"“This cavern stretches under the island as far as the volcano, and is only separated from its central shaft by the wall which terminates it. Now, this wall is seamed with fissures and clefts which already allow the sulphurous gases generated in the interior of the volcano to escape.”
“Well?” said Pencroft, his brow suddenly contracting.
“Well, then, I saw that these fissures widen under the internal pressure from within, that the wall of basalt is gradually giving way and that after a longer or shorter period it will afford a passage to the waters of the lake which fill the cavern.”
“Good!” replied Pencroft, with an attempt at pleasantry. “The sea will extinguish the volcano, and there will be an end of the matter!”
“Not so!” said Cyrus Harding, “should a day arrive when the sea, rushing through the wall of the cavern, penetrates by the central shaft into the interior of the island to the boiling lava, Lincoln Island will that day be blown into the air<...>"
Wikipedia: "The sound was claimed to be heard in 50 different locations around the world and the sound wave is recorded to have travelled the globe seven times."
The pressure wave was recorded around the globe seven times, on barometers. I am actively monitoring my digital pressure sensors on my home weather station and have seen the pressure waves from the Tonga blast go by 4 times and counting (2 in each direction). Hoping to see a 5th pass tonight here in Seattle at around 10:55pm. I wrote a little python script to predict the future passes based on the first two very obvious ones. Very fun.
If they were opposite waves (One negative wave, one positive wave, emitted from two points opposite on the globe) then yes. But if they are both positive, they just add in place where they meet and then travel away as they did before.
For an author who loved his engineer protagonists, none are more skilled than Cyrus Harding. This is the OG competency porn novel, and highly recommended – especially if you have also read (and enjoyed) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
They're not. Your post to some tweets doesn't count for 'exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.'
If you really predicted a volcano a year in advance you should present your methods and results in a better way before you start posting mildly condescending responses on platforms that allow people to downvote you
Also, you must be commenting in response to my deleted sentence: 'downvotes are signals of quality?' Is that not not correct?
I get how that seemed condescending because it could come across as arrogant: as in, "I do not need to care what these downvotes mean."
Before you replied, I thought about that sentence some more and I thought, 'Actually, it is not so optimal to leave it there.' Then I deleted it. Methinks you must have replied just after that...
Even thus so, your comment was unwarrantedly and very rude, do you not think? Perchance you know not of the difficulty nor courage it took to post all these things publicly...
But underneath that for you... I detect you are trying to help me, although if you will permit me to offer my feedback and to hear it, I do possibly think your delivery could be better.
One reason I think you are trying to help me is because you are essentially saying, "Well, what do you expect, if you say it like that here?" So, I appreciate that empathy which prompted you to care enough to reply but, I just wonder, what more is going on for you than the disbelief? Why even try to be helpful and if you are going to be helpful, why deliver it in that way?
It is kind of weird, do you not think? Perchance you do not expect anyone will appreciate your assistance so you prefer to fall from the first floor than from the penthouse and aim low with a sort-of rude response, rather than something genuinely or generously helpful. I do not know. Am curious. Please tell me more about any of this if you want, thank you.
A reason I am generous here is because I can tell there is more going on for you than just disbelief and rudeness.
But is not the real condescending comment the one that is so unwarrantedly critical of mine, pays it no merit, and misrepresents it to pretend it is less than it is? It does seem grossly condescending and arrogant.
That's an unwarrantedly rude, don't you think? Are you able to back this up more?
The data is there. I cannot have forged it. It is extremely close to what happened. Please state what your actual criticism is of that.
Which part does not count, in your belief, precisely?
In addition, not solely Tonga. Were you to scroll up that same thread you would discover the pandemic, too, from 2018.
I think it is more like your disbelief, or whatever it is, fails to count either as an exceptional claim or as exceptional evidence, against what I have there posted and here linked.
I get to feeling you are trying to help but your delivery could be improved I believe.
Is there more to your pandemic prediction than 14 months before Corona-19 was declared a pandemic your writing "I have an ominous feeling ... for the last few days I had a sense that a pandemic would come" ?
If not, then that doesn't seem a very striking prediction: public health bodies have been apprehensive for years, maintaining (to varying degrees of effectiveness) pandemic preparations. In the past 20 years there has been SARS (mk 1), MERS, several substantial avian influenza outbreaks, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and so on. Even a popular movie "Contagion" (2011) about a pandemic from a novel virus of swine + bat origin.
So there has been plenty of awareness of pandemic risks and the foreboding that someday soon the next mass human pandemic would arrive; plenty for your restless subconcious to haunt your sleep with.
Surely I’m not the only one wondering how many “prediction tweets” they’ve deleted?
It’s an easy scam, if you’re prepared to invest the time. Make lots and lots of quite vague claims. Delete the ones that don’t pan out. Cash in as a “futurist” on the TEd talk circuit or similar…
Trying to misrepresent what I do as an easy scam is very rude and uncharitable.
Before deciding to begin posting recordings of data to Twitter I wanted to do something that was publicly verifiable. As that was my intention I chose Twitter and decided to never delete any predata.
The only tweets I have deleted are replies to Threadreaderapp and maybe some other random accounts where I would make a comment but then not want to associate it permanently with this precognitive Twitter so I would delete the comment. I never delete any predata. You may find some way to verify that with Twitter, anyone who works there with the right access, will know that what I say is true. I am sure someone can verify that should they choose. I am fully confident of that point.
If that is your method of trying to misrepresent what I have done then I accept the implied flattery that what is there is so incredible that it requires such a, however cruelly delivered, attempt at misrepresenting.
Although your TED talk idea is somewhat crazy-sounding to me. I do not think people are ready for that real acknowledgment of precognition. I hope that is wrong, however.
IIUI for that trick they need to make those futurist tweets protected AND not allow followers, or we'd see them too? So try following and see what happens?
You may archive it in various ways. Followers may be a mixed blessing. Toxic hurtful people I would block to protect myself. It is a public archive for me. If people appreciate that, then that is great.
For many years I was reluctant to tell people about what I could do. The misrepresenting and cruelness hurts. And I did not feel strong enough before to share that. I was afraid that the mean words of another my damage my belief and my ability. Although I have been skeptical I know it is also necessary for me to believe. I wanted to regulate my emotions and thoughts about this ability as I went through the process of development. Prematurely sharing and exposing myself to the cruelty and misrepresentation of others, was something I was afraid would harmfully interfere with my ability to regulate, on my own terms, my emotions and thoughts about this, and I was scared it would also impact my development of my abilities.
So I carefully shared at each stage. Posting here today was another step for me. The significance of the Tonga event and the clarity of my predata on it is a milestone for me.
I knew something huge was coming but I did not anticipate the predata would be such a stunning hit.
Although, there are inaccuracies. I had the water and land mix, I had the undersea volcano and tsunami but I said North Pacific Ocean. When in fact Tonga is in the South Pacific ocean.
If you examine the history of my recorded predata and analysis and association with possible event hits you will see that these types of inaccuracies, either in time, geographic location or the event type are present.
Finally, in response to your earlier comment, I see it was perhaps a tactical error to respond to the misrepresentation of my work by adding additional examples to this thread. I anticipated that would expose me to further risks by little targeting more days then just the Tonga data. But for some reason I was careless and did it anyway. Perchance it is this: the pandemic data really stands out for me and holds its own.
Thank you for the "amazing." But the rest of it: that is a misrepresentation. I am not saying You must Believe. I am saying some data is on Twitter and you can look at it. It seems some people do not do that. It seems some people cannot see past their confirmation bias.
I am saying remain open, remain curious, do not prosecute a confirmation bias, especially not on another, do not think that justifies you to be cruel to another. I posted my precognitive data on the Tonga event. There is nothing there that warrants cruelty. I am saying be kind tolerant and charitable in your responses. Do not assume the world must conform to your own understanding or belief of it.
There is much in the world which exists beyond your understanding. And that is okay. I do not understand how predata works. I do not understand any 'mechanism' for it. But I know how to do it. I am saying ignorance gives you no right to cruelty. Perchance it is that which helps people to so much fear and anger about this. There is a slice of the world which they know naught about, and within their existing beliefs they cannot conceive its existence, so they attack the idea and anyone suggesting it with all their cruelty. Perchance that explains but not excuses the cruelty: the wrath of the stubbornly ignorant?
"Schizo ramblings", huh? well how do you explain how I can get results?
You're the only schizo... Splitting off your reality from what you're too afraid to face.
