Note to people who haven't read the paper: This isn't seriously about building a nuclear bomb destroying super-ray. The authors even admit that this is waaaay beyond our current technology. The whole paper feels like a con attempt by the authors to talk governments into building smaller muon colliders as an intermediate step. Of course these smaller colliders could also be used to study concepts of a higher energy collider that could produce anti-nuke rays. But for the most part, these smaller colliders would be incredible physics discovery machines. Muon colliders are basically the holy grail of experimental particle physics. They offer higher energy collisions than electron colliders because muons are much heavier, but they also offer higher precision than proton colliders because muons are elementary particles. The difficulty is sourcing and accelerating them. This is insanely complicated, which is why noone has done it yet. But if you can talk some government knobheads into building it to study forced nuclear disarmament or whatever, the reason why they do it doesn't really matter.
In some sense the authors were already successfuly by triggering all this discussion here on HN about the purely theoretical implications on geopolitics (rather than the very real, down-to-earth implications for modern particle physics).
I agree with that. But this was expected reaction of HN. I will take your comment as a chance to quote the P5 report [1]
> There is a compelling physics case for constructing a 10 TeV or more pCM collider. Such a collider would search for direct evidence and quantum imprints of new particles and forces at unprecedented energies. There are several approaches: a 10 TeV muon collider, a 100 TeV proton-proton collider such as FCC-hh at CERN, or possibly a 10 TeV high-energy e+e– or γ-γ collider based on the wakefield acceleration technology. Any of them would enable a comprehensive physics portfolio that includes ultimate measurements in the Higgs sector, a broad search program providing access to new hidden sectors by producing a substantially higher mediator mass or probing even smaller coupling, and opportunities to produce new particles directly. All options for a 10 TeV pCM collider are new technologies under development and R&D is required before we can embark on building a new collider.
Mind that the original paper is 20 years old. Of course we could construct a more powerful intermediate collider today than the sub-TEV one suggested in this old paper. I think most proposals these days target ~10 TeV to study the Higgs and probe the rest of the weak scale for supersymmetry. But these are just the fancy high-end goals. There's a plethora of other things we could learn simply from building such a machine, because it requires so many new technologies.
I disagree, that the authors aren't serious about it. They are just aware and state it clearly, that it is not realistic with current tech. But I do believe, they would like to see it being build one day. They are from Japan btw. the only country that suffered from 2 direct nuclear hits.
"The whole paper feels like a con attempt by the authors to talk governments into building smaller muon colliders as an intermediate step. Of course these smaller colliders could also be used to study concepts of a higher energy collider that could produce anti-nuke rays. But for the most part, these smaller colliders would be incredible physics discovery machines."
So why a con attempt, when it is just logical to get there step by step by building smaller colliders, that also enable awesome new research?
If they would not have stated clearly, that the concept is too futuristic currently, then it would be a con attempt. But they did.
You should really read the whole paper. They even talk about some of the other amazing possibilities these smaller colliders would offer despite being orders of magnitude away from providing anything close to what the paper's title suggests. Also, the authors are all particle physicists and some of them worked on future colliders like the ILC - which was supposed to be built in Japan, but is currently put on hold (practically cancelled) by the Japanese government due to economic reasons. That must have really sucked for them. If you worked with any particle physicists, you'd know that they don't really care much about politics. They wouldn't care more or less about nuclear disarmament than other physicists. But they definitely do care a lot about their experiments.
Can't it be both? Can't they be excited to do more interesting research now or as soon as possible, but with the prospect of getting rid of the nuclear fear in the future?
>This isn't seriously about building a nuclear bomb destroying super-ray.
What a pity. Imagine how peaceful the world would be today if we could suddenly and irrevocably destroy every single nuclear weapon, across the globe, in one fell swoop.
Well, we better leave them entombed in their casings for a more advanced society to develop the technology to do this .. if we can do it for scrolls, we can do it for bombs.
On the contrary, the existence of nuclear weapons makes significant conflicts between large nations less likely, as both fear nuclear escalation.
