters and memorandums that clearly stated that every country is entitled to their own economic and defensive alliances.
So it's not clear at all - and even if it was clear, then it should become imperative to have Ukraine join NATO as soon as possible to make it blatantly clear that Russia can't dictate what other sovereign nations choose for their economic and defensive alliances.
The real question is: why aren't Russians questioning and making their government accountable for not following their agreements and destroying decades of diplomacy for the sake of one man?
Bush's invite of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO in 2007 (against the opinion of France and Germany) was probably a cause of Russian invasion into South Ossetia.
Bush did not "invite" those countries to join NATO. Only NATO can do that, and it famously chose not to do that at the Bucharest Summit the following year (and to explicitly deny those countries invites), precisely because of France and Germany's objections. I'm not sure what you think you can gain here by attempting to spin the situation into the opposite of what it was.
Regardless - the "cause" of what Russian armed forces did in Georgia in 2008 was Putin's ordering them to. Nothing the West did made or "caused" him to do anything.
I can hardly imagine how could Russians be clearer about opposing NATO expansion.
Post-2022 the discussion is entirely moot, and I don't see why the world should begin to care what the current Russian regime thinks about NATO at this point.
NATO expansion was never the real reason for that invasion - but once Putin chose to go in, he completely extinguished whatever moral capital Russia may have had that issue.
>Ukraine was not made a member of NATO - it hadn’t even applied. At no point did Russia even rattle any sabres, offer red lines, or pursue diplomacy.
To be fair, without saying that their position is a defensible one- they've been pretty vocal about Ukraine not becoming aligned with the West for almost 20 years now if not longer, and politicians in the West have been vocal about the exact opposite for at least as long. I see people saying online that what's happening now was completely irrational and unexpected but that's not really true. We know it's a sore point for them and have been goading them with a "will we won't we" over a clear red line they've drawn for a long while now.
https://www.rferl.org/a/1079726.html
That's a good list of Russian-fueled narratives that have little to no grounds in reality - as a kind way of saying they're lies and conspiracy theories.
> NATO expansion?
You seem to have forgotten all the agreements, charters, and memorandums the Soviet Union and Russia signed stating that Sovereign Countries are entitled to their own alliances and strategic partnerships. You also seem to have forgotten that even Putin hinted at Clinton the idea of Russia joining NATO. Regarding Ukraine, the population only started to care to join NATO after 2014, but started to trend since the invasion of Georgia.
Even Gorbachev himself - the man who was allegedly involved in that so-called "no NATO expansion" myth said it was a lie and a myth[0]. I didn't even make logical sense to have such a red line.
> Alleged discrimination against the Russian majority in Eastern Ukraine?
So you invaded and annex a country in a genocidal war based on "alleged discrimination"? Who did something similar to this... ah yeah... Nazi Germany also made up some discrimination stories about ethnic germans being under threat by polish people.
> Alleged foreign interference in the Maidan revolution?
Another conspiracy theory and lie... God forbid Ukrainians having the capacity to revolt against a president who turned his back on Ukrainians will to join the EU, in exchange for a deal under the table with Russia that no one knew the terms of.
Oh and by the way, the US wanted Yanukovich to remain president - it was the overwhelming majority of the parliament that didn't want the corrupt fellow in power any longer.
At least get your facts straight, with a little bit of research you can get access to this information.
Being non-sensical is the point of that school of rhetoric.
Briefly summarized: Power is being able to say something false, that the audience knows is false, that the speaker knows the audience knows is false, and that the audience knows that the speaker knows the audience knows is false -- but the audience can't/wont speak up.
I haven't downvoted it, but one issue with parent's post is that it applies double standards to our nations' responses to those of the Cold War. During the 20th century, the public impression of diplomacy was the very same 'wild west of bluster and provocation' - only nowadays, we get to see more behind the scenes of the Cold War as files are declassified and then-current affairs become history. The propaganda from the American and Soviet leadership was no more nuanced historically than it is now from contemporary leaders like Putin and Trump (and since parent mentioned the EU, we could include European figures such as von der Leyen here as well).
I predict that future history books will observe a certain amount of care and diplomatic engagement in our era that isn't visible from the press releases and the ways in which politicians want to be seen.
I don't know why you're bringing BRICS into this. Brazil and South Africa aren't nuclear powers (at least not anymore, and South Africa is an irrelevant failed state anyway). India isn't engaged in any sort of ideological war with the West. Their nukes are purely defensive to deter China and Pakistan.
That leaves China and Russia. We learned during the Cold War that a policy of aggressive containment is effective and this should continue. Don't give them an inch.
In "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, a poignant point was made, originating from people like Bohr, who were definitely on the peaceful side: without demonstrating the effect of the atomic bomb, the "nuclear taboo" would not have come into existence, and the first large conflict between nuclear powers would have seen a terrible outcome. The use of the bomb was inevitable, so it was sadly better to use it in a restricted war, before the US and the CCCP would use them against each other and the rest of the world.
> And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity:
> Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women...
Ezekial 9:5-6
> Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
1 Samuel 15:3
> And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
Genesis 7:23
Two and a half thousand years later, human nature is unchanged. How easily we make peace with wholesale slaughter.
Does it matter? It was probably obvious to the scientists working on the bomb that other countries would get it too sooner or later, including countries at odds with each other.
Could Hirohito (Suzuki, etc.) have been convinced by bombs dropped elsewhere?
(our physicists were able to back-of-the-envelope; should their physicists have needed hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths to calculate what an A-bomb could do?)
So I think it's not obvious (multiple books have been written on the subject) what could or should have been done or not done back then; now, from my point of view, those cards have been dealt, for good or for ill.
Hirohito was apparently convinced after the bomb on Hiroshima, the cabinet and military staff still wanted to fight on after the bomb on Nagasaki. They even tried to block his radio speech.
Personally, I think it was tragic, but there was not much choice. Forcing Japan to its knees by conventional means would have been a prolonged bloodbath (with the Soviets getting in the game as well), with probably a higher death toll.
But was it really obvious? From what I can tell, much of the nuclear arms race happened thanks to espionage. Had information on warheads and the like been properly contained, maybe other countries would not have so easily developed the bomb.
Not so easily, but they would have done it. Once it was known, there wouldn't have been any way to stop Stalin. His paranoia knew no limits. And then there would have been dozens, hundreds when the war would break out, nobody would be scared to use them.
Unfortunately, democracies have their downsides. One of them is that "properly containing" things is extremely hard. Soviet spy network was vast and infiltrated all tiers of US society, and without instituting some extremely draconian policies, compared to which McCarthy would look like a hippie, I don't see how it would be possible to prevent it. Especially given a lot of top scientists were, unfortunately, if not communists themselves than quite friendly with communists and would probably refuse to cooperate with any draconian regime that would be capable of suppressing the communist networks.
Japan was better off in the long run being occupied solely by the US instead of a split occupation with the Soviets like Germany. If we hadn’t dropped the two bombs, the Soviets were set to invade northern Japan.
They were allies by necessity, but I don't think there were a lot of illusions about where things age heading. After all, the official doctrine of the Communist Party has always been that every non-communist regime has to be violently overthrown and replaced by a communist one. USSR didn't have the bomb not because they didn't want one, but because they were incapable of building one by themselves, and stealing all the details by means of vast spy network they had in the US, and then recreating them on their side, took time. If they had the capacity, they'd do it as fast as possible.
Phenomenal choice. While 80 years is nice- it's a blip on the timescale of history.
I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age. I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on.
I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers are extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this is a very naive take.
* We can't really live on another planet in the solar system.
* Look at how far the next star is and realise that we won't get there anytime soon (probably at all).
* What's the point of surviving on another planet, without any other species?
* Without considering the risk of nuclear war, we are in the process of destroying life on Earth.
The resources we put on that project are mostly wasted. We should try to live on Earth, I hear it's a nice place.
I don't personally believe we should colonize other heavenly bodies because of a potential nuclear apocalypse, but the negation of that is no reason to abandon space travel either. Every time we have launched a mission into deep space we have learnt more as a species about what makes Earth 'tick'. We can also do a lot without actual space travel - maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s, for instance, we would have less of an issue cleaning up our own atmosphere now.
I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
> maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s
We know pretty well what's happening on Earth and we have for decades. It's not like we just realised 5 years ago that we have a problem. We have not done anything (and we still aren't), but we knew, that's for sure.
> I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
In terms of survival as a species, anything that's not about solving our biodiversity and climate problems is a loss of time. I'm fine if some people work on it (just like it's good to have people working in art), but a lot of those researchers and engineers working on space exploration may actually be more useful to the species if they worked on the actual problems we have.
This precisely. We're in fact nowhere close to a sustainable off world human habitat, with all the inputs/outputs such requires, not to mention the ecosystem needed to sustain such in perpetuity.
If people are really interested in perpetuating "the light of consciousness" among the stars, they'd be working themselves to death to make life sustainable here on Earth, where we're from, which still presents far more hospitable conditions relative to anywhere else in the Universe we've so far identified. Say you're a billionaire with such an interest - wouldn't your funds be somewhat better directed ensuring we don't annihilate ourselves in a mad max hellscape locally, before we suffocate in the void when the O2 machine breaks down and we can't source replacement parts because Earth is now a wasteland?
The Great Filter is us, and so far, doesn't look like we're making it past.
I don't think people understand just how un-feasible life on Mars would be. It's got 1% of the atmospheric pressure as Earth. It's -65 degrees Celsius. It'd be more feasible to try colonizing the Moon or Antarctica.
We have permanent presence in Antarctica. Depends on your exact definition of "colony", but a narrow definition of it is barred by international treaty, I think.
Moon is definitely a great first step. I originally said "other heavenly bodies".
You sound like someone in 1900 saying "We can't fly, we're too heavy" or "We can't be in space it's got 0% atmospheric pressure".
Antartctica has a permanent presence that's totally dependent on regular supplies delivered from other continents. They don't grow their own crops, have their own industry.
We couldn't fly until the early 1900s, primarily because we didn't have engines with power to weight ratios sufficient for heavier-than-air flight. The concept of flight via the Bernoulli principle was known for a long time, and when engines improved people did start flying.
The lack of atmosphere on Mars largely prohibits any self sufficient colony. Colonies could be limited to pressurized habitats. But again, at that point we might as well focus on colonizing the moon which is much closer. I guess if we have a mechanism to somehow pump mars full of air, colonization would become more feasible. But it's a lot harder to work around the law of conservation of mass, than it is to improve internal combustion engines. No, it's not like people doubting the feasibilityy of heavier-than-air flight.
>> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
This is not a joke. But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth, and we should all go to hell if we can't. But we only need a few madmen in power for the rest of us to not matter.
It's much easier to intercept said nuclear weapon because instead of minutes you would have months to do it. And attacking Mars outside the few months every two years that have the most favorable transfer windows would also be much more difficult. It's a non-trivial advantage.
Of course, if you have nuclear weapons already on Mars that can be remotely triggered from Earth this doesn't apply, but hopefully we can avoid that...
TBH I think this whole discussion - that fixing Mars should be easier than fixing Earth - is some proof that a lot of hacker news commenters are already aliens from Mars.
The point is that making it work on Earth is orders of magnitude easier than making it work on Mars (or wherever). And by that I don’t mean that it’s easy by any stretch, but that establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is so much harder. In addition to the extremely challenging extraterrestrial environment (much more challenging than anything we have on Earth, including in the case of terrestrial nuclear catastrophe), all the problems that we have on Earth due to human nature will travel with us to any other planet if we don’t manage to solve them here.
>> The point is that making it work on Earth is orders of magnitude easier than making it work on Mars (or wherever)
I disagree.
There are folk who know the physics and the engineering of putting a colony in, say, the Moon. That knowledge is theoretical to an extent, since we haven't done it before. But we don't need any new physics or even radically new engineering. So, you get a bunch of engineers, give them 10% of the West's budget, and you are good to go. It should be said that whatever it costs to put a self-sustaining colony outside of Earth will be an investment. Even if, for whatever reason, you can't trade heavy commodities with that settlement, you are creating a blueprint. Next time somebody wants to spend $XXXXXXX in weapons or a trade war, they may consider to instead use your blueprint and go somewhere where they can live the way they want.
Now think about some other problem, like say, avoiding a nuclear war with Putin. You could give him Europe or a chunk of it an hope he would be sated. Or you could try to forcibly remove Putin from power. If you succeed, you would have turned his entire nation into a decided enemy of the West for at least a century, not less willing to use nuclear weapons. You could invade Russia--again, risking nuclear annihilation in the process--, occupy the country and destroy their nuclear stock. That's going to be 30% of the West's budget at least, and a huge human toll. The reconstruction effort will be 20% of the West's budget for many decades, and you will need to rebuild that country or their resentment will cost you dearly. What about China and Taiwan, and a few decades from now, China vs Australia and China vs India? What about global warming and ecological collapse?
I think you are failing to see the staggering complexity of "making it work on Earth", and the fact that we only need to fail once.
Yet Another Hand Waving Away Challenges Of Self Sustaining Off Earth Colonies.
Even if there was a self sufficient colony on Mars, it's tiny and all the other problems remain; non European colonies on Earth didn't eliminate issues at home and they were vastly simpler to establish than off planet colonies for a host of reasons you've skimmed over.
> Point is that if we can not behave on Earth how can we do it in other place.
If we have a 90% chance of behaving in any given century, we are doomed on earth. If we have a 10% chance of behaving in any given century, a continuous heritage is possible in a galaxy (re-)populated by slowships.
it's an open question as to how interplanetary politics will actually go. it's possible that ancient squabbles between countries will carryover, but hopefully they won't, which means that a terrorist's nuclear bomb causing MAD on Earth wouldn't necessarily carryover to MAD on a terraformed Mars and Lunar colonies, as we saw with the Russians who boarded the ISS in blue and yellow. But even if it doesn't, Earth being hit by an asteroid is another scenario that being a multi-planetary species would prevent our extinction in.
Well if it was possible, it would be an alternative. But it's not, period. Counting on it happening in your life time is simply preposterous. But you know what might collapse during your lifetime? Our civilization. Pretty likely.
I am more worried that we do not have that many attempts at rebuilding, because coal and oil are finite. OTOH a slower 2nd iteration might actually work better than this one.
If we lost access to electricity, we'd be completely screwed; we can't even get drinkable water in many places without electricity.
For example where I live there is water around 10-20m depth, but it's polluted (it may be usable for agriculture but not for human consumption); you'd have to dig a well over 100m below the surface.
> I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age.
One reason to use less oil now is to perhaps preserve it in case we need to 'reboot' civilization in the future in case of a future cataclysm.
We were only able to reach beyond (near-)subsistence living because of cheap energy, first coal and later petroleum. All the easily accessible stuff is now kind of gone, so if there's another collapse (which may be more likely to be global in nature: see pandemics), then depending on how much knowledge we lose it could be hard to get back to the say level without the previously cheap/easy energy.
In past collapses (Europe: Western Roman Empire, Black Death) we were able to eventually recover because we at a simply technological level that could keep going even with the loss of a lot of knowledge.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this will be impossible given advanced countries can't even be self-sufficient on Earth.
Is there oil on those heavenly bodies? Probably no, so you're importing your lubricants and seals/o-rings. Advanced fabs? No? Well you're importing your electronics. What kind of silica is there, because if you don't have the right kind of sand, you're mot making your own solar panels. How much radioactive material (uranium, plutonium, thorium, etc) is around if you want to try nuclear power.
> There is so much coal... I wouldn't worry about running out of that.
It's not just about quantity, but accessibility: early coal was on the surface in the UK, and when they depleted that they had to create pumps to drain the mines—which led to all sorts of discoveries when it comes to pressure, which got translated into steam engine advancements.
In the past you could almost literally stick a straw in the ground in parts of the US and suck oil out of the ground. You have to go further afield in many cases now.
Obviously the invader is not going to stop the war and say "this was foolish". So it is up to all other nations to bow down and let them have their piece of the world.
Can we think on the next step then? A nuclear nation invades and annexes territories from a non-nuclear one, given the premise to avoid wars between nuclear powers by proxy it means that a nuclear nation can then invade and annex anything in their surroundings with little repercussion, since we want to avoid any escalation towards nuclear powers at war. They settle for peace, the nuclear power gets what they want, stops for a while to re-arm, and then pushes to another non-nuclear nation.
What would stop other nations from pursuing their own nukes if that's the case? It also would make any military alliance such as NATO moot, there are only 3 nuclear powers in the alliance, any other country in the alliance which gets invaded by a nuclear power wouldn't be able to call for help since we want to avoid nuclear confrontation.
This only spirals more and more, countries without nukes are at a massive disadvantage, they will naturally seek nukes to protect themselves, just increasing the odds that a nuclear exchange will happen by sheer statistics.
> This is why I will be voting for the candidate who was not endorsed by Dick Cheney.
Proving my point that you don't think very rationally at all.
You're claiming a compromised peace in the Donbas could spiral into a nuclear exchange.
I'm claiming that continuing the proxy war between a jingoistic US government and a (probably) jingoistic Russian government could spiral into a nuclear exchange, and that the US government should be less jingoistic. Being jingoistic doesn't reduce the chance of nuclear war.
I doubt we're going to convince each other, so I would challenge readers of the two claims to decide for themselves what makes more sense for preventing nuclear armageddon.
It's a classic short-term vs long-term tradeoff. Letting Russia get away with an invasion of Ukraine decreases the risk of a nuclear war in the next couple of years but increases it in the following decades. I personally believe the long-term thinkers have the better argument
It's not long vs short term. It's money and conquest vs peace and compromise.
The "long term" vision you're proposing is a decades long entrenched conflict with multiple nuclear states. Literally every single foreign policy disaster of the past 40 years has been orchestrated by following this exact playbook, by the exact same people.
The "long term" vision I propose is normalizing relation with these nuclear states and we do business with them all without telling everyone how to live.
This is actually how long term peace is achieved. We shouldn't be the world's policeman. We do much better as the world's businessman.
No. I'm claiming that a compromised peace in the Donbas with the annexation of territories of the Donbas and Crimea will further strengthen that if you have nukes you have a massive lever to use against non-nuclear nations. And Russia wants the Donbas, Crimea and the land bridge all the way around the Sea of Azov, that's a massive plot of land.
You are only considering a narrow point in time, think ahead in terms of 20-50 years the repercussions of allowing an annexation to happen uncontested.
