OT: Nuclear War???

[Renegade 13]

I was watching the movie "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" (a good movie by the way), and it got me to thinking about the very real possibility of nuclear war. How it is actually more possible than any of us care to think about. How it would change our lifestyle completely....at least, those of us who survived. We never know what day may be the day that some crazy person gets control of a nuke, and decides to usher in the end of civilization for mankind.

We would be reduced to the technological level that existed 2000 years ago....all around us would be remnants of the technology that exists all around us today, but it would be useless soon. World population would fall immensely, and I don't think I can even imagine anywhere near all the effects such a war would have.

For some reason, I felt like sharing this. No one really wants to think about it, but maybe we should. But eventually, I firmly believe that it WILL happen. Someone will be genocidal, or things will just get out of hand. Who knows when it will happen? But I think it will...

[bearclaw]

That someone will eventually detonate a nuke? Yes, I belive that will happen one day. That we will end up in a civilizaton-ending nuclear war? Unlikely. At best. IMO.

[Kamog]

With so many nuclear weapons that have been built, it's a scary possibility that some of them will fall into the wrong hands. Making an atomic bomb, I read somewhere, isn't very difficult, if you have fissionable materials available.

[Randallw]

Were our civilsation to fall or become extinct no future civilisation would ever reach our level. Why?. Because we have mined all the minerals freely available on the Earths surface. Future civilisation would need to develop deep mining technology to reach our level and they can not do that without the very resources they can not reach.

[Slick]

Kamog said:
With so many nuclear weapons that have been built, it's a scary possibility that some of them will fall into the wrong hands. Making an atomic bomb, I read somewhere, isn't very difficult, if you have fissionable materials available.

I share your fear that someday someone may get their hands on a nuclear weapon or even enough radioactive material to make a substantial "dirty bomb"; but even if that happens, that won't be "nuclear war" and I think it unlikely that there will be a nuclear exchange as envisioned in the first post here like the scenario of T3. Even if a weapon was stolen, they are designed to be as tamper-proof as technology allows. I'm not saying it would be totally impossible, but the very smart minds that created those things also ensured to the best of their ability that they could not be set off by someone who stole one. Let's hope that the unseen forces with the "white hats" who are trying to prevent this on a daily basis don't let us down.

Regarding building a bomb: It is extremely difficult; indeed impossible without some very-expensive-and-extremely-difficult-to-come-by equipment, the production and sale of which is closely monitored by the nuclear-capable countries. IMPO it is impractical. [As an aside, I would recommend reading Tom Clancy's "The Sum of all Fears" for some insight into this task - and remember, it is fiction]

As we saw in OK City, a truck with some fertilizer and fuel oil is pretty much a "precision weapon" because it can be driven anywhere and set off manually. You don't need any special skills, equipment or money to make one of those truck bombs to kill hundreds. As far as damage/kill potential, there are much easier ways to get to people or places. Drinking water reservoirs, shopping malls, stadiums, for example are all much easier targets - a relatively easier-to-get biological agent could infect thousands of people via any of these or countless other places. Infected people would then spread the biological agent to thousands of others before they showed any symptoms.

There are, of course, more of these targets than any country could guard continuously against all possible threats. So, yes, the "white hats" would have to be successful 100% of the time whereas the bad guys only need to be successful on a very small percentage of attempts - the odds of a successful catastrophic attack eventually lies with the terrorists. Any of these isolated terroristic attacks, however many thousand people are affected or killed, won't endanger the whole planet. I say again that I think a large scale WMD exchange between countries is highly unlikely and a worldwide exchange is even more unlikely.

[Baal]

A good movie to watch on this topic would be "The Day After." It takes a look at how an actual nuclear war would play out and how in the end all would lose. Worth a look.

[Will]

Randallw said:
Were our civilsation to fall or become extinct no future civilisation would ever reach our level. Why?. Because we have mined all the minerals freely available on the Earths surface. Future civilisation would need to develop deep mining technology to reach our level and they can not do that without the very resources they can not reach.

Well, if you think about it... that's not true. Really, we were just nice enough to bring all of it up to the surface. Sure, we've combined it into various different forms, but it should be relatively easy to take, say, a partially oxidized aircraft, and extract the aluminum and other metals in it. The bigger problem would be the amount of time needed for another intelligent species to develop.

[Atrocities]

We discussed the possibility of a nuke war a while back and the topic quickly become very depressing. The human race is determined to kill itself off. When the war for resources will begin no one really knows, but when it ends, I am afraid everyone will know. That is they will know for a breif milisecond before the bLast wave incerates them.

[Randallw]

ALthough it is true that human relics could be recycled for minerals, aLso consider oil. I do not know an exact figure, but say we have depleted oil supplies so that they will only Last another 50 years. ALthough our technology may well come up with an alternative power supply, a less advanced culture that develops after ours may find it difficult to have an industrial revolution if oil is sparse.

[deccan]

Randallw said:
ALthough it is true that human relics could be recycled for minerals, aLso consider oil. I do not know an exact figure, but say we have depleted oil supplies so that they will only Last another 50 years. ALthough our technology may well come up with an alternative power supply, a less advanced culture that develops after ours may find it difficult to have an industrial revolution if oil is sparse.

As an aside, Vernor Vinge's novel "The Peace War" describes a high-tech, low-energy civilization that I found fascinating. In that novel, high-energy technologies are actively suppressed by a global "Peace Authority", much like the Antareans in MOO, instead of being wiped out in nuclear warfare, but the result is a proliferation of extremely energy efficient, solar-power / geothermal energy based civilization focusing on super-efficient electronics.