Sorry for the delay in my reply but I noticed your response after checking if she posted about risk mitigation.
I read the paper you linked and had previously listened to the 80000 hours podcast in alternative foods. I am for research into alternative foods. I think it is a good plan B and your methods should be tested to narrow down the uncertainty in their efficacy. However, my plan A would be $1,000 in flour baked into hardtack and a few thousand multivitamins or other food stores.
I do not think it is necessary to split hairs between counterforce and countervalue. I would be amazed if our launch on warning and use it or lose it mentality has changed. The assumption should be MAD instead of NUTS.
In her nukemap she uses a 15 and 500 kiloton example. The orange part is the thermal radius where fires are widespread. The grey circle before that is the 5 psi overpressure where most residential buildings are destroyed. However it does not show the 1-2 psi overpressure range where windows and fires are blown out. In smaller yield weapons the flash and blast radii that snuffs the fire out nearly overlap. I think secondary fires are unlikely to start due to modern building codes.
If it were possible for nuke map to MIRV you could see 33 blasts, each with 15 kilotons instead of her one 500 kiloton blast. And
In reality her 500KT example is just one piece of the MIRV attack from the SS-18 which would carry ten 500KT weapons. This would extend the blast radius over the city where the fuel load is highest. It would be immediately apparent that the same total number of kilotons from many lower yield weapons are more effective for total destruction than a single 5MT weapon.
In the firebombing of Dresden a first wave of high explosive blockbusters opened up the interior of the buildings. A second wave of bombers dropped incendiaries to start many fires in a predetermined pattern on top of the exposed interiors. A third wave of fragmentary bombs suppressed firefighters and civilians from extinguishing the fires.
The order of operations to make a firestorm are blast, fire, and the suppression of firefighters. Firestorms are hard to pull off and the allies waited for ideal weather conditions before attacking. The high temperature pyrocumulous cloud lifts the soot into the stratosphere.
In a nuclear MIRV blast the firestorming sequence of events does not occur. The first blast is a high altitude burst which disrupt the power grid reducing the likelihood of secondary electrical fires. Natural gas fires may still be possible.
The flashes start interior fires through transparent windows. Fire suppressing sprinklers in commercial buildings would be triggered to suppress them. Lastly, the blast from a second up to a few minutes later snuffs out any remaining fires. Fires started on the perimeter of cities are unlikely to have a high enough fuel load to firestorm or move before they burnout.
I understand your analysis shows 50Tg of soot making it into the lower stratosphere from a large number of moving fires. I still think rubble burning in such a manner is unlikely. Although you discount this by giving it a 20% weight. It is hard to tell since it is uncertainties on top of uncertainties.
Your analysis for the number of deaths makes sense. When US designed MAD they wanted enough firepower to assure the destruction of Russia. This was likely done by taking the number of deaths per kiloton and matching their population. Russia has a population of 144 million. Therefore, your 150 million number for US deaths is likely correct because the Russians are now matching the number of US weapons.
Those videos were helpful. You mentioned that secondary fires can start because of natural gas supply-there is a book I’ve read discussing this in detail called Fire After Earthquake. I think secondary fires remain a large risk even with building codes because the valves to shut off the supply could be damaged by the blast.
Sprinklers only have the capacity to put out a fire in one limited location of the building-since the thermal radiation from the fireball would set multiple fires, sprinklers would be overwhelmed.
A big problem with food storage is that it would be trillions of dollars for the whole world to do it – very unlikely to get funded and it would exacerbate current malnutrition.