Just a year ago, Chinese and Indian soldiers engaged in a free-for-all melee at the border using nothing but sticks and stones. Both are nuclear states, and they feared an escalation to a proper armed conflict if actual weapons were involved. Pakistan and India, also both nuclear states, have a localized conflict in Kashmir that has been ongoing for decades. However, neither state dares to fully commit to a decisive military intervention there. If Russia didn't possess nuclear weapons, it's not unimaginable to think that the US would have intervened directly in Ukraine, maybe even with boots on the ground. The US and Russia have been in conflict for the last 70ish years through proxy wars, yet neither has thought of pushing the big red button.
I believe that nuclear weapons, terrible as they are, bring about peace to a certain extent, as long as rational actors are involved. Nobody wants to die in a fiery ball of plasma.
"I believe that nuclear weapons, terrible as they are, bring about peace to a certain extent, as long as rational actors are involved. Nobody wants to die in a fiery ball of plasma."
Yeah, "as long as rational actors are involved". But people do go crazy. Like the pilot who decided to do suicide and take the whole plane with them. And some mad dictator, who developes late stage cancer and feels like he has nothing left to loose and feels betrayed by everyone also might say, fuck it.
Then there are religious nuts, who hide their fanatism, till they are in control. The world was already close to someone pushing the button too many times, but yes prevented by some rational actors, but I do not see, how we can take it for granted, that it always stays like it.
Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, given enough time.
That not using nuclear weapons is a rational choice, but somehow using conventional is, is far from clear.
That we are alive now is a fact. But that we have nuclear weapons to thank for it, is not. It is a common argument that the cold war would have developed into a hot war otherwise, but we don't know that. That it feels right is not a good argument.
But irrationality of nuclear weapons aside, it is also a fact that whole nation states act irrational from time to time. Invading Ukraine certainly wasn't, but it happened anyway. Taking both of these facts into account it is increasingly unlikely that nuclear weapons actually protect us from conflicts going hot.
Too bad we don't have similar planets in a comparison group.
Would it really have developed into a hot war though? Already WW1 made most countries way less willing to engage in another one. Was not enough to prevent the next one of course. WW2 was quite terrible even though nukes were used only at the very end*. Conventional Soviet strength was overwhelming immediately after WW2; it can therefore be argued that the developing nuclear stockpiles contributed to the Cold War as it happened. It would have still happened in a different way, but the Soviets might have eventually prevailed without the threat of nukes stopping Soviet tanks from reaching the Atlantic.
Edit:
*: Which meant that only the "true" winner nations were able to hold on to colonies and go on military adventures.
I was puzzled as to whether you were agreeing with me or not, but you seem to be thinking that a huge war that would see no military fighting taking place on continental Americas (yet again) would not be considered a "World War" (or even weaker, a "hot war") ? If so, I disagree with that.
Such a war might not necessarily be limited to Europe though, as the various alliances are spread globally, and thus the designation "World War" would again be appropriate. Anyways, my point was more that such a war would be much more unlikely with the Soviets as the hegemon across most of Europe. This doesn't preclude proxy wars from time to time of course.
If your history only diverges around the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's hard for me to imagine a likely scenario where the conquest of Western Europe (minus UK?) by the USSR wouldn't qualify as "WW3". (Maybe if it immediately follows WW2 - for which I somewhat doubt the Soviets has the strength for, considering the heavy US presence... and even then this seems like hair-splitting ?)
It really depends on whether the conflict stays restricted to Europe or not. A regional war is not a world war, even though Europeans might regard themselves as the navel of the world. As you say, a hair-splitting exercise for future archeologists (might actually be cockroaches or aliens) studying the leftovers of human culture.
> If Russia didn't possess nuclear weapons, it's not unimaginable to think that the US would have intervened directly in Ukraine, maybe even with boots on the ground.
At least 500,000 people have died to the lack of a solid western response.
I think there are several reasons for that. John Nash was right, and MAD has been a factor in global issues since then.