Disabled? I'm more like super abled. You're the only disabled.
You're just jealous I can do this, and you can't. So... well thought points that address everything relevant, that's "schizo ramblings" to you? Then it's your mind that's the problem, not what I write. The visions you get just mean you're crazy, but mine are actually of the future. Drives you nuts, doesn't it?
So you're not going to be mean? How nice, should I be grateful to you, for your attempts at abuse then? is that how you'd like it? Is that what you need?
> Your posts sound like schizo ramblings so I'm not going to be mean in case you are actually disabled.
So "schizo ramblings" that's you not being mean, right? Well you must be projecting. Maybe get some help to deal with how disabled you are, before trying to pretend other people are schizophrenic like you, that's just your desperate attempt to make yourself feel your pathetic nothing of a life is not completely without power.
Are you actually claiming that you can pre-cog the future and predict future events? Sorry for interjecting myself on a 12 day old thread but just saw this new comment.
Basically, yeah. I think it's pretty clear what I'm claiming. Just check out the Twitter, man. Hopefully you'll be more open minded than the rest of them. :)
Just one more idea about the subconscious thing to the comment that made that: it's not that, nor fear, nor other emotion.
It's a distinct cognitive process, and impression. First I percieve the signal, it feels like an energetic pressure (to those who can sense the energy of other people... The energetic pressure sensation is like that but not exactly the same). Then I can look into it to resolve details, which involves interpretation.
I can also go looking for data in a given place or time, instead of just waiting to percieve a signal. While some of my previous reports on Twitter, including involving an Indonesian air crash, were made after actively looking for signals, most of my recent work on Twitter has been receptive to signals rather than looking for them.
This whole process (sensing a signal or looking for one, connecting to and looking into the data, interpreting the information, then recording what I see and so on) is completely distinct from any subconscious thing, or fear, except in the way I'll outline just now. Because at the same time when I'm looking into the data, I will percieve many things: including emotions, sounds, visuals, smells, sensations, ideas (and so on) and the interpretation of the signal and these data also depends in part on my subconscious, in terms of my wide accrued experience giving me a way to interpret a wide variety of things... So the subconscious is there, of course, just like in any other thing that people do, but the role it plays seems mostly interpretive, and the signal certainly doesn't arise in the subconscious at all. So that's to clarify some things, and I think these are very important misunderstandings and it's important to get it right.
the criticism is that it is necessarily entirely coincidental, due to there being no possible mechanism for these signals. if you really are under the delusion that you are predicting volcanic eruptions based on dreams, perhaps speak to a mental health professional rather than posting on twitter and hn?
That is an extremely rude misrepresentation and attempt to pretend I am less than I am.
That is an unkind, cruel way to react simply because you do not believe it is possible. Rather than maintaining curiosity and being open that there is something new you could learn in the data, you aggressively perpetrate a confirmation bias, and try to pretend someone is less than they are, and try to hurt them, and think it is okay to do that. It is very wrong.
The only delusion here is yours: that reality must conform to your current belief of it. And arrogant that nothing outside your necessarily limited understanding must exist. And wrong to perpetrate your own chosen closed-mindedness on others with cruelty.
I remain a little skeptical and in the past have considered that it is all a delusion. And if so, good, I would give it up. I am unattached. But the data convinces me otherwise. It is not a delusion. I am sure. I too have no explanation for how it is possible.
It is you who is deluded to be so arrogant and you who is the only one under a delusion, which includes your believing that the cruelty in your comment is either appropriate or warranted. Perhaps speak to a mental health professional rather than making these choices and posting on hn?
sure, touché, i may well have my very own issues, this in no way stops me being correct though. also, in no way did i suggest you are a lesser or inferior person, you are just wrong. we all are, occasionally. in your case, the thing you are wrong about is the certainty that you are not delusional. the fact that you can describe these delusions and have 'no explanation for how it is possible' should maybe be the thing to introspect on...
Oh, I should introspect because you're too narrow minded to think it's possible, so you got to pretend it's "wrong" and "deluded" but you're "correct" in seeing this thing that you have no knowledge of at all, but I deeply know my way around, and you're going to tell me how it is?
> also, in no way did i suggest you are a lesser or inferior person, you are just wrong....that you are not delusional... should maybe be the thing to introspect on...
But I'm not your lesser, and I'm not inferior to you, right, you just know so much more than me about my own thing? Oh, I see. I see, sure. Well you're the crazy one then, if you think you know so much about something you know nothing about, and you think you can talk down to someone about their thing, when you know nothing about it and you're just scared, you can't understand, and you hate not understanding stuff don't you. Because then everyone's gonna pretend you're little weak and crazy. Without your knowledge, you're nothing, right? So you just gotta keep study study study...but all that work--you're still so narrow-minded that you see something new and you just want to pretend you already know it's impossible.
Well I don't know how you're gonna get around that arrogance that's stopping you seeing the reality. I feel sorry for you, man. But when you pretend you're right and try to hurt people with that surety, it's going to come crashing back on you, like now.
Thanks for showing yourself so clearly. At least you don't hide behind anonymity like others who same the same. I got another prediction for you: in the future in a moment of rare introspection, you will deeply regret you made this comment, and feel shame for how it reflected upon you.
How do you know I'm deluded though? You don't. But I know you're deluded because you are pretending that this reality doesn't exist.
You're saying because you, grkvlt, can't understand how it can be therefore it doesn't exist. That's the delusion. So you can't say I'm deluded because you're coming from a deluded point of view. I am not deluded. I look at the data and I go okay it works. you don't look at the data. or if you do you don't allow yourself to face that reality. Because you don't understand it or you're scared of it. So you pretend. That's the delusion.
And anyway who's more deluded and out of touch with reality: someone who can actually see the future and see what's coming up or someone who can't? the deluded one is you. You're clearly just scared and projecting here.
> The phenomena and effects of airblast, ground shock, thermal radiation,
cratering and ejecta, and debris cloud and deposition from the eruption of
Mt St. Helens were compared to those that would result from a nuclear explosion to determine if phenomena or effects were analogous and thus might provide
useful data for military nuclear weapon effects studies. It is concluded that
the phenomena are not analogous. In particular, airblast destruction was
caused by clouds of ash driven by subsonic winds, rather than by a supersonic
shock wave that would be the-damage mechanism of a nuclear explosion. Because of the lack of analogy between the eruption and nuclear explosion phenomena, it
appears questionable that any of the effects are analogous; therefore, it is
unlikely that anything more of military interest can be gained from studying
the effects of the eruption. However, key contacts for further information on
the eruption and the associated research studies are given. The comparison of
the eruption of Mt. St. Helens to the explosion of a 10- to 20-megaton nuclear
weapon is misleading. Such comparisons serve no useful purpose and should be
avoided.
Even though the damage types are not analogous people still want a crude metaphor for how "big" the blast was. Since people are going to compare it to a nuke regardless you might as well have some rough criteria for how a comparison could happen.
Why are people going to compare to a nuke? Because the media uses those terms. Maybe we need to suggest alternatives.
Also since 1945, had there been just a single size of nukes? I may not have a sense of how big a Hiroshima nuke was as compared to a 1975 nuke vs a 2022 nuke. Just saying ... a better comparison (which I don't know as I am not a subject expert) could be developed.
Maybe "enough energy to melt 1980 Antarctica" or some other similar scary comparison. Maybe "10 times the energy of hurricane Katrina"
Hurricane Katrina was quite recent, it devastated a major American city and had all sorts of bad effects in lots of places, people have an intuitive understanding of how big Hurricane Katrina was - be aware of course that intuitive understandings are not precise.
Hurricane Katrina made very little damage directly, as an effect of the energy of the wind. Almost all the damage was caused by the flood, which in turn turn was a consequence of the levees failing.
It doesn’t make much sense to compare the energy released by Katrina to that of the Tonga eruption.
The math might check out but that's about it. Comparing a storm to an explosion is completely asinine because the mechanism by which the energy is dispensed is completely different.
Katrina did squat to the city except tear up some roofs and windows. The water deposited just so happened to breach some flood control stuff and then all the damage was a result of everything being immersed in floodwater. A storm releases energy in the form of find and droplets of liquid being accelerated by gravity and flung around by said wind. An explosion releases a pressure wave.
Comparing energy released in storms to explosions is like saying a leafblower can push harder than a dude with a sledge because it has more horsepower. Neither comparison serves any useful purpose.
