Not putting any probabilities on these ideas yet, just brainstorming:
I expect that some dynamics would be similar to nuclear strategy in the real world: nuclear weapons would make wars less common, but the few wars that did happen would have a risk of being much more devastating. If you’re Saddam Hussein and you’re pondering whether to start the Iran-Iraq war, maybe you hold back for fear of a nuclear exchange, and start your own local cold war instead. I’d expect that maybe we have only a small fraction as many wars, but some of the remaining wars would involve nuclear weapons.
While interstate wars might decrease dramatically, I’m not sure if the frequency of civil wars would change much. I could easily imagine a dark alternate history where maybe half of civil wars involve some small group (either rebels or an embattled remnant of government) getting their hands on a stray nuke and setting it off in the middle of a city.
It could be tempting for many countries to go for a North Korea strategy—acting crazy and threatening everyone around them in exchange for concessions. Perhaps, after a bunch of initial chaos, the world would eventually enforce a much stronger norm against these rogue nations… imagine a kind of worldwide NATO who wouldn’t have any qualms preemptively nuking dictators who seemed to be going down the North Korea path.
In a world where nuclear weapons were much easier to obtain and/or construct (imagine you don’t need to refine the uranium at all, and you don’t need specialized high-precision shaped explosives to set it off—just take ordinary U-238 and wrap it in TNT), it would also become much more important to pay attention to other parts of a nation’s nuclear capabilities. If you are a poor African country, do you have intercontinental missiles ready to fire towards anywhere on earth at a moment’s notice, or do you just have some loose warheads that you can hope to sneak into another nation’s port in a disguised container ship? Do you have any second-strike capability? Etc. Just giving everyone nukes would not put countries on an even, mutually-assured-destruction playing field. The resulting instability as different countries jockeyed to gain advantages over their neighbors—more accurate missiles, stealthier submarines, etc—would probably breed plenty of conflict.
Overall: A peaceful world stuck in a multipolar-Cold-War mexican standoff seems very unstable and unlikely to me. Instead, I think a world with easy nukes looks like something between the following two extremes:
Things are mostly similar to our world, except wars are a less common, but those wars often involve nuclear weapons, so everyone is just nuking each other occasionally, especially during civil wars, in poorer countries with less nuclear capability, and among dictatorships rather than democracies. (Cold-war-like dynamics mostly prevail among rich and powerful nations, just like IRL) This is obviously terrible because many more people die, and over time a larger part of the earth’s territory, atmosphere, etc, is being irradiated.
In order to prevent continual low-level nuclear war as described above, the world coordinates much more to eliminate the threat posed by unstable and rogue nations. This coordination would take a different form depending on whatever part of nuclear conflict seems easiest to control. If our scenario is “nukes are still hard to make, but everyone gets 100 free warheads in 1950”, maybe this means aggressively forcing countries to give up those nuclear weapons. If it’s “nukes are easy to build, you just need the uranium”, maybe the leading countries jointly occupy all uranium mines. If nukes are even easier to build than that, perhaps we end up with a neocolonial system with very few independent nations to eliminate the threat of war (no civil wars or unstable dictators if there are just a handful of empires dividing up the Earth), or a system of totalitarian surveillance if we are also worried about small non-state actors (as imagined would be necessary in Nick Bostrom’s “Vulnerable World Hypothesis”).
I’m surprised you don’t mention what seems to me to be the most likely scenario, 0. : Mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, etc. The world looks like 1 or 2 up until some series of accidents and mistakes causes sufficiently many nukes to be fired that we end up in nuclear winter.
(Think about the history of cold war nuclear close calls. Now imagine that sort of thing is happening not just between two countries but everywhere. Surely there would be accidental escalations to full-on nuclear combat at least sometimes, and when two countries are going at it with nukes, probably that raises the chances of other countries getting involved on purpose or on accident)
Well, if we’re starting in 1950, not a single nation has ICBMs, and few countries even have long-range bombers. I’m also not sure how many nukes we’re supposed to imagine everyone gets / how quickly they can be made. So the world would have a little bit of time to settle into the new equilibrium—I agree that if every country in the world was magically gifted an arsenal equal to the USA’s current nuclear forces, the world would probably end in fire pretty quickly.
To keep things simple, I was also treating this question as purely an alternate history exercise—what would have happened by 2020 if things were different in 1950. Maybe from a long-term perspective of thousands of years, that much proliferation means you’re totally doomed. But on a timescale like that, it’s still early days for the real world’s nuclear proliferation dynamics, too.
I was also imagining that my scenario 2, where basically the world gets quickly taken over by some kind of powerful alliance tantamount to a strict mostly-unified world government, might involve a very severe worldwide nuclear war—either as the crisis that prompts the decision to centralize, or as a result of the decision, when the winning coalition must now seize power by potentially obliterating all the objecting countries.
It would be really depressing if we repeatedly had giant full-scale worldwide nuclear wars, getting worse and worse as technology advanced, and ALSO failing to change world governance to put a stop to it. But I guess humanity has disappointed me before, so it could definitely happen—maybe each nuclear war just makes affected nations dramatically more fractured and broken and chaotic, so after the first big war there’s no alliance of countries powerful/functional/responsible enough to impose order and stop the next round.
