I think what the two of you have identified is that the hardiness of logistics and coordination capacity seems like a key determinant of how well we’d weather a nuclear exchange. If it’s robust, some combination of stores and agricultural adjustments could allow us to avoid famine. If it’s weak, we might experience famine even if there’s plenty of siloed food.
The results of the original paper could be taken, then, as a proxy for the “logistics failure” scenario. What limited food we can access lasts us for about a year, and our practical ability to adjust our agricultural practices is minimal for one reason or another. It’s not couched in those terms, but it represents them.
I think publications considering outcomes under a range of logistics scenarios, as well as modeling the impact on logistics capacity itself, would be very valuable. My advice is that, while it’s natural to be angry about academic shortcomings on an important topic, it’s helpful to be collegial. If anyone here is hoping to produce any of this research, it is probably not a good long-term strategy to start by accusing your future colleagues of “lying,” short of a flat-out deliberate misrepresentation of current, verifiable facts as opposed to a contentious choice of predictive modeling assumptions.
I think what the two of you have identified is that the hardiness of logistics and coordination capacity seems like a key determinant of how well we’d weather a nuclear exchange. If it’s robust, some combination of stores and agricultural adjustments could allow us to avoid famine. If it’s weak, we might experience famine even if there’s plenty of siloed food.
The results of the original paper could be taken, then, as a proxy for the “logistics failure” scenario. What limited food we can access lasts us for about a year, and our practical ability to adjust our agricultural practices is minimal for one reason or another. It’s not couched in those terms, but it represents them.
I think publications considering outcomes under a range of logistics scenarios, as well as modeling the impact on logistics capacity itself, would be very valuable. My advice is that, while it’s natural to be angry about academic shortcomings on an important topic, it’s helpful to be collegial. If anyone here is hoping to produce any of this research, it is probably not a good long-term strategy to start by accusing your future colleagues of “lying,” short of a flat-out deliberate misrepresentation of current, verifiable facts as opposed to a contentious choice of predictive modeling assumptions.