Right now it's Ukraine, let's say next is Iran acquiring nuclear weapons over the next 20 years and moving towards Basra in Iraq + Kuwait for their oil fields, in this scenario they are a nuclear power, arming themselves for 20 years (and they already have ballistic missiles), to avoid a nuclear escalation between Iran and USA + Israel a negotiated peace happens. The Saudis see that happening and now they feel the need to arm themselves with a nuclear weapon, just in case Iran thinks of continuing this campaign.
Multiply this across many other nations under similar low-level confrontations, African nations fighting for water sources, one of them arms themselves with a nuclear weapon (let's say Sudan) to have leverage to control a massively important water source, what's going to stop others around it to not arm themselves (like Eritrea) to not get invaded?
It's a spiral, the moment you allow a nuclear power to use that status to force the hand of an opposing nation at war you open a can of worms. Since 1945 the world has been trying to control proliferation through other means, wars of annexation have been shunned, you really don't want that to come back into a world armed with nuclear weapons.
I don't have an answer, I don't think anyone does. Putin has changed the world with this invasion, you are choosing to vote for Trump on a flimsy argument, you don't even know what the fuck he will do since he's a massive liar. On top of that you're jeopardising your country's democracy based on wishful thinking of what you project Trump will do, it's all from your head, not from his words.
> It's a spiral, the moment you allow a nuclear power to use that status to force the hand of an opposing nation at war you open a can of worms. Since 1945 the world has been trying to control proliferation through other means, wars of annexation have been shunned, you really don't want that to come back into a world armed with nuclear weapons.
You also have an example of what happens when some countries are more powerful than others: the veto at the UN Security Council. The UN is essentially unable to do anything that is against the interest of US, Russia or China (it just happens that France and the United Kingdom usually agree with the US). Imagine US, Russia and China having the same power but with 1) the actual ability to wipe enemies off Earth, instead of just blocking UN processes; 2) anybody able to join the club "just" by investing into nuclear proliferation. Doesn't seem good.
Do not discount the veto at the UN of the UK and France. Part of the current situation with Israel rests on those two countries colluding with Israel for a war the other three did not want.
In the past yes, but right now UK and France have not used the veto for over 30 years; while the Biden administration (just because those are the numbers I found most easily) has already used it over ten times on Israel-Palestine relationships.
China also used it a lot more sparingly than Russia and the United States, I must say, but probably that's also because some China issues don't even reach the Security Council.
> based on wishful thinking of what you project Trump will do, it's all from your head, not from his words.
Since we're off-topic already can I just emphasize this point? Pretty much everybody I know who has or will vote for Trump is like this. For example, I knew one guy who voted for Trump because he thought Trump would legalize marijuana.
Trump is all vibes, zero policy. The people working for him are zero vibes, all policy. With Trump being the complete reverse of a workaholic, his fours years in power ran on the wishes of his appointees. He was curtailed when in power.
If Trump actually liked working and writing laws, he'd have probably legalized marijuana.
Trump's first term was basically another 4 more years of Bush. Without leadership from the top, his mostly Bush-era appointees kept doing what they did before.
His second term will be filled with fanatics rather than Bush-era appointees.
I don't manage to keep up with Republican party machinations - please could you explain why the Bush-era staff won't be there if Trump is elected again?
Because most have left, either retired or disassociated from Trump and his movement.
Trump's running as hard as he can (which isn't very, he isn't convincing) from the proudly published (and terrifying!) Project 2025 stuff, but they aren't running from him, and there are reasons for that.
In terms of 20-50 years where will we be if the Ukraine conflict continues? At best an entrenched, decades long conflict, where we're at odds with 2 major nuclear powers. At worst, we're all dead. Including my children.
Over a bunch of neoliberal theories proposed by the architects of the last number of catastrophic wars? No thanks.
The left/Democrats/progressives used to be anti-war. But they've been entirely co-opted as a result of Trump derangement syndrome.
No need to worry about 20-50 years from now. It is very unlikely the conflict will continue much longer once Putin croaks or enters his diaper stage, in a few years.
The candidate I assume you’re voting for increased the future nuclear threat last time he was in office by pulling out of the Iran deal, for no good reason at all. He’s also one of the most jingoistic people in politics.
not to mention fact checkers are often overwhelmed after just one speech of his there are so many lies and exaggerations. He is a narcissistic grifter that became a cult leader.
I don't believe you. Virtually every contribution you've made in this thread is manipulative, including this one. Making specific but evidence-free allegations and then leaning on aphorisms to keep the argument going is an obvious and unfortunately common pattern in your social activity here.
I don't know if the Russians are just as jingoistic and corrupt,
Short story: current regime in the Russian Federation quite definitely is, may more so in fact, and has fascist, revanchist, genocidal ideology to boot. You may want to look further into its history (and that of the Russian/Soviet empires, which it sees itself as the natural successor to), and into the writings/thinking of the folks the helm of that regime in more detail sometime.
Sabotaging negotiations in Turkey
That's a myth, as you will easy verify for yourself by doing adequate research into the topic.
Forget about Dick Cheney. Instead look into who's been drip-feeding you false narratives like the above, and why.
Davyd Arakhhamia, Ukraine’s chief negotiator at Istanbul, said "[Boris] Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the NATO powers] are not"
We've all been drip-fed by the military industrial complex since at least 9/11 that war is necessary. Look what it got us- millions dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza. Not to mention our countless soldiers killed and injured on the line of duty.
Except that's not a direct quote from Arakhmiya - now is it?
Rather, it's a characterization of what he said -- whose original provenance seems to be difficult to track down, and there are conflicting versions available, which of course got copy-pasted all over in both left- and right-wing outlets (as well as by the Kremlin of course). But both Johnson and Arakhmiya have strenuously denied this characterization in any case, when directly asked about the topic:
“This is nothing more than nonsense and Russian propaganda,” Johnson said in an interview with the Times.
His words were confirmed by the head of the pro-presidential Servant of the People party faction, David Arakhamia, who headed the Ukrainian delegation at the Ukraine-Russia talks in Istanbul in March 2022. ... Arakhamia denied that the Ukrainian delegation was allegedly ready to sign such a document, and Johnson stopped Kyiv.
And yet somehow you've come to believe that the first characterization you came across was "absolutely true". Why is that?
It's evil, no I will not forget Dick Cheney.
You can build an anti-shrine to him on your bedroom wall, and throw darts at it every night if you want to. The unfortunate point here is that it seems you've allowed him to become a bogeyman, just like the big bad old MIC. And when I'm saying "forget about him", I don't mean in the literal sense. Of course we have to remember assholes like Cheney and the evil they did, what Eisenhower said way back when and all that.
But the bigger point is: that doesn't mean we have to let these ghosts not only dictate our narratives, but completely override our understanding of events in the present moment. More to the point -- if you'd like to yourself a huge favor, and just forget about all these good/evil narratives altogether. Instead focus on the facts of who said what, and when, and what really happened as a result.
Which in the case of the current Ukraine war, really aren't that complicated or hard to figure out.
At some point a name was put to the anonymous source, could be one of the many journalists who have investigated this quote, as you yourself admit there are lots of sources on this topic.
But that single quote aside, it's not like they're saying this in secret. Even Victoria Nuland and Foreign Affairs said some version of the same thing.
Nuland says the West didn't want to basically disarm Ukraine, and Foreign Affairs did an investigation of the negotiations (Ukrainska Pravda's investigation was better) and said the West didn't want to provide security guarantees to Ukraine.
And they all say it out loud that they don't want give an inch.
Good/evil moral compass is enormously important, especially when faced with war. It's precisely this flippant view towards morality that leads normal people to justify horrific acts of violence.
Murder, war, invasion bad.
Family, health, love, business good.
It really is that simple and the moment you stray from that, you stray towards everything we want to avoid.
I understand there are moments you MUST go to war. If I were Ukrainian I would be 100% on the war effort.
But I'm not Ukrainian. I'm American. Russia didn't attack America and I have a say in where my tax dollars go.
The Foreign Affairs investigation (probably the most detailed of any) suggested multiple reasons for the breakdown of the process. For the purpose of this thread, the main takeaway is that it squarely rejects the "sabotage" theory, stating:
The claim that the West forced Ukraine to back out of the talks with Russia is baseless.
Right - the UP quote names "one of Zelenskyy's close associates", not Arakhmiya. Since Arakhmiya is explicitly quoted elsewhere in the article (and the different UP article it links to as a source for those quotes, in Ukrainian, does not include anything resembling the quote in question) -- that strongly suggests it was never his characterization in the first place.
All I can say at this point, and which I feel I'm entitled to, is: "Now let that sink in". (Can't delve into Nuland angle right now, maybe another day).
literally all the Russians have to do is stop and go back home and the war is over. they will never do that because they elected a President who is named Putin and now he has a Hitleresque dream of taking all the old Soviet vassal states back. He is the one doing this and he is the one you will have to convince to stop; although I am sure there are plenty of yes men that he has attracted to his orbit to support his crazed dream of Soviet restoration
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
But who will inhabit those other bodies? Humans? The same species that destroyed earth in your scenario? What makes you think that living on Mars would suddenly make everybody peaceful and enlightened?
So like usual I offer up "what's your alternative" ? Is it to ignore Russian's invasion of countries? Ignore Iran's chaos it wants to sew constantly in the Middle East? It's easy to say "just be peaceful" but history shows that countries are not peaceful towards one another, they constantly want to take other's resources, or force their way of life on others, or settle some vague issue they have with another country (or people there). I think most people would love if countries would just stop attacking others. right now we don't have the tech to live on "other bodies", that is pie in the sky. I would love if nation-states just stopped the nonsense and were good to one another and their inhabitants, but that has never been the case.
Irans wants to sew chaos? The whole conflict with Iran started because the US and UK installed a puppet government (Pahlavi) so they can control the oil. After Pahlavi was ousted, the religious extreme took control, and cut ties with the west as a result. Its more like the west wanted chaos and started this whole mess
It's this same mentality that got us in trouble in literally all conflicts of the past 40 years. One day it's gonna get us blown up and I hope it's not over the Donbas.
The CIA was actively involved in the Maidan revolution, which sought to pull Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence and into the EU / NATO. Obviously this is antagonistic towards Russia, especially when they have so few natural barriers to defend against invasion of their land. Look at how quickly the Wagner group reached Moscow after defecting from the Ukrainian front.
If the shoe were on the other foot, and China had supported a revolution in Mexico and was setting up military bases, the American government would not take it lightly. The US would cook up some reason to wage war against Mexico as a continuation of the Monroe Doctrine. These wars are not about good and evil, as much as it's about empires and power.
You realize achieving a compromise is not simply "ignoring" or surrendering to Russia?
Putin and Biden haven't spoken in years. I would say you're proposing ignoring the situation until it becomes even more of a powder keg in a decade or two.
Alternative is accepting some territorial losses, compromising, soldiers go home. Doomsday clock ticks back to 5 minutes to midnight.
You're acting as if this is the first time anyone has annexed territory. Do I like it? No. But you gotta manage with the cards you're dealt and that territory is not worth decades long conflict with two major nuclear powers.
You realize achieving a compromise is not simply "ignoring" or surrendering to Russia?
Depends on the degree of compromise.
What kind of compromises do you think Ukraine should make at this point in order to win "peace" with Russia?
Specifics needed please, especially in regard to: (1) the proportion of currently occupied territory Ukraine would need to grant permanent recognized sovereignty to Russia on; (2) the proportion of the the estimated 1T in material damage caused to Ukraine that Russia would need to pay before sanctions are lifted; and (3) the matter of some 20k abducted citizens, mostly minors that Ukraine asserts (with a high degree of credibility) are currently behind held by Russia?
Because it's the specifics that matter.
(BTW, future NATO status is mostly symbolic at this point; items (1)-(3) are what really matter).
Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots. They are so pretentious that they pretend they are not pretentious and they care a lot ('It is utmost important for us [arbitrary lie here]'). Except Trump kind of people. They honestly and proudly announce that they give no fuck about anyone but themselves.
>Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots.
Oh I see how I can perfectly fit this role sure, I tell you so as the most humble entity that universe ever spawned.
It was of the outmost importance for me to deliver this lie: I don't care about anyone, humanity can go extinct, self included, and it doesn't trigger any emotion in me.
Yeah, this is also a big concern of mine. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since ww2, but there also hasn’t ever been total war between two nuclear powers.
The current climate in Russia and the Middle East may change that.
At home I have a book telling stories of Dutch WW2 survivors still living today. One of them was an eye witness account of the Hiroshima bomb. He was a POW and worked in a quarry or mine on the outskirts of town. He saw a single plane fly over. A bomb dropped with a parachute attached. Moments later he was flung to the back of the quarry and the city was gone. I would never have guessed there were eyewitnesses like this, let alone coutrymen of mine.
My opa was also a Dutch POW and I believe he was working in that same mine on the same day. When it happened, he was deep in the mine, which was evacuated because people inside initially thought the blast was an earthquake. Being a POW was without question extremely hard, but it was the bombing of Hiroshima that resulted in PTSD lasting many years after the war. He survived, retiring in Florida, and passed away in the late 80s. Some US government scientists asked if they could study his body, believing radiation exposure affected his long term health. It seems they were correct because his bones were found to have a slightly blue tint to them.
The book Hiroshima by John Hersey has many accounts like this. It’s a short read and follows six people and covers the first year after the bombing. I’d highly recommend reading it if such accounts are interesting to you.
My opa was also a Dutch POW, and his story is one for the books. He was assigned to work at a sake distillery just outside of Hiroshima. When the bomb hit, he was in the middle of taste-testing a new batch—he always claimed he was more of a quality control expert than a prisoner. The explosion sent him flying into a stack of sake barrels, and he ended up with a head full of rice wine and a newfound appreciation for the finer things in life.
The distillery, being built like a fortress to withstand earthquakes, somehow remained standing. Opa used to say that if he ever got nuked again, he'd want to be surrounded by sake barrels—apparently, they make for excellent shock absorbers.
Every New Year, he'd tell us about "the time I survived a nuclear blast with nothing but a sake buzz." He'd chuckle, pour himself a small glass of the weakest beer he could find, and toast to "the power of fermented rice."
Also POW Dutch grandfather here. He was in a giant concrete factory machining parts for airplanes. Bomb destroyed the whole city but the factory (being thick concrete) somewhat shielded the people inside. He had scars on his legs from pieces of a door blasting through the factory
> A resident of Nagasaki, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 AM, on 6 August 1945. He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, returned to work on 9 August, the day of the second atomic bombing. That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
> That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
That is one way to win an argument. Not that anyone would prefer that "win".
The Wikipedia article says there were at least 165 survivors of both bombings: "[Yamaguchi] was invited to take part in a 2006 documentary about 165 double A-bomb survivors".
I, too, was shocked to learn this. I only learned about it fairly recently, from my older brother who read a book from the school library on it as a child:
Nine Who Survived Hiroshima & Nagasaki Hardcover – January 1, 1957
The Hiroshimia/Nagasaki situation is one of the best examples I can think of with plenty of evidence of the "history is written by the winners" concept.
It has been justified repeatedly over the years both in terms of relativism ("The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, yet isn't so controversial"), and in terms of hypotheticals becoming certainties ("The empire was never going to surrender without a massive fight. The US anticipated unprecedented losses from an invasion of the main island, and is still giving out purple hearts printed in anticipation of this invasion")
In the end the historical narrative was that dropping the bombs was necessary to end the war, as written by the winners.
The reality is that we just don't know what would've happened if the US waited. Japan was not an active threat any longer. What was? The Soviet Union that would've certainly "helped" invade Japan, and would've also demanded to carve it up post-war the way they did with Germany.
From evaluating the overall evidence it seems pretty clear that this is what was driving the urgency to drop the bomb, not once, but twice.
The irony is that it's entirely possible that for the population of Japan this ended up a better outcome than having half of it face the "East Germany" scenario for the next 40 years.
And while the "blight" of having actually used nuclear weapons to kill civilians may be on the US forever as the only nation to have done so, the horrors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki almost certainly helped prevent nuclear weapon usage throughout the cold war. If they were never tried, it's almost certain that either the US or the USSR would've been itchy to be the first in some future engagement, and then who knows what would've happened.
So the truth is messy. My position is that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were NOT necessary to end WW2 and did not reduce the overall bloodshed within THAT conflict. But this action counterintuitively helped improve Japan's prosperity over the rest of the 20th century and may have reduced the likelihood of an actual nuclear war over the rest of the Cold War.
Your last paragraph makes a terrible moral argument: Yeah, maybe I am waging a war today, but's in the interest of the future peace!
I don't think your hypothetical assumption that 20th century peace could not be made without using nukes in WW2 is valid.
Why not even turn it up and say that future peace from nuclear weapons is impossible without living through the global thermonuclear war? Clearly, most people can imagine dangers of that, so they are perfectly capable of imagining dangers of only 2 nukes being used, without them actually being used.
With the information available at the time, dropping the nukes was immoral, and unjustifiable. The public justifications and the ones accepted by the standard western historical narrative do not hold up to scrutiny.
Despite that, I'm claiming that the decision probably inadvertently saved lives.
But that's not a moral argument. There were other means to save lives from nuclear apocalypse, and the US is complicit in its own actions that they've done to ensure a cold war with the Soviet Union.
I watched the film “Threads” last night, anyone in any doubt about the horrific consequences of a nuclear exchange should watch it. The speed at which society falls apart is simply terrifying. Those poor souls unlucky to be in a war zone will understand better than I ever will. The world needs a new order.
As said in the announcement, even 80 years after those bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we still need to highlight the dangers of nuclear weapons.
The threat and use of such weapons is still allowed by customary international law. Maybe movements like this will help change this sad fact. There has been progress in this direction. However, of course, nuclear-weapon states have been vehemently opposed to that, although they are obliged to negotiate a general and complete nuclear disarmament.
"Customary international law" is written by countries that can win a huge wae that are countries that have nuclear weapons, so they will not forbid themself the use of nuclear weapons.
As the name says, customary international law is not written. It arises from international practices that have become so widespread that states begin to recognize they have a legal obligation to continue them (opinio juris).
Current literature says that the non-usage of nuclear weapons has become a widespread international practice, but that the resistance of nuclear powers has prevented the formation of an “opinio juris” thus far. What is at stake is whether an international custom can be formed despite the opposition of certain states — as long as several other states acknowledge the custom.
Doesn't the history of war in the twentieth century (because we've got to start somewhere) suggest that "international law" means absolutely fucking nothing at fucking all when it comes to major wars?
Why bother?
What are you going to do to enforce it, invade the guy who just nuked/invaded you/your friends?
What makes me really angry are the NPCs that constantly try to justify the bombing and that it was "painless". When I visited Hiroshima and I read about what had happened, I realized our history books were egregiously nonchalant about quite possibly the worst acts of crime against humanity.