I plan on reading your book first. I have noticed the assumption in this attack scenario is a surprise nuclear war, however, I think that is unlikely. There would be a period of tension when crisis upgrading and emergency personnel would be on alert. If an attack was expected then natural gas valves would be closed before the attack occurred. Preemptively shutting down utilities would be one way to encourage major cities to evacuate. Only 5% of the country would be subjected to lethal amounts of blast. It is more effective to spread out the population but people may be unwilling to leave unless the can move to areas where utilities are available. Earthquakes do not give the advanced notice while even a surprise attack would have some warning. A buried small metal pipe is highly resistant to blast forces due to its small diameter and the earth arching phenomena and would likely survive directly below the airburst of a 500KT weapon. Natural gas valves near homes would be covered in debris choking off their supply of oxygen.
Painting houses white is another potential crises upgrade that may be encouraged before a conventional war turns nuclear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGJcwaUWNZg&t=3m30sClosing blinds would also prevent the flash from entering the entire of the homes. In commercial buildings without blinds. The sprinklers do have standing water in them to keep the system pressurized. The flash shown in the video was from 29KT which has a shorter more intense pulse at around 0.3 seconds. A 1 megaton weapon can blow out windows 20 miles away but it is only capable of igniting dry leaves up to 11 miles from the epicenter.
If using intumescent paint becomes the industry standard through inexpensive products then would that stop a global famine?
The flash from a weapon cannot penetrate most substances as it quickly deposits all its energy. What if cities are protected by releasing white smoke when missiles are inbound?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely built from wood, paper with charcoal used for heating and cooking. It was much easier for Japanese cities to firestorm. Conventional weapons were used to firestorm many cities. How did the burning of those cities impact the climate?
Hardtack can be stored for over a century. Salt, sugar and multivitamins never expire. The country is littered with abandoned mines which are at the ideal temperature for long term food storage. I think the costs would be low. A one time expenditure has a long shelf life. It might be more expensive than alternate foods but it can be accumulated over time without triggering food shortages and may help people who are already food insecure under the guise of protecting Americans. Eisenhower argued we needed national highways to win wars. This does not solve the worldwide problem but your arguments are compelling. I just think there is too much uncertainty to give a definitive answer.
I looked into a dozen or so interventions for preventing firestorm given nuclear war. I estimated that some of them could be cost effective only looking at saving lives of US citizens. However, I abandoned the project once I realized that some of the ideas were around in the Cold War, and they were still not implemented, so it was very unlikely we would implement them now.
If one side believes they are being attacked and launches weapons, there would not be a period of tension before the attack. Even if there is a period of tension like the Cuban missile crisis, I don’t believe that caused people to evacuate cities, though of course the attack could not have occurred as quickly as it could now.
I’m not sure if your proposed diet has the required essential oils. These tend to go rancid, though they might still be safe to eat.
I appreciate your reply. I feel like I am learning a lot.
Have you ever read, Why Civil Defense Failed? The author argues civil defense failed because people took MAD literally. They believed that any attempts to stop or prevent total annihilation was utterly futile and only made things worse. They did not understand that an effective deterrence might be more effective and cheaper than guaranteeing total destruction. I think we both recognize the possibility MAD does not prevent conflicts but just makes them more deadly.
Civil defense during the cold war was scrapped because people believed it would create an incentive to build more weapons. Civil defense planners were believed to only be creating more targets. Your large scale alternate food production in factories would become targets in their arguments as well as any personnel trained to implement your plans. The author describes how the office of Civil Defense had its budget cut in the 60s even with the recent Cuban missile crisis. Only 7% of Americans made any preparations during the missile crisis because they thought total annihilation meant exactly that. So why bother? Senators believed any civil defense was just a way to prepare Americans for a war that is by definition not winnable or even survivable. I would still be interested to see your research on the nuclear winter effect if FEMA was properly funded and if their personnel were well trained.
Alternate foods are important but preventing firestorms would also stop other mass extinctions and ecological collapse. Being able to farm greatly decrease our chances of going extinct from a nuclear war. The argument can be made that now with nuclear arms treaties in place we should implement the safeguards that were not done during the cold war. This is because unchecked arms growth is less likely and we will forever live with the possibly of nuclear weapons being used.
