Nuclear winter/nuclear famine being fake is something I’ve suspected for awhile (without specifics, eg I never looked into the size of food commodity stockpiles.) I avoided talking about it partially because it seems infohazardous; “a nuclear war reliably inflicts famine on the victor” seems a lot like a noble lie that someone might spread to reorient militaries away from starting one.
I’m confused about how to relate to this, because I still think any nuclear exchange would be catastrophic for everyone (including the victor, and even assuming that use-nukes-to-shoot-down-other-nukes tactics work as intended). But, even if it’s good for everyone to be deceived about this from a nuclear-risk perspective, I think the collateral epistemic damage is bad enough that we shouldn’t have noble lies in this area; people need to know the truth about how resilient or how brittle the food supply really is, in order to be able to evaluate other risks like climate change or supervolcanoes.
Nuclear winter/nuclear famine being fake is something I’ve suspected for awhile (without specifics, eg I never looked into the size of food commodity stockpiles.) I avoided talking about it partially because it seems infohazardous; “a nuclear war reliably inflicts famine on the victor” seems a lot like a noble lie that someone might spread to reorient militaries away from starting one.
I’m confused about how to relate to this, because I still think any nuclear exchange would be catastrophic for everyone (including the victor, and even assuming that use-nukes-to-shoot-down-other-nukes tactics work as intended). But, even if it’s good for everyone to be deceived about this from a nuclear-risk perspective, I think the collateral epistemic damage is bad enough that we shouldn’t have noble lies in this area; people need to know the truth about how resilient or how brittle the food supply really is, in order to be able to evaluate other risks like climate change or supervolcanoes.