One potential crux here might be the importance of the “nuclear taboo” (which in the real world is intact, and in alt-1950 would have be broken almost immediately) and the idea of something like nuclear conflict contagiousness. In the real world, we have this vision that once even small nukes start flying, possibly things might escalate extremely quickly, and also draw in more third parties until every country is flinging their missiles around as part of an omni-apocalyptic conflict. I’m not sure how realistic this vision is for alt-1950 or the real world (although obviously nobody wants to find out by testing) -- wouldn’t all third parties want to make very clear that they are staying totally out of any ongoing nuclear conflict? But I’m no nuclear strategist, so idk.
Interesting! For (1) how do you expect the economic superpowers to respond to smaller nations using nuclear weapons in this world? It sounds like because of MAD between the large nations, your model is that they must allow small nuclear conflicts, or alternatively pivot into your scenario 2 of increased global policing, is that correct?
Yes, that’s what I’m thinking. As I’m continuing to develop this thought (sorry for being a bit repetitive in my posts), perhaps the main things that determine where the world might fall between scenarios (1) and (2) are:
-How hard it is to establish stricter global governance: Is there an easy proliferation bottleneck that can be controlled, like ICBM technology or uranium mines? Can the leading nations get along well enough to cooperate on the shared goals of global governance? When everyone has nukes, how easy is it to boss around small countries? If the leading nations don’t have the state capacity to pull off global governance, then we’ll be stuck in a multipolar anything-goes world no matter what we think is preferable.
-The “contagiousness” of nuclear conflict helps determine the value of strict global governance: if conflicts are extremely contagious (such that something like the real-world Syrian Civil War ends up with the superpowers at DEFCON 1), then small-scale wars are still extremely dangerous, and global policing is very desirable. If nuclear conflict isn’t contagious at all and it’s easy to stay out of a dispute, then it would be a lot more acceptable for the leading nations to just let nuclear wars happen, in the same way that the modern world often lets civil wars happen without intervening too much. Just play defense by being really paranoid about your ports/borders, and threatening to first-strike anyone who develops suspicious new long-range capabilities.
I really don’t know much about the question of contagiousness. Is there something special about nuclear weapons and the “nuclear taboo” that affects contagiousness? (Maybe nations feel like they have to “use or lose” their ICBMs before they are destroyed by opponents.) Or does all war seem contagious because it naturally erupts at the center of complex knots of geopolitical tensions and alliances? (Like the rapid domino-like declarations of war that set off WW1, or the agglomeration of seemingly disparate atrocities and conflicts centered around WW2.) If nuclear attacks are specifically and specially contagious, we should be most worried about something like a nuclear Israel-Iran or India-Pakistan conflict. Aside from the horrific direct cost of an India-Pakistan exchange, how likely would it be to eventually draw in the gigantic arsenals of the USA and Russia? If it’s more about the underlying geopolitical conditions and the universal logic of escalation, we should be most worried about small direct conflicts between the biggest nuclear powers getting rapidly out of hand. Maybe the USA feels pressured to confront China early over Taiwan since China’s power is only rising over time, and the vision of having a limited-casualties, mostly-naval battle in the South China Sea ends up being wrong, with geopolitical energy fueling rapid massive escalation between the two.
Here is a sliding scale of global-policing, extending my original scenarios: 3.0 -- 100% literal single world government with totalitarian surveillance (established after a devastating WW3) 2.5 -- closely cooperative alliance of all major governments (perhaps but not necessarily established after a devastating WW3) 2.0 -- colonial/imperial system where there’s plenty of competition between empires, but no great power is deliberately supplying nukes to rebel groups, and rouge nations are reliably punished. (In 1950, Africa was still mostly colonized! Maybe Britain and France just keep it that way, the USA covers latin america, and the USSR & China exert similar nonproliferation pressure in their spheres of influence.) 1.5 -- proxy-war system where the two superpower teams are simultaneously suppressing and encouraging proliferation as they fight over declining european empires (like the coups and revolutions of the real Cold War but with lots of actual detonations) 1.0 -- multi-polar world where the superpowers play defense and the developing world is defined by regional tensions (like the India-Pakistan standoff but everywhere, between eg Turkey & Greece or South Africa & Angola) and the most damage is done by medium-scale nuclear exchanges (like a war between Iran and Iraq / Saudi Arabia) 0.5 --anarchic, hyper-fragmented world where independence movements succeed everywhere and random nukes are going off all over whenever local mexican standoffs break down (eg Maoist China collapses into multiple warring states, Northern Ireland experiences nuclear terrorism, etc)
I think the most likely (and perhaps best-case) scenario is that the world eventually makes a serious attempt at the neo-imperial system of 2.0, although this scenario only really works if the USSR and China decide to play along. It would obviously be a more totalitarian world than the real world, and it still wouldn’t stop a lot of nukes from going off. But I think in a neo-imperial system, although it world would be much more fragile than the real world, could still have a basically-normal future that is not guaranteed-doomed. Versus everything from 1.5 and down feels like it might work well for a few decades, but would slowly drift farther and farther off the rails as each nation’s capabilities advance.