As a non-American, I have no idea what kind of damage hurricane Katrina did. As far as I am concerned, there was some wind. Enough to make international news, but that's about it.
But when I see "comparable to a nuke" at least I know immediately that this is a major event. A hurricane, powerful as it may be, is harder to grasp for a comparison.
>As a non-American, I have no idea what kind of damage hurricane Katrina did
As a non-American, I do.
I agree comparable to a nuke is better, I was just commenting that Katrina for a large number of people is quite different than the other examples and does convey an intuitive understanding.
While noting that intuitive understandings are imprecise.
I’m personally a huge fan that the most destructive device in human history can can be thrown around in conversation simply, as a four letter word, and as simply as one would refer to a “book” as being a good source inspiration, or “coke” as being a delicious beverage. Yes, a “nuke” can be inspirationally delicious comparison for destruction.
Perhaps comparisons to “nukes” should be reserved to their “human impact”, and not simply their “big boom” factor. I’m sure victims of nuclear weapons, and unfortunate locals of nuclear test sites would agree.
Say, it’s likely more accurate to say “That TikTok went nuclear”, than any comparisons of an explosion or eruption to a “nuke”.
If that's correct than that comparison doesn't initially sound as cool as a nuclear blast... :). But I guess that that's related to the duration of a blast vs. thunderstorm...?
The Tonga explosion is more powerful than a fission bomb but the same magnitude as many thermonuclear bombs. Imagine multiple Tonga explosions over major population centers, and you begin to understand the horrors of these weapons
It was a pretty damn big explosion nonetheless. The US strategic warheads max out at around 1.3 megatons these days. It's hard to imagine a blast 9 times stronger than what even the US military deems excessive in an Armageddon scenario.
It's not because they're excessive, it's because the deaths/gram are better for smaller warheads, so you can get more Armageddon per missile with smaller warheads
Yes, four 1MT explosions in a spaced square do more damage than a single 4MT in the centre of that square, plus if one of them is a dud or completely misses the target then the target is still effectively destroyed by the others. (Not the case if the single large weapon fails). Also, small weapons means more warheads per missile, some of which can be decoys - which increases the chances of defeating any anti-ballistic missile system.
Calling MIRVs cluster bombs is, uh, probably stretching the definition of “cluster bomb” a bit. The problem with the latter is unexploded (but still dangerous) submunitions that are difficult to find and dispose of once the conflict is over, compare antipersonnel mines. But if you’re hit by a MIRV nuclear strike… well, the issue of post bellum disposal of potential duds is very very far down the list of your problems!
The US is one of the few western countries that are not a signatory to that treaty and a few other weapons/human rights related treaties. For... obvious reasons.
Signing a treaty when you would just be ignoring it is typically not a diplomatically smart move. Better to not sign the treaty if at all possible.
Leave it to humans to optimize for the most Armageddon per $.
There's a non zero chance each year that we trigger Armageddon. Given enough years it will happen with certainty. Yet nothing is done about it. I think our first mistake in thinking about the possibilities of other intelligent civilizations in the universe is to assume we are an example of one...
You think nature isn't "making" such computations all the time? Say like a virus "deciding" how long to let a host live to spread it before finishing him/her off?
We live pretending we are rational, intelligent beings but in the end we aren't very far from nature and its processes which created us.
Nature seems to make computations that allow for a balance because, usually, breaking out of that balance has detrimental effects. Humanity's technological progress has broken us out of balance, since we're able to steal more energy than we need from our environment.
So yes, humans are obviously part of nature. That's of course where we get our primordial emotions from. But it's misleading to say we're just like other parts of nature, when that's clearly not the case. Our problem is technological progress greatly outpaces emotional development, which may or may not even be progressing. In many ways, technological progress degrades emotional development.
Exactly, the "humans are killing machines" argument is false because all life is optimised competitively. We're definitely the best at it, but any species that evolved to our level would behave in the same way because it's fundamental to the way species evolve in general. I find it comforting and disturbing at the same time.
i think i recall reading a RAND study or similar that calculated the most cost effective megadeath per dollar, and it turning out to be equipping a very large number of people (paid minimum wage) with a stout piece of 2x4 wood, and instructing them to hit communists over the head until ordered to stop. i think they may have made some simplifying assumptions about the delivery mechanism to get the 2x4 weilders and the communists in the same location, which is an obvious requirement for this to be effective, but it's better than hydrogen bombs if killing communists and saving dollars are all you care about #amirite
Keep in mind that the size is dictated by MIRVs[1] - one ICBM goes up into space, breaks into lots of independent missiles, and they all rain down on different targets.
Yea, the US arsenal downsized the weapons in keeping with the tonnage restrictions in the various arms reduction agreements. However, they compensated by increasing the accuracy of the weapons so that fewer bombs per target will be needed, increasing the hard kill power of the arsenal without violating the agreements.
This is important because "in theory" no one is allowed to explicitly target civilians, which don't require much accuracy, per the laws of war. Military targets are often in reinforced concrete or buried and so require a precise high pressure hit to crack. In practice, aiming points are chosen of military targets that are quite close to civilians.
Also because a single large blast wastes a lot of energy, and is easier to intercept.
You’ll do way more damage way more reliably with 20 1MT warheads than with a single 20MT bomb.
But it required reliable ballistic missiles and M(I)RV. If your delivery mechanism is bombers, then at equiv-tech you have to account for high attrition rates, and thus need large payloads to ensure even low success rates will do the necessary damage to the target.
I'd argue that the very very wrong models for fallout generation and dispersal were an even bigger issue. If they hadn't gotten that wrong, no one would have cared other than the scientists in the near bunkers who had to change their trousers.
This is as good a time as any to pitch the UN Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons which aims to the total elimination of this weapons of terror with a comprehensive set of prohibitions on participating in any nuclear weapon activities.
This treaty has been in effect since January 22 last year and has been ratified by 59 countries and signed by 17 more including big and powerful states such as Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Ireland, the Philippines and Malaysia.
Armies of nation states are responsible for the greatest of all human tragedies. None of us are safe as long as these weapons belong in the arsenal of some of the biggest and most dangerous armies in the world.
The safest option of avoiding a terrible attack or a major accidents involving these weapons is a total elimination, and currently our best hope is with international agreements such as these. International agreements have proven to
be effective in other comprehensive prohibitions of dangerous materials and it is time we act to eliminate the most dangerous weapons of them all.
Because a world war every so often was a nice break from the monotony of everyday life?
Nuclear weapons achieve something utterly unprecedented: they make the leaders afraid of the consequences of war. We're arguably better off with them. Disarmament is neither responsible nor realistically achievable.
Do you think every leader in every nuclear capable nation is going to have those same views forever?
There's going to be a failure in the "our leaders are afraid of nuclear war" plan. That isn't viable. Just because it has happened for a few decades doesn't mean it will continue to happen, everywhere, forever.
> What's your plan for ensuring that such a berserk national leader doesn't retain nuclear capability in a post-disarmament world?
That is for the UN to decide, and I’m sure they will come up with a plan. Options include sanctions, boycotts, shunning from international sports and cultural events, etc. Individual nations can go further and fund opposition groups etc. International disarmament treaties like these have worked in the past, there is no reason to think that nuclear weapons are any different. What is different is the scale of the potential damage.
> When it comes to preventing war, MAD works. Wishful thinking doesn't.
I’d argue that the assumption that nuclear weapons prevent wars are speculations at best. Hoping they won’t be used by nation states in future wars and hoping there won’t be a devastating accident involving them is not just wishful thinking but also an extremely dangerous belief.
That is for the UN to decide, and I’m sure they will come up with a plan.
How much do you know about the post-WWII history of the Korean peninsula?
Options include sanctions, boycotts, shunning from international sports and cultural events, etc. Individual nations can go further and fund opposition groups etc.
That isn't an argument against my statement. MAD is the very wishful thinking that you indicate does not work. Your initial scenario here of a berserk national leader is plenty applicable to MAD.
Why do you assume MAD will work on a long timescale? There are too many variables with different nations and leaders.
The way I see it, when it comes to preventing war, we have an approach that, while both literally and figuratively MAD, has worked OK so far, and an approach that we know doesn't work.
It would be great if we had more options, no argument there.
How does that apply here, though? We know your suggested approach doesn't work. We know that there are definitely live rounds in the gun, because they've killed millions already. The UN's best intentions didn't deter the conflicts in Korea, or Viet Nam, or Iraq, or Rwanda, or whatever shenanigans Putin is about to pull in Ukraine, just to name a few.
