Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Thinking about the Unthinkable
Here are a few links regarding interstate war that you might find interesting.
Embedded at the top of this post is a long (by the standards of the Internet, at least; ~15:00) video depicting--in 8-bit video game form--every confirmed nuclear detonation from 1945 through 1998. You can view it full size here.
Related is a post on HowStuffWorks entitled, "What would nuclear winter be like?" In class, we discussed briefly the concept of nuclear winter. This post provides greater detail on the theory.
Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to one of the links that has occupied the right-hand sidebar since the start of the session. Erik Sass at Mental Floss has been recounting every major event leading up to World War I in blog form. This is a must read for history and/or international security geeks (like me).
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
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Clearly, the Cold War was a nuclear arms race that the U.S. won. Its just amazed me how much money nuclear weapons cost to build and how the U.S. launched over 1,000 of them. I know that by the end of the Cold War, the U.S.S.R. was spending an astounding 25% of their GDP towards nuclear weapons development. Nuclear winter is obviously not where any person would want to be. It makes me think that some of those apocalypse prepers are actually doing something constructive, but I still feel that nuclear war will not come during my lifetime. With all these weapons capable of wiping out millions of people, it makes you wonder what if a irrational terrorist group got a hold of them. That would sure be scary.
ReplyDeleteThis is why the Taliban and Al Qaeda are a major concern. Pakistan is literally a stone's throw from the Taliban (in fact, there are rumors that the Pakistani military itself is fostering terrorists), and India is a just a bit farther. If Pakistan is destabilized as Afghanistan was and is, the entire welfare of South Asia and the Middle East is threatened because of nuclear weapons. Terrorism is already a commonplace occurrence in both Pakistan and India, so imagine what would happen if the Taliban got to these countries!
DeleteBefore today, I had no idea of what Nuclear Winter was. After reading the following statement from the article, I got kind of scared: "The result is noontime darkness, plummeting temperatures and the eventual death of life on planet Earth." I believe that diplomacy could save us this problem, and after all the number of interstate wars have decreased over the last years. As Vishal and Jeremy commented, it is kind of scary, but I don't think it could happen in the years to come. We need to be the new leaders of a better tomorrow guys! Let's not let this happen...-Ces!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ces, Jeremy and Vishal that nuclear winter is definitely terrifying. It makes me wonder why humans would even built nuclear weapons in the first place, why would you build something that if used in war with someone else might cause the destruction of not only your enemy, but yourself, and to an extent life on planet earth. I mean I understand that if more places have nuclear weapons and second strike capabilities then conflict is less likely because of mutually assured destruction. However I wonder if more nuclear weapons are really better, because if an insane, non-rational, lunatic get control of nuclear weapons, and fires at any other country with nuclear weapons then they will retaliate and we will have nuclear winter. As I said it terrifying that the fate of our world might rest in the hands of a lunatic. I think a solution would be (if it were possible) to have aliens come in and destroy all nuclear weapons and notes on how to make them. Then they should brainwash planet earth to never make nuclear weapons again and never go to war again and then the aliens fly back home in their spaceship, but the likelihood of that is pretty slim, so I guess we will all just have to hope no lunatics come to power.
ReplyDelete-Feddi
All that can really be said of this is nuclear weapons are utterly terrifying and I never want to go to New Mexico. Unfortunately there is no way to guarantee that nuclear war will never happen, but its worthless to live as it if were, so I will just live as if they didn't exist and let the policy makers deal with them, and hope beyond hope that some extremist or the like doesn't use them.
ReplyDelete