The Russian dead hand was designed to let their leaders wait and see if an attack was real or a false alarm. They could arm their dead hand knowing that if they were hit that they could still retaliate. This is also true for SLBMs that would retaliate if they confirmed there was an attack against their countries. The submarine second strike ability and their near invincibility to a first strike attack ensures that cooler heads prevail during false alarms. This reduces the likelihood of accidental full scale war. Additionally if the codes are not correct then they would not be launched at countries and would land somewhere in the ocean.
Can the US soybean crop convert into vegetable oil? What about using powdered milk for essential fats?
I have not read it, but that is an interesting conclusion from “Why Civil Defense Failed.” Some of the interventions for preventing firestorming were natural gas shut off, electrical shutoff, enhanced sprinklers, and automatically closing shades. One proposed in 1967 was intentionally exploding nuclear weapons beneath the city to create a fire break to stop the spread of a mass fire-talk about fighting fire with fire! That is interesting that the political incentive might actually be greater now to prevent fire storming. Still, preparing for alternate foods would be lower cost than preventing fire storming given nuclear winter or storing more food. So that’s why I think alternate foods have a better chance of actually getting implemented. Yes, the industry that could be used for alternate foods may be targeted, but some alternate foods do not depend on industry still functioning. Furthermore, if the world were prepared for alternate foods, it could potentially provide these foods to the target countries.
The main roadblock to additional funding into alternate foods research is likely the same nuclear fatalism that also cuts into FEMA’s budget. There is some validity to their arguments that this creates more countervalue targets. This is why decentralization, redundancy and resiliency is important. This same set of properties is what motivated the creation of the internet. A mixture of agricultural science, stored foods, alternate foods, fire prevention, arms treaties, and nuclear non-proliferation should all be pursued.
Any advances in those areas, especially agricultural science like dwarf wheat, would still save many lives. Even if there is not a nuclear winter and farming is possible people will not be able to garden as if their lives depended on it. A global year long power outage is expected to kill 90% of the population even with farming as an option. I think of stored food as buying people the time to adapt and survive. It also hedges against multiple existential risk scenarios and allows people to focus on rebuilding what they can before they become generationally trapped into subsistence farming. An electrical engineer turning into a farmer to survive is a waste of talent when they could be working in their specialty. I have read that malaria is considered to be an example of a good effective altruist investment. Their ROI for a single life is $3,340 according to this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768/
Assume that $3,340 is guaranteed to save a life. Stored food is also guaranteed to save a life should the worst happen. Your research shows that the accepted and expected likelihood of a nuclear war is 0.3% per year. Multiplying our good ROI example of $3,340/life by our expected probability 0.3%per year gives us $1002. That is enough to buy 10 years worth of flour for one person and it is more than enough whole wheat to feed multiple people through a nuclear winter (which I think is overblown but cannot prove it yet). This looks like an even better investment when spread out over 70 years. Alternate foods should also be explored and it may be more cost effective but the stored food is guaranteed. I do not understand why someone would be against that. The high costs to save everyone might even incentivize countries to further reduce their stockpiles if the citizens in those countries demand an adequate amount of hedging against their use.
While nuclear winter gets much of the existential risk attention an easy way to reduce that risk is to reduce fallout. This means eliminating high yield groundbursts by removing the outdated hardened targets like silos and cold war government bunkers. The fallout suppresses firefighters and civilians from putting out secondary fires because they would be instructed to remain indoors for weeks or months. Civilian deaths due to fallout would likely escalate the conflict into a full scale exchange. It would also be in an attacker’s best interest to allow civilians to put out fires in order to avoid a nuclear winter.
the cost $3340 should be multiplied by 0.003 and 72 years to make a nuclear winter lifetime hedge comparison to malaria. That is $721. This is about 10 years worth of wheat grain. It is still on par with malaria prevention but also looks better if it hedges against multiple existential risks.
Sorry for the delay in my reply but I noticed your response after checking if she posted about risk mitigation.