In the MAD game, both the goal and the incentives are rationally aligned to avoid pulling the trigger at all. If MAD fails, it will happen because a mistake occurred. If the "Just let the UN take care of it" approach fails, it will fail for the same reason it has failed so many times before: because someone rationally calculated that the consequences were worth it. These scenarios don't really compare to a simple game of Russian roulette.
Logically speaking, it seems best to keep doing what we've been doing, but work as hard as we can to reduce the odds of a mistake.
It is relevant because if we are dealing with a poisson-like distribution the chances of the event happening is greater over a longer time-span. We don’t know what distribution nuclear strikes and accidents occur with. It may very well be a distribution similar to Russian roulette. If it is, we really really shouldn’t risk it any further.
That is the flaw in your logic. It is assuming a favorable distribution when the distribution is unknown.
There are historical evidence to the contrary. The 19th century saw no large scale world wars, and yet they didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. There are many theories as for the cause of the relative peace of the 19th century, but prominent theories include a mass disarmament of the world’s superpowers. Relative to the 18th century (which did see a world war; the 7 years war) countries were spending only a fraction of what they used to on their military. You can argue whether the peace caused the decreased spending or vice-versa but there is some evidence of correlation here and the spending part we can control.
Currently there are 9 states which control nuclear weapons. By far the majority of all active weapons belong to just two states. If USA and Russia would agree to at least lower their nuclear arsenal to that of the third state—China, you make the world at least that much safer.
But I want total elimination of these weapons of terror, and so does the governments of 86 countries (and growing). And the UN comity which is comprised of numbers of experts these issues has reached the same conclusion that total elimination is both necessary and feasible. I guess you can disagree with their findings, and who am I to argue with that.
The 19th century saw no large scale world wars, and yet they didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction.
WWI was different. Nothing like it had ever happened before because nothing like it was possible. Conversely, almost as soon as it became possible, it happened. Technology made WWI the "War to end all wars," at least until the next "War to end all wars" came along. We can't afford a third, and that's true with or without nukes. Whatever it takes to avoid WWIII is (very likely) worth it.
And as krasin suggests, the notion that the 19th century was characterized by international peace and goodwill is naïve at best.
I do tend to agree that the nuclear powers have a ridiculous quantity of weapons, and that this constitutes a hazard in itself. If the goal is to deter aggression rather than to initiate it, I don't see why something on the order of a dozen modern MIRV-capable strategic weapons wouldn't be plenty. Getting rid of all of them, though, on a worldwide basis? Not going to happen.
(One valid objection to my point is that various proxy wars between the superpowers have killed almost as many people over time as a good old fashioned world war used to, but that's a different debate.)
Anyway, none of this has much to do with volcanos or tsunamis.
You forgot the Napoleonic wars involving most of continental Europe (~6 million dead).
Instead of world wars, the 19th century was full of significant regional ones, e.g.:
- Taiping Rebellion (20-50 million dead)
- Crimean War
- Russo-Turkish War(s)
- US Civil War
- Franco-Prussian War
- First & Second Boer Wars
- Multiple bloody revolts/rebellions in British India
It was not a "peaceful" century by any stretch of the imagination, and the powers involved in these conflicts were by no means "disarmed".
I never said that, in fact I was purposefully careful in my wording by adding the necessary qualifiers. The 19th century was relatively peaceful compared to all the centuries before and the century that came after. It is the only century since the 16th to not have a conflict that spans continents.
We have two periods of this relative peace. The 19th century and the current post world war II era. Both these periods have relatively low military spending in common. Could we do better? Yes! Should we do better? Also yes. Does nuclear weapons take us there. Probably not. Will the elimination of nuclear weapons take us there? Probably not. Should we get rid of nuclear weapons anyway? Yes!
Yes, and failing that goal he didn't particularly care about sacrificing his own people. If he had had the capability to nuke London, Paris, Moscow or Amsterdam during the withdrawal he would have certainly done so.
Then it's a darned good thing we got the Bomb first, I'd say.
Tell me again how giving up our weapons would leave us in a better position against the next Hitler. Would the same sort of people who failed to enforce the terms of Versailles be in charge of nuclear disarmament?
The first is a matter of luck. If Hitler had funded Heisenberg instead of von Braun, things might have turned out very differently.
The second is a matter of opinion, one that's largely unjustified by history or morality. Setting aside the fact that rational opponents would have surrendered after having one city vaporized, would you have preferred that we learn the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Korea and China instead, with hundreds of bombs instead of two?
Truman would have had no incentive to deny MacArthur's request if we hadn't dropped the bombs in Japan and seen the results firsthand. What happened in Japan was horrific, but it was also a relatively cheap lesson for humanity, compared to how things could have played out.
>>>Armies of nation states are responsible for the greatest of all human tragedies.
Yes. So why advocate for a return to the pre-nuclear status quo: major powers use their large armies to influence each other, with millions dead. The threat of MAD between the world's powers is why global casualties from warfare have been in steady decline since the end of WW2.
>>>The safest option of avoiding a terrible attack or a major accidents involving these weapons is a total elimination
What is the contingency plan for when every country except ONE agrees, and then the last country, as the only nuclear-armed state, then has free reign to impose its will on the world with now-overwhelming force?
First, history of the past 80 years casts doubts on your claims:
The USSR-Afghanistan left an estimated 2 million dead. Nigerian Civil War between 1 and 3 million. France-Algeria War about 1 million. Korean War between 1.5 and 4.5 million dead. Vietnam between 1.3 and 4.5 million. I could go on really.
MAD doesn't stop wars from happening. It only stops nuclear powers from using nuclear weapons. And it stops major powers from targeting each other directly. That's the extent of MAD. Even that's a contentious claim to make: Pakistan vs. India over Kashmir comes to mind.
Even more so, MAD isn't the only incentive for not going to War. After World War II, the World got profoundly reshaped with new economic and geo-strategic treaties and alliances. Bretton Woods, United Nations, NATO, European Union,... come to mind. In fact, after 1945, European integration was considered as an antidote against extreme nationalism in Europe and was heavily advocated for by Churchill.
Second, "global casualties from warfare being in decline" doesn't imply that no casualties of war, or atrocities, have been committed since 1945. Neither does it imply that things can take a turn for the worst without resorting to nuclear weaponry. For instance, the Syrian Civil War sits at about .5 million dead currently, and it has essentially been a proxy war between regional as well as global powers. And let's not forget the Ukraine situation that's currently playing out.
Third, the "lack of a contingency plan" is essentially part of the Prisoner's dilemma which the arms race during the Cold War was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Internati... But that doesn't render the argument moot: objectively, casting nuclear weapons out of this world is the best outcome for everyone involved. But rationally, that's not possible as you end up in a situation where owning nuclear weapons while everyone doesn't is the better option from the perspective of a single nation. Albert Einstein was well aware of this dilemma and said he wouldn't have participated in the Manhattan Project if he had known that the German bomb was a figment of imagination.
The main reason why MAD has become a thing is because a chunk of humanity just wants to see the rest of the world burn. No matter how rational and bent on peace between nations you are yourself, you can't possibly predict whether the other side has equally rational leaders or, as it turns, absolute mad men behind the buttons who are very much willing to use them when push comes to shove. And that's absolutely not a great outlook for humanity in the long term. We're extremely lucky to not have had a war between major powers over the past 80 years; it's been a close shave a few times as well (e.g. Cuban Missile Crisis).
> The USSR-Afghanistan left an estimated 2 million dead. Nigerian Civil War between 1 and 3 million. France-Algeria War about 1 million. Korean War between 1.5 and 4.5 million dead. Vietnam between 1.3 and 4.5 million. I could go on really.
That's peanuts, really. WW2 killed 70-85 million people, WW3 is projected from killing some 7 billion folks. No war between highly industrialised countries is a big win.
Factually? No discussion there. A dozen million is less then 70-85 million. That's how numbers work.
Morally? We are talking about the lives of human individuals. Concluding that a dozen million dead is "peanuts" and therefor a justifiable argument to defend the purported useful nature of nuclear weapons is reprehensible.
It's the exact same consideration made by military leadership when it comes to going to war or deploying nuclear weapons. It's a manner of thinking which should send shivers through anyone's spine. Why? Because it's a way of thinking that reduces the value of anyone's life to either "friend" or "foe" / "strategically valuable" or "without value".