But some other factors could also have some influence:
The aftermath of WWII did show the world that for a nation, engaging in an all out war was no longer profitable. Wars have been profitable for most of human history, but now, with such reliance on technology and logistics, which are so much easier to destroy than to rebuilt, wars are a serious economic risk, with total economic destruction a very possible result.
Also, for many leaders in prosper nations, declaring a war would be a cause of political death, as the majority of the population would be against it, and continuing with the conflict would require a dictatorship or other forms of destruction of democracy.
I think the economic argument is very strong, probably stronger than MAD, and the democracy argument can have a small positive or negative influence, depending on the society.
Unfortunately, there are still a few national leaders who don't entirely operate under those constraints. Fortunately, I think they're still militarily weaker than the big democracies (if the US still counts in 5 years), so deleting nukes might still be a good idea.
Isn't there a middle ground? Suppose we could make ICBMs useless (known storage sites for bombers and ground-based missiles, lots of time and distance to track and destroy them in the air) while shorter-range weapons stayed relevant (smaller, easier to move, maybe spread over a battlefield). This could both keep the cost of a war too high to consider for great powers, while greatly lowering the civilizational risk caused by thousands of high-yield weapons on hair trigger.
For example, a border war between India and Pakistan or China would be a disaster that no side wants to see. But a massive ICBM launch due to tensions and miscalculations between the three biggest arsenals would have a much lower impact. These arsenals might even become irrelevant enough that they stop being maintained. Seems like a win-win?
It basically asks whether conflict is fractal, or whether it's patterns of outbreak are self-similar at different scales. Is it like forest fire where, if you suppress it at smaller scales, it eventually reasserts itself at larger scales?
This leads to interesting hypotheses on the evolution of language (which is certainly conducive to less destructive conflict at smaller scales) among other things
Indeed, it is a world view, and not a nationalist one.
> On the contrary ...
You say that as the one with the weapons and thus, the loudest dogma.
Really, think about this again but instead - indeed, contrarily - try looking at it from the perspective of those nations which must always and dutifully bend a knee to the nuclear-armed thugs in their neighborhood. This would of course require you to apply something more powerful than any technology, and which is a far more effective substance than fission when it comes to producing peace: empathy.
Technological inequality is the basis of all oppression. Oppressors only get away with it because they have the technology to do so, and their victims don't.
There is much motivation to believe that the world would be a lot more fair and equitable place to live in without this technological oppression consistently and unfailingly being used to blackmail the worlds poor into submission. Especially in societies where empathy for ones fellow human beings has been sapped by relentless dogma.
Just because you can build nukes, doesn't mean your self-acclaimed "great society" [0] should consistently be allowed to lead the world into calamity and chaos, over and over again.
Which is precisely what the nuclear thugs are doing with their power. They don't make the world more peaceful - indeed, they make it more dangerous.
If bayonets were all we had to fight each other with, we wouldn't be so keen to do so. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate expression of utter irresponsibility for ones fellow human beings, and under the threat of their use, much atrocity has been committed.
Peoples who consider themselves truly equal, share technology for the good and do not weaponize it against themselves.
It is only the "moralistic" imperative to demonstrate ones higher power against 'the lesser, unclean others' that motivates the user to turn technology into a weapon ... so yes, de-nuclearization would, by definition, mean a lot more peace in the world.
Maybe not for those with the privileged nuclear buttons to push, initially, but not long after, certainly for those who have no choice but to live as though foreign uncontrollable powers may destroy the world within 45 minutes, any day of the year ..
[0] - This will always be met with resistance, because there is no true one great human society. They all suck.
Nations only get away with genocide because they have the technological prowess to do so, and that includes - but is not limited to - the ability to threaten ones enemies with nuclear annihilation.
Other means of technological prowess that can be used to get away with genocide include the mass control of information, the ability to pretend to be ones enemies, and the control of the education/stupidity of ones own citizen-subjects - who are, after all, the only truly peaceful force on Earth that can ever do anything effective about state oppression ..