I read the paper you linked and had previously listened to the 80000 hours podcast in alternative foods. I am for research into alternative foods. I think it is a good plan B and your methods should be tested to narrow down the uncertainty in their efficacy. However, my plan A would be $1,000 in flour baked into hardtack and a few thousand multivitamins or other food stores.
I do not think it is necessary to split hairs between counterforce and countervalue. I would be amazed if our launch on warning and use it or lose it mentality has changed. The assumption should be MAD instead of NUTS.
In her nukemap she uses a 15 and 500 kiloton example. The orange part is the thermal radius where fires are widespread. The grey circle before that is the 5 psi overpressure where most residential buildings are destroyed. However it does not show the 1-2 psi overpressure range where windows and fires are blown out. In smaller yield weapons the flash and blast radii that snuffs the fire out nearly overlap. I think secondary fires are unlikely to start due to modern building codes.
If it were possible for nuke map to MIRV you could see 33 blasts, each with 15 kilotons instead of her one 500 kiloton blast. And
In reality her 500KT example is just one piece of the MIRV attack from the SS-18 which would carry ten 500KT weapons. This would extend the blast radius over the city where the fuel load is highest. It would be immediately apparent that the same total number of kilotons from many lower yield weapons are more effective for total destruction than a single 5MT weapon.
In the firebombing of Dresden a first wave of high explosive blockbusters opened up the interior of the buildings. A second wave of bombers dropped incendiaries to start many fires in a predetermined pattern on top of the exposed interiors. A third wave of fragmentary bombs suppressed firefighters and civilians from extinguishing the fires.
The order of operations to make a firestorm are blast, fire, and the suppression of firefighters. Firestorms are hard to pull off and the allies waited for ideal weather conditions before attacking. The high temperature pyrocumulous cloud lifts the soot into the stratosphere.
In a nuclear MIRV blast the firestorming sequence of events does not occur. The first blast is a high altitude burst which disrupt the power grid reducing the likelihood of secondary electrical fires. Natural gas fires may still be possible.
The flashes start interior fires through transparent windows. Fire suppressing sprinklers in commercial buildings would be triggered to suppress them. Lastly, the blast from a second up to a few minutes later snuffs out any remaining fires. Fires started on the perimeter of cities are unlikely to have a high enough fuel load to firestorm or move before they burnout.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ztJXZjIp8OA
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0kxCjiIyBA
I understand your analysis shows 50Tg of soot making it into the lower stratosphere from a large number of moving fires. I still think rubble burning in such a manner is unlikely. Although you discount this by giving it a 20% weight. It is hard to tell since it is uncertainties on top of uncertainties.
Your analysis for the number of deaths makes sense. When US designed MAD they wanted enough firepower to assure the destruction of Russia. This was likely done by taking the number of deaths per kiloton and matching their population. Russia has a population of 144 million. Therefore, your 150 million number for US deaths is likely correct because the Russians are now matching the number of US weapons.
Those videos were helpful. You mentioned that secondary fires can start because of natural gas supply-there is a book I’ve read discussing this in detail called Fire After Earthquake. I think secondary fires remain a large risk even with building codes because the valves to shut off the supply could be damaged by the blast.
Sprinklers only have the capacity to put out a fire in one limited location of the building-since the thermal radiation from the fireball would set multiple fires, sprinklers would be overwhelmed.
A big problem with food storage is that it would be trillions of dollars for the whole world to do it – very unlikely to get funded and it would exacerbate current malnutrition.