Whether it's the sterile press of a button, or hand-to-hand combat, the end result is the always same: suffering.
>>>Third, the "lack of a contingency plan" is essentially part of the Prisoner's dilemma which the arms race during the Cold War was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Internati... But that doesn't render the argument moot:
If no one can produce a tangible, actionable, PLAN that gets us from "nukes in the hands of sociopaths with itchy trigger fingers" to "no nukes", then yes, the argument is rendered moot. A bunch of plebs signing petitions amounts to nothing but hot air if there is no realistic way to convince a head of state to throw hundreds (or thousands, in US/Russia's case) of the world's most powerful weapons into the dumpster.
>>> But rationally, that's not possible as you end up in a situation where owning nuclear weapons while everyone doesn't is the better option from the perspective of a single nation.
So you identify right here the crux of the matter: a rational nationstate will retain its nuclear arsenal.
The rest of your post is a bad case of shifting the goalposts.
>>>First, history of the past 80 years casts doubts on your claims:
>>>The USSR-Afghanistan left an estimated 2 million dead. Nigerian Civil War between 1 and 3 million. France-Algeria War about 1 million. Korean War between 1.5 and 4.5 million dead. Vietnam between 1.3 and 4.5 million.
Let's take the maximal estimates for all of those: 15 million dead. That's a selection of some of the deadliest conflicts post-WW2.......which doesn't even match the casualties of the Eastern Front alone: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II) ), which lasted for a mere ~4 years during WW2. Whether viewed in absolute terms of lives lost or per-capita losses over time (as a % of global human population), the data supports my assertion, not yours.
>>>In fact, after 1945, European integration was considered as an antidote against extreme nationalism in Europe and was heavily advocated for by Churchill.
The Brits have always played one (or more) continental powers against whoever was strongest. When Napoleon ran France, the UK allied with Russia and the Prussians. When Germany was ascendant, they allied with the French and the Russians. After WW2, with the Soviet Union dominating the Eurasian landmass, the only way to counter the Warsaw Pact was to coagulate the devastated West European democracies into a super-state. This was business as usual for the Brits.
>>>Second, "global casualties from warfare being in decline" doesn't imply that no casualties of war, or atrocities, have been committed since 1945.
Nor has anyone in this thread ever made such an assertion (that casualties = 0). Conflict casualties will never fall to 0, for the same reasons homicides will never fall to 0:
1. Human beings exist on a spectrum of morality.
2. Human beings exist on a spectrum of willingness to commit violence.
When opposing value sets overlap with violent inclinations, people die. We can significantly tamper the violence via material abundance, but First World-levels of wealth are climatologically unsustainable for a population of ~8 billion...
>>>The main reason why MAD has become a thing is because a chunk of humanity just wants to see the rest of the world burn.
I'd argue just the opposite. If anyone in a leadership position wanted to see the world burn....it would happen, because they only need to pass orders to one of the three legs of the nuclear triad (silos/strategic bombers/SSBNs) to trigger a response.
There are almost never "absolute mad men" running entire countries (Idi Amin was perhaps the closest IMO). It's just vapid propaganda. It is why it is so important to understand the adversary's problem set, and to place their actions within the correct context of what they are trying to achieve. Lunatics are exceedingly rare, and we still plan for those edge cases with Counter-WMD Quick-Reaction Forces from SOCOM, to mitigate risks of nuke employment:
Since I was the one to pitch the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons I should probably try to answer some of these.
I don’t know what kind of a plan would be sufficient for you, but the point of this treaty is to come up with this plan and the signatories are intended to be all the nation’s states. Some very powerful governments (like Austria, Brazil, and Indonesia) have already signed it and it is already ratified by 59 nations. This is hardly a bunch of plebs signing a petition. What I’m pitching here is for you to contact your national government and encourage them to sign it if they haven’t done so already.
I’m not gonna go into the philosophy of violence here. I’m just gonna leave my earlier appeal to authority as good enough of a justification. If the national governments of 86 nations think that total elimination is needed, as described by some of the world’s leading experts at the UN comity which called for this proposal, then perhaps arguments they have are good enough to overcome the problems proposed by the above conjectures of the philosophy of violence.
The preamble of the treaty it self might actually answer some of your concerns. Perhaps you should read it, it is really legible and straight forward. So I will simply refer to it and leave it at that.
>>>Some very powerful governments (like Austria, Brazil, and Indonesia) have already signed it and it is already ratified by 59 nations. This is hardly a bunch of plebs signing a petition.
Austria? Brazil? Indonesia? None of those are nuclear-armed states...which means that their "power" is effectively ZERO. It also costs them nothing to slap a signature on a document that has no material impact on their national security, because they have no capability to lose. You seem to have a very....idealistic view of international relations. Let me explain how nuclear disarmament would play out in the real world:
UN Signatories: We don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons.
US/Russia/China/etc: Nah, keeping these "just in case" is an important part of our international influence.
UN Signatories: I guess we will have to forcibly disarm you?
UN Signatories: Ok on second thought we'll just send you another sternly-worded letter....
And that's how the conversation ends. Because sovereign states that are unable to enforce their will on others have no real power.
>>>What I’m pitching here is for you to contact your national government and encourage them to sign it if they haven’t done so already.
I'm a citizen of not only a nuclear-armed state, but arguably the world's most influential global hegemon: the USA. If any of my politicians even HINTED at supporting such a disarmament, I'd vote them out of office ASAP.
I read the entire treaty here: ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_... ). The Preamble reads like it was drafted by a drum circle of hippies, stoned on a beach in California. It's not written in a manner that is in any way persuasive to the people who actually need to be convinced: the national security leadership.
If this is a policy you seriously want to advance, I recommend taking a hard look at how national security professionals establish values and objectives, assess problems, and work through cost-benefit analyses in pursuit of said objectives. Know your audience, or you will never talk them into an alternative course of action.
> I'm a citizen of not only a nuclear-armed state, but arguably the world's most influential global hegemon: the USA.
That's essentially an unveiled admission of a want to hold the rest of the world hostage and establish domination. There's little rational nor justifiable about such a want from the perspective of anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.
> Because sovereign states that are unable to enforce their will on others have no real power.
Well, they signed the treaty anyway, did they? I'd say the implicit signal here was: "We don't listen to a hegemony who isn't willing to listen to the rest of the world." What they did was take a moral high ground, and condemn anyone who didn't sign.
Call it virtue signaling, but in international diplomacy, it's a pretty powerful statement. The U.S. may have nuclear weapons, but it's still very much a part of the rest of the planet.
The same is true for all the COP conferences from Rio to Glasgow, and climate protocols, over the past 30 years.
> If this is a policy you seriously want to advance, I recommend taking a hard look at how national security professionals establish values and objectives, assess problems, and work through cost-benefit analyses in pursuit of said objectives.
Which objectives? To who's benefit? Yours? The U.S.? The rest of the world?
The U.S. is in a tentative spot of taking an exclusive role in determining what is or isn't a moral high ground. Whether that's nuclear disarmament, or reducing CO2 / curbing climate change, or social equity.
This is used as an argument for new, upcoming powers like India or China to forge their own path forward, for better or worse. If the U.S. wants to keep playing a role of significance in the 21st and 22nd centuries, it will have to relinquish its hegemonic stance.
>>>That's essentially an unveiled admission of a want to hold the rest of the world hostage and establish domination. There's little rational nor justifiable about such a want from the perspective of anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.
We've already been holding the world hostage, arguably since we ended Breton Woods in favor of the Petrodollar, and definitely since the Soviet Union collapsed. This might be rational or justifiable to non-US citizens if we better communicated how Pax Americana is to their benefit. But we suck at soft power, and have squandered much of our goodwill with our devastation of the Middle East. So I fully understand and appreciate, for example, Russia and China doing everything in their power to break the back of our supremacy.
>>>Well, they signed the treaty anyway, did they?....Call it virtue signaling, but in international diplomacy, it's a pretty powerful statement.
It cost the signatories nothing substantive, and it changed nothing substantive. I will absolutely call it virtue signaling.
>>>Which objectives? To who's benefit? Yours? The U.S.? The rest of the world?
Which objectives? The objectives of the nations that employ said security professionals, as typically laid out in a "National Security Strategy" or similar document. So my point here is that in order to convince the people who control nuclear assets to change, one needs to understand them. You can't persuade them if you are not communicating with language that resonates with them in the first place.