Worth noting that with "disable" here they mean "trigger an immediate explosion with ~3% of their actual yield". That can still be a lot, expose radioactivity, etc:
> When the neutrino beam hits a
bomb, it will cause the fizzle explosion with 3% of the full strength. It seems that it is not
possible to decrease the magnitude of the explosion smaller than this number at this stage.
It is important to decrease this number to destroy bombs safely. We are not sure what this
means when the plutonium or uranium is used to ignite the hydrogen bomb. We may just
break the bomb or may lead to a full explosion.
If such a tech existed, it could give a new edge to MAD though, because just storing nuclear bombs would suddenly carry a risk of "spontaneous" nuclear explosions. This might already be enough to have a chilling effect. (Then again, it might not...)
* Likely a dirty explosion, spreading radioactive contaminants.
* The area where the beam is targeted (couple meter radius) gets a 1 Sv/sec dose, for about 100 seconds. "compared with the U.S. Federal off-site limit of 1 mSV/year"
I'm also curious if anything inside the earth gets dosed by the beam? I don't know enough about neutrinos to speculate.
Also, wouldn't one assume that these bombs have neutron shields on them, to prevent accidental triggering by the stray neutron source? Hence, they'd really need the beam to target _inside_ the bomb, not just near it.
Finally, skimming the paper, I didn't see mention of the energy levels of the neutrons they expect to hit the radioactive materials. Most radioactive isotopes don't have a large cross section for fast neutrons. Is it expected for this hadron shower to generate thermal neutrons? Otherwise, the beam would need to be several orders of magnitude stronger...
(Not that the idea isn't cool as fuck)
EDIT: Thinking about it a bit. If I understand the paper correctly, the beam has to be at 1000TeV to penetrate the Earth and hit the target, so you can't decrease the beam's strength and mitigate the above issues. But if the beam could be PWM'd, then you can effectively do that. And if you can lower the effective energy of the beam, then it might be possible to spray a slow and steady stream of neutrons inside the bomb, slowly decaying all the radioactive isotopes. It would take a lot longer, on the order of months, and would probably be detectable, but at least there wouldn't be that pesky issue of turning it into a small dirty bomb...
“In 1979, Carter acknowledged that fixed-based missiles were “becoming vulnerable to attack” and authorized full-scale development of MX to be deployed in Multiple Protective Shelters, a “shell-game” arrangement in the deserts of Nevada and Utah.
It provided for 200 “racetracks” or long oval roadways. Each of them was a 15-mile closed loop with 23 spur roads leading off of it to concrete and steel shelters. One MX would be assigned to each racetrack, able to take cover in any of the 23 shelters. For arms control verification, the shelters would have a removable “plug” in the roof, to be opened at specific intervals to allow the Soviets to see that there was only one MX per racetrack.
“The system consists of a missile, a transporter or fancy truck, a shelter or concrete bunker, a launcher decoy, and some cheap roads,” said Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Seymour Zeiberg. “For security reasons, a two-and-one-half-acre plot around the shelters will be fenced off. … The fenced area is the same as we use in the Minuteman bases. We expect that farming and grazing can be right up to the fence. … The roads connecting the shelters will be as simple as we can get away with.”
The footprint of the project was significantly greater than that, said local ranchers and farmers who were opposed to it. True, the total “public exclusion zone” was 33 square miles, but the clusters were not bunched together into a single space. The total deployment area took in about 15,000 square miles, some of which might be closed off in times of increased security.
That, along with more than 10,000 miles of connecting and service roads, would change the character of the desert region. Furthermore, the project would use large amounts of water, especially during construction, and deplete scarce ground water reserves. The governors of Nevada and Utah did not want the missiles in their states.“
I wonder what that means for our "dial-a-yield" designs.. The B61 can be adjusted to 0.3KT, 1.5KT, 10KT, or 50KT. Is the 3% yield on the smallest possible setting or the largest? Some of them used to be 10kt or 350kt -- 3% could still be a massive explosion if applied to the latter.