Now that it appears the world is once again creeping towards nuclear stand-off this time with a very large non-zero chance that a country pushed towards existential crisis will not hesitate to detonate a nuclear device, it makes the people justifying Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuking as completely deranged.
I urge y'all to visit Hiroshima and see first hand the horrors of nuclear terrorism. When you attack civilians directly, its terrorism no matter what side of the fence you are on.
I visited the Hiroshima museum last year. They've got a set of stone steps, a person was sat there when the bomb went off and they were simply vaporised. The stone steps bear the residue of the person, almost like a shadow.
Visited Hiroshima over a decade ago during a school trip, and had a local guide that was a survivor. Very powerful.
As a teenager we also visited concentration camps on a school trip, and a survivor joined the trip from Norway to Germany. We got to know him a bit during the week long trip, and there was a session where he told his story. I'll never forget this, and I think it affects me to this day.
Soon we will have no Time Witnesses left.
Edit: I remembered a very specific anecdote he told, about how him randomly having learned to knit helped when in a concentration camp, as some officer wanted something to be made, and he then could sit inside and do that instead of working himself to death in the quarry. Based on this I managed to find his name again now.
The atomic bombs weren't close enough to vaporize anyone since they were detonated in the air, what you see is disintegration which is a little bit different and instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing" the materials are torn apart and get embedded into the surrounding environment. Some vaporization did occur, but only on plants and the skin tissue of humans.
> instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing"
You can't turn material into "nothing". At best you can turn it into equivalent amount of energy if you collide it with antimatter.
That being said I don't really feel the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration". In both cases you stop being biology and start being physics in a subjective instant. (at least from the perspective of your own central nervous system, which has not enough time to even detect that something has happened)
In both cases you go from a living, breathing, laughing, thinking human being into contaminants in the air or surfaces around you.
What do you feel is the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration"? Is it about how big your largest continuous chunk is? Where do you draw the line?
the specific definition is that vaporization turns solids and liquids into gas or plasma, while disintegration means being broken into pieces. the difference between a gas and a solid, and also fine solids suspended in a gas, is fairly well defined.
By "nothing" is that there isn't a piece of you that is still you. Disintegration means that we can still find pieces of "you" in the environment. Not sure if there's any recoverable DNA left thought, that was most likely destroyed by the other waves of the atomic bomb.
At that distance you wouldn't be vaporized, but burned. What you see on the steps is not vapor deposits, but rather they are shadows.
The immense heat and light from the detonation burned/discolored the stones, but not in the shadow of the person sitting on the steps. Hence why you can see these 'permanent shadows' in various places in the city. Some caused by humans, but most are just shadows of structures. For example bridge railings: https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/photographs/hiroshima/im...
Of course the reminder of the impact there and the ongoing risk is nice but is this really a relevant and current choice? Why not last year? Why not ten years ago? What success have they even had? Considering where we are right now.
This isn't a group making an impact on the ground anywhere right now. Many of the winners in recent years have been civil & human rights activists in real fights on the ground in their countries/regions. The public will take the reminder but mostly shrug the news off.
This discussion proves the importance. We are so far from properly appreciating the horror of nuclear weapons. One would think that after nearly eighty years Americans would be able to apprehend our crimes against the innocents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with clear vision.
As some other commenters have pointed out:
It is lamentable that the focus is almost always on the atomic bombing itself instead of why it came to that point at all.
Many Asian countries feel scant sympathy toward Japan. From Indonesia to Malaysia to the Philipipines or even worse and for much longer, in Korea and China. In each of these countries the Japanese perpetrated massacre, forced labour, gang rape and forced prostitution in the millions. Even European women who were stranded in their former colonies were not spared. In fact their diaries are the foremost historical sources.
Their brutality is such that the hatred towards colonialist European nations were ameliorated and pretty much forgotten these days. It's sickening to me that outside East and Southeast Asia itself, most of the world only remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima when it comes to casualties in the Pacific theatre of WW2.
This sympathy felt even more misplaced considering even to this very day, unlike Germany, Japanese historiograpy deliberately downplays Japan brutality during occupation or that there was any aggression on their part at all. Most Japanese college mates in the US that I've talked to were not even aware that Japan occupied my country for years resulting in millions of casualties.
There are also well-maintained shrines (like Yasukuni) to the Japanese war criminals frequented even by high-level politicians (former PM went there, current ministers went there). Imagine that in current Germany!
The Yasukuni situation is more complex than "the shrine for war criminals". A lot more people are enshrined there, the war criminals are a tiny fraction (and were only added in 1978, while the shrine was established 109 years earlier). To give you an example of an important and less controversial figure enshrined there: Sakamoto Ryōma. There are 2+ millions souls enshrined there.
What did nyc or the US do to deserve 9/11? On the other hand what Japan has (usually brutally) killed way more innocent people in Asia than those killed by the A-bombs
Nuclear weapons are not used not because they are morally unacceptable, but rather because of MAD and their limited efficiency when used against armies.
If you wanted to give a Nobel Prize to someone for preventing nuclear wars, give it to Nuclear Winter researchers and military analysts.
You mean like the small guns, right? They are not being used not because society deems it morally unacceptable, but because the gun owners are afraid they will be counterattacked with guns.
Actually, it would be interesting if someone researched the relationship between gun culture and acceptance of MAD. Both on national (cultural) and individual level.
The Hibakusha's firsthand accounts and efforts have kept the horrors of nuclear war alive in the world's consciousness, helping to build a lasting taboo against the use of such weapons.
I have no issue with this laureate, but it is sad that the comittee could not find someone deserving that is working on a more current conflict. I guess this is not a positive outlook for the current state international conflicts.
At a time when Russia threatens the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Israel and Iran escalate tensions, North Korea tests missiles and warheads… it is hard not to relate the award to these circumstances.
Perhaps the committee thought it was best to express its opinion on current conflicts indirectly, as it has done so in the past.
Obama is by far the most vapid recipient of the award, but I wonder if he is also the best representative for the lack of peace given his legacy of "Yes we can, (but we don't)."
The reason we seemingly can't have peace is because we deliberately refuse it.
> I have no issue with this laureate, but it is sad that the comittee
You have no issue but it is sad?
> could not find someone deserving that is working on a more current conflict. I guess this is not a positive outlook for the current state international conflicts.
Just any issue would be fine for you? Or could it be some specific issue that you care abuot.
I see no issue with this org being nominated. Their advocacy seems to be right and useful. Good for them. On the other hand, reading the declaration, it's pretty clear that this nomination does not exist to celebrate good news. That is the sad part.
> Or could it be some specific issue that you care abuot.
I, of course, have causes that are closer to my heart. But even if it was a conflict I had no previous knowledge, learning about it through the news of its end, or even that people are working hard to solve it, is kind of beautiful. Peace in our time is always awing.
Since over 2 years, we again live now under the constant real threat of a nuclear war. Or this is at least what Russia is regularly claiming. This is very current as long as Putin doesn't get his s** together.
Of course there are other current candidates who would also deserve it, but I think it might be also a matter of how hot and current the problem is, and how much political impact this message would have. Russia and their threats are cooling down for the moment, so it's "safer" to send this message, instead of anything related to the Middle East, for example.
Yes, this is a generic tangent—somewhere between generic and offtopic, actually—and certainly a flamewar tangent, so it is correctly flagged. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
I believe the west cares that much to pretent that they have doubt about interfering drastically in the life of heterogeneous and diverse view people grouped together geographically and called country. Showing that they respect independence and self governance. A rigteous self image to cloak cowardnes towards risky acts you know.
Also global assholes cover each other's ass and there are quite a few of them.
50/50 but yeah it's like Israel attempts to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Problem is they are buried so deep now that it's pointless and at best a slight delay. Only the US (or maybe China or Russia) to get at facilities that deep and I don't see that happening unless Trump wins. Biden/Harris will never sign off on that.
Not really. I can see through his nonsense like the Haitians comment was hilarious. But if I’m choosing between a politician that says nuclear war is a high existential risk and talks about ending wars, and his opponents who seem to get off on prolonging them, I have no problem making that choice.
It’s very sad to voice support for a man you believe is actively lying to you and your peers. That, to me, feels like hatred for your own politically affiliates even.
Genuinely interested: if Trump talking nukes is 'one of the reasons (for liking him), what are the others, and do they include his talking about soldiers and generals?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This comment is simply stating historical facts. It's not unsubstantive. The actions of the US military in this particular case are relevant to this story. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II caused an estimated 140,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, according to some sources.
Your comment was (1) obvious, (2) inflammatory because of the context and the fact that it added zero extra information, and (3) snarky because of the internet trope you added ("our friendly reminder"). That means it was both unsubstantive and flamebait, even though it mentioned a fact.
Also, your account has been posting comments like this a lot, where by "like this" I mean low-information and high-inflammation. This is not what HN is for and undermines what it is for, so it you could please stop this, we'd appreciate it. You're still welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully, of course, but it you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules (such as avoiding snark and flamebait), we'd appreciate it.
I'm also of the opinion that MAD has been the largest single greatest cause of peace in the past 80 years, but I disagree that this award is bad. The reason we haven't seen a single use of nuclear weapons since then, not even relatively small ones, is because of the nuclear taboo that organizations like this have engendered
It is, as so often the case, a classic prisoner's dilemma problem [0]: "no nukes" is pretty clearly superior to "any nukes at all", but "they have nukes but we don't" is game over, so... nukes for all (major world powers)!
It's awful, but that's the prisoner's dilemma for you. I have a hard time respecting any anti-nuclear activist who doesn't at least acknowledge this facet of things, even if "no one has nukes and no one can easily get them" really would be best for the world.
[0]: if anyone hasn't seen it before, the interactive https://ncase.me/trust/ on the iterated prisoner's dilemma is excellent
If the past 8 years have shown us anything, it's that we are capable of electing incredibly stupid people who likely would get us into war if being blown back into the stone age weren't a possibility. I like nuclear weapons for that reason. It scares tyrants into complacency on the larger scale.
Define "hot war". There have been plenty of fighting in border regions of India and Pakistan in recent years, and both have nukes. India since 1974 and Pakistan since 1998.
There have been plenty of wars being fought. And even proxy wars between nuclear powers!
But those don’t affect you.
And I’m sure you are 100% convinced that if we could snap our fingers and give all sovereign states nukes then all fighting would stop. So what’s the point.
And if you’re wrong? Then we only risk the permanent destruction of advanced human organization. No biggie.
I would contend that it's really interconnectedness (aka globalization) and the general march of technology (especially long-distance weapons) that have contributed to the (very) relative peace of the post-WWII age, but I will readily admit that your point of view is very reasonable and there is a genuine discussion to be had here.
I don't think this point of view is at all defensible. The "game theory" I am referencing is the most basic thing, the very foundation of that discipline, and if you don't think it is applicable, I posit the following scenario:
Consider the Cold War-era state of affairs (because we seem to be heading back that way, at least a little bit), with the following variations:
A. Nuclear weapons do not exist.
B. USA has nuclear weapons. Russia does not.
C. Russia has nuclear weapons. USA does not.
D. Both USA and Russia have nuclear weapons.
Suppose you're an American. (WLOG, so adjust appropriately.) Now rank those four possible scenarios in order of your personal preference.
Personally, I'd rank C dead last. If you don't... why?
I kind of agree, but we have way too many bombs just floating around.
How many nukes does a country need to have readied in order for mutually assured destruction to be relevant? I feel like 100 would be enough to deter any aggression, and if two countries unload their full arsenal at each other would not end life on earth.
Russia and US have closer to 10,000 between them which could pretty much end humanity on any day.
Nuclear weapons have not prevented major world powers from engaging in proxy wars. As we can see today in the Middle East, proxy wars can make things dangerous and more likely to lead to an unwanted escalation.
Mutually assured destruction works best when the number of involved parties is limited. If every state were to have a warhead of its own, many risks would increase: those of miscalculation, nuclear proliferation to non-state actors, etc.
The linked video, which is a claim by somebody who isn't Castro, said that he recommended using them as a response to a US attack - not unconditionally. It's the principle of MAD, and the same as the US doctrine.
> Also, those bombs saved a lot of lives. I know many will disagree, but it's true.
This is a hotly, perhaps one of the most hotly contended, modern questions of World War II. To say what you said so blithely betrays your ignorance on the subject.
General modern consensus suggests that the first is up for debate for various reasons, but that the second one really didn't do much to change the Japanese government's course.
Regardless if you disagree with that above statement or not, positioning your uninformed opinion as fact is a bad look.
A specific strain of 20th century revisionism considers their use questionable in academia, it isn’t remotely a consensus (outside JP) and it certainly isn’t modern.
It's not a "specific strain", it's an overwhelming consensus that "both weren't necessary". There are, of course, people who take hard lines that "both were necessary", but they are in the minority.
At this point the argument has shifted to "was the bombing of Nagasaki necessary to end the war" with the common thought agreeing more or less that some initial large show of force was necessary.
Suppose we grant your premise. Indiscriminately massacring entire cities of men, women, and children saved the lives of some soldiers. That's barbaric.
You know very well that depleted uranium rounds are neither nuclear weapons nor dirty bombs and claiming so only creates confusion.
The US' military usage of DU (not just in ammunition but also armor) has been controversial and you're free to critique it, but that's not what you're doing.
Instead you lied and created these fictional "nuclear weapons" that the US is supposedly spreading everywhere, which is just not true.
> takes a very special person to link to an Iran backed "news"
Of course, there's no propaganda in
the West, and anyone who doesn't tow that line has to be a special person and totally desperate, yeah? On trigger to make a racial/personal attack (despite the fact that I called out that the claims are unverified).
Japan's national security policy is hypocritical given that it relies solely on the US nuclear umbrella for security despite disavowing anything to do with nuclear weapons, but unfortunately reality is not ideality.
Ukraine is the perfect example of what actually happens when a country discards its nuclear arsenal.
So yes, Japan is absolutely hypocritical and the Nobel Peace Prize has been the most vapid of all the Nobel Prizes, but for once this Peace Prize is actually trying to say something meaningful in an ever violent human world.
> Ukraine is the perfect example of what actually happens when a country discards its nuclear arsenal.
That's silly. Ukraine never had a nuclear arsenal. Ukraine had nuclear weapons on their soil, but they were managed, and controlled by forces loyal to Moscow. Had forces loyal to Kyiv tried to force their way into the silos they would have been repelled and a war would have broken out there and then.
Ukraine had a nuclear arsenal as much as Turkey has a nuclear arsenal because the USA stores nuclear warheads in Incirlik.
I agree that Ukraine was not a nuclear power even while they had warheads on their territory after the USSR fell apart, but I believe it was very feasible for them to become one.
Posession is nine tenths of the law, after all-- it would've been quite possible to just lock down a few silos and refuse to hand the weapons over. Russia as a state was highly disrupted at that point, and would've had a hard time opposing this effectively.
I'm not disputing that this would've been a very costly move for an already poor nation (in potential economical sanctions and also maintenance of the arsenal itself). Maybe the external political/economical pressure resulting from this would've ripped Ukraine apart some other way.
But I'm highly confident that Russia would not have risked annexing territory from an country with a few nuclear ICBM silos. No need even to have full control/launch capability, as long as there is sufficient doubt (on Russias side).
As a matter of fact Japan has no other choice than being under US protection.
I can't imagine a chain of event that would lead the US to get out of Japan volunteerly [0], nor Japan being able to kick the US out forcibly. It's just outside of the realm of possibility right now.
[0] they won't even move out of Okinawa as the whole island loathes the US base and gives the middle finger to their own gov to get them out.
Pejorative labels like "dumbest ever" and "idiotic".
From the guidelines: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons. I'd argue the “nuclear taboo” is just the product of.. I don't just seeing one nuclear test video? It doesn't take the cataloging of witness testimony to see it's terror (though that may be important in its own right)
I'm not intimately familiar with Japanese self-perceptions - but from the outside it seems like post-WW2 the country really leaned into a view that "nuclear weapons are terrible" to the point of distraction - instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines. There seems to be much less anxiety about preventing getting into a similar situations that triggered WW2: neo-colonial military bullying and domination of neighbors, xenaphobic oppression of ethnic groups, sycophantic following of cultural leaders etc. and an intense worry about the more tangeable use of nuclear weapons - which I'd argue is something that even if it were to come to pass would almost certainly never involve the Japanese people.
I wonder how this seeming diversion of public attention is perceived in Japan itself.
As I understand it, the anti-nationalist narrative was repressed due to anti-communist agendas of the occupation forces (ex: freeing of nationalist war criminals)
Would be curious to hear from anyone Japanese on the topic
The general human tendency to focus on single short term events seems to be the main cause.
Let's compare using Wikipedia as a source:
Atomic bombings in Japan:
50,000–246,000 casualties.
Air Raids in Japan:
241,000–900,000 killed,
213,000–1,300,000 wounded,
8,500,000 rendered homeless.
Mass killings of large civilian populations should not happen. I don't personally see nuclear weapons as worse than incendiary bombs or artillery. It's the number of casualties that makes it horrible.
* one early bomb is more or less equivilant to one conventional HE + incendiary raid.
* 2,000+ other bombs have since been detonated, a good number of which were orders of magnitudes more destructive than the early "first gen" bombs used on Japan.
Nuclear war with the larger weapons that followed would be considerably worse than incendiary bombs, in physical destruction, in immediate deaths, and in injuries and following mortalities.
I agree. I've been to the Hiroshima Peace Park or whatever it's called in English numerous times, but I can't say I've been anymore moved by it than any other demonstration of human brutality.
I can't register a difference between a nuclear bomb and, say, a GBU-12 Paveway conventional bomb. They both destroy and kill brutally, the magnitude is irrelevant and it would be great if we never have to use either of them.
I'm Japanese-American, so I can throw two cents in your hat.
Post-war Japan is against nuclear weapons to an absolute, but it must be admitted that the response to nukes in particular is just as much a kneejerk reaction. NHK literally spams the entirety of August with anti-nuclear propaganda every year. Japan's anti-nuclear stance is also hypocritically at odds with relying on the US nuclear umbrella for national security.
More rationally, post-war Japan is against wars of any and all kinds to an absolute. This goes as far as refusing to defend the US in the event of an attack on the US-Japan alliance; this was only changed recently in the last decade or so after strong pressure from the US to reciprocate the US's defense commitments to Japan.
Nationalism is a... complex topic. You will be considered a crazy person if you wave the Japanese flag or put up a flagpole on or around your house, but at the same time loyalty and reverence to the Emperor still remains strong and the country is politically and culturally very conservative/liberal with a very interesting mix of individualism and conformity. Most Japanese ex-pats actually leave Japan because they are more progressive and can't stand the conservative culture.