>>>This is used as an argument for new, upcoming powers like India or China to forge their own path forward, for better or worse. If the U.S. wants to keep playing a role of significance in the 21st and 22nd centuries, it will have to relinquish its hegemonic stance.
This is actually something I strongly agree with. I think it is folly for a mismanaged nation of 330 million to expect to continue to lord over 7+ billion people that are rapidly closing the gap of technical and/or institutional competency across the board. The US is failing on several key fronts 1) failing to recognize the limitations of its hard (aka military) power 2) failing to make the necessary domestic investments in infrastructure and education to even keep it abreast of rising, high-population nations 3) failing to capitalize on existing soft power.
We should have begun to pivot away from the Petrodollar after the Soviet Union fell, should have kept the footprint in Afghanistan smaller, and never should have invaded Iraq. I would have cut the active-duty Army and Air Force to the bone outside of special operations forces, and relied on expeditionary Navy/Marine forces, sailing from the US itself. That's still an overwhelming amount of combat power for most global security threats. Spend the money saved on high-speed rail, thorium reactors, fusion research, and pre-collegiate education that doesn't suck.
> Austria? Brazil? Indonesia? None of those are nuclear-armed states
This is a little bit moving the goal post, I was only arguing against your point that this treaty was just a bunch of plebs signing a petition. But I would just like to point out that South Africa is a previous nuclear state which is a party to this treaty. Disarmament has precedence.
History has examples of nuclear states cooperating. 6 of 9 nuclear states have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (China, France, Israel, Russia, UK, and USA) and 3 have ratified both annexes (France, Russia, and the UK). No signatory (including the USA) has conducted a nuclear test since 1997 and North Korea is the only country to conduct a test since 1998. This treaty has been a huge success even though we can still do better with respects to North Korea.
The Non-proloferation treaty is an even greater success. India, North Korea and Pakistan are the only nuclear states which haven’t ratified it. Since it came into effect in 1970 we’ve seen the worldwide stockpile decrease by more then half. But we can still do better.
At the risk of muddying this post with unnecessary geopolitics I’m gonna be equally speculative and come up with made up scenario which counters yours. The point of this exercise is not to make predictions—as they will probably not come true—but to demonstrate that fictional scenarios can back up either cause. You did yours, so here is mine:
* During this decade more and more countries will sign and become parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. At some point a NATO member will become a signatory (perhaps Germany or Norway from popular demand and favorable government; or Turkiye to assert their independence).
* At some point, seeing the world take the cause of total elimination, the UK might become the first nuclear country to sign the treaty. Perhaps after a Labour victory during a push from party members which oppose the nuclear weapons program.
* With most of Europe having signed the EU might pressure France into signing.
* Israel might go the way of South Africa, with a post apartheid government dismantling the program on their own volition.
* India and Pakistan might have an easing of relation and as a sign of good will they might sign this treaty jointly.
* Korea might unify, and the unified government might want to put it’s dark past behind it with a strong sign of cooperation.
* After most of the world has signed China might fear the optics and might sign in the hope to prove it’s moral superiority over the USA. But secretly sees their program as expensive and unrealistic so this treaty—if proven popular—might be a good excuse out.
* Russia might follow Europe if tensions around Ukraine ease and sign the treaty from popular demand both domestic and from other countries. Or it might cop out for similar reasons as China in this hypothetical scenario.
* This leaves only the USA. Maybe in a decade or two—if this treaty proves popular—and only the USA and a few microstates which depend on aid from the USA haven’t signed it. And maybe the democratic leadership shifts towards more progressive candidates which takes issues with the American exceptionalism which the current Democratic and the Republican parties share. Maybe then the USA will become the last nuclear state to sign.
Again don’t take this as a prediction, this won’t be this easy. This is only an exercise in speculation. My point is only to counter a hypothetical scenario which favors one outcome with another equally fictional that favors the other. My main point is that international treaties have proven effective in the past, and there is no reason to think they won’t this time.
>>>I was only arguing against your point that this treaty was just a bunch of plebs signing a petition.
I don't mind going down the rabbit hole on this word usage. I was trying to use plebs to communicate "not the people making impactful decisions in the halls of power". The governments of non-nuclear powers have no ability to force nuclear states to do anything, so for all practical purposes they are indistinguishable from the commoner folk.
I'll agree that digging deeper into the case of South Africa might yield some insights, but I think much of it boiled down to avoiding international pariah status, which was already a problem due to apartheid.
The Comprehensive Test Ban is one of those brilliant "pulling up the ladder after you've made it" moves. It's a tool to hang over the heads of anyone that needs to debug their nuclear weapons, such as up-and-coming nuclear powers (NKorea, Iran). It hurts the existing nuclear powers (who already have giant datasets and fine-tuned nuclear equations) less than it hurts potential newcomers. And even still, it's not enforced as most of the existing nuke powers haven't ratified it.
>>> My point is only to counter a hypothetical scenario which favors one outcome with another equally fictional that favors the other.
Our two scenarios are not in any way, shape, or form "equally" fictional. Anyone with even the most basic real-life work exposure to the national security establishments of Great Powers can attest to that. And often the populations themselves are cut from a similar cloth. My hypothetical, where the nuclear powers ignore the requests of the non-nuclear nations, isn't too far off from the long-standing refusal to modify the permanent membership/veto power of the UN Security Council. ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1758-5899.1... ) So we already have precedent for the Great Powers telling everyone else to pound sand.
In contrast, your hypothetical scenario that posits Russia would eliminate nukes due to "popular domestic demand" is completely out of touch with reality. Look at Figures 6 & 7 from this paper: ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep29483.16 ) A whopping 68% of Russians support either maintaining or expanding the number of nuclear weapons. In the second chart, 52% say the government does "enough" to ward off external aggression via nukes and a further 23% responded the government doesn't do enough and should do more. Although what "the people" want is of limited concern as they don't run Russia anyway ( https://www.amacad.org/publication/russias-oligarchs-unlikel... ). Look at similar public perception survey results for China: ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205316802110328... ). The population wants their government to retain nuclear weapons. Overwhelmingly. The Chinese don't "fear the optics" of nuke possession, or see the program as expensive and unrealistic. Their population, especially the younger generations, are quite hawkish ( https://uscet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/How-Hawkish-Is-... ) As for India and Pakistan easing tensions and jointly signing an anti-nuke treaty?!?! These two nations don't even have an established back-channel for defusing nuclear escalation! ( https://www.iiss.org/blogs/research-paper/2021/05/nuclear-de... )
I'll bow out, I doubt we will reach any common ground, but I applaud you for maintaining a cordial conversation on a serious and difficult subject.
I don't think Vulcanoes usually produce an EMP, however, we did record quite a number of lightning strikes around the vulcano. If memory serves, the area around the vulcano was struck in excess of 200'000 times per minute at the height of the ejecta's activity.
Nuclear weapons are much much worse, I'm not trying to argue that.
But something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer would be devastating, if I read it right - Tonga might have been related too (there was a "mystery eruption" somewhere in the pacific).
> The Tonga explosion is more powerful than a fission bomb but the same magnitude as many thermonuclear bombs
Well, less powerful than several tested thermonuclear weapons, and maybe a very few that were deployed (largely to deal with low accuracy of early weapons and dealing with hard targets.) But more powerful than any currently known to be deployed (the biggest current is a ~5MT Russian strategic warhead.)
The "low yield" bombs ordered by the last president are 5-100kt. It's basically the "trigger" from the thermonuclear bomb without the subsequent stages. The adjustment comes from the amount of tritium added.
Not that it would be good… but it really makes me wish we had the kinds of observation satellites during the era of above ground nuclear testing. Himawari time lapse footage of the Bikini Atoll Castle Bravo test? The Tzar Bomba test? Operation Ploughshare tests… it’s hard to really get a feel for how large those mushroom clouds are when you always seem to get phots from angles that don’t convey the extent to which these explosions can be truly “planet scale” events.
There had been coverage of the eruption between December 29th and January 4th, and landslides due to the island's instability were certainly reported as a possible danger. Among other sources, this was covered extensively by the GeologyHub channel on YouTube which pretty much predicted this collapse.
It's not an unusual cause of explosive eruptions, but Mt. St. Helens is ~50 miles from the ocean. Magma can build up pressure entirely independently of seawater-induced steam explosions.