I think that to get the fusion boost, you need a highly-symmetric implosion, which isn't what you'd get by just toasting the TNT. Their 3% figure is presumably what they think you'd achieve by the bomb just "cooking off".
Hm. Do neutrino beams occur naturally in the universe?
From my almost illiterate level: It seems like a supernova will produce a bunch of neutrinos in one go. And they are affected by gravity. So a black hole near with a supernova could act as a gravity lens and "focus" the neutrinos.
Does this mean that any nuclear bomb has a (infinitesimal) chance of exploding with 3% of their actual yield, apparently on their own?
As expected, the example application given is only one option, and this is basically a long-range radiation death ray:
> We are certainly aware of the fact that this kind of device can not only target the nuclear bombs but other kinds of weapons of mass destruction and also, unfortunately, any kind of living object including human.
If I understand it correctly, from skimming the paper, this depends on the beam passing through earth without interaction and then "emerging" (starting to interact) at a precise point. Is that how these beams work at least in theory, i.e. will a "perfect" beam emerge in a point rather than distributed along a line due to the process being probabilistic? Of course, getting the beam perfect would then be the next challenge.
(Conveniently, this part of the problem seems to have been left for a separate publication.)
Ignoring the calls for it to be built by a "one world government", it would be difficult to do this in secret. Those that possess nuclear weapons would simply keep it from being built. Since it can't destroy all nuclear weapons at once but has to do so one at a time, using the power equal to the generation capacity of the UK, it wouldn't take long for any nuclear nation to detect this and simply nuke the source long before it could destroy even a small fraction of the existing nuclear stockpile.
As a thought experiment, it's pretty good. But there's no real practical application.
This is the same argument as having a nuclear missile shield that is 100% effective.
If such a shield becomes operational, then there's no reason not to first strike anyone without such a shield, as there'd be no repercussions.
So, by that same logic, the opponent knows this, and thus, it's in their interest to first strike, before the shield becomes operational. So the MAD doctrine no longer applies, and we'd have destroyed the world.
Therefore, even starting to make such a technology will very quickly spiral the world into a nuclear appocalypse.
This is why the ABMT was in my opinion one of the most important recent arms control treaties. Making sure you cannot defend yourself against a second strike with high likelihood will prevent a first strike.
An ABM system can be developed surreptitiously; it wouldn't be easy to distinguish ordinary research launches from ABM test launches, or to distinguish ABMs from other kinds of air-defense missile. Patriots, for example, are supposedly able to defend against ballistic missiles.
If you can't detect another state developing ABM systems, then the treaty becomes unenforceable, and is a destabilising factor.
People don't sign treaties that prevent them from doing whatever it is they want to do. It follows that the parties didn't want to develop/overcome ABM systems. When one of the parties changed their mind (under Ronald Ray-guns), the treaty ended.
But it turned out to be very difficult and expensive to build an ABM system that can protect much more than an airbase from ballistic missiles. Protecting something like the entire continental USA was infeasible.
If it is build deep deep underground, it might work long enough to get the job done. But there are other ways to stop such a project, besides nuking it.
> We are certainly aware of the fact that this kind of device can not only target the nuclear bombs but other kinds of weapons of mass destruction and also, unfortunately, any kind of living object including human. But we should emphasize that the device itself is not a weapon of mass destruction. The reason is as follows: The calculation in section 2 and
section 3 shows that it takes 1 second for this device to cover a 1 m2 with the radiation dose of 1 SV. It takes more than a year to cover the area of 10 km2 with this value of dose per unit area. It is extremely unlikely that no measure is taken after a few minutes of exposure of this kind.
I don't get it: it seems to be dangerous for people inside the beam, but it isn't? What kind of measures you can take if a city is aimed to with an invisible beam, probably from space?
Yeah, telescopes can see where the beam is aimed to buy then what? Neutrinos go through every shielding.
What am I missing?
The only thing I can think about is that to build that structure in space you have to be sure to suppress any missile from Earth and to win the war that your enemies will fight against you down here. Those are probably the measures to be taken.