Japan is actually quite welcoming of foreigners, but there is a hard gentlemen's agreement that if you're in Japan you do as the Japanese do. Those who can adapt are welcomed, those who can't/don't are excluded and ejected sooner or later.
The Hiroshima museum, while advocating for a nuclear free world, has an interesting take on why the US dropped the bomb on them.
According to them, the US dropped the bomb because they wanted to show their strengths against the Soviets. It makes little to no mention of the bloody battles in the Pacific.
> instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines.
It used to bother me a lot, until I realized that
- the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers ("you're not a god anymore...except for those who still believe you are")
- all surrounding countries have incentives to to keep distances from Japan (in particular as long as the US are there, Japan and China will never be allies, same for Russia), Taiwan being the exception.
I see no future where Japan nationalism is truly solved, short of these two things also getting solved. And boy is there no end in sight to this.
>the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers
This was a deliberate political decision in an effort to not repeat the grave mistake of how post-WW1 Germany was handled which essentially led to WW2. Denying Japan of their identity and dignity would have risked an eventual WW3, and the US did not want to even entertain the possibility.
It also didn't help that practically all of Japan were not going to see their Emperor deposed or worse; Japan was willing to compromise on literally everything but the Emperor in making peace with the US and the west, and the extended Imperial family along with all the other nobles thereof lost their titles and powers in the post-war occupation and restructuring.
I think we're mostly in agreement. It was a strategic move and it might have helped a lot letting Japan get back on its feet. And it's also the move that left the deep deep nationalism in place and it's still here today.
Perhaps there was no way to have one without the other, but at least I want to look at it as a series of cause and consequences.
Crazy popular anime girl representations of WW2 battleships is the most funniest form of that reality IMHO.
> I'd argue the “nuclear taboo” is just the product of.. I don't just seeing one nuclear test video?
And yet some high ranking military planers were seriously pushing for employing nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Do you think they just haven't seen any nuclear test videos?
> It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons.
Because humans keep building, and fielding nuclear weapons. Not sure where you live, but chances are good your taxes are used to build, and maintain nuclear weapons and the means to carry them.
"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony"
Nice to see they do somehow recognize the whole association of people and not push to much about a single person. But the committee is trapped with the rules that push for this ridiculous individual centric point of view which is so out of touch with measurable realities considering what forces actually come at play to anything with large social impact.
Also on a side note:
>the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.
Well, first thing, this is a quite restrictive anthropocentric and restrictive POV for what count for a weapon. Putting appart all things that triggered previous mass extinction as they might not really fit the expectation of weapon and "ever witnessed as implied agent", ok. But let's consider European invasion of America: while this was not intended and per design, it somehow greatly leveraged on bacteriological weapons.
Currently humanity is also at war with biodiversity, and the scale is massive and worldwide, using a large panel of tools.
Of course we are more prone to empathy to our fellow humans, and nuclear weapons are abominations.
I recently went to the Hiroshima museum. I had originally thought that people simply vaporized when the bomb hit, but that is not the case. The museum shows how people's skin simply sloughed off and some were holding parts in their hands as they walked around to find their loved ones.
But the worst part was radiation poisoning. Many that did not initially get hit and burned directly went towards the center of the city to find their families and over the course of days, months and years, they almost always died a slow, painful death, with their teeth falling out and their skin and organs becoming necrotic.
Truly, everyone should visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki at some point, if only to understand what true horrors nuclear weapons create. And those are only atomic weapons of the 1940s, the hydrogen bombs we have today that fuse instead of fiss are orders of magnitude more powerful, but at least those under their effects (near the epicenter) will die a quick vaporized death instantaneously.
As an addition (and correction) to this, powerful thermonuclear weapons don't vaporize anyone either. They are targeted for high-altitude airbursts and kill through a combination of burns and building collapse, plus secondary fires, infection and breakdown of emergency services. The majority of the victims would not die an instant death.
For more information: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html
There are multiple lethal effects from nuclear weapons, and a person inside the 100 million Celsius fireball itself (TK-radius), yes, will be vapourised.
Fireball size depends on weapon yield. For a 1 MT weapon, the radius is roughly 870m, at 5 MT ~1010m, at 150 KT, about 250m.
Most US nuclear weapons yield between 600 to 2,200 KT (0.6 to 2.2 MT).
Whether or not individuals are within the fireball radius depends on the height of detonation, parameters of the nuclear explosion itself (shaped nuclear charges are theoretically possible, though I'm not aware whether any present weapons are designed as such), and of course the local population density.
Outside the fireball, the principle lethal mechanism is the shock wave, though thermal pulse can still provide severe burns, and initial and fallout radiation can also be lethal, though over longer periods (hours, days, weeks, or more).
Effects generally fall with the inverse cube law. Larger weapons also experience an inverse cube effect, such that a one thousandfold increase in weapon yield delivers only a tenfold increase in effects at a given distance.
People may be vapourised, though most within a blast effect area will likely not. They may however be severely burned if directly exposed to the thermal pulse. Near in, other lethal effects, which may be delayed by a few seconds, principally from the blast wave, should predominate.
Air-burst attacks would likely decrease vapourisation. Penetrating / shaped charges would have markedly different and highly directional effects.
Major Kong would not have felt a thing.
Regardless of how big a bomb is, there's going to be a distance at which it's no longer immediately lethal. Inside that radius you die quickly, outside you die slowly.
I had a similar experience, looking at the contorted metal lunchboxes and other household items was more terrifying, I always used to think things just go poof.
[flagged]
I’ll assume that you are American, so you obviously don’t understand how tone deaf that suggestion is to the current thread. Imagine someone commenting on horrible Auschwitz’s is after they visit and someone commenting “you should visit the Reichstag building to understand what lead to it all”, or a thread about 9/11 and someone suggest visiting a museum about the conflict in the Middle East to learn what lead to the events.
Obviously we are talking about completely different types of events and magnitudes of death and destruction, and the very notion that you should try to find justification for murder by events you can correlate to people who share ethnicity or nationality with the victims is just a cruel insult to anyone with a hint of human decency.
Ask what "hint of human decency" the Japanese had to attack a neutral country.
It seems you've fallen for the propaganda that they've been producing ever since. Regardless whether they'd be nuked they would've still suffered horribly.
Indeed. I did find it interesting that the museum made no mention of the atrocities committed by the Japanese military in China as well, or even any discussion of Pearl Harbor beyond a mere mention that Japan attacked it. But then again, that doesn't really have anything to do with the suffering experienced by the populace, as the sins of the government should not be atoned by the governed.
It should be noted that up to 15% of all hibakushas were Koreans, who were seen as second-class citizens in Japan in spite of the government propaganda that annexed Koreans are given same rights as Japaneses. So the lack of statements about wrongdoings of the former Japan empire, including WW2, is certainly relevant here.
(Just in case, Nixon Hidangyo is clearly aware of this and has campaigned for proper recognition of Korean survivors for a long time.)
I went to Korea after Japan and they in fact do have museums dedicated to this fact. It's quite enlightening to visit various countries who've been subject to the same historical events and see where each ones bias lies. I felt the same in Vietnam with their museums.
This is indeed a very timely award. I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and are still on hair-trigger alert to obliterate major cities. Maybe the end of atmospheric testing and the success of (now defunct) weapons reduction treaties has blunted public perception to the ongoing threat that they represent, and to the need to tread carefully where nuclear powers are involved.
If I put a hammer over your head that can fall any minute you'll be worrying, but if you're born with the hammer over your head and your parents before you as well, it becomes less of a thing.
On an individual level, we all have a variety of hammers over our heads. Cancer has killed far more people prematurely than nuclear weapons. Something like 500,000 people a year are murdered. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents also kill more than nuclear weapons. Even compared to a once-in-a-century nuclear war that perhaps kills a billion people, cancer will kill roughly a billion in the next century anyway. So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
I'd like to think of myself as a rational person, yet I worry about it. Because it's not just a matter of math; the effects of a billion people dying at once would be far more detrimental than the deaths from cancer over a century.
(One might think this line of reasoning that some people apply is a coping mechanism to ignore the reality, but that might be a different conversation)
But it is not just about coping. We as society, can make policies to decrease chance of getting a cancer and decrease traffic deaths. We just chose not to out of convenience and profit.
it's easier to ignore 100 papercuts than it is to ignore missing a hand.
Your analogy makes no sense whatsoever. More mundane causes of death aren’t paper cuts, and nuclear war isn’t losing a hand.
It makes sense to me. You understand it's not meant to be taken literally, right?
Not really, we all eventually die. No need to worry about how you will die past 70.
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If I fall 1 feet one hundred times, I'll probably be Ok
If I fall 100 feet once, I won't.
1m people dying in 1 day is not the same as 1M people dying over a decade.
Also. People generally dont fear death itself. This is expressed by people in pallitative care. Its the chaos and uncertainty preceding death that is really feared
If that one million people dying is followed by 3649 days of no one dying from that cause, yes it is.
No, abrupt deaths are much more disruptive to society
Does your risk assessment methodology also account for near misses? Agency? Morality? Source of risk? Costs of mitigation? Benefits? Something like actuary tables?
Mitigation of bike and pedestrian deaths is cheap. Just reform land use, advantage people over vehicles. Oops, now you're into culture and values.
Mitigation of cancer deaths is very expensive. Though we didn't invent cancer, we feel the moral imperative to "cure" it. And yet, while we're mitigating it, we're also making it worse. Cross purposes. What's your balance sheet for this conundrum?
Drugs kill lots of people. We own that one, right? How's the War on Drugs working out?
In conclusion, I wish I could wave away these dilemmas with a cute nominator and denominator. But I can barely reason about them before my head explodes. So I'm not buying what you're selling. Life's a bit more complicated, a bit more empirical, a bit less rational, than your tidy equations.
I think for a lot of people, myself included, you try not to worry about things you can't control.
"Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere. Write that down." - Van Wilder
While this apathy is an important coping mechanism to some degree, it's important not to become complacent. It's precisely this apathy and hopelessness that authoritarian regimes cultivate to prevent action.
I don't think this registers as apathy in this context. Maybe you live in a country that has nuclear weapons and can vote for one leader or another. This may or may not have some impact on things. Certainly, we cannot influence what other countries do with their arsenals. Our mental stacks can only run so deep & I'd wager for most of us, the things that are in our sphere of influence simply take priority.
> This may or may not have some impact on things. Certainly, we cannot influence what other countries do with their arsenals.
It demonstrably does. Nuclear arms reduction treaties have been enacted in the past and it is hard to believe that it would have happened without the popular support it enjoyed.
Just because we are at a time in history where many of those treatise have been weakened or left by the wayside shouldn't be a reason for us to forget them and the good they did.
> Our mental stacks can only run so deep & I'd wager for most of us, the things that are in our sphere of influence simply take priority.
It's a challenge to look beyond ourselves, but we must have the courage to do so. Many people here have the resources to act in the interest of their family, their neighborhood, their community, and their country. It's hard not to be selfish. We can't all afford not to be. Most of us can, however.
This makes it sound like regimes like ours necessarily do not also engage in it, which seems "a bit off" to me.
I'm not sure what you mean by "ours" as this is the internet, but yes, to the extent that there are authoritarian elements in every government, most governments do this to some degree. It's important to fight against these authoritarian elements as best as one can, especially if you are in a position of influence.
It's also important, however, not to equivocate between totalitarian regimes like Russia and (albeit imperfectly) open democracies like the USA in instances like this. Just because no government is without sin does not mean they are all the same.
And just because you believe that yours is better (as most of your countrymen do, purely by coincidence) does not mean that it is necessarily true.
Humans love telling stories about the superiority of this or that. Humans hate wondering if these stories are true. Most cannot even try.
Rocking chair is better than worrying, because rocking chair at least calms your anxiety.
Most people also don't worry about whether what they think they have no control over is actually true.
Cancer isn't something that humans develop and control. It's also very unlikely to kill 20-year-olds. On the other hand, it's almost guaranteed if you happen to live long enough. Finally, getting cancer doesn't mean that everybody around you also gets one. Getting hit by a nuke is something that is totally under human control, it's not going to discriminate by age or gender, and is likely to wipe out most of the humans you care about along with you.
A better comparison would be climate change vs nukes. If you have the time to worry about the former, you should also worry about the latter since if the nukes go off, we won't even get a chance to get killed by the environment.
Worry is unproductive in the sense of feeling anxiety, sure, but it's noble to worry at the various hammers in the archaic definition to "move, proceed, or progress by unceasing or difficult effort, to shake or pull at with the teeth."
Some of the hammers such as the hammer representing nuclear weapons - are caused by people and can be solved by people. There's a big game theoretic hill to climb over, but social pressure and advocacy have been effective at making progress. Others, like cancer and general senescence, are more of a looming threat that's a fundamental characteristic of biology, we can (and should) worry at them to make incremental progress but we're unlikely to suddenly eliminate them. The murder rate is enormously dependent on individual location and individual relationships. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents are enormously dependent on individual behavior.
Of those threats, addressing the problem of nuclear weapons - especially for a member of Nihon Hidankyo, with a personal and persuasive story of the damages these weapons caused - is probably near the top of the list for actions which can have the greatest positive change.
> So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
Until you have children and future generations to worry about. Then it suddenly seems quite a bit more pressing that their world could be obliterated at a moment's notice by a small handful of decision makers.
So what value do you get out of worrying about the nuclear threat, that makes it worth it?
What? I have a son and a wife and I couldn’t care less about nuclear war or climate change or any abstract and distant catastrophe that could face humanity as a whole.
Living in the future is a silly affair. There’s only one moment and it’s the present.
Those other things are also worth worrying about too.
Gee, I hope the people in charge don't think "the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about"
Extrapolating from two samples to "once-in-a-century" does not strike me as rational.
I once knew an academic who would not fly in an airplane. He was invited to a distinguished conference across the country, but complained to me that he was too scared to fly. "Why?" I ask.. "Terrorists" he replied.. "it is too serious. I just can't do it". so a year or two pass and then I see this Academic again. While talking he mentions that he just returned from a great conference far away. "What? I thought you were afraid to fly in an airplane!" .. He replies "that was true, I was scared of someone carrying a bomb on the flight. But, I calculated the statistical odds of there being TWO bombs on a single plane, and it was infinitesimal..."
"So now I carry my own!"
That depends on where you live. There are people right now in certain places who are terrified of the nuclear threat.
Everybody dies so there's nothing to fear from war?
Chaos , without death.
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Why does that figure looks really suspicious to me. So in nuclear exchange there is either already fully setup blocks or the responding party will pull in others in?
My parents had no problem reminding us that we all live with a nuclear sword hanging over our heads.
It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them.
And nuclear war is so much more horrifying and its consequences are so much beyond the pale, that people can't even think of what it would mean.
Oh I can imagine it happening. I'm currently working in Pearl Harbor and find myself hoping that I'll be on-base if the balloon goes up, thus avoiding any post-apocalyptic survival bullshit in a brilliant flash.
> It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them.
One of my great disappointments after 9/11 was that U.S. citizens were not, by and large, asked/expected to make any sacrifices (other than our liberties). It felt that if we were at war, we should all be contributing, but it seemed to me that our value as consumers was more important than as citizens.
No, it’s simply the end of the cold war that made it a possibility less present in the media. The cold war was cold because making it hot would have meant going nuclear. So the possibility was always closely linked to the state of cold war. Globalization has blurred the picture considerably.
maybe your parents aren't old enough to remember how much of the population could expect to die in wars before nuclear weapons (i.e. mutually assured destruction) existed
> I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist
I don't understand this. Between Iran and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, they seem to be very top of mind for many.
I agree completely. The award serves as a crucial reminder of the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons
The entire purpose of nuclear armaments is to make certain wars too nasty to fathom engaging in. If their organization didn't exist at all, we'd still have exactly the same number of nuclear war casualties since the 1940s.
The net result of this has enabled nuclear powers to engage in asymmetric wars against countries that don't have nukes, or to engage in proxy wars between nuclear superpowers. Meanwhile, we heave come perilously close to nuclear armageddon, with Stanislav Petrov standing in the way.
So make everyone a nuclear power?
(Considering what's been happening in Ukraine and Palestine I would like for the Netherlands to obtain nukes. If we ever get invaded we can at least take out 50 million of the enemy with us to hell).
Interdependence via global trade makes it unlikely that without nuclear weapons we would have nearly the number of wars we had in the 1940s.
In 1913, Norman Angell published a book called "The Great Illusion" in which he argued that the use of military force had become economically futile due to the interconnectedness of international finance and trade. World War I started one year later. Trade and interconnectedness probably have a net positive effect on reducing war, but not a reliable guarantee.
Thats not a thing though is it? Sanctions aren’t affecting Russia in any capacity.
Sanctions aren’t affecting Russia in any capacity.
Definitely false. They were never the slam dunk that they were supposed to be, and it's true to say their effect has been significantly blunted. But that's not the same as "no effect". It's just turned out to be a comparatively mild one (but important nonetheless).
Sanctions are hurting Russia financially. Putin doesn't care because he can extract wealth from oligarchs in whatever manner he sees fit. That's the benefit of being a dictator who has a wealth of knowledge on how to watch his own back after his career in intelligence work. He'll just tell his people to create some propaganda and everyone will fall into line.
Totally agree this is very relevant today. We have heads of state in the EU and to some degree people in the USG with very cavalier approaches to the ideological war between the West and the BRICS.
I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist.
Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
BRICS? What ideological war is South Africa, India, and Brazil waging against the west? Members of Brics such as India and China are closer to war with each other then they are to war with the West.
You're exposing the whole Russian narrative about a new "multipolar world", which has already existed since globalization was a thing, from the oppressed "Global South"... which is a:
- a geographical misconception - for example, India is part of the Northern Hemisphere and a lot of Western aligned countries are in the Southern Hemisphere like Australia, New Zealand, Argentina;
- a population size misconception, where the propaganda states the majority of the world population is in the south - 850 million people live in the southern hemisphere;
- It's a sign of imperialism - no countries from the actual Southern Hemisphere elected Russia as their representatives and to speak for them about their ideas, grievances, or ideology.
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I'm not sure why this got downvoted. The point is not to bow to Putin in all matters, but to treat the matter with extreme seriousness: Take time to do proper background research, evaluate your sources, give serious consideration to the Russian narrative -- without necessarily agreeing of course, allow for a margin of error both in your own judgement and for stray missiles entering the detection radius, etc. If it still seems like a good idea to take a stand afterwards, OK. But let's please not cause a nuclear war over Facebook likes and political brownie points.
