Eh, this is good for crypto.
That's funny, my financial planning model is founded on the opposite premise.
Only if you stockpile lots of GPUs and generators
Just sucks thinking about starting over, try to make RISC V out of sticks.
Not if you’re dead, you won’t be. IMO the much worse fate is remaining alive in an apocalyptic hellscape.
Reading the first part, I think the best thing that could happen in the event some big red buttons get pushed is that if you're next to a military base you're probably going to be vaporized along with it if you can't evacuate. Trying to survive that kind of thing sounds way worse.
Was nice knowing everyone!
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/15/russia-poland-missi...
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russia-now-firing-s-30...
https://www.reuters.com/world/poland-blast-caused-by-missile...
In fact, in some rare scenarios, nuclear destruction might even make logical sense to someone in power. One such scenario is evening out the playing field when you are way behind everyone else in the race. Do you recall how playing the "Armageddon" card in certain scenarios of Worms could actually help you win?
Worms might not be a very detailed geopolitical simulator. The ninja rope was nice thoug.
How would we know, one way or the other? I mean, it only takes a few wackos to trigger such a scenario. And there are clearly a lot of wackos among 8 billion people. Doesn’t seem far fetched to me at all.
It is a well-crafted film, with a neat-o formal technique of only using found footage/ audio to describe the history of US atomic-age propaganda.
More interestingly to me, it offers a useful commentary about the contradictions between the use of media to present nuclear wars a survivable and possibly necessary event but simultaneously an existential threat that requires the total resources of the state to avoid. The ending of the film seems especially useful as footage of naive "duck and cover" drills is juxtaposed with (legitimately terrifying) images of actual bomb blasts.
I think, in general, it recalled this bit: "Christopher Isherwood gave expression to this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the motel room: "American motels are unreal! /.../ they are deliberately designed to be unreal. /.../ The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate.""
Interestingly, the detail in the linked document that made me think of a movie was the improvised lean-to shelter. One of the protagonists in the British film "When The Wind Blows" built one in his house while following a similar guide.
I used to really enjoy bringing Strangelove into my history of film classes as an opportunity to talk about obscenity and the end of the US PCA-- the opening sequence of "Try a Little Tenderness" across the mating of a tanker and a bomber is the first of many, many implied situations
But still, it's part of a larger apparatus of making nuclear war appear to be "reasonable" alternative when in reality it is a horrific crime against all humanity; if you haven't seen the film, you might enjoy how it presents these drills, along with all of the other apparatus of selling nuclear war to US population.
In all seriousness, in a true nuclear disaster the survivors will envy the dead.
Having grown up pretty much assuming I'd be incinerated by nukes at some point (I frequently dreamed of mushroom clouds on the horizon as a child), this is all nothing new to me. I've lived longer than I ever expected.
As an X-gen child of the 70s/80s I was at various points terrified of nuclear bombs!
Watching Threads when I was way to young didn't help...
There are times when I'd lay terrified in bed when I heard a jet engine over my house, and thought it might be a nuclear bomb!
An article I read a while back suggested that X-Gen kids have a form of PTSD from the Cold War!
An ICBM will take ~20-30 minutes from launch to hit the US. By the time you are notified, you will have 5-15 minutes to prepare. This goes down to minutes to seconds for dirty bombs/ground detonations or short range missiles (to which the US is not immune thanks to submarines).
There are all kinds of scenarios where a nuclear disaster comes into the picture but society is intact, while also massively disrupted. In such a case more people would lose their lives from panic, starvation, infection, lack of clean water than anything exotic like radiation or a nuclear blast. This is why I have some preps; it’s not to survive if the world turns into a Walking Dead episode but as a way to prevent dying over something mundane before help arrives a few weeks or months later.
There was a brief, happy span of a couple decades without duck-n-cover or shooter drills, though.
I've lived near Camp David and Site R for 50+ years, so we always joked that if the missiles ever started flying, we'd be the first to know and go.
Too close? Incinerated. Doesn't matter.
Goldilocks nearby enough for glass shrapnel? Dodged some glass by being under desk! Win!
Far away? Heard a distant boom while under desk.
Hard to fault really.
That said, I suspect these drills were more for theatre, like most of the TSA is now - put up a big visible show that you're doing _something_.