I plan on reading your book first. I have noticed the assumption in this attack scenario is a surprise nuclear war, however, I think that is unlikely. There would be a period of tension when crisis upgrading and emergency personnel would be on alert. If an attack was expected then natural gas valves would be closed before the attack occurred. Preemptively shutting down utilities would be one way to encourage major cities to evacuate. Only 5% of the country would be subjected to lethal amounts of blast. It is more effective to spread out the population but people may be unwilling to leave unless the can move to areas where utilities are available. Earthquakes do not give the advanced notice while even a surprise attack would have some warning. A buried small metal pipe is highly resistant to blast forces due to its small diameter and the earth arching phenomena and would likely survive directly below the airburst of a 500KT weapon. Natural gas valves near homes would be covered in debris choking off their supply of oxygen.
Painting houses white is another potential crises upgrade that may be encouraged before a conventional war turns nuclear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGJcwaUWNZg&t=3m30sClosing blinds would also prevent the flash from entering the entire of the homes. In commercial buildings without blinds. The sprinklers do have standing water in them to keep the system pressurized. The flash shown in the video was from 29KT which has a shorter more intense pulse at around 0.3 seconds. A 1 megaton weapon can blow out windows 20 miles away but it is only capable of igniting dry leaves up to 11 miles from the epicenter.
If using intumescent paint becomes the industry standard through inexpensive products then would that stop a global famine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVWVP3tKlZc
The flash from a weapon cannot penetrate most substances as it quickly deposits all its energy. What if cities are protected by releasing white smoke when missiles are inbound?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely built from wood, paper with charcoal used for heating and cooking. It was much easier for Japanese cities to firestorm. Conventional weapons were used to firestorm many cities. How did the burning of those cities impact the climate?
Hardtack can be stored for over a century. Salt, sugar and multivitamins never expire. The country is littered with abandoned mines which are at the ideal temperature for long term food storage. I think the costs would be low. A one time expenditure has a long shelf life. It might be more expensive than alternate foods but it can be accumulated over time without triggering food shortages and may help people who are already food insecure under the guise of protecting Americans. Eisenhower argued we needed national highways to win wars. This does not solve the worldwide problem but your arguments are compelling. I just think there is too much uncertainty to give a definitive answer.
I looked into a dozen or so interventions for preventing firestorm given nuclear war. I estimated that some of them could be cost effective only looking at saving lives of US citizens. However, I abandoned the project once I realized that some of the ideas were around in the Cold War, and they were still not implemented, so it was very unlikely we would implement them now.
If one side believes they are being attacked and launches weapons, there would not be a period of tension before the attack. Even if there is a period of tension like the Cuban missile crisis, I don’t believe that caused people to evacuate cities, though of course the attack could not have occurred as quickly as it could now.
I’m not sure if your proposed diet has the required essential oils. These tend to go rancid, though they might still be safe to eat.
I appreciate your reply. I feel like I am learning a lot.
Have you ever read, Why Civil Defense Failed? The author argues civil defense failed because people took MAD literally. They believed that any attempts to stop or prevent total annihilation was utterly futile and only made things worse. They did not understand that an effective deterrence might be more effective and cheaper than guaranteeing total destruction. I think we both recognize the possibility MAD does not prevent conflicts but just makes them more deadly.
Civil defense during the cold war was scrapped because people believed it would create an incentive to build more weapons. Civil defense planners were believed to only be creating more targets. Your large scale alternate food production in factories would become targets in their arguments as well as any personnel trained to implement your plans. The author describes how the office of Civil Defense had its budget cut in the 60s even with the recent Cuban missile crisis. Only 7% of Americans made any preparations during the missile crisis because they thought total annihilation meant exactly that. So why bother? Senators believed any civil defense was just a way to prepare Americans for a war that is by definition not winnable or even survivable. I would still be interested to see your research on the nuclear winter effect if FEMA was properly funded and if their personnel were well trained.
Alternate foods are important but preventing firestorms would also stop other mass extinctions and ecological collapse. Being able to farm greatly decrease our chances of going extinct from a nuclear war. The argument can be made that now with nuclear arms treaties in place we should implement the safeguards that were not done during the cold war. This is because unchecked arms growth is less likely and we will forever live with the possibly of nuclear weapons being used.