What is the Russian narrative? How to give consideration for something that is not even meant to be sensical?
Ah... NATO expansion? Alleged discrimination against the Russian majority in Eastern Ukraine? Alleged foreign interference in the Maidan revolution? Not that I'm trying to start a discussion here, but dismissing the other side's arguments as "not even meant to be sensical" is exactly what I was arguing against.
None of this is a legitimate casus belli in any sense of the term. You’re suggesting we ought to take seriously the geopolitical equivalent of “he looked at me funny”.
I would you say the Cuban missile crisis was made up by the Kennedy admin? The establishment was ready to war if the missiles were not removed. Being in our “backyard” and sphere of influence (LatAm) we didn’t take to it too kindly.
I would say that the Cuban Missile Crisis, indeed, would not have constituted a good reason to invade Cuba. US foreign policy during the Cold War was often pretty indefensible.
But there’s still a number of things about this situation that make the comparison flimsy. The relationship between the west and Russia was - and actually still is - significantly less tense than the relationship between the Soviets and the west during the Cold War, for one.
But moreover, the way everything went down was very different.
In the CMC, the Soviets installed their missiles, the US caught wind of this, and pursued a diplomatic solution. The public was, generally, made aware of what was going on and what was at stake.
Ukraine was not made a member of NATO - it hadn’t even applied. At no point did Russia even rattle any sabres, offer red lines, or pursue diplomacy. Russia built up its forces along the border in secret and launched a surprise invasion. From the jump they’ve been offering shifting explanations for the “special military operation” - is it about NATO expansion or “de-Nazification”? - which is one reason why we shouldn’t take any of those explanations especially seriously.
> Ukraine was not made a member of NATO - it hadn’t even applied. At no point did Russia even rattle any sabres, offer red lines, or pursue diplomacy.
I don't think you're paying attention. Bush's invite of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO in 2007 (against the opinion of France and Germany) was probably a cause of Russian invasion into South Ossetia.
And just about recently a newly chosen top NATO chief has been promoting path for Ukraine to enter NATO (and so-called "West Germany model"), despite that Putin clearly demanded Ukraine neutrality and NATO's own rule about not admitting members with an ongoing territorial disputes.
I can hardly imagine how could Russians be clearer about opposing NATO expansion.
> I can hardly imagine how could Russians be clearer about opposing NATO expansion.
That's a very confusing statement because Russia signed agreements, charters and memorandums that clearly stated that every country is entitled to their own economic and defensive alliances.
So it's not clear at all - and even if it was clear, then it should become imperative to have Ukraine join NATO as soon as possible to make it blatantly clear that Russia can't dictate what other sovereign nations choose for their economic and defensive alliances.
The real question is: why aren't Russians questioning and making their government accountable for not following their agreements and destroying decades of diplomacy for the sake of one man?
Bush's invite of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO in 2007 (against the opinion of France and Germany) was probably a cause of Russian invasion into South Ossetia.
Bush did not "invite" those countries to join NATO. Only NATO can do that, and it famously chose not to do that at the Bucharest Summit the following year (and to explicitly deny those countries invites), precisely because of France and Germany's objections. I'm not sure what you think you can gain here by attempting to spin the situation into the opposite of what it was.
Regardless - the "cause" of what Russian armed forces did in Georgia in 2008 was Putin's ordering them to. Nothing the West did made or "caused" him to do anything.
I can hardly imagine how could Russians be clearer about opposing NATO expansion.
Post-2022 the discussion is entirely moot, and I don't see why the world should begin to care what the current Russian regime thinks about NATO at this point.
NATO expansion was never the real reason for that invasion - but once Putin chose to go in, he completely extinguished whatever moral capital Russia may have had that issue.
>Ukraine was not made a member of NATO - it hadn’t even applied. At no point did Russia even rattle any sabres, offer red lines, or pursue diplomacy.
To be fair, without saying that their position is a defensible one- they've been pretty vocal about Ukraine not becoming aligned with the West for almost 20 years now if not longer, and politicians in the West have been vocal about the exact opposite for at least as long. I see people saying online that what's happening now was completely irrational and unexpected but that's not really true. We know it's a sore point for them and have been goading them with a "will we won't we" over a clear red line they've drawn for a long while now. https://www.rferl.org/a/1079726.html
That's a good list of Russian-fueled narratives that have little to no grounds in reality - as a kind way of saying they're lies and conspiracy theories.
> NATO expansion?
You seem to have forgotten all the agreements, charters, and memorandums the Soviet Union and Russia signed stating that Sovereign Countries are entitled to their own alliances and strategic partnerships. You also seem to have forgotten that even Putin hinted at Clinton the idea of Russia joining NATO. Regarding Ukraine, the population only started to care to join NATO after 2014, but started to trend since the invasion of Georgia.
Even Gorbachev himself - the man who was allegedly involved in that so-called "no NATO expansion" myth said it was a lie and a myth[0]. I didn't even make logical sense to have such a red line.
> Alleged discrimination against the Russian majority in Eastern Ukraine?
So you invaded and annex a country in a genocidal war based on "alleged discrimination"? Who did something similar to this... ah yeah... Nazi Germany also made up some discrimination stories about ethnic germans being under threat by polish people.
> Alleged foreign interference in the Maidan revolution?
Another conspiracy theory and lie... God forbid Ukrainians having the capacity to revolt against a president who turned his back on Ukrainians will to join the EU, in exchange for a deal under the table with Russia that no one knew the terms of.
Oh and by the way, the US wanted Yanukovich to remain president - it was the overwhelming majority of the parliament that didn't want the corrupt fellow in power any longer.
At least get your facts straight, with a little bit of research you can get access to this information.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rPnAlbYfa7E
Being non-sensical is the point of that school of rhetoric.
Briefly summarized: Power is being able to say something false, that the audience knows is false, that the speaker knows the audience knows is false, and that the audience knows that the speaker knows the audience knows is false -- but the audience can't/wont speak up.
I haven't downvoted it, but one issue with parent's post is that it applies double standards to our nations' responses to those of the Cold War. During the 20th century, the public impression of diplomacy was the very same 'wild west of bluster and provocation' - only nowadays, we get to see more behind the scenes of the Cold War as files are declassified and then-current affairs become history. The propaganda from the American and Soviet leadership was no more nuanced historically than it is now from contemporary leaders like Putin and Trump (and since parent mentioned the EU, we could include European figures such as von der Leyen here as well).
I predict that future history books will observe a certain amount of care and diplomatic engagement in our era that isn't visible from the press releases and the ways in which politicians want to be seen.
I don't know why you're bringing BRICS into this. Brazil and South Africa aren't nuclear powers (at least not anymore, and South Africa is an irrelevant failed state anyway). India isn't engaged in any sort of ideological war with the West. Their nukes are purely defensive to deter China and Pakistan.
That leaves China and Russia. We learned during the Cold War that a policy of aggressive containment is effective and this should continue. Don't give them an inch.
In "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, a poignant point was made, originating from people like Bohr, who were definitely on the peaceful side: without demonstrating the effect of the atomic bomb, the "nuclear taboo" would not have come into existence, and the first large conflict between nuclear powers would have seen a terrible outcome. The use of the bomb was inevitable, so it was sadly better to use it in a restricted war, before the US and the CCCP would use them against each other and the rest of the world.
> And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity:
> Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women...
Ezekial 9:5-6
> Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
1 Samuel 15:3
> And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
Genesis 7:23
Two and a half thousand years later, human nature is unchanged. How easily we make peace with wholesale slaughter.
All those examples are from a single ancient culture. Why did you pick only from that culture?
They are quotes from the most important text of our Western culture, the sacred scripture of the world's largest religion.
And similar things are still going on today
Texts that idiots humans take at face value are no more useful then stories of Santa Claus.
That might have been a better argument if the USSR[0] had had the bomb in 1945[1]?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw#t=15s
[0] first test: 29.08.1949
[1] a year in which the US and USSR were, however tenuously, still allied
Does it matter? It was probably obvious to the scientists working on the bomb that other countries would get it too sooner or later, including countries at odds with each other.
I don't know.
Could Hirohito (Suzuki, etc.) have been convinced by bombs dropped elsewhere?
(our physicists were able to back-of-the-envelope; should their physicists have needed hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths to calculate what an A-bomb could do?)
So I think it's not obvious (multiple books have been written on the subject) what could or should have been done or not done back then; now, from my point of view, those cards have been dealt, for good or for ill.
Hirohito was apparently convinced after the bomb on Hiroshima, the cabinet and military staff still wanted to fight on after the bomb on Nagasaki. They even tried to block his radio speech.
Personally, I think it was tragic, but there was not much choice. Forcing Japan to its knees by conventional means would have been a prolonged bloodbath (with the Soviets getting in the game as well), with probably a higher death toll.
> Could Hirohito (Suzuki, etc.) have been convinced by bombs dropped elsewhere?
Not likely, Tokyo was firebombed to ashes and it didn't move him to surrender.
But was it really obvious? From what I can tell, much of the nuclear arms race happened thanks to espionage. Had information on warheads and the like been properly contained, maybe other countries would not have so easily developed the bomb.
> Had information on warheads and the like been properly contained, maybe other countries would not have so easily developed the bomb.
The Soviets had people inside the Manhattan Project / Los Alamos. As the US made progress that information was fed to the Soviets/Russians.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies
Not so easily, but they would have done it. Once it was known, there wouldn't have been any way to stop Stalin. His paranoia knew no limits. And then there would have been dozens, hundreds when the war would break out, nobody would be scared to use them.
Unfortunately, democracies have their downsides. One of them is that "properly containing" things is extremely hard. Soviet spy network was vast and infiltrated all tiers of US society, and without instituting some extremely draconian policies, compared to which McCarthy would look like a hippie, I don't see how it would be possible to prevent it. Especially given a lot of top scientists were, unfortunately, if not communists themselves than quite friendly with communists and would probably refuse to cooperate with any draconian regime that would be capable of suppressing the communist networks.
Japan was better off in the long run being occupied solely by the US instead of a split occupation with the Soviets like Germany. If we hadn’t dropped the two bombs, the Soviets were set to invade northern Japan.
They were allies by necessity, but I don't think there were a lot of illusions about where things age heading. After all, the official doctrine of the Communist Party has always been that every non-communist regime has to be violently overthrown and replaced by a communist one. USSR didn't have the bomb not because they didn't want one, but because they were incapable of building one by themselves, and stealing all the details by means of vast spy network they had in the US, and then recreating them on their side, took time. If they had the capacity, they'd do it as fast as possible.
This is the organisation that has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize:
https://www.ne.jp/asahi/hidankyo/nihon/english/
Phenomenal choice. While 80 years is nice- it's a blip on the timescale of history.
I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age. I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on.
I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers are extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this is a very naive take.
* We can't really live on another planet in the solar system. * Look at how far the next star is and realise that we won't get there anytime soon (probably at all). * What's the point of surviving on another planet, without any other species? * Without considering the risk of nuclear war, we are in the process of destroying life on Earth.
The resources we put on that project are mostly wasted. We should try to live on Earth, I hear it's a nice place.
I don't personally believe we should colonize other heavenly bodies because of a potential nuclear apocalypse, but the negation of that is no reason to abandon space travel either. Every time we have launched a mission into deep space we have learnt more as a species about what makes Earth 'tick'. We can also do a lot without actual space travel - maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s, for instance, we would have less of an issue cleaning up our own atmosphere now.
I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
> maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s
We know pretty well what's happening on Earth and we have for decades. It's not like we just realised 5 years ago that we have a problem. We have not done anything (and we still aren't), but we knew, that's for sure.
> I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
In terms of survival as a species, anything that's not about solving our biodiversity and climate problems is a loss of time. I'm fine if some people work on it (just like it's good to have people working in art), but a lot of those researchers and engineers working on space exploration may actually be more useful to the species if they worked on the actual problems we have.
This precisely. We're in fact nowhere close to a sustainable off world human habitat, with all the inputs/outputs such requires, not to mention the ecosystem needed to sustain such in perpetuity.
If people are really interested in perpetuating "the light of consciousness" among the stars, they'd be working themselves to death to make life sustainable here on Earth, where we're from, which still presents far more hospitable conditions relative to anywhere else in the Universe we've so far identified. Say you're a billionaire with such an interest - wouldn't your funds be somewhat better directed ensuring we don't annihilate ourselves in a mad max hellscape locally, before we suffocate in the void when the O2 machine breaks down and we can't source replacement parts because Earth is now a wasteland?
The Great Filter is us, and so far, doesn't look like we're making it past.
I think this is a very naive take.
We could live on Mars. Just a matter of time. Let engineers iterate.
We would obviously bring species here at home with us to Mars. And then new species would flourish too.
I don't think people understand just how un-feasible life on Mars would be. It's got 1% of the atmospheric pressure as Earth. It's -65 degrees Celsius. It'd be more feasible to try colonizing the Moon or Antarctica.
We have permanent presence in Antarctica. Depends on your exact definition of "colony", but a narrow definition of it is barred by international treaty, I think.
Moon is definitely a great first step. I originally said "other heavenly bodies".
You sound like someone in 1900 saying "We can't fly, we're too heavy" or "We can't be in space it's got 0% atmospheric pressure".
Antartctica has a permanent presence that's totally dependent on regular supplies delivered from other continents. They don't grow their own crops, have their own industry.
We couldn't fly until the early 1900s, primarily because we didn't have engines with power to weight ratios sufficient for heavier-than-air flight. The concept of flight via the Bernoulli principle was known for a long time, and when engines improved people did start flying.
The lack of atmosphere on Mars largely prohibits any self sufficient colony. Colonies could be limited to pressurized habitats. But again, at that point we might as well focus on colonizing the moon which is much closer. I guess if we have a mechanism to somehow pump mars full of air, colonization would become more feasible. But it's a lot harder to work around the law of conservation of mass, than it is to improve internal combustion engines. No, it's not like people doubting the feasibilityy of heavier-than-air flight.
We have an atmosphere.
Don’t forget the radiation.
> It'd be more feasible to try colonizing the Moon
And just as useless.
>> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
This is not a joke. But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth, and we should all go to hell if we can't. But we only need a few madmen in power for the rest of us to not matter.
I imagine that if you can colonize other planets you can also target them with nuclear weapons.
It is like saying that the solution to all problems is colonizing Antarctica.
It's much easier to intercept said nuclear weapon because instead of minutes you would have months to do it. And attacking Mars outside the few months every two years that have the most favorable transfer windows would also be much more difficult. It's a non-trivial advantage.
Of course, if you have nuclear weapons already on Mars that can be remotely triggered from Earth this doesn't apply, but hopefully we can avoid that...
TBH I think this whole discussion - that fixing Mars should be easier than fixing Earth - is some proof that a lot of hacker news commenters are already aliens from Mars.
Yes- but raises an interesting problem of nuclear energy. Might be very important/useful in space.
The book series "The Expanse" does an amazing job of showing what a war in space would look like, and the role of nuclear energy.
Interestingly, nukes become small fry compared to slinging asteroids at planets.
The point is that making it work on Earth is orders of magnitude easier than making it work on Mars (or wherever). And by that I don’t mean that it’s easy by any stretch, but that establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is so much harder. In addition to the extremely challenging extraterrestrial environment (much more challenging than anything we have on Earth, including in the case of terrestrial nuclear catastrophe), all the problems that we have on Earth due to human nature will travel with us to any other planet if we don’t manage to solve them here.
>> The point is that making it work on Earth is orders of magnitude easier than making it work on Mars (or wherever)
I disagree.
There are folk who know the physics and the engineering of putting a colony in, say, the Moon. That knowledge is theoretical to an extent, since we haven't done it before. But we don't need any new physics or even radically new engineering. So, you get a bunch of engineers, give them 10% of the West's budget, and you are good to go. It should be said that whatever it costs to put a self-sustaining colony outside of Earth will be an investment. Even if, for whatever reason, you can't trade heavy commodities with that settlement, you are creating a blueprint. Next time somebody wants to spend $XXXXXXX in weapons or a trade war, they may consider to instead use your blueprint and go somewhere where they can live the way they want.
Now think about some other problem, like say, avoiding a nuclear war with Putin. You could give him Europe or a chunk of it an hope he would be sated. Or you could try to forcibly remove Putin from power. If you succeed, you would have turned his entire nation into a decided enemy of the West for at least a century, not less willing to use nuclear weapons. You could invade Russia--again, risking nuclear annihilation in the process--, occupy the country and destroy their nuclear stock. That's going to be 30% of the West's budget at least, and a huge human toll. The reconstruction effort will be 20% of the West's budget for many decades, and you will need to rebuild that country or their resentment will cost you dearly. What about China and Taiwan, and a few decades from now, China vs Australia and China vs India? What about global warming and ecological collapse?
I think you are failing to see the staggering complexity of "making it work on Earth", and the fact that we only need to fail once.
> I disagree.
Of course you do, you've followed that with
Yet Another Hand Waving Away Challenges Of Self Sustaining Off Earth Colonies.
Even if there was a self sufficient colony on Mars, it's tiny and all the other problems remain; non European colonies on Earth didn't eliminate issues at home and they were vastly simpler to establish than off planet colonies for a host of reasons you've skimmed over.
Point is that if we can not behave on Earth how can we do it in other place.
> Point is that if we can not behave on Earth how can we do it in other place.
If we have a 90% chance of behaving in any given century, we are doomed on earth. If we have a 10% chance of behaving in any given century, a continuous heritage is possible in a galaxy (re-)populated by slowships.
Except that the current state of physics says that we just can't possibly reach another galaxy. Period.
> Except that the current state of physics says that we just can't possibly reach another galaxy. Period.
Yes, that's exactly why my comment limited itself to discussion of population of /this/ galaxy.
The next star is already way too far for our theory. You may as well study telekinesis.
it's an open question as to how interplanetary politics will actually go. it's possible that ancient squabbles between countries will carryover, but hopefully they won't, which means that a terrorist's nuclear bomb causing MAD on Earth wouldn't necessarily carryover to MAD on a terraformed Mars and Lunar colonies, as we saw with the Russians who boarded the ISS in blue and yellow. But even if it doesn't, Earth being hit by an asteroid is another scenario that being a multi-planetary species would prevent our extinction in.
>as we saw with the Russians who boarded the ISS in blue and yellow
That's just the colors of one of the top Russian universities from which all three cosmonauts had graduated. [0]
[0] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Московский_государственный_тех...
> it's possible that ancient squabbles between countries
Don't forget with-in countries.
If another planet becomes another 'country', they'll have internal disagreements.