> only thing I can think about is that to build that structure in space you have to be sure to suppress any missile from Earth and to win the war that your enemies will fight against you down here.
Absolutely. There are many technologies where if your enemy manages to create it you are already in an un-winnable situation. For example nuclear warheads pre-positioned in orbit with solid reentry boosters. If you have that you can nuke anyone with seconds of warning. The correct counter to this strategy from your enemy is to kill you before you can implement this plan.
Because of that you will want to sneak it by your enemy. But with this… even that is hard. Surely they will see when you light up this much energy generation no matter how sneaky you built it up? Unless you provide some plausible explanation, like hide it in an active carbon capture scheme or something.
Or you might build it in such a way as to avoid attribution. For example make a very stealthy von-neumann probe launched at the asteroid belt designed to reconfigure matter there for solar power harvesting and build this particle accelerator in-situ. You can disguise the initual launch as a failed interplanetary mission perhaps. And when it lights up pretend you didn’t know who did it?
It's going to take quite a while before humanity will start to routinely build those kind of structures in space, and disguise them among the others as we could do with satellites now.
The preparations and the launch of something that has to build a 1000 km wide structure won't go unnoticed. Add to it all the time it will take to build the accelerator in relatively plain sight for anybody that has a strategic interest to monitor space for weapons.
There not arguing it's safe. They're arguing that after firing for a few minutes at most, nuclear capable nations will have noticed it. Thus, the largest area you can "wipe out" is very small. Compare that to an actual wmd which has an effective area of many square kilometers.
That is like only about 12% of the US defense budget. And I'm pretty sure, much less than what the US has spent on ICBM interceptor research in the last 30 years.
So if it was feasible, I think it would have already been built. Not necessarily as a first strike weapon, but definitely something take out the birds in the atmosphere once they flew
Wow super cool, didn't realize that was a possibility.
1000 TeV when we're currently at ~13 TeV seems like one problem. 1000km ring requiring ~10 Tesla powered magnets likely be another.
Those "technical difficulties" aside seems like aiming it would be a massive problem. Would need the beam to exit and that exit would have to be movable - realistically pointing "down". Not like you can take a beam like that and just turn corners, haha. That "2d" picture of it hitting through the earth is ms-paint level optimistic.
Would nuclear weapons be the only thing affected? Feels like it would be bad to be on the other end of this thing if the beam spread was too big.
To aim the beam to targets on Earth you have to build it in space and be able to maneuver that pretty large Death Star. Probably just a ring instead of a sphere.
The invisible beam is probably a non starter for movies. If somebody will put this idea on screen they'll find a way to make neutrinos visible.
It's a neutrino beam... doesn't that mean it can be selectively directed to only disable SOME nuclear bombs... on the other side of the earth, where host country arsenal is not.
E: looks like the beam is actually aimed, I was expecting some explosion that takes out all nukes simultaneously. good luck finding nuke subs.
Although would a smaller version be viable ABM defense against nukes? Assuming you can hit them a few "minutes" and have them explode at 3% yield. Which is still kiloton range given full yeild of modern weapons.
And spray the resulting mess over a large population. Maybe you can hit them before they reach your cities? Over the ocean, the explosion might not be too much of an issue.
Looks you could easily defend against this thing by storing nuclear warheads in an empty cavern, suspended by ropes in midair. Most of the heating isn't from neutrinos hitting the target, but hitting dense matter in a wide vicinity of the target, creating showers of secondary radiation. So creating a void around the target should give you many orders of magnitude of shielding.
Come to thing of it, orbital nuclear weapons would be pretty safe too?
I don't think I've ever seen a sci-fi rendition of this concept. It means that an advanced enough alien species could come to a planet, from orbit disable all nuclear weapons and power plants, then start their invasion. Not as cinematic as a Death Star planet explosion, but sounds like a good tactical move for a galactic empire.
If you can travel between solar systems and have enough resources that you want to conquer (not just render inhabitable) a gravity well then you likely don’t need to worry about nukes - point defences will be able to detect and neutralise them before they got anywhere near your ship
If you have the ability to travel between stars, it doesn't seem like there's still need to conquer a planet for resources - except for resources that aren't natural.