IIR, the Mt. St. Helens 1980 eruption mechanism was the slow build-up of a steep slope of very weak rock, while various earthquakes (associated with deep magma movements) jiggled the whole mountain. The little glaciers on top were, at best, along for the ride when the "final" 'quake turned the unstable slope into a big landslide. Which landslide also "uncorked the champagne bottle" for the main eruption.
those huge multi-decile megaton bombs are probably less useful than the same amount of materials made into many more smaller bombs.
Megaton bombs are really only useful in bombing civilian targets tbh. Military targets tend to be small, and spread out over a large area, and smaller bombs makes more sense for those targets.
The 2+ km CEP[0] of early ICBMs required a large warhead to ensure that the target would be taken out. With this large of an error, you can easily make fortified structures and bunkers survive a 'close' hit, so civilian targets were the only target left.
Once the CEP got small enough, bunkers were no longer effective as you can't really make a bunker strong enough if the nuke can be delivered right on top of it. EPW nukes can burrow 100+ meters into the ground before detonating to deliver more of their energy to the target, which means a vastly smaller nuke.
Not saying you’re wrong, but fo you have a reference for the >100m penetration figure you’ve mentioned? The best numbers I can find are ~50 meters of “ground”, substantially less (but still impressive) for concrete… but this is a long way short of over 100 meters.
The GBU-57A/B is rated for 61m of penetration. I believe there has been testing of munitions that can do 100-150m, and that is roughly the depth you need to have a hope of fully containing the blast to eliminate fallout. I’m not aware of any munition in operational service that has a public penetration of 100m though.
The GBU-57A/B is a conventional (non-nuclear) device, weighing 14,000kg. (Vs. the W76 warhead on a Trident missile is ~100kg.) Conventional bombs can reliably detonate after taking damage (say, from smashing through 61m of earth & concrete) which would utterly ruin the delicate geometries and mechanisms of a nuclear weapon. And for smaller targets (say, the "deep" bunker under somebody's Presidential Palace), the kinetic energy of 14,000kg smashing through the roof (without detonating) has a very good chance of accomplishing the mission.
They made nuclear artillery shells and bunker busters. This indicates they are not sensitive to shock. Since the impact is a known force & vector, you can pre-deform the mechanism so the impact causes the geometries to be correct, and/or just live with reduced yields from less than ideal geometries.
They do not have public figures for any of the recent nuclear bunker busters, though its likely on the order of 100m based on the depths that various countries have claimed to have made bunkers. The main limiting factor for depth is what speed the materials can handle before vaporizing, how dense you can make the nose and how much mass your delivery system can handle.
Like you have said, nuclear busters are moot as putting 14000kg on someones dining table will still ruin their day without the political issues that nukes cause.
For MAD purposes, isn't bombing civilian targets is just as or more useful than taking out military targets? Is that not the case, or do militaries envision nuclear war not immediately entering a MAD scenario?
No. The first priority in a nuclear war is to negate the enemy the capability of waging war. So, you'll be targeting military bases, ICBM silos, airstrips and command and control facilities.
Urban centers are secondary targets, and never because of their civil population per se, but because usually industrial installations are located in or very closely to the biggest urban centers. But then again, if you plan on conducting a land invasion and an occupation there's some reason to refrain bombing your enemy all the way down to the Paleolithic
largest for bomber delivery? I would think that ICBM delivered payloads would be higher. did a quick search, but wiki's article only gave numbers on range distances. I didn't see any megaton ratings in the time willing to spend on it.
edit: i realize now that the numbers floating around in cavity between my ears was in kilotons. that's why the megaton numbers seemd low to me.
The really big weapons come from an era when delivery systems were really inaccurate and so you'd drop an absurdly big explosion somewhere near your target. Once you can hit your target reliably you go with a smaller explosion that's still sufficient to destroy it when dropped on top of it and you stick multiple independent warheads on the same missile.
I'm morbidly curious to see if there will be any footage of the big eruption. Everything I've seen so far appears to be from the previous eruptions in Dec and Jan. I'm sure many of them aren't visible but lightining detectors counted 5-6k strikes per minute for the first few minutes. ~190k total. I can't imagine.
That's all from space. I'm guessing they mean, as I also mean, on the ground footage that isn't getting off the island yet due to the connectivity issues.
There's some faraway and not very interesting footage from those who captured the sonic boom of the explosion (the boom is rather impressive, though). With any luck, we'll get better videos once internet access has been restored.
There is some footage from the ground. The space footage is time lapse so it happened a lot slower in real time. It was actually multiple eruptions in rapid succession in random directions. I have not seen one of the initial eruption though.
In the early nuclear age, DARPA had proposals for a 10,000 megaton thermonuclear weapon [1].
In principle, we can design weapons horrendous enough to crack this entire planet apart forever. Four billion years of life up in smoke (or out in debris, I should say).
The question of whether humans are the most intelligent life form on the planet is still under active consideration. :)
Definitely don't think that's true. Yes, Edward Teller did propose a design for a 10 gigaton device but the initial devices based on that design ended up being a dud, not working as intended and the project was abandoned in favor of more practical nuclear weapons. Maybe in theory such a device would be possible, but even at 10 gigatons it wouldn't come remotely close to cracking much of anything.
The largest confirmed explosion on earth was on the order of 1 teraton (1,000,000 megatons) caused by the Vredefort asteroid impact and that certainly left a crater but did not come close to cracking the planet forever. It left a crater 40km deep and 300km wide, which is absolutely enormous and mind boggling and if it happened today would certainly cause a mass extinction event, but the Earth would recover.
That's a bit bigger than Chicxulub. Someone estimated the heat from the re-entry of debris at 20kw/m2 for 7+ minutes, not close up, but far away. A random study on firefighting I just skimmed said that heat flux will destroy clothing in about 20 seconds and produce 3rd degree burns in another 20 or so. So, uh...ten times 40 seconds over practically the whole world would probably not be good.
The collision that produced the Moon is speculated to have left the surface of the Earth approximately as bright as the Sun for a while, so it could be worse, but there's hardly any difference for the forms of life we can relate to.
Anerobic organisms deep in the crust would have an easier time of it.
The earth recovered its collision with the asteroid that eventually gave us the moon, yet the earth has actually been “taken apart forever” (since a significant fraction of its former mass now belongs to the moon).
I can’t find exactly what they said, but a weapon that size is the easiest to deliver because you just bury it in your own backyard. It’s so destructive it doesn’t matter if it explodes on your enemy or you.
How big is big enough? There is no physical, engineering, or practical limit to how much worldly damage can be done with supers. The yields increase exponentially with linear increases in effort (stages / size).
The point isn't the exact number, it's the fact that it's so reasonable to attain no matter the number.
If we manage to not kill ourselves, we will ultimately advance into a type 2 civ (and higher), and harnessing enormous amounts of destructive energy for useful work will probably be par for the course.
Trajectory calculations are less and less accurate when you go forward in time (because it's an n-body problem, fundamentally chaotic) so it will be really hard to land a hit with such device.
Naron of the long-lived Rigellian race was the fourth of his line to keep the galactic records.
He had a large book which contained the list of the numerous races throughout the galaxies that had developed intelligence, and the much smaller book that listed those races that had reached maturity and had qualified for the Galactic Federation.
In the first book, a number of those listed were crossed out; those that, for one reason or another, had failed. Misfortune, biochemical or biophysical shortcomings, social maladjustment took their toll. In the smaller book, however, no member listed had yet blanked out.
And now Naron, large and incredibly ancient, looked up as a messenger approached.
“Naron,” said the messenger. “Great One!”
“Well, well, what is it? Less ceremony.”
“Another group of organisms has attained maturity.”
“Excellent. Excellent. They are coming up quickly now. Scarcely a year passes without a new one. And who are these?”
The messenger gave the code number of the galaxy and the coordinates of the world within it.
“Ah, yes,” said Naron. “I know the world.” And in flowing script he noted it in the first book and transferred its name into the second, using, as was customary, the name by which the planet was known to the largest fraction of its populace. He wrote: Earth.
He said, “These new creatures have set a record. No other group has passed from intelligence to maturity so quickly. No mistake, I hope.”
“None, sir,” said the messenger.
“They have attained to thermonuclear power, have they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, thats the criterion.” Naron chuckled. “And soon their ships will probe out and contact the Federation.”
“Actually, Great One,” said the messenger, reluctantly, “the Observers tell us they have not yet penetrated space.”