> But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth
Yeah, we must. As in: it's not rational to even consider that becoming self-sustaining on other heavenly bodies is an alternative.
It's fun, it's interesting, it's many things. But it's not an alternative.
Of course it’s an alternative. A self sustaining colony could be the only thing that survives a massive pandemic.
Well if it was possible, it would be an alternative. But it's not, period. Counting on it happening in your life time is simply preposterous. But you know what might collapse during your lifetime? Our civilization. Pretty likely.
> But it's not, period.
Said every dipshit Luddite 50 years ago about basically everything we enjoy on a day to day basis.
You mean 50 years ago when many were proclaiming that there would be whole cities in space by now? You mean that 50 years ago?
(Even more were proclaiming it 70 years ago.)
Says everyone who actually checks what 4.25 light-years means and understands that this is actually the closest star.
But I'm always happy to be classified as "disphit" by people who apparently replace their lack of physic knowledge with some kind of faith.
Stone age? Hardly. More like 18th century.
I am more worried that we do not have that many attempts at rebuilding, because coal and oil are finite. OTOH a slower 2nd iteration might actually work better than this one.
"I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on."
Far more important than 18th century vs stone age debate is the fact that there are people in charge that would lead us down either path.
> there are people in charge that would lead us down either path
Must you follow?
Would love not to. But I'm not the decider whether we head down the path of nuclear armageddon.
If we lost access to electricity, we'd be completely screwed; we can't even get drinkable water in many places without electricity.
For example where I live there is water around 10-20m depth, but it's polluted (it may be usable for agriculture but not for human consumption); you'd have to dig a well over 100m below the surface.
The standards for what is fit for human consumption might drastically change in a post-apocalyptic scenario, though.
Boil it
> I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age.
One reason to use less oil now is to perhaps preserve it in case we need to 'reboot' civilization in the future in case of a future cataclysm.
We were only able to reach beyond (near-)subsistence living because of cheap energy, first coal and later petroleum. All the easily accessible stuff is now kind of gone, so if there's another collapse (which may be more likely to be global in nature: see pandemics), then depending on how much knowledge we lose it could be hard to get back to the say level without the previously cheap/easy energy.
In past collapses (Europe: Western Roman Empire, Black Death) we were able to eventually recover because we at a simply technological level that could keep going even with the loss of a lot of knowledge.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this will be impossible given advanced countries can't even be self-sufficient on Earth.
Is there oil on those heavenly bodies? Probably no, so you're importing your lubricants and seals/o-rings. Advanced fabs? No? Well you're importing your electronics. What kind of silica is there, because if you don't have the right kind of sand, you're mot making your own solar panels. How much radioactive material (uranium, plutonium, thorium, etc) is around if you want to try nuclear power.
> I think this will be impossible given advanced countries can't even be self-sufficient on Earth.
And that's only after you've passed the fact that it's impossible for us to reach the next star.
There is so much coal... I wouldn't worry about running out of that.
> There is so much coal... I wouldn't worry about running out of that.
It's not just about quantity, but accessibility: early coal was on the surface in the UK, and when they depleted that they had to create pumps to drain the mines—which led to all sorts of discoveries when it comes to pressure, which got translated into steam engine advancements.
In the past you could almost literally stick a straw in the ground in parts of the US and suck oil out of the ground. You have to go further afield in many cases now.
> And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers is extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
The strict interpretation of that foreign policy is that any nuclear nation is free to invade any non-nuclear nation and abuse its citizens.
Where do you draw the line? If for example an ally is invaded by a nuclear nation. Should you intervene or just call peace?
Does the rule-of-law between countries have any relevance?
You're claiming "wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers" are not "extremely foolish" and should not "be stopped with great urgency"?
Yes but how?
Obviously the invader is not going to stop the war and say "this was foolish". So it is up to all other nations to bow down and let them have their piece of the world.
[flagged]
Can we think on the next step then? A nuclear nation invades and annexes territories from a non-nuclear one, given the premise to avoid wars between nuclear powers by proxy it means that a nuclear nation can then invade and annex anything in their surroundings with little repercussion, since we want to avoid any escalation towards nuclear powers at war. They settle for peace, the nuclear power gets what they want, stops for a while to re-arm, and then pushes to another non-nuclear nation.
What would stop other nations from pursuing their own nukes if that's the case? It also would make any military alliance such as NATO moot, there are only 3 nuclear powers in the alliance, any other country in the alliance which gets invaded by a nuclear power wouldn't be able to call for help since we want to avoid nuclear confrontation.
This only spirals more and more, countries without nukes are at a massive disadvantage, they will naturally seek nukes to protect themselves, just increasing the odds that a nuclear exchange will happen by sheer statistics.
> This is why I will be voting for the candidate who was not endorsed by Dick Cheney.
Proving my point that you don't think very rationally at all.
You're claiming a compromised peace in the Donbas could spiral into a nuclear exchange.
I'm claiming that continuing the proxy war between a jingoistic US government and a (probably) jingoistic Russian government could spiral into a nuclear exchange, and that the US government should be less jingoistic. Being jingoistic doesn't reduce the chance of nuclear war.
I doubt we're going to convince each other, so I would challenge readers of the two claims to decide for themselves what makes more sense for preventing nuclear armageddon.
It's a classic short-term vs long-term tradeoff. Letting Russia get away with an invasion of Ukraine decreases the risk of a nuclear war in the next couple of years but increases it in the following decades. I personally believe the long-term thinkers have the better argument
It's not long vs short term. It's money and conquest vs peace and compromise.
The "long term" vision you're proposing is a decades long entrenched conflict with multiple nuclear states. Literally every single foreign policy disaster of the past 40 years has been orchestrated by following this exact playbook, by the exact same people.
The "long term" vision I propose is normalizing relation with these nuclear states and we do business with them all without telling everyone how to live.
This is actually how long term peace is achieved. We shouldn't be the world's policeman. We do much better as the world's businessman.
IOW the same plan we tried with Russia and China in the 90's, and failed miserably at?
No. I'm claiming that a compromised peace in the Donbas with the annexation of territories of the Donbas and Crimea will further strengthen that if you have nukes you have a massive lever to use against non-nuclear nations. And Russia wants the Donbas, Crimea and the land bridge all the way around the Sea of Azov, that's a massive plot of land.
You are only considering a narrow point in time, think ahead in terms of 20-50 years the repercussions of allowing an annexation to happen uncontested.
Right now it's Ukraine, let's say next is Iran acquiring nuclear weapons over the next 20 years and moving towards Basra in Iraq + Kuwait for their oil fields, in this scenario they are a nuclear power, arming themselves for 20 years (and they already have ballistic missiles), to avoid a nuclear escalation between Iran and USA + Israel a negotiated peace happens. The Saudis see that happening and now they feel the need to arm themselves with a nuclear weapon, just in case Iran thinks of continuing this campaign.
Multiply this across many other nations under similar low-level confrontations, African nations fighting for water sources, one of them arms themselves with a nuclear weapon (let's say Sudan) to have leverage to control a massively important water source, what's going to stop others around it to not arm themselves (like Eritrea) to not get invaded?
It's a spiral, the moment you allow a nuclear power to use that status to force the hand of an opposing nation at war you open a can of worms. Since 1945 the world has been trying to control proliferation through other means, wars of annexation have been shunned, you really don't want that to come back into a world armed with nuclear weapons.
I don't have an answer, I don't think anyone does. Putin has changed the world with this invasion, you are choosing to vote for Trump on a flimsy argument, you don't even know what the fuck he will do since he's a massive liar. On top of that you're jeopardising your country's democracy based on wishful thinking of what you project Trump will do, it's all from your head, not from his words.
> It's a spiral, the moment you allow a nuclear power to use that status to force the hand of an opposing nation at war you open a can of worms. Since 1945 the world has been trying to control proliferation through other means, wars of annexation have been shunned, you really don't want that to come back into a world armed with nuclear weapons.
You also have an example of what happens when some countries are more powerful than others: the veto at the UN Security Council. The UN is essentially unable to do anything that is against the interest of US, Russia or China (it just happens that France and the United Kingdom usually agree with the US). Imagine US, Russia and China having the same power but with 1) the actual ability to wipe enemies off Earth, instead of just blocking UN processes; 2) anybody able to join the club "just" by investing into nuclear proliferation. Doesn't seem good.
Do not discount the veto at the UN of the UK and France. Part of the current situation with Israel rests on those two countries colluding with Israel for a war the other three did not want.
In the past yes, but right now UK and France have not used the veto for over 30 years; while the Biden administration (just because those are the numbers I found most easily) has already used it over ten times on Israel-Palestine relationships.
China also used it a lot more sparingly than Russia and the United States, I must say, but probably that's also because some China issues don't even reach the Security Council.
When did Russia withdraw from the nuclear testing treaty?
November 2nd 2023.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-revokes-russias-r...
That's my point
> based on wishful thinking of what you project Trump will do, it's all from your head, not from his words.
Since we're off-topic already can I just emphasize this point? Pretty much everybody I know who has or will vote for Trump is like this. For example, I knew one guy who voted for Trump because he thought Trump would legalize marijuana.
Trump is all vibes, zero policy. The people working for him are zero vibes, all policy. With Trump being the complete reverse of a workaholic, his fours years in power ran on the wishes of his appointees. He was curtailed when in power.
If Trump actually liked working and writing laws, he'd have probably legalized marijuana.
Hilariously, Trump effectively legalized marijuana accidentally in the 2018 Farm bill. https://thehill.com/homenews/4564181-2018-farm-bill-hemp-can...
Trump's first term was basically another 4 more years of Bush. Without leadership from the top, his mostly Bush-era appointees kept doing what they did before.
His second term will be filled with fanatics rather than Bush-era appointees.
I don't manage to keep up with Republican party machinations - please could you explain why the Bush-era staff won't be there if Trump is elected again?
Because most have left, either retired or disassociated from Trump and his movement.
Trump's running as hard as he can (which isn't very, he isn't convincing) from the proudly published (and terrifying!) Project 2025 stuff, but they aren't running from him, and there are reasons for that.
Yeah, I failed to indicate the risk of a second Trump presidency.
Because they had enough of Trump after 4 years.
Dick Cheney is voting for Harris, that's the equivalent of Norman Osborn voting for Peter Parker.
He explicitly said he'll try to get peace before he even gets sworn into office.
I don't think he'll succeed that quick, but that's way better than pushing for further conflict.
And again, under his administration we saw more peace than any president since at least Clinton.
In terms of 20-50 years where will we be if the Ukraine conflict continues? At best an entrenched, decades long conflict, where we're at odds with 2 major nuclear powers. At worst, we're all dead. Including my children.
Over a bunch of neoliberal theories proposed by the architects of the last number of catastrophic wars? No thanks.
The left/Democrats/progressives used to be anti-war. But they've been entirely co-opted as a result of Trump derangement syndrome.
No need to worry about 20-50 years from now. It is very unlikely the conflict will continue much longer once Putin croaks or enters his diaper stage, in a few years.
The candidate I assume you’re voting for increased the future nuclear threat last time he was in office by pulling out of the Iran deal, for no good reason at all. He’s also one of the most jingoistic people in politics.
A lot less war under his admin than now. And I voted for the current admin.
He's more jingoistic than Dick Cheney?
He’s certainly more jingoistic than Harris, as his slogans and supporters make evident.
not to mention fact checkers are often overwhelmed after just one speech of his there are so many lies and exaggerations. He is a narcissistic grifter that became a cult leader.
You're describing me in this comment thread right now. Overwhelmed by the onslaught of political bias.
At least Trump's lies have killed less people than Victoria Nuland's
You who brought the 2024 election into the thread.
I am not talking about any conflict in particular. I am just pointing out that this is the consequence of that kind of policy.
The world is not black and white.
And that also gives you the right to choose what part of the grayscale you want to be, good on you!
You have stated you agree that wars between nuclear powers are extremely foolish.
It's difficult to say how you can stop such wars if you don't know what the war is.
It was you who said that.
You responded “Yes but how?” to my question. Did I misunderstand and you meant wars between nuclear powers is not foolish?
Can you please stop with these tacky rhetorical moves, it's inimical to good conversation.
It was a genuine question.
When you start getting attacked personally, you know whoever's attacking you is losing the argument.
I don't believe you. Virtually every contribution you've made in this thread is manipulative, including this one. Making specific but evidence-free allegations and then leaning on aphorisms to keep the argument going is an obvious and unfortunately common pattern in your social activity here.
Yes. I am sorry but you missed the second part of the post and then proceeded with putting words in my mouth.
I don't know if the Russians are just as jingoistic and corrupt,
Short story: current regime in the Russian Federation quite definitely is, may more so in fact, and has fascist, revanchist, genocidal ideology to boot. You may want to look further into its history (and that of the Russian/Soviet empires, which it sees itself as the natural successor to), and into the writings/thinking of the folks the helm of that regime in more detail sometime.
Sabotaging negotiations in Turkey
That's a myth, as you will easy verify for yourself by doing adequate research into the topic.
Forget about Dick Cheney. Instead look into who's been drip-feeding you false narratives like the above, and why.
It is absolutely true.
Davyd Arakhhamia, Ukraine’s chief negotiator at Istanbul, said "[Boris] Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the NATO powers] are not"
We've all been drip-fed by the military industrial complex since at least 9/11 that war is necessary. Look what it got us- millions dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza. Not to mention our countless soldiers killed and injured on the line of duty.
It's evil, no I will not forget Dick Cheney.
Except that's not a direct quote from Arakhmiya - now is it?
Rather, it's a characterization of what he said -- whose original provenance seems to be difficult to track down, and there are conflicting versions available, which of course got copy-pasted all over in both left- and right-wing outlets (as well as by the Kremlin of course). But both Johnson and Arakhmiya have strenuously denied this characterization in any case, when directly asked about the topic:
And yet somehow you've come to believe that the first characterization you came across was "absolutely true". Why is that?It's evil, no I will not forget Dick Cheney.
You can build an anti-shrine to him on your bedroom wall, and throw darts at it every night if you want to. The unfortunate point here is that it seems you've allowed him to become a bogeyman, just like the big bad old MIC. And when I'm saying "forget about him", I don't mean in the literal sense. Of course we have to remember assholes like Cheney and the evil they did, what Eisenhower said way back when and all that.
But the bigger point is: that doesn't mean we have to let these ghosts not only dictate our narratives, but completely override our understanding of events in the present moment. More to the point -- if you'd like to yourself a huge favor, and just forget about all these good/evil narratives altogether. Instead focus on the facts of who said what, and when, and what really happened as a result.
Which in the case of the current Ukraine war, really aren't that complicated or hard to figure out.
Original provenance was Ukrainska Pravda. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/
At some point a name was put to the anonymous source, could be one of the many journalists who have investigated this quote, as you yourself admit there are lots of sources on this topic.
But that single quote aside, it's not like they're saying this in secret. Even Victoria Nuland and Foreign Affairs said some version of the same thing.
Nuland says the West didn't want to basically disarm Ukraine, and Foreign Affairs did an investigation of the negotiations (Ukrainska Pravda's investigation was better) and said the West didn't want to provide security guarantees to Ukraine.
And they all say it out loud that they don't want give an inch.
Good/evil moral compass is enormously important, especially when faced with war. It's precisely this flippant view towards morality that leads normal people to justify horrific acts of violence.
Murder, war, invasion bad.
Family, health, love, business good.
It really is that simple and the moment you stray from that, you stray towards everything we want to avoid.
I understand there are moments you MUST go to war. If I were Ukrainian I would be 100% on the war effort.
But I'm not Ukrainian. I'm American. Russia didn't attack America and I have a say in where my tax dollars go.
The Foreign Affairs investigation (probably the most detailed of any) suggested multiple reasons for the breakdown of the process. For the purpose of this thread, the main takeaway is that it squarely rejects the "sabotage" theory, stating:
https://archive.ph/lSQPrRight - the UP quote names "one of Zelenskyy's close associates", not Arakhmiya. Since Arakhmiya is explicitly quoted elsewhere in the article (and the different UP article it links to as a source for those quotes, in Ukrainian, does not include anything resembling the quote in question) -- that strongly suggests it was never his characterization in the first place.
All I can say at this point, and which I feel I'm entitled to, is: "Now let that sink in". (Can't delve into Nuland angle right now, maybe another day).
"way more so"
literally all the Russians have to do is stop and go back home and the war is over. they will never do that because they elected a President who is named Putin and now he has a Hitleresque dream of taking all the old Soviet vassal states back. He is the one doing this and he is the one you will have to convince to stop; although I am sure there are plenty of yes men that he has attracted to his orbit to support his crazed dream of Soviet restoration
Correct. Russians should absolutely go home.
You're pushing forward a neoliberal wet dream that he wants the whole eastern bloc.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
But who will inhabit those other bodies? Humans? The same species that destroyed earth in your scenario? What makes you think that living on Mars would suddenly make everybody peaceful and enlightened?
So like usual I offer up "what's your alternative" ? Is it to ignore Russian's invasion of countries? Ignore Iran's chaos it wants to sew constantly in the Middle East? It's easy to say "just be peaceful" but history shows that countries are not peaceful towards one another, they constantly want to take other's resources, or force their way of life on others, or settle some vague issue they have with another country (or people there). I think most people would love if countries would just stop attacking others. right now we don't have the tech to live on "other bodies", that is pie in the sky. I would love if nation-states just stopped the nonsense and were good to one another and their inhabitants, but that has never been the case.
Irans wants to sew chaos? The whole conflict with Iran started because the US and UK installed a puppet government (Pahlavi) so they can control the oil. After Pahlavi was ousted, the religious extreme took control, and cut ties with the west as a result. Its more like the west wanted chaos and started this whole mess
It's this same mentality that got us in trouble in literally all conflicts of the past 40 years. One day it's gonna get us blown up and I hope it's not over the Donbas.
The CIA was actively involved in the Maidan revolution, which sought to pull Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence and into the EU / NATO. Obviously this is antagonistic towards Russia, especially when they have so few natural barriers to defend against invasion of their land. Look at how quickly the Wagner group reached Moscow after defecting from the Ukrainian front.
If the shoe were on the other foot, and China had supported a revolution in Mexico and was setting up military bases, the American government would not take it lightly. The US would cook up some reason to wage war against Mexico as a continuation of the Monroe Doctrine. These wars are not about good and evil, as much as it's about empires and power.
You realize achieving a compromise is not simply "ignoring" or surrendering to Russia?
Putin and Biden haven't spoken in years. I would say you're proposing ignoring the situation until it becomes even more of a powder keg in a decade or two.