For example, you can easily just get water from comets/asteroids, mineral resources from uninhabited planets (easier than to fight the inhabitants), and gas/fuel from the gas giants.
However, one resource you cannot get is slaves. Therefore, i predict that any advanced civilization that can travel between stars would actually invade to capture the life forms as slaves, rather than to extract resources.
I think if you have the ability the travel between stars you probably also have machines to do work way more effectively than using human slaves.
Maybe they could use humans for a zoo or something.
Well as two armed slaves, we'd be useless at handling their devices that require all 8 tentacles... We might not even be useful as snacks, having picked the wrong handed proteins. They might annihilate us out of frustration and build a hyperspace bypass instead.
I assume any civilization with the tech to get to earth would also have the ability to shoot down any nukes heading their way or simply throw it in reverse long enough to dodge them, no huge TeV particle beam necessary
In this paper 100TeV are called “totally ridiculous” but now scientists want to build a new hadron collider which would have that capacity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271297
There's more than just raw strength that goes into making magnets for a collider. It's the combination of strength, uniformity, and enclosed volume which makes things difficult.
A highly insightful quote, oddly enough from Jurassic Park:
---
John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
---
Imagine this were possible. You'd have just destroyed what is likely the primary reason that the past ~80 years have been this weird blip in history where there's been no major and unrestrained war between two world powers. The most obvious embodiment of this is the reason that the Cold War is now called the Cold War, and not WW3. There's also the reality that in this new WW3 which we'd near to immediately create, we'd likely see the rapid emergence of the chemical, biological, and other weapons that every major nation totally aren't developing.
Of course we do stand a good chance of destroying ourselves with nukes, but it's not entirely clear to me that we stand less of a chance of destroying ourselves without them. And adding to this equation is that if the nukes are gone on day 1, then WW3 starts on day 2.
> Of course we do stand a good chance of destroying ourselves with nukes, but it's not entirely clear to me that we stand less of a chance of destroying ourselves without them.
The problem with nukes is they're an absorbing state. Once the nuclear war happens there's no retries. Nukes present an x% chance of near-extinction over the next T years. That x% goes up as T goes up, asymptoting to 100% as T becomes sufficiently long, assuming no ground-breaking paradigm shift in global cooperation such as a single world government, which won't happen in our lifetime due to how hardwired nationalism and nativism is. Each generation, we're going to keep rolling the i.i.d. nuclear dice and x% will go from 2% to 10% to higher as T goes up, then eventually it'll happen. Recall that it almost happened in the Cold War, only one random person who stopped it is the reason you're alive.
The main argument I'd accept for nukes is that we need to reduce hot war in the short-term to accelerate economic and scientific progress, which will then reduce other civilization-scale problems (like climate change, pandemics, cancer treatments, diversifying life to other plants) to a point where the perpetuation of the nuke existential risk becomes justified.
FWIW I agree with you on literally every single point. Where we may differ is I also see far more viable threats. It's not just nukes but biological weapons (which could very easily prove a far greater threat than nukes) and then the countless number of ever-creative ways that the universe has to kill us: asteroids, super volcanoes, unfortunate gamma ray burst, etc. It seems fairly safe to say that all those living on any planet, anywhere, will inevitably face an extinction level event.
The only way to beat the game is to expand. We've lost countless civilizations on Earth, but we thrive yet because we spread far and wide. The same will be true on a planetary scale. WW3 will not only likely set back humanity many decades, if not centuries, but it's not like that it will be the War to End All Wars. As we start to regrow, tensions and conflicts will once again emerge, and we'll be back to killing each other en masse soon enough, repeating the cycle all over again.
The fact that our reaching the window in time to viably consider expanding to other planets corresponds basically perfectly to the window in time which we become capable of exterminating ourselves probably goes a long way towards explaining the Fermi Paradox. I doubt power seeking behavior is unique to our species. And war has the allure of power, control, wealth, and all that. And colonizing an inhospitable rock has, to most, all the allure of punching oneself in the face.