Naron was astonished. “Not at all? Not even a space station?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“But if they have thermonuclear power, where do they conduct the tests and detonations?”
“On their own planet, sir.”
Naron rose to his full twenty feet of height and thundered, “On their own planet?”
“Yes, sir.”
Slowly Naron drew out his stylus and passed a line through the latest addition in the small book.
It was an unprecedented act, but, then, Naron was very wise and could see the inevitable as well as anyone in the galaxy.
There's a story called "Memorial" by Theodore Sturgeon, from 1946, where humanity doesn't learn its lesson after the first nuclear war that is triggered by accident.
The ending (after the second war) referred to "half-stooping, naked things whose twisted heredity could have been traced to mankind." and said something about how, since they could be frightened, they were definitely not human any more.
Pick a spot, the yield of the weapon, and it will draw radius circles for the fireball, ionizing radiation, 3 degrees of blast damage, and finally, the broad thermal radiation damage. I imagine there's others with things like fallout, etc.
There are more exact things, but at a bare minimum "damage" needs to fill the volume it's interacting with, and the volume of a sphere goes up by the cube of distance.
It's what led to the development of the smart bomb - they figured out that it's a losing game to increase the power of a bomb - that cube root is painful. So instead they made small, but more accurate, bombs.
It's also why the nuclear bomb is not as useful as people think: It's strong, but a large number of accurate, small, smart bombs works better to destroy your target (as opposed to digging holes in the ground).
There are books on this (I own one, but don't have it to hand right now), but I suspect it's related to the area within which blast impulse energy is above some threshold (enough to damage stuff to some agreed level).
The total physical work done MW (and thus energy) by the quake was 4.0×10^22 joules (40 ZJ),[31] the vast majority underground, which is over 360,000 times more than its ME, equivalent to 9,600 gigatons of TNT equivalent (550 million times that of Hiroshima)
Scott Manley has a great video about it talking about the atmospheric pressure recorded during the eruption and it is amazing to watch the pressure wave travel around the world.
Is there a remote chance this is why we have such foul weather ever since the blast?
I have cross-checked a few places and it seems everywhere is relatively cooler than what it should be. Even Dubai and Miami have rain, cloudy and storms. Same here in my place which has seen uncharacteristic wind, rainfall and cloud cover since last week.
I understood it the same way, the mean data for the past x years was however more difficult to find, and they seem to do a mean per month or year so not fined grained enough for 1 week.
This reminds me of one of the hardest lessons I ever learnt from college worksheets. We were asked whether a cell’s ribosomes fit in the cell normally or if they required compression of some sort. Subtracting the total volume of ribosomes in a cell from the total volume of the cell itself, we got a negative number, and indicated there must be some sort of compression.
Almost everyone got marked wrong. A simple difference, lacking context, is not a useful measure. What we should have calculated was a ratio.
It seemed arbitrary, but the entire class was a crash course towards scientific writing and everything was graded as if up for review. Picking the right metrics, assumptions, and descriptive language was crucial.
Yeah, this doesn't make sense to me. If you're trying to go for good scientific writing, you want to use detail where it's important. A ratio is great if you're describing the compression. If you're simply saying it doesn't fit raw, noting which number is bigger is effective and simple.
I never bothered to look it up, but that still tells me nothing. Is everyone into what's the destructive power of one ton of TNT but me? All I can think of when I read TNT is some old cowboy movie where they threw TNT cartridges around, or some cartoon.
A problem is also that the power is used ineffectively. For a tsunami you want to get a lot of water moving in your wave, a naked under-water explosion wastes a lot of energy on making steam and causing impressive fountains.
Volcanoes have a net cooling effect, due to the ash blocking sun and sulphur dioxide being an anti-greenhouse gas. There’ve been global temperature drops after big ones.
That's an interesting question. I am not sure if there is a process where any significant CO2 would be generated directly in this event. However, dust in the atmosphere tends to cause global cooling.
Tsar bomba was detuned to 50 Mega tons from 100. The US deployed 25 MT bombs. Modern nukes are smaller because the delivery systems are better (a MIRV with ten 1 MT does more damage and is more reliable that a single 25 MT warhead)
Honest Q: in geological standards, was this even a big blast?
Volcanic eruptions are rated on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 8. It looks like there hasn't been a formal rating assigned to Tonga yet, but it's believed to be the largest of the 21st century so far, and there was already a VEI 5 in 2011. A VEI 8 is the eruption of a super volcano like the Yellowstone caldera, so obviously it would make Tonga look like a firecracker in comparison. If you consider asteroid impacts as geological events then they can be substantially larger.
One obvious-ish lower bound estimate would be an estimate of the energy required to pulverize a Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai-sized rock into a troposphere-height cloud.
Edit: It's not any kind of estimate but the before and after pictures of the first thermonuclear weapon test site look quite a bit like the images from Tonga:
Hmm. Ivy Mike 10.4Mt near water detonation. Did that cause a 1m tidal wave across the eastern pacific? (No) Wondering if they're thinking about only the atmospheric blast energy.
>"This is just a horrible event for the Tongans," he says. But "it could be a benchmark, watershed kind of event in volcanology."
What I find most curious about this event is that nobody seems to really care about... the Tongans. No charity drives. No on the ground footage and interviews of news crews rushed to the scene. 100,000 people just had their lives destroyed and everyone is "cool! how big was it? this is great for science!"
The reports mention only 3 deads and around 100 houses destroyed, the problems affecting the full 100K population are damage to communication infrastructure, nothing about all of them losing their homes, the New Zealand government is already sending aid, and tonga government does not want a wave of foreign aid workers as Tonga is of the few places that has avoided a covid outbreak.
The Australian government has sent P-8A Poseidon and C-130J Hercules aircraft to surveil damage at the request of the Tongan government. And the HMAS Adelaide is about to leave Brisbane with relief supplies and should get there in a few days.
Tonga is a tiny island country in the middle of the pacific that lost its main communication channel as the suboceanic cable that connected it with the rest of the world was damaged after the eruption.
As it is a tiny country, there are no permanent BBC or CNN offices there with satellite equipment.
As it was a volcanic eruption, air travel was severely restricted due to the ash both in the atmosphere as well as in the single airstrip that serves the nation's main island. Help is being dispatched both by The Australian and New Zealand governments (the closest nations to Tonga) by ship.
There's also the complication that Tonga was basically spared from COVID, and thus has a population immunologically naive other than from the current vaccines which are not that great against the current dominant variants in circulation, so, there's a great level of care that needs to be taken to ensure that the relief effort doesn't backfire by triggering an outbreak.
Here's a seismogram of the event[1]. I don't know if there's a correlation between the results and the rate of energy release, but I feel like there might be.
No. Big eruptions are generally preceded and followed by smaller eruptions and earthquakes, but there was a catastrophic explosion here; you can see the shockwave hitting Tonga at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shl11xAQ_aI.
a bit of randomness: i tried to click the seismo image like it was a soundcloud embed. doh! now i want to find one of those apps that'll turn an image into sound.
Most of the timelapse imagery I saw had about a 10 minute gap between the images. So from the first image with noticeable detail from the previous wasn't a great amount of time. You could maybe compare old realtime film footage of nuclear tests to see how the cloud expands. It seems like the volcano continued spewing after the explosion to allow for the debris cloud to continue to expand to the size seen when compared to nuclear explosion
Yeah, the biggest bomb ever detonated for eg, Tsar Bomba[0], was 50-58 megatons. It's chilling to remember militaries have had the tech for some time now to direct a blast bigger than Tonga right overhead a city.
"“This cavern stretches under the island as far as the volcano, and is only separated from its central shaft by the wall which terminates it. Now, this wall is seamed with fissures and clefts which already allow the sulphurous gases generated in the interior of the volcano to escape.”
“Well?” said Pencroft, his brow suddenly contracting.
“Well, then, I saw that these fissures widen under the internal pressure from within, that the wall of basalt is gradually giving way and that after a longer or shorter period it will afford a passage to the waters of the lake which fill the cavern.”
“Good!” replied Pencroft, with an attempt at pleasantry. “The sea will extinguish the volcano, and there will be an end of the matter!”
“Not so!” said Cyrus Harding, “should a day arrive when the sea, rushing through the wall of the cavern, penetrates by the central shaft into the interior of the island to the boiling lava, Lincoln Island will that day be blown into the air<...>"
1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1268/1268-h/1268-h.htm#link2...