Alternative is accepting some territorial losses, compromising, soldiers go home. Doomsday clock ticks back to 5 minutes to midnight.
You're acting as if this is the first time anyone has annexed territory. Do I like it? No. But you gotta manage with the cards you're dealt and that territory is not worth decades long conflict with two major nuclear powers.
You realize achieving a compromise is not simply "ignoring" or surrendering to Russia?
Depends on the degree of compromise.
What kind of compromises do you think Ukraine should make at this point in order to win "peace" with Russia?
Specifics needed please, especially in regard to: (1) the proportion of currently occupied territory Ukraine would need to grant permanent recognized sovereignty to Russia on; (2) the proportion of the the estimated 1T in material damage caused to Ukraine that Russia would need to pay before sanctions are lifted; and (3) the matter of some 20k abducted citizens, mostly minors that Ukraine asserts (with a high degree of credibility) are currently behind held by Russia?
Because it's the specifics that matter.
(BTW, future NATO status is mostly symbolic at this point; items (1)-(3) are what really matter).
Alternative is accepting some territorial losses, compromising, soldiers go home.
This is just machtpolitik.
Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots. They are so pretentious that they pretend they are not pretentious and they care a lot ('It is utmost important for us [arbitrary lie here]'). Except Trump kind of people. They honestly and proudly announce that they give no fuck about anyone but themselves.
>Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots.
Oh I see how I can perfectly fit this role sure, I tell you so as the most humble entity that universe ever spawned.
It was of the outmost importance for me to deliver this lie: I don't care about anyone, humanity can go extinct, self included, and it doesn't trigger any emotion in me.
Yeah, this is also a big concern of mine. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since ww2, but there also hasn’t ever been total war between two nuclear powers.
The current climate in Russia and the Middle East may change that.
The current situation will not lead to nuclear war.
Yeah, we should just stop all wars. Great idea! How has nobody thought of this before???
At home I have a book telling stories of Dutch WW2 survivors still living today. One of them was an eye witness account of the Hiroshima bomb. He was a POW and worked in a quarry or mine on the outskirts of town. He saw a single plane fly over. A bomb dropped with a parachute attached. Moments later he was flung to the back of the quarry and the city was gone. I would never have guessed there were eyewitnesses like this, let alone coutrymen of mine.
My opa was also a Dutch POW and I believe he was working in that same mine on the same day. When it happened, he was deep in the mine, which was evacuated because people inside initially thought the blast was an earthquake. Being a POW was without question extremely hard, but it was the bombing of Hiroshima that resulted in PTSD lasting many years after the war. He survived, retiring in Florida, and passed away in the late 80s. Some US government scientists asked if they could study his body, believing radiation exposure affected his long term health. It seems they were correct because his bones were found to have a slightly blue tint to them.
The book Hiroshima by John Hersey has many accounts like this. It’s a short read and follows six people and covers the first year after the bombing. I’d highly recommend reading it if such accounts are interesting to you.
It was published in New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
Fun fact the cover image if this edition was kind of a decoy (perhaps to accentuate the shock): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31
Wow, brutal!
As an aside I would never had guessed this artstyle was a 40s cover.
My opa was also a Dutch POW, and his story is one for the books. He was assigned to work at a sake distillery just outside of Hiroshima. When the bomb hit, he was in the middle of taste-testing a new batch—he always claimed he was more of a quality control expert than a prisoner. The explosion sent him flying into a stack of sake barrels, and he ended up with a head full of rice wine and a newfound appreciation for the finer things in life.
The distillery, being built like a fortress to withstand earthquakes, somehow remained standing. Opa used to say that if he ever got nuked again, he'd want to be surrounded by sake barrels—apparently, they make for excellent shock absorbers.
Every New Year, he'd tell us about "the time I survived a nuclear blast with nothing but a sake buzz." He'd chuckle, pour himself a small glass of the weakest beer he could find, and toast to "the power of fermented rice."
You may be interested in the 1945 Project - which collects the stories of hibakusha,[1] or atomic bomb survivors: https://www.1945project.com/
There is also Yoshito Matsushige, a survivor and the only photographer who was able to capture an immediate, first-hand photographic historical account: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/yoshito-mats...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha
Little Boy didn't have a parachute. Maybe he was mis-remembering that.
There were instruments dropped by parachute.
IIRC those were dropped by a second plane accompanying the Enola Gay.
Also POW Dutch grandfather here. He was in a giant concrete factory machining parts for airplanes. Bomb destroyed the whole city but the factory (being thick concrete) somewhat shielded the people inside. He had scars on his legs from pieces of a door blasting through the factory
Just how widespread the effects of World War II were
Which book is it?
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One of my friends grandmothers was an atomic bomb survivor - she was just a baby when the bomb hit and was blind the rest of her life.
One thing I was surprised by was the number of survivors and also that there was at least one person who survived both bombs [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi
> A resident of Nagasaki, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 AM, on 6 August 1945. He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, returned to work on 9 August, the day of the second atomic bombing. That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
> That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
That is one way to win an argument. Not that anyone would prefer that "win".
The Wikipedia article says there were at least 165 survivors of both bombings: "[Yamaguchi] was invited to take part in a 2006 documentary about 165 double A-bomb survivors".
I, too, was shocked to learn this. I only learned about it fairly recently, from my older brother who read a book from the school library on it as a child:
Nine Who Survived Hiroshima & Nagasaki Hardcover – January 1, 1957
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Who-Survived-Hiroshima-Nagasaki/...
Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi
a.k.a. Tsutomu "Wolverine" Yamaguchi
The Hiroshimia/Nagasaki situation is one of the best examples I can think of with plenty of evidence of the "history is written by the winners" concept.
It has been justified repeatedly over the years both in terms of relativism ("The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, yet isn't so controversial"), and in terms of hypotheticals becoming certainties ("The empire was never going to surrender without a massive fight. The US anticipated unprecedented losses from an invasion of the main island, and is still giving out purple hearts printed in anticipation of this invasion")
In the end the historical narrative was that dropping the bombs was necessary to end the war, as written by the winners.
The reality is that we just don't know what would've happened if the US waited. Japan was not an active threat any longer. What was? The Soviet Union that would've certainly "helped" invade Japan, and would've also demanded to carve it up post-war the way they did with Germany.
From evaluating the overall evidence it seems pretty clear that this is what was driving the urgency to drop the bomb, not once, but twice.
The irony is that it's entirely possible that for the population of Japan this ended up a better outcome than having half of it face the "East Germany" scenario for the next 40 years.
And while the "blight" of having actually used nuclear weapons to kill civilians may be on the US forever as the only nation to have done so, the horrors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki almost certainly helped prevent nuclear weapon usage throughout the cold war. If they were never tried, it's almost certain that either the US or the USSR would've been itchy to be the first in some future engagement, and then who knows what would've happened.
So the truth is messy. My position is that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were NOT necessary to end WW2 and did not reduce the overall bloodshed within THAT conflict. But this action counterintuitively helped improve Japan's prosperity over the rest of the 20th century and may have reduced the likelihood of an actual nuclear war over the rest of the Cold War.
Your last paragraph makes a terrible moral argument: Yeah, maybe I am waging a war today, but's in the interest of the future peace!
I don't think your hypothetical assumption that 20th century peace could not be made without using nukes in WW2 is valid.
Why not even turn it up and say that future peace from nuclear weapons is impossible without living through the global thermonuclear war? Clearly, most people can imagine dangers of that, so they are perfectly capable of imagining dangers of only 2 nukes being used, without them actually being used.
I wasn't trying to make a moral argument.
With the information available at the time, dropping the nukes was immoral, and unjustifiable. The public justifications and the ones accepted by the standard western historical narrative do not hold up to scrutiny.
Despite that, I'm claiming that the decision probably inadvertently saved lives.
But that's not a moral argument. There were other means to save lives from nuclear apocalypse, and the US is complicit in its own actions that they've done to ensure a cold war with the Soviet Union.
I watched the film “Threads” last night, anyone in any doubt about the horrific consequences of a nuclear exchange should watch it. The speed at which society falls apart is simply terrifying. Those poor souls unlucky to be in a war zone will understand better than I ever will. The world needs a new order.
Congratulations to Nihon Hidankyo!
As said in the announcement, even 80 years after those bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we still need to highlight the dangers of nuclear weapons.
The threat and use of such weapons is still allowed by customary international law. Maybe movements like this will help change this sad fact. There has been progress in this direction. However, of course, nuclear-weapon states have been vehemently opposed to that, although they are obliged to negotiate a general and complete nuclear disarmament.
"Customary international law" is written by countries that can win a huge wae that are countries that have nuclear weapons, so they will not forbid themself the use of nuclear weapons.
As the name says, customary international law is not written. It arises from international practices that have become so widespread that states begin to recognize they have a legal obligation to continue them (opinio juris).
Current literature says that the non-usage of nuclear weapons has become a widespread international practice, but that the resistance of nuclear powers has prevented the formation of an “opinio juris” thus far. What is at stake is whether an international custom can be formed despite the opposition of certain states — as long as several other states acknowledge the custom.
Doesn't the history of war in the twentieth century (because we've got to start somewhere) suggest that "international law" means absolutely fucking nothing at fucking all when it comes to major wars?
Why bother?
What are you going to do to enforce it, invade the guy who just nuked/invaded you/your friends?
But the several other states must have nuclear weapons to enforce the custom on a rogue country with nuclear weapons.
What makes me really angry are the NPCs that constantly try to justify the bombing and that it was "painless". When I visited Hiroshima and I read about what had happened, I realized our history books were egregiously nonchalant about quite possibly the worst acts of crime against humanity.
Now that it appears the world is once again creeping towards nuclear stand-off this time with a very large non-zero chance that a country pushed towards existential crisis will not hesitate to detonate a nuclear device, it makes the people justifying Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuking as completely deranged.
I urge y'all to visit Hiroshima and see first hand the horrors of nuclear terrorism. When you attack civilians directly, its terrorism no matter what side of the fence you are on.
Not than many people died.
I visited the Hiroshima museum last year. They've got a set of stone steps, a person was sat there when the bomb went off and they were simply vaporised. The stone steps bear the residue of the person, almost like a shadow.
Visited Hiroshima over a decade ago during a school trip, and had a local guide that was a survivor. Very powerful.
As a teenager we also visited concentration camps on a school trip, and a survivor joined the trip from Norway to Germany. We got to know him a bit during the week long trip, and there was a session where he told his story. I'll never forget this, and I think it affects me to this day.
Soon we will have no Time Witnesses left.
Edit: I remembered a very specific anecdote he told, about how him randomly having learned to knit helped when in a concentration camp, as some officer wanted something to be made, and he then could sit inside and do that instead of working himself to death in the quarry. Based on this I managed to find his name again now.
Haakon Sørbye, thanks for telling us your story.
The atomic bombs weren't close enough to vaporize anyone since they were detonated in the air, what you see is disintegration which is a little bit different and instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing" the materials are torn apart and get embedded into the surrounding environment. Some vaporization did occur, but only on plants and the skin tissue of humans.
> instead of turning the human body into what could be considered "nothing"
You can't turn material into "nothing". At best you can turn it into equivalent amount of energy if you collide it with antimatter.
That being said I don't really feel the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration". In both cases you stop being biology and start being physics in a subjective instant. (at least from the perspective of your own central nervous system, which has not enough time to even detect that something has happened)
In both cases you go from a living, breathing, laughing, thinking human being into contaminants in the air or surfaces around you.
What do you feel is the difference between "vaporisation" and "disintegration"? Is it about how big your largest continuous chunk is? Where do you draw the line?
the specific definition is that vaporization turns solids and liquids into gas or plasma, while disintegration means being broken into pieces. the difference between a gas and a solid, and also fine solids suspended in a gas, is fairly well defined.
That makes sense! Thank you. Gas or plasma vs solids is indeed a well defined difference.
By "nothing" is that there isn't a piece of you that is still you. Disintegration means that we can still find pieces of "you" in the environment. Not sure if there's any recoverable DNA left thought, that was most likely destroyed by the other waves of the atomic bomb.
Are you sure that's the explanation?
It could be (and I think it's more likely) that the rest of the stone was lightened, and the part in the shadow, wasn't.
No "residue of a person", just literally "shadow".
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone
At that distance you wouldn't be vaporized, but burned. What you see on the steps is not vapor deposits, but rather they are shadows.
The immense heat and light from the detonation burned/discolored the stones, but not in the shadow of the person sitting on the steps. Hence why you can see these 'permanent shadows' in various places in the city. Some caused by humans, but most are just shadows of structures. For example bridge railings: https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/photographs/hiroshima/im...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone
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Of course the reminder of the impact there and the ongoing risk is nice but is this really a relevant and current choice? Why not last year? Why not ten years ago? What success have they even had? Considering where we are right now. This isn't a group making an impact on the ground anywhere right now. Many of the winners in recent years have been civil & human rights activists in real fights on the ground in their countries/regions. The public will take the reminder but mostly shrug the news off.
This discussion proves the importance. We are so far from properly appreciating the horror of nuclear weapons. One would think that after nearly eighty years Americans would be able to apprehend our crimes against the innocents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with clear vision.
As some other commenters have pointed out: It is lamentable that the focus is almost always on the atomic bombing itself instead of why it came to that point at all.
Many Asian countries feel scant sympathy toward Japan. From Indonesia to Malaysia to the Philipipines or even worse and for much longer, in Korea and China. In each of these countries the Japanese perpetrated massacre, forced labour, gang rape and forced prostitution in the millions. Even European women who were stranded in their former colonies were not spared. In fact their diaries are the foremost historical sources.
Their brutality is such that the hatred towards colonialist European nations were ameliorated and pretty much forgotten these days. It's sickening to me that outside East and Southeast Asia itself, most of the world only remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima when it comes to casualties in the Pacific theatre of WW2.
This sympathy felt even more misplaced considering even to this very day, unlike Germany, Japanese historiograpy deliberately downplays Japan brutality during occupation or that there was any aggression on their part at all. Most Japanese college mates in the US that I've talked to were not even aware that Japan occupied my country for years resulting in millions of casualties.
There are also well-maintained shrines (like Yasukuni) to the Japanese war criminals frequented even by high-level politicians (former PM went there, current ministers went there). Imagine that in current Germany!
The Yasukuni situation is more complex than "the shrine for war criminals". A lot more people are enshrined there, the war criminals are a tiny fraction (and were only added in 1978, while the shrine was established 109 years earlier). To give you an example of an important and less controversial figure enshrined there: Sakamoto Ryōma. There are 2+ millions souls enshrined there.
You can separate one group of innocents killed horrifically from other innocents killed horrifically.
No one goes around expecting New York City to attone for the events that led up to 9/11.
What did nyc or the US do to deserve 9/11? On the other hand what Japan has (usually brutally) killed way more innocent people in Asia than those killed by the A-bombs
No one said deserve.
But if we’re just going to use the states’ body counts as justification, you’ve sort of answered your own question.
Not sure if that organisation is making progress, sounds like a smoke bomb, to please people who care about these meaningless rewards
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/385216...
The chances of a nuclear bomb being used in the next 30 years is at least 90%. That's an opinion so don't ask for a link.
Why? Purely because of the combinatorial math of proliferation, and the likelihood of either an accident or a crazy person getting control of a bomb.
I wish it weren't so, but eventually your luck runs out.
Nuclear weapons are not used not because they are morally unacceptable, but rather because of MAD and their limited efficiency when used against armies.
If you wanted to give a Nobel Prize to someone for preventing nuclear wars, give it to Nuclear Winter researchers and military analysts.
You mean like the small guns, right? They are not being used not because society deems it morally unacceptable, but because the gun owners are afraid they will be counterattacked with guns.
I just had an argument about madness that is MAD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41776112
Actually, it would be interesting if someone researched the relationship between gun culture and acceptance of MAD. Both on national (cultural) and individual level.
People whose prediction skills are so bad as to use a gun without a good reason tend not to get in charge of nuclear weapons.
And yes guns are used as a deterrent a lot more than they are used to shoot to kill.
MAD is everything that held it all together during the Cuban missile crisis. Later countries agreed not to pursue ABM so as to keep the deterrent.
Your snark is misplaced.
The Hibakusha's firsthand accounts and efforts have kept the horrors of nuclear war alive in the world's consciousness, helping to build a lasting taboo against the use of such weapons.
An excellent choice.
I have no issue with this laureate, but it is sad that the comittee could not find someone deserving that is working on a more current conflict. I guess this is not a positive outlook for the current state international conflicts.
At a time when Russia threatens the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Israel and Iran escalate tensions, North Korea tests missiles and warheads… it is hard not to relate the award to these circumstances.
Perhaps the committee thought it was best to express its opinion on current conflicts indirectly, as it has done so in the past.
> Perhaps the committee thought it was best to express its opinion on current conflicts indirectly, as it has done so in the past.
I do agree, and this is my point: this particular committee expressing concern rather than celebrating success is a source of lament to me.
I'm just glad it looks like a legitimately given out award this time, instead of giving it to e.g. Peres, Arafat, Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi, etc.
Obama is by far the most vapid recipient of the award, but I wonder if he is also the best representative for the lack of peace given his legacy of "Yes we can, (but we don't)."
The reason we seemingly can't have peace is because we deliberately refuse it.
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> I have no issue with this laureate, but it is sad that the comittee
You have no issue but it is sad?
> could not find someone deserving that is working on a more current conflict. I guess this is not a positive outlook for the current state international conflicts.
Just any issue would be fine for you? Or could it be some specific issue that you care abuot.
I see no issue with this org being nominated. Their advocacy seems to be right and useful. Good for them. On the other hand, reading the declaration, it's pretty clear that this nomination does not exist to celebrate good news. That is the sad part.
> Or could it be some specific issue that you care abuot.
I, of course, have causes that are closer to my heart. But even if it was a conflict I had no previous knowledge, learning about it through the news of its end, or even that people are working hard to solve it, is kind of beautiful. Peace in our time is always awing.
Since over 2 years, we again live now under the constant real threat of a nuclear war. Or this is at least what Russia is regularly claiming. This is very current as long as Putin doesn't get his s** together.
Of course there are other current candidates who would also deserve it, but I think it might be also a matter of how hot and current the problem is, and how much political impact this message would have. Russia and their threats are cooling down for the moment, so it's "safer" to send this message, instead of anything related to the Middle East, for example.
A good one this year. Some past recipients, not so good...
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Yes, this is a generic tangent—somewhere between generic and offtopic, actually—and certainly a flamewar tangent, so it is correctly flagged. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I believe the west cares that much to pretent that they have doubt about interfering drastically in the life of heterogeneous and diverse view people grouped together geographically and called country. Showing that they respect independence and self governance. A rigteous self image to cloak cowardnes towards risky acts you know.