Reasonable people can disagree.
Thank to your leaders.
Because we as humans are seemingly only endowed with creative and innovative thinking when it comes to advertising, crypto scams or new JS frameworks, etc. When it comes to accomplishing something as basic as survival we seem to revert thoughts and prayers, and amassing even more weapons. It's frankly a mystery.
The sword of Damocles is indeed hanging over our heads. Morons hung it there, and morons stand around waiting to prevent anyone from taking it down. We should push towards denuclearization, and we shouldn't compromise. But also, we should have better public transportation. Doesn't mean that anyone mentioning seat belts is just a firm believer in the specter of car accidents. If you take the threat of these morons-in-charge and their nukes seriously (as I do), can't you see why someone might want to maximize their and their family's chances of survival? I'll note you haven't presented a solution any single person can work with either- perhaps it is a difficult problem.
Edit: There's an argument to be made that having a fallout shelter would make you more complacent. But I'd expect the average person who is worried enough about nuclear war to dig a bunker is probably more worried with that bunker than the average person is without it. The opposing viewpoints are "nuclear war is potentially possible and very bad" and "nuclear war won't happen". There are probably people who believe in a MAD-style argument for the latter, but my bet is that most of them just don't think through how scared they should be. Things have been fine so far, after all. Nevermind all the warheads just sitting in silos. This silent majority is not thinking about how to survive nuclear war. They, in their heart of hearts, do not think it is a concern.
Have you a gameplan to cause this possible series of actions to manifest in physical reality with zero chance of failure?
Exactly; it's a tough problem. Much as I admire my own intellect [/s], I hardly think I can come up with a solution by myself, no. If we were an "army of millions" who were thinking hard about the problem then we would have sporting chance I think - but we are not that many (which, again, is frankly baffling).
Other than that, for the record I don't believe this is a problem of morons vs intelligent people. Political leaders, leaders of the military, and the others that we might want to point fingers at in this context are probably highly intelligent. It's just that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The initiative likely needs to come from people that are not already mired in the system.
The hostile responses you've go this do rather demonstrate your point. Building peace in a world bristling with nukes held by independent sovereignties with limited information about each other and often incongruent self-defined 'interests', is indeed a hard problem. Hard problems require work and thought and research to try to solve. If conditions change to make the problem harder, more resources and work are required.
That readers here find that requirement incomprehensible for this specific hard problem is exactly the point. Peacebuilding (as an activity, an actual diplomatic project, not a hope) has indeed fallen out of vogue and out of the collective political imagination. Little being permanent in international relations, it could yet return.
It always creates a stir to point out the absurdity of our current predicament. If I was a psychologist I might conclude that this is because many actually share my deep sense of despair, but can see no other solution that to trod on "in the machine" so to speak. I can sympathize, but we need to start doing something, to prod the diplomats in the right direction if nothing else.
There’s something uniquely frustrating about seeing somebody like you, who has a completely naive and childlike worldview, assuming that YOU are just a genius and everyone else is an idiot.
I can’t speak for the OP, but this is an issue I’ve been interested in for some time. I think the alternatives are many, but it involves a multipronged approach, starting with reforming the financial sector, which helps fund warmongering in several different sectors, followed by slowly converting the defense industry into a civilian engineering sector (climate change remediation, infrastructure rebuilding and development, space based energy, transportation and habitation) combined with tearing the heart out of the arms sector and enforcing the law against so-called "lords of war" who help arm both sides. That’s just to start. The idea that peacetime can be more profitable than wartime needs to be a new mantra supported by financial incentives and large scale engineering projects that help benefit everyone instead of diverting resources to build more weapons and make a few companies wealthy while squandering the wealth of public treasuries that could otherwise support their people. The idea that war is a still a legitimate solution to a problem is the psychological hurdle that needs to be overcome. Nobody has to accept that this is the way it is. It requires courageous acts of individuals to stand up and say one word: no. I ain’t gonna study war no more. It’s really that simple. The hard part is getting the momentum for everyone to stop doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
Also frustrating:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...
More weapons that are likely to start a third world war by mistake is not a satisfactory solution IMO.
Poland is a NATO member, so that is the likely context of the submission.
