why i support nuclear war.

The economic effects of being a pussy.

Username hidden to protect the innocent.

In my article on centrism, I offered the following:

In the face of overwhelming odds, Putin might decide to launch nuclear weapons. [..] The damage to Europe and America would be significant, but I think we would emerge from the ashes stronger than ever before. To be clear, I do not support a “first strike,” and I would leave that decision in the hands of Putin.

My argument is that, even if Putin faced a total loss in Ukraine, this would not guarantee nuclear war, since Putin is afraid of nuclear war. But what if the chance was 1%? Does that mean a 1% chance of the total extinction of humanity?

What would be the consequence of nuclear war?

tl;dr:

Confronting Putin has a 1% chance of killing 4 billion people, but also, not confronting Putin has a 1% chance of (effectively) killing 4 billion people.

There’s no 0% risk option. Stop fetishizing nuclear apocalypse, and understand that there are multiple roads to civilizational destruction.

warning:

You have entered one of my “unedited posts.” These are really rough sketches with much work needing to be done. It is 4am as I write this and I need to wake up in 5 hours. This is going to be dirty. Lest you waste your time reading some doodle-brained claptrap, proceed with caution. Abandon post now, or submit to fate!

I warned you:

I don’t support nuclear war for the sake of depopulation. I think nuclear war is destructive to infrastructure, which other forms of depopulation (like turning the frogs gay) is not. Infrastructure is very important.

Nuclear war is no different from regular war. All wars damage infrastructure. All wars kill people, including innocent civilians. War is bad. However, sometimes, when all things are considered, war becomes the lesser of two evils.

For example, if we declare that “war is bad,” and use this pacifism to support the disestablishment of the American Order, then the result will be chaos and destruction of infrastructure and innocent lives. While war is bad, it is less bad than the unraveling of global trade.

Nuclear war is a particular kind of war. Nuclear war is not better or worse than any other form of warfare. For example, imagine India and China go to war without nuclear weapons. Both countries would experience massive casualties from conventional weapons. ICBMs can carrying other payloads besides nuclear ones: conventional, chemical, and biological weapons can all be used.

Anthrax

This study from 2003 suggested that Anthrax could kill, at minimum, 70,000 people in a single city. The maximum death count, with low availability of antibodies, is 700,000, per city. Since there 10,000 cities in the world, a global anthrax war could easily kill between 700 million and 7 billon people — no nukes required!

For reference, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 40,000 to 160,000 people per bomb. Even assuming that nuclear bombs are now 10x more effective than they used to be, this is still 400k to 1.6M. Deadlier than Anthrax, but not by much.

Anthrax has already been around for 30 years, and regardless of what you think about COVID, there are almost certainly deadlier options today, under wraps.

Cyber attacks.

Cyber attacks, in shutting down key infrastructure (nuclear power plants, coal power plants, transformers, logistics hubs, water treatment facilities) could cause millions of deaths in the absence of any “physical” destruction. If the power grid went down for a month, millions of people would be forced to drink dirty water and die of disease. As the global population becomes more dependent on desalination plants for drinking water, this becomes more perilous.

As technology advances, the ability of governments (or terrorists) to kill millions of people very easily also advances. Although this isn’t entirely due to technology.

pre-nuclear wars were bad.

In 1850, China had a population of 430 million. In the War of the Heavenly Kingdom, nearly 30 million people died, or about 7% of China’s population. By contrast, during WWII, approximately 10% of Germans died. Only 3% of Japanese people died! By contrast,15% of Soviets died. So much for the myth of the “fanatical” Axis powers, with their suicidal stormtroopers and “Banzai!” samurai.

The point here is that even with primitive technologies, wars cause massive economic damage and death. You don’t need nuclear weapons to achieve that.

Hypothetical:

It’s 1939, and you’re in charge of Britain. Hitler has just invaded Poland. Do you declare war? One advisor tells you, “yes, we have to declare war, otherwise Hitler will succeed in conquering Europe.” Another tells you, “no! War would lead to the deaths of untold millions!” Both of your advisors are technically right: without opposition, Hitler will indeed conquer Europe. But, war will lead to the deaths of untold millions.

If Britain stayed out of the war, millions still would have died. The death count wouldn’t have been that much different — it just would have shifted from Germans to Russians. America would still become involved in the war through the Pacific Theater rather than the European one.

Russia, facing certain doom, would appeal to America for direct assistance, and gotten it due to Hitler’s declaration of war. American troops, after conquering Japan, would land in Vladivostok to reinforce Siberia. The war would have dragged on much longer than 1945, killing more people.

“War is bad,” yes, but to freak out and get hysterical at the mention of “nuclear war” is not a proportional or rational response. Take nuclear weapons off the table, and war is still bad. Put nuclear weapons back on the table, and war becomes worse, but not orders of magnitude worse.

There are 12,100 nuclear weapons. They would target cities in order of size:

• 512 cities in the world with a population above one million

• 4,037 cities with a population above 100,000

• 10,000 cities with a population above 10,000 (a small town)

If every nuclear weapon was fired at every city in the world, conceivably, every city in the world would be destroyed.

55% of the world’s population lives in cities. That means 45% of people do not live in cities, and would survive direct impact. The worry about a nuclear war is not just that 55% of people would die, but that it would cause a nuclear winter and destroy global agriculture.

volcanic activity.