The Russian dead hand was designed to let their leaders wait and see if an attack was real or a false alarm. They could arm their dead hand knowing that if they were hit that they could still retaliate. This is also true for SLBMs that would retaliate if they confirmed there was an attack against their countries. The submarine second strike ability and their near invincibility to a first strike attack ensures that cooler heads prevail during false alarms. This reduces the likelihood of accidental full scale war. Additionally if the codes are not correct then they would not be launched at countries and would land somewhere in the ocean.
Can the US soybean crop convert into vegetable oil? What about using powdered milk for essential fats?
I have not read it, but that is an interesting conclusion from “Why Civil Defense Failed.” Some of the interventions for preventing firestorming were natural gas shut off, electrical shutoff, enhanced sprinklers, and automatically closing shades. One proposed in 1967 was intentionally exploding nuclear weapons beneath the city to create a fire break to stop the spread of a mass fire-talk about fighting fire with fire! That is interesting that the political incentive might actually be greater now to prevent fire storming. Still, preparing for alternate foods would be lower cost than preventing fire storming given nuclear winter or storing more food. So that’s why I think alternate foods have a better chance of actually getting implemented. Yes, the industry that could be used for alternate foods may be targeted, but some alternate foods do not depend on industry still functioning. Furthermore, if the world were prepared for alternate foods, it could potentially provide these foods to the target countries.
The main roadblock to additional funding into alternate foods research is likely the same nuclear fatalism that also cuts into FEMA’s budget. There is some validity to their arguments that this creates more countervalue targets. This is why decentralization, redundancy and resiliency is important. This same set of properties is what motivated the creation of the internet. A mixture of agricultural science, stored foods, alternate foods, fire prevention, arms treaties, and nuclear non-proliferation should all be pursued.
Any advances in those areas, especially agricultural science like dwarf wheat, would still save many lives. Even if there is not a nuclear winter and farming is possible people will not be able to garden as if their lives depended on it. A global year long power outage is expected to kill 90% of the population even with farming as an option. I think of stored food as buying people the time to adapt and survive. It also hedges against multiple existential risk scenarios and allows people to focus on rebuilding what they can before they become generationally trapped into subsistence farming. An electrical engineer turning into a farmer to survive is a waste of talent when they could be working in their specialty. I have read that malaria is considered to be an example of a good effective altruist investment. Their ROI for a single life is $3,340 according to this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-is-the-greatest-good/395768/
Assume that $3,340 is guaranteed to save a life. Stored food is also guaranteed to save a life should the worst happen. Your research shows that the accepted and expected likelihood of a nuclear war is 0.3% per year. Multiplying our good ROI example of $3,340/life by our expected probability 0.3%per year gives us $1002. That is enough to buy 10 years worth of flour for one person and it is more than enough whole wheat to feed multiple people through a nuclear winter (which I think is overblown but cannot prove it yet). This looks like an even better investment when spread out over 70 years. Alternate foods should also be explored and it may be more cost effective but the stored food is guaranteed. I do not understand why someone would be against that. The high costs to save everyone might even incentivize countries to further reduce their stockpiles if the citizens in those countries demand an adequate amount of hedging against their use.
While nuclear winter gets much of the existential risk attention an easy way to reduce that risk is to reduce fallout. This means eliminating high yield groundbursts by removing the outdated hardened targets like silos and cold war government bunkers. The fallout suppresses firefighters and civilians from putting out secondary fires because they would be instructed to remain indoors for weeks or months. Civilian deaths due to fallout would likely escalate the conflict into a full scale exchange. It would also be in an attacker’s best interest to allow civilians to put out fires in order to avoid a nuclear winter.
*correction
the cost $3340 should be multiplied by 0.003 and 72 years to make a nuclear winter lifetime hedge comparison to malaria. That is $721. This is about 10 years worth of wheat grain. It is still on par with malaria prevention but also looks better if it hedges against multiple existential risks.