Are we doomed to blow ourselves up?

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I want to know what people think about the world possibly getting destroyed one day by nuclear war?

Do you think that no matter how bad things get between our countries during times of war that nobody is going to be stupid enough to destroy the entire planet and kill everybody within their own country too?

Or do you think we are all pretty much doomed because humans just can't resist the temptation of destroying the hell out of each other?

No. We've had nuclear weapons for quite a few decades and nothing like this has happened.

Mutually assured destruction stops those with the nukes from nuking each other.



They love their children too.

If that's true then why don't we dispose of all these damn nukes?

If not nuclear annihilation, it seems highly probable that in the immediate future we will be steamrolled by the Anthoropocene Mass Extinction Event, which will render the ecosystem terribly inhospitable, if not completely uninhabitable, and the resultant Malthusian Check may wipe homo sapiens off the face of the Earth, along with at least 30% of other species.
Self-immolation appears to be our collective karma, regardless of the method used.

I guess we need to work on trying to colonize life on Mars then.

eventually not that far into the future the progression of technology will render nuclear arms obsolete. and will also replace those mechanisms which produce too much co2.

In fact, thermonuclear war very nearly happened on several occasions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

If nations A and B sit down to agree to get rid of their nukes nation A might still keep a few nukes hidden in abandoned salt mines somewhere, so that when nation B complies and gets rid of its nukes, nation A can pull out its hidden nukes and extort anything it wants from nation B.

Getting rid of all nuclear bombs is no more possible than getting rid of all vacuum cleaners, or of any other technology.

We cant go back.

All we can do is try to slow down nuclear proliferation. And cross our fingers.

The odds of a nuclear exchange breaking out any given year is extremely low. But its like throwing a thousand sided dice with only one side having the bad outcome. Every year we have to throw the dice. So eventually the undesired side has to come up. And as more and more nations get nukes the more times the dice gets thrown. Eventually there will be a little white nuclear war here or there. The kind in which ….maybe... only a 100 million people die (comparable to the death toll of WWII), and the human race will just stagger on. And we wont get something like the feared all out nuclear exchange that was possible between the two superpowers during the decades of the Cold War in which many hundreds of millions, or billions would die, and world civilization would collapse.

A kilodeath here, and a megadeath there, but somehow we will avoid gigadeath. That's my "optimistic" take on it!

I kind of feel like I'm better off killing myself before I see that day happen. I really don't want to die a slow painful burning death while some other country laughs their asses off and celebrates what they did to me.

Glad you weren't around in 1962----with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We are not even CLOSE to that point right now.

Forgive me for sounding like a complete idiot because I don't like reading about this kind of stuff, but has any other country been nuked by bombs since Japan got bombed after World War 2?

Nope....there's no documented occurrence of this. Whatsoever.

That's good to know at least.

Cause if one side did the other side could nuke them without fear of counter attack and would do so

Yep.

Only two nukes have ever been exploded in anger.

Thousands of nukes have been set off in practice (including one by the soviets in 1961 that was fifty megatons- more than a thousand times as powerful as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined), but none since 1945 in an actual act of war, or of terrorism, on human targets.

I think we are unfortunately doomed, I don't really know the "method" of us going though. I don't want to sound like I'm preaching any religion, but there is a lot of deception today and powerful groups that have control of all important institutions are backed by very rich people.