We can model global winters based on volcanic activity. The worst nuclear winter I could find was from 43 BC, the Okmok II eruption.

The material which comes out of a volcano is referred to as ejecta. Okmok II had 50 cubic kilometers of ejecta. As a result, 43 BC to 41 BC were the coldest years measured in the last 2500 years. It resulted in famines in China and the Mediterranean, leading to the events of the Battle of Actium, where Rome defeated the Greeks in Egypt.

Nuclear weapons produce around 0.3 million tons of dust per megaton. This is unfortunately not a volumetric measurement, but a weight measurement. To compare this to a volcanic eruption, the 1991 Pinatubo eruption ejected around 10 billion metric tons of ash. The 1991 eruption led to global cooling between 0.2°C to 0.4°C over a period of 13 months.¹

The conversion rate between tons and metric tons is about 0.907185, so I’m going to basically ignore it since these are very rough numbers.

agricultural damage.

The damage to agriculture was estimated at about $1.5 billion pesos in 1991, which is around $19.4 billion pesos today, or roughly $1 billion USD.

Approximate formula: 1 metric ton of ash results in $0.10 USD of agricultural damage.

The largest nuclear weapons are 50 megatons, which would produce 3 million tons of dust per warhead. Assume all 12,000 nukes are this big.² The result would be 36 billion tons of dust, or three times as bad as the 1991 eruption (which I’m sure you’ve never heard about). Three years of 1.2°C cooling, or $3.6 billion dollars of agricultural damage, sounds like a lot. But the global agricultural industry is $13 trillion, so this represents a decrease of 0.03% in total agricultural output.

The 1991 eruption and Okmok II were both a 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. The worst modern eruption was the 1815 eruption, which was a VEI 7.

The 1991 eruption emitted 10 km3 (2.4 cu mi) of ejecta. The 1815 eruption emitted, at most 45 km3 (10.8 cu mi) of ejecta, making it 4.5x worse than 12,000 50-megaton nuclear warheads.

In 1815, there were 1 billion people on earth. The highest possible estimates of the indirect death toll (due to agricultural loss) are 200,000 people. That means 0.02% of the global population died.

What about the effects of nuclear radiation and fallout? That was already factored in with the initial death toll.

There are less nuclear weapons today than there were in 1985. In 1974, when there were 4x more nuclear weapons around than today, James Schlesinger, as Secretary of Defense, predicted 100 million American casualties as a result of all-out nuclear war, or around 50% of the population. If nuclear weapons were the only weapons used today, we should expect only 12.5% of Americans to die according to Schlesinger.

Of course, nuclear weapons aren’t the only weapons. There are many more weapons. It’s good to oppose war. However, if war is opposed on the grounds that “America should give up its position in the Global Order,” we have to consider the economic effects.

The economic effects of being a pussy:

It’s difficult to assess what percent of the global economy is held up by the American Order. 80% of trade is conducted in USD. America holds together NATO, which accounts for at least 50% of the world’s navies.

If America disappeared tomorrow, I think it’s reasonable to predict a 50% decline in global trade. Around 22.4% of the global economy is a direct result of international trade, so we should expect the global economy to decline by at least 11.2%.

Global GDP is $105.4 trillion in 2023. A decline of 11.2% would be $11.8 trillion dollars.

There are 8.2 billion people, and the global dependency ratio is 53.3%, meaning that there are 3.8 billion working people. This means that each person produces around $27,737 per year, on average. Assuming 40 years of productive labor, each person produces $1.1M of economic value in their lifetime, on average.

A loss of $11.8 trillion dollars, in economic terms, is equivalent to the deaths of 10.7 million people. Global unipolar orders are rare, and infrequent. There were at least 1,000 years between Rome and America. Even at a slight decline of 1% per year, things get bad pretty fast:

By 2100, global GDP would be cut in half. By 2500, global GDP would be $880 billion, which is essentially the GDP of the world in 1750. If we couldn’t get the gang back together by the year 3000, global GDP would sit at a measly $6 billion, which is much less than the world 2000 years ago.

I’m not suggesting that any of this is likely (or even possible), but merely comparing the threat of economic collapse with the threat of nuclear apocalypse.

There’s very little difference, in practical terms, between the slashing of the global economy by 50% and nuclear hellfire killing 50% of people. This is because much of the global is fragile, and when the dam starts to break, it has exponential effects. When people don’t have money, they starve to death.

Does poverty make nuclear war more likely, or less likely? Looking back at history, economic downturn tends to increase conflict. By confronting Russia, we are slightly increasing the risk of nuclear war. However, by not confronting Russia, we are also slightly increasing the risk of nuclear war, by making the world poorer.

This argument depends on the fact that America is a force for good and keeps the global economy together. The USD and NATO’s navy are the two biggest reasons why the global economy could not persist without America. The counterargument is that China could fill the gaps and “stop the bleeding,” but I would also argue that America’s decline would destroy China, so I don’t think that’s a very good solution.

There is no one who can take the place of America. We’re not perfect, but we’re the best the world has got. In a world of imperfect states, America is the best among the mediocre.

Ok, it’s 7am and I’m going to get 3 hours of sleep, maybe. Then a nice 12 hour drive. Wish me luck against the 1% chance that my potential death on the great American highway results in a heightened risk of civilizational collapse.

1. Reassessing the cooling that followed the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364682624000154

2. (they aren’t, but I’m steelmanning here)