Yeah, you’re right I’m making an assumption that a “nuclear war” refers to a nuclear war scenario with current arsenals or those in the near future.
1) Future nuclear weapons, especially if they’re designed to kill everyone, could greatly increase the risk. Poseidon / Status-6 aside, I don’t think states are likely to invest in omnicide capabilities, for several reasons. One is that it’s a really hard optimization problem, and it’s easier to be able to just crush your enemy with standard hydrogen bombs. So why pay far more for something that doesn’t provide much additional deterrence capability? The other is that it’s staggeringly unethical, in such an obvious way that people in most cultures are going to shy away from it. I can see how someone could justify standard nuclear deterrence. But a doomsday device would be bargaining away literally the entire world and future for one’s own country, and even then it’s a poor bargain. There are some who would contemplate this, but I think their number is relatively small. The fact that such ideas have so far not caught on in a serious way in any nuclear power that we’re aware of is a good sign.
2) Very cheap weapons would be bad, agreed. I still think it would be hard to kill everyone with them, but it would at least increase the risk. And if they were continuously build and used, I could imagine longterm effects building up to greater systemic extinction risk.
3) Yeah, these seem like under-explored risks as well, though they don’t appear to have much deterrence value so I don’t expect military establishments to take them very seriously.
Thanks for your reply. One thing which is in play here is that Doomsday and geophysical weapons is the last resort of weakest side. If a stronger side has effective anti-missle tech and-or first strike capability, than having nuclear misseles becomes useless. This is a situation for Russia now. This is the reason why they are building Poseidon.
Giving the mindset, a county like North Korea may invest in Doomsday weapon, but not a western country. Russia and China also could do it.
Yeah, you’re right I’m making an assumption that a “nuclear war” refers to a nuclear war scenario with current arsenals or those in the near future.
1) Future nuclear weapons, especially if they’re designed to kill everyone, could greatly increase the risk. Poseidon / Status-6 aside, I don’t think states are likely to invest in omnicide capabilities, for several reasons. One is that it’s a really hard optimization problem, and it’s easier to be able to just crush your enemy with standard hydrogen bombs. So why pay far more for something that doesn’t provide much additional deterrence capability? The other is that it’s staggeringly unethical, in such an obvious way that people in most cultures are going to shy away from it. I can see how someone could justify standard nuclear deterrence. But a doomsday device would be bargaining away literally the entire world and future for one’s own country, and even then it’s a poor bargain. There are some who would contemplate this, but I think their number is relatively small. The fact that such ideas have so far not caught on in a serious way in any nuclear power that we’re aware of is a good sign.
2) Very cheap weapons would be bad, agreed. I still think it would be hard to kill everyone with them, but it would at least increase the risk. And if they were continuously build and used, I could imagine longterm effects building up to greater systemic extinction risk.
3) Yeah, these seem like under-explored risks as well, though they don’t appear to have much deterrence value so I don’t expect military establishments to take them very seriously.
Thanks for your reply. One thing which is in play here is that Doomsday and geophysical weapons is the last resort of weakest side. If a stronger side has effective anti-missle tech and-or first strike capability, than having nuclear misseles becomes useless. This is a situation for Russia now. This is the reason why they are building Poseidon.
Giving the mindset, a county like North Korea may invest in Doomsday weapon, but not a western country. Russia and China also could do it.