Also global assholes cover each other's ass and there are quite a few of them.
The risk is that if you start bombing Iranian nuclear facilities that they immediately start manufacturing a nuclear bomb.
Start..?
Current intelligence believes Iran is not actively building a bomb, although the time to do so is very short if they choose to.
and how exactly will they be able to do so without any nuclear facilities?
You cannot guarantee success on knocking them out. You cannot guarantee other countries won’t make the situation vastly more complicated.
I have a feeling this will change real soon.
I wish you were wrong because that means shit that is hitting the fan real hard and I'm not up for this.
"I died, I swear, when the ABC said we're going to war, I really believed we wouldn't fight no more" Edge of the World Pt. 3 by Pond
50/50 but yeah it's like Israel attempts to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Problem is they are buried so deep now that it's pointless and at best a slight delay. Only the US (or maybe China or Russia) to get at facilities that deep and I don't see that happening unless Trump wins. Biden/Harris will never sign off on that.
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yeah the peace prize has completely lost any credibility that it may have had.
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That’s because he is manipulating you with scare tactics, much like virtually every other topic. Great Depression 2! Dog eaters! Rapists!
Every other sentence is an appeal to fear.
Not really. I can see through his nonsense like the Haitians comment was hilarious. But if I’m choosing between a politician that says nuclear war is a high existential risk and talks about ending wars, and his opponents who seem to get off on prolonging them, I have no problem making that choice.
It’s very sad to voice support for a man you believe is actively lying to you and your peers. That, to me, feels like hatred for your own politically affiliates even.
You're right. Biden and Harris never lie. I'll support them.
Genuinely interested: if Trump talking nukes is 'one of the reasons (for liking him), what are the others, and do they include his talking about soldiers and generals?
He wants a secure border, and to end the wars in the east. You don't support those things?
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This comment is simply stating historical facts. It's not unsubstantive. The actions of the US military in this particular case are relevant to this story. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II caused an estimated 140,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, according to some sources.
Your comment was (1) obvious, (2) inflammatory because of the context and the fact that it added zero extra information, and (3) snarky because of the internet trope you added ("our friendly reminder"). That means it was both unsubstantive and flamebait, even though it mentioned a fact.
Also, your account has been posting comments like this a lot, where by "like this" I mean low-information and high-inflammation. This is not what HN is for and undermines what it is for, so it you could please stop this, we'd appreciate it. You're still welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully, of course, but it you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules (such as avoiding snark and flamebait), we'd appreciate it.
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I'm also of the opinion that MAD has been the largest single greatest cause of peace in the past 80 years, but I disagree that this award is bad. The reason we haven't seen a single use of nuclear weapons since then, not even relatively small ones, is because of the nuclear taboo that organizations like this have engendered
It is, as so often the case, a classic prisoner's dilemma problem [0]: "no nukes" is pretty clearly superior to "any nukes at all", but "they have nukes but we don't" is game over, so... nukes for all (major world powers)!
It's awful, but that's the prisoner's dilemma for you. I have a hard time respecting any anti-nuclear activist who doesn't at least acknowledge this facet of things, even if "no one has nukes and no one can easily get them" really would be best for the world.
[0]: if anyone hasn't seen it before, the interactive https://ncase.me/trust/ on the iterated prisoner's dilemma is excellent
If the past 8 years have shown us anything, it's that we are capable of electing incredibly stupid people who likely would get us into war if being blown back into the stone age weren't a possibility. I like nuclear weapons for that reason. It scares tyrants into complacency on the larger scale.
No, I disagree.
There hasn't been a hot war between nuclear powered states, ever.
This is pretty obviously superior compared with the previous "no nukes" era, that had plenty of hot wars...
Define "hot war". There have been plenty of fighting in border regions of India and Pakistan in recent years, and both have nukes. India since 1974 and Pakistan since 1998.
There have been plenty of wars being fought. And even proxy wars between nuclear powers!
But those don’t affect you.
And I’m sure you are 100% convinced that if we could snap our fingers and give all sovereign states nukes then all fighting would stop. So what’s the point.
And if you’re wrong? Then we only risk the permanent destruction of advanced human organization. No biggie.
I would contend that it's really interconnectedness (aka globalization) and the general march of technology (especially long-distance weapons) that have contributed to the (very) relative peace of the post-WWII age, but I will readily admit that your point of view is very reasonable and there is a genuine discussion to be had here.
Chinese troops and Soviet planes were there in Korea.
God, spare the world from nerds and their game theories. There have been enough nuclear trigger close calls already.
> spare the world from ... game theories
I don't think this point of view is at all defensible. The "game theory" I am referencing is the most basic thing, the very foundation of that discipline, and if you don't think it is applicable, I posit the following scenario:
Consider the Cold War-era state of affairs (because we seem to be heading back that way, at least a little bit), with the following variations:
A. Nuclear weapons do not exist.
B. USA has nuclear weapons. Russia does not.
C. Russia has nuclear weapons. USA does not.
D. Both USA and Russia have nuclear weapons.
Suppose you're an American. (WLOG, so adjust appropriately.) Now rank those four possible scenarios in order of your personal preference.
Personally, I'd rank C dead last. If you don't... why?
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I kind of agree, but we have way too many bombs just floating around.
How many nukes does a country need to have readied in order for mutually assured destruction to be relevant? I feel like 100 would be enough to deter any aggression, and if two countries unload their full arsenal at each other would not end life on earth.
Russia and US have closer to 10,000 between them which could pretty much end humanity on any day.
How did you come up with the number 100?
Nuclear weapons have not prevented major world powers from engaging in proxy wars. As we can see today in the Middle East, proxy wars can make things dangerous and more likely to lead to an unwanted escalation.
Mutually assured destruction works best when the number of involved parties is limited. If every state were to have a warhead of its own, many risks would increase: those of miscalculation, nuclear proliferation to non-state actors, etc.
That's not applicable to the mullahs in Iran. If they have they'd use it on Day 1.
Just don't use nuclear weapons
What if a fanatical leader has them? Castro said he would have nuked the US if he could and didn't care if Cuba gets destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtUfBc4qQMg
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Not at all. A fanatic wouldn't feign it, they'd do it. Self destruction be damned.
So why mention Castro?
Because the person I responded to said that if everyone has nukes we are safer because of MAD but if Castro had nukes he would have used them!
Fanatical leaders don't give a damn about MAD
The linked video, which is a claim by somebody who isn't Castro, said that he recommended using them as a response to a US attack - not unconditionally. It's the principle of MAD, and the same as the US doctrine.
How do you know that Castro would've used them?
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> Also, those bombs saved a lot of lives. I know many will disagree, but it's true.
This is a hotly, perhaps one of the most hotly contended, modern questions of World War II. To say what you said so blithely betrays your ignorance on the subject.
General modern consensus suggests that the first is up for debate for various reasons, but that the second one really didn't do much to change the Japanese government's course.
Regardless if you disagree with that above statement or not, positioning your uninformed opinion as fact is a bad look.
A specific strain of 20th century revisionism considers their use questionable in academia, it isn’t remotely a consensus (outside JP) and it certainly isn’t modern.
It's not a "specific strain", it's an overwhelming consensus that "both weren't necessary". There are, of course, people who take hard lines that "both were necessary", but they are in the minority.
At this point the argument has shifted to "was the bombing of Nagasaki necessary to end the war" with the common thought agreeing more or less that some initial large show of force was necessary.
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I don't think that negates the work that these organizations do. The degree to which nuclear weapons are developed and proliferated is not binary.
Suppose we grant your premise. Indiscriminately massacring entire cities of men, women, and children saved the lives of some soldiers. That's barbaric.
> I know many will disagree, but it's true.
I know you will disagree, but you are wrong.
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Depleted uranium ammunition is not a type of nuclear weapon since its method of dealing damage is kinetic, not a nuclear reaction.
Ironically enough you calling these "nuclear weapons" only serves to confuse people and soften the nuclear taboo.
They are clearly atomic weapons - they are made of atoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb
Stop.
You know very well that depleted uranium rounds are neither nuclear weapons nor dirty bombs and claiming so only creates confusion.
The US' military usage of DU (not just in ammunition but also armor) has been controversial and you're free to critique it, but that's not what you're doing. Instead you lied and created these fictional "nuclear weapons" that the US is supposedly spreading everywhere, which is just not true.
> nor dirty bombs
Tell that too kids in Iraq and Serbia suffering from deformities. https://www.icbuw.eu/en/the-problem/scientific-data/
> created these fictional "nuclear weapons" that the US is supposedly spreading everywhere
In the current war in ME there's unverified accusation of US allies using EU (enriched uranium) weapons. Time will tell. https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/is--israel-...
> depleted uranium are neither nuclear
OK. I guess, you could say these weapons are enabled by the nuclear energy / weapons industry.
>> nor dirty bombs
>Tell that too kids in Iraq and Serbia suffering from deformities. https://www.icbuw.eu/en/the-problem/scientific-data/
How about you read my comment again? Emphasis on bombs.
> In the current war in ME there's unverified accusation of US allies using EU (enriched uranium) weapons. Time will tell. https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/is--israel-...
It takes a very special person to link to an Iran backed "news" website spewing conspiracy theories about Israel using mini-nukes in Lebanon.
You are so desperate to be right.
> Emphasis on bombs
Emphasize more on nuclear radiation.
> takes a very special person to link to an Iran backed "news"
Of course, there's no propaganda in the West, and anyone who doesn't tow that line has to be a special person and totally desperate, yeah? On trigger to make a racial/personal attack (despite the fact that I called out that the claims are unverified).
The use of US-supplied DU munitions has already prompted Russia to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. This is the point I was getting at in my original comment. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/07/depleted-urani...
> spewing conspiracy
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-congressman-denies-calling-...
Japan's national security policy is hypocritical given that it relies solely on the US nuclear umbrella for security despite disavowing anything to do with nuclear weapons, but unfortunately reality is not ideality.
Ukraine is the perfect example of what actually happens when a country discards its nuclear arsenal.
So yes, Japan is absolutely hypocritical and the Nobel Peace Prize has been the most vapid of all the Nobel Prizes, but for once this Peace Prize is actually trying to say something meaningful in an ever violent human world.
> Ukraine is the perfect example of what actually happens when a country discards its nuclear arsenal.
That's silly. Ukraine never had a nuclear arsenal. Ukraine had nuclear weapons on their soil, but they were managed, and controlled by forces loyal to Moscow. Had forces loyal to Kyiv tried to force their way into the silos they would have been repelled and a war would have broken out there and then.
Ukraine had a nuclear arsenal as much as Turkey has a nuclear arsenal because the USA stores nuclear warheads in Incirlik.
I agree that Ukraine was not a nuclear power even while they had warheads on their territory after the USSR fell apart, but I believe it was very feasible for them to become one.
Posession is nine tenths of the law, after all-- it would've been quite possible to just lock down a few silos and refuse to hand the weapons over. Russia as a state was highly disrupted at that point, and would've had a hard time opposing this effectively.
I'm not disputing that this would've been a very costly move for an already poor nation (in potential economical sanctions and also maintenance of the arsenal itself). Maybe the external political/economical pressure resulting from this would've ripped Ukraine apart some other way.
But I'm highly confident that Russia would not have risked annexing territory from an country with a few nuclear ICBM silos. No need even to have full control/launch capability, as long as there is sufficient doubt (on Russias side).
As a matter of fact Japan has no other choice than being under US protection.
I can't imagine a chain of event that would lead the US to get out of Japan volunteerly [0], nor Japan being able to kick the US out forcibly. It's just outside of the realm of possibility right now.
[0] they won't even move out of Okinawa as the whole island loathes the US base and gives the middle finger to their own gov to get them out.
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Can you please make your substantive points without name-calling and flamebait? We've had to ask you this before!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What's name calling?
Pejorative labels like "dumbest ever" and "idiotic".
From the guidelines: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
OK I've redone my post.
while Iran has them,
Present tense, you say?
What about right wing dictatorships backed by the CIA?
Is there any right wing dictatorship backed by CIA that has nuclear weapons?
i'm confused. what does Hidankyo have to do with large language models?
It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons. I'd argue the “nuclear taboo” is just the product of.. I don't just seeing one nuclear test video? It doesn't take the cataloging of witness testimony to see it's terror (though that may be important in its own right)
I'm not intimately familiar with Japanese self-perceptions - but from the outside it seems like post-WW2 the country really leaned into a view that "nuclear weapons are terrible" to the point of distraction - instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines. There seems to be much less anxiety about preventing getting into a similar situations that triggered WW2: neo-colonial military bullying and domination of neighbors, xenaphobic oppression of ethnic groups, sycophantic following of cultural leaders etc. and an intense worry about the more tangeable use of nuclear weapons - which I'd argue is something that even if it were to come to pass would almost certainly never involve the Japanese people.
I wonder how this seeming diversion of public attention is perceived in Japan itself.
As I understand it, the anti-nationalist narrative was repressed due to anti-communist agendas of the occupation forces (ex: freeing of nationalist war criminals)
Would be curious to hear from anyone Japanese on the topic
The general human tendency to focus on single short term events seems to be the main cause.
Let's compare using Wikipedia as a source:
Mass killings of large civilian populations should not happen. I don't personally see nuclear weapons as worse than incendiary bombs or artillery. It's the number of casualties that makes it horrible.The evidence we have is
* one early bomb is more or less equivilant to one conventional HE + incendiary raid.
* 2,000+ other bombs have since been detonated, a good number of which were orders of magnitudes more destructive than the early "first gen" bombs used on Japan.
Nuclear war with the larger weapons that followed would be considerably worse than incendiary bombs, in physical destruction, in immediate deaths, and in injuries and following mortalities.
It's all about scale. Not about the type weapons themselves. All the testifying of the horrors seems irrelevant.
Using nuclear weapons only tactically against counterforce targets would not be that horrifying.
I agree. I've been to the Hiroshima Peace Park or whatever it's called in English numerous times, but I can't say I've been anymore moved by it than any other demonstration of human brutality.
I can't register a difference between a nuclear bomb and, say, a GBU-12 Paveway conventional bomb. They both destroy and kill brutally, the magnitude is irrelevant and it would be great if we never have to use either of them.
A nuke and a pave way? That’s like comparing a 22lr to a 155mm HE shell.
I'm Japanese-American, so I can throw two cents in your hat.
Post-war Japan is against nuclear weapons to an absolute, but it must be admitted that the response to nukes in particular is just as much a kneejerk reaction. NHK literally spams the entirety of August with anti-nuclear propaganda every year. Japan's anti-nuclear stance is also hypocritically at odds with relying on the US nuclear umbrella for national security.
More rationally, post-war Japan is against wars of any and all kinds to an absolute. This goes as far as refusing to defend the US in the event of an attack on the US-Japan alliance; this was only changed recently in the last decade or so after strong pressure from the US to reciprocate the US's defense commitments to Japan.
Nationalism is a... complex topic. You will be considered a crazy person if you wave the Japanese flag or put up a flagpole on or around your house, but at the same time loyalty and reverence to the Emperor still remains strong and the country is politically and culturally very conservative/liberal with a very interesting mix of individualism and conformity. Most Japanese ex-pats actually leave Japan because they are more progressive and can't stand the conservative culture.
Japan is actually quite welcoming of foreigners, but there is a hard gentlemen's agreement that if you're in Japan you do as the Japanese do. Those who can adapt are welcomed, those who can't/don't are excluded and ejected sooner or later.
The Hiroshima museum, while advocating for a nuclear free world, has an interesting take on why the US dropped the bomb on them.
According to them, the US dropped the bomb because they wanted to show their strengths against the Soviets. It makes little to no mention of the bloody battles in the Pacific.
> instead of a more self-reflective "nationalism is terrible" or something along those lines.
It used to bother me a lot, until I realized that
- the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers ("you're not a god anymore...except for those who still believe you are")
- all surrounding countries have incentives to to keep distances from Japan (in particular as long as the US are there, Japan and China will never be allies, same for Russia), Taiwan being the exception.
I see no future where Japan nationalism is truly solved, short of these two things also getting solved. And boy is there no end in sight to this.
>the US purposefully left the Emperor in place with only a slap on the fingers
This was a deliberate political decision in an effort to not repeat the grave mistake of how post-WW1 Germany was handled which essentially led to WW2. Denying Japan of their identity and dignity would have risked an eventual WW3, and the US did not want to even entertain the possibility.
It also didn't help that practically all of Japan were not going to see their Emperor deposed or worse; Japan was willing to compromise on literally everything but the Emperor in making peace with the US and the west, and the extended Imperial family along with all the other nobles thereof lost their titles and powers in the post-war occupation and restructuring.
I think we're mostly in agreement. It was a strategic move and it might have helped a lot letting Japan get back on its feet. And it's also the move that left the deep deep nationalism in place and it's still here today.
Perhaps there was no way to have one without the other, but at least I want to look at it as a series of cause and consequences.
Crazy popular anime girl representations of WW2 battleships is the most funniest form of that reality IMHO.
> I'd argue the “nuclear taboo” is just the product of.. I don't just seeing one nuclear test video?
And yet some high ranking military planers were seriously pushing for employing nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Do you think they just haven't seen any nuclear test videos?
> It's a bit unclear to me why you need an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons.
Because humans keep building, and fielding nuclear weapons. Not sure where you live, but chances are good your taxes are used to build, and maintain nuclear weapons and the means to carry them.
So US has nuclear bombs, but japan is somehow not allowed to make their own? Seems like controlled oppression to me
Japan is free to withdraw from the NPT at any time.
If I were a gambling man I'd put some money on a chinese professor getting the economics Nobel Prize
You might want to consider a little more carefully before putting money down. There is no economics Nobel Prize.
"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony"
Where's that from?
Nice to see they do somehow recognize the whole association of people and not push to much about a single person. But the committee is trapped with the rules that push for this ridiculous individual centric point of view which is so out of touch with measurable realities considering what forces actually come at play to anything with large social impact.
Also on a side note:
>the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.
Well, first thing, this is a quite restrictive anthropocentric and restrictive POV for what count for a weapon. Putting appart all things that triggered previous mass extinction as they might not really fit the expectation of weapon and "ever witnessed as implied agent", ok. But let's consider European invasion of America: while this was not intended and per design, it somehow greatly leveraged on bacteriological weapons.
Currently humanity is also at war with biodiversity, and the scale is massive and worldwide, using a large panel of tools.
Of course we are more prone to empathy to our fellow humans, and nuclear weapons are abominations.