We aren't though. No current national governments are itching for a WW like they were in WW1 and WW2, plus now we have nukes. Possibly the only outlier is Kim Un who seems to think he can scare S. Korea into joining his clown show.
* Russia showing how to get ahead with invading your neighbors for conquest in 21st century
* Everyone else with expansionist plans taking notes and making schemes
* Russia again, pouring gasoline to every fire they see
* And the usual powder keg that the Middle East is
Meanwhile nationalism is on the increase everywhere, military spending is breaking records in anticipation. Millions of people relocate because of wars and warming climate. So it's looking to me like this one will get a lot bigger before it dies down. How big before it counts as a World War?
the interesting thing is, the device may have to be built but possibly never operated. the existence of this device would make all nuclear-bomb-holders scramble to disarm them.
OTOH we'd also have to know where the bombs are pretty precisely, if i understand correctly. i'd put the bombs on a nuclear airport luggage belt and have them go around in circles. makes a moving target out of them.
The authors seem surprisingly sanguine, even enthusiastic, about the prospect of a World Government. To me, it sounds like the whole world stomping on your face forever.
This is actually a great plot for a supervillain in a movie. Simultaneously detonate all nuclear weapons on Earth, albeit at 3% of it's power. That would seriously fuck us up.
Most nukes are underground, so most of the fallout would be contained. And the result would be a world not fearing anymore for accidental or intentionally nuclear anhilation.
So most would consider that supervillain a super hero.
It would work if the villain sells conventional weapons - we've been itching for a conventional world war for a while now, and nukes are the only reason we've not been able to.
Peace?
You mean there was no world war, but there were and are plenty of wars going on all the time. Also it is quite a risky bet, to assume all the actors will remain rational.
The only two actors capable of inflicting gigadeath are still the US and Russia. Both of them are ultimately run by oligarchs who want to remain alive, and have a population to lord over.
The actors who are genuinely irrational don't really have the number of nukes to do more than cause ~megadeath. This sort of thing would only happen once and then the actors would cease to exist.
That does actually sound like a good plot - do something ostensibly "villainous" by stripping countries of their beloved nukes, but be hailed a hero for it. As in, it would be an actually smart way for a villain to rehabilitate their image. And then, you know, 10 years down the line they could build their own super-weapon, perhaps. This is why I'm not a screenwriter.
For better or worse, autonomous weapons seem to be more practical, and something like this would be a pretty big deterrent against having nuclear weapons in the first place.
On my reading, the paper envisages that bombs will be destroyed by "cooking" the conventional explosive shell untilit explodes chaoticly [sp?]. In the event that the bomb's fissionable core is stored separately from the conventional shell, then it might induce the fissionable material to melt.
So I guess that if you targeted a reactor, you could induce a meltdown, given enough time-on-target.
On the one hand, this seems crazy and impractical. On the other hand, compared to constructing 60,000 nuclear warheads, this seems comparatively sane and practical.
From the POV of countries that do not have tons of such bombs is much better, also bombs exploding inside bunkers or submarines should make less damage then exploding on areas where it was computed it would make the most damage.
But IMO this will be used to scare the nuclear weapons owners, they will need to invest a lot into shielding all their bombs or reducing the number of such bombs, probably at that time when this tech is possible we will have antimater bombs
Nope. Unless you take out all the thousands of nukes at the same instant, you are guaranteed to get at least some of them sent your way. Doesn’t take many to wipe out a large part of your population.
The path of radioactivity through the missile facility would point at the facility with the beam, because the showers of induced particles would be along the same axis.
You then nuke that country out of existence, as is standard policy if governments fear an attack on their strategic capability.
You could also, eg, track the facility ingesting that incredible amount of power — whose signature would be basically impossible to hide from satellites.
In some sense the authors were already successfuly by triggering all this discussion here on HN about the purely theoretical implications on geopolitics (rather than the very real, down-to-earth implications for modern particle physics).