Not putting any probabilities on these ideas yet, just brainstorming:
I expect that some dynamics would be similar to nuclear strategy in the real world: nuclear weapons would make wars less common, but the few wars that did happen would have a risk of being much more devastating. If you’re Saddam Hussein and you’re pondering whether to start the Iran-Iraq war, maybe you hold back for fear of a nuclear exchange, and start your own local cold war instead. I’d expect that maybe we have only a small fraction as many wars, but some of the remaining wars would involve nuclear weapons.
While interstate wars might decrease dramatically, I’m not sure if the frequency of civil wars would change much. I could easily imagine a dark alternate history where maybe half of civil wars involve some small group (either rebels or an embattled remnant of government) getting their hands on a stray nuke and setting it off in the middle of a city.
It could be tempting for many countries to go for a North Korea strategy—acting crazy and threatening everyone around them in exchange for concessions. Perhaps, after a bunch of initial chaos, the world would eventually enforce a much stronger norm against these rogue nations… imagine a kind of worldwide NATO who wouldn’t have any qualms preemptively nuking dictators who seemed to be going down the North Korea path.
In a world where nuclear weapons were much easier to obtain and/or construct (imagine you don’t need to refine the uranium at all, and you don’t need specialized high-precision shaped explosives to set it off—just take ordinary U-238 and wrap it in TNT), it would also become much more important to pay attention to other parts of a nation’s nuclear capabilities. If you are a poor African country, do you have intercontinental missiles ready to fire towards anywhere on earth at a moment’s notice, or do you just have some loose warheads that you can hope to sneak into another nation’s port in a disguised container ship? Do you have any second-strike capability? Etc. Just giving everyone nukes would not put countries on an even, mutually-assured-destruction playing field. The resulting instability as different countries jockeyed to gain advantages over their neighbors—more accurate missiles, stealthier submarines, etc—would probably breed plenty of conflict.
Overall: A peaceful world stuck in a multipolar-Cold-War mexican standoff seems very unstable and unlikely to me. Instead, I think a world with easy nukes looks like something between the following two extremes:
Things are mostly similar to our world, except wars are a less common, but those wars often involve nuclear weapons, so everyone is just nuking each other occasionally, especially during civil wars, in poorer countries with less nuclear capability, and among dictatorships rather than democracies. (Cold-war-like dynamics mostly prevail among rich and powerful nations, just like IRL) This is obviously terrible because many more people die, and over time a larger part of the earth’s territory, atmosphere, etc, is being irradiated.
In order to prevent continual low-level nuclear war as described above, the world coordinates much more to eliminate the threat posed by unstable and rogue nations. This coordination would take a different form depending on whatever part of nuclear conflict seems easiest to control. If our scenario is “nukes are still hard to make, but everyone gets 100 free warheads in 1950”, maybe this means aggressively forcing countries to give up those nuclear weapons. If it’s “nukes are easy to build, you just need the uranium”, maybe the leading countries jointly occupy all uranium mines. If nukes are even easier to build than that, perhaps we end up with a neocolonial system with very few independent nations to eliminate the threat of war (no civil wars or unstable dictators if there are just a handful of empires dividing up the Earth), or a system of totalitarian surveillance if we are also worried about small non-state actors (as imagined would be necessary in Nick Bostrom’s “Vulnerable World Hypothesis”).
I’m surprised you don’t mention what seems to me to be the most likely scenario, 0. : Mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, etc. The world looks like 1 or 2 up until some series of accidents and mistakes causes sufficiently many nukes to be fired that we end up in nuclear winter.
(Think about the history of cold war nuclear close calls. Now imagine that sort of thing is happening not just between two countries but everywhere. Surely there would be accidental escalations to full-on nuclear combat at least sometimes, and when two countries are going at it with nukes, probably that raises the chances of other countries getting involved on purpose or on accident)
Well, if we’re starting in 1950, not a single nation has ICBMs, and few countries even have long-range bombers. I’m also not sure how many nukes we’re supposed to imagine everyone gets / how quickly they can be made. So the world would have a little bit of time to settle into the new equilibrium—I agree that if every country in the world was magically gifted an arsenal equal to the USA’s current nuclear forces, the world would probably end in fire pretty quickly.
To keep things simple, I was also treating this question as purely an alternate history exercise—what would have happened by 2020 if things were different in 1950. Maybe from a long-term perspective of thousands of years, that much proliferation means you’re totally doomed. But on a timescale like that, it’s still early days for the real world’s nuclear proliferation dynamics, too.
I was also imagining that my scenario 2, where basically the world gets quickly taken over by some kind of powerful alliance tantamount to a strict mostly-unified world government, might involve a very severe worldwide nuclear war—either as the crisis that prompts the decision to centralize, or as a result of the decision, when the winning coalition must now seize power by potentially obliterating all the objecting countries.
It would be really depressing if we repeatedly had giant full-scale worldwide nuclear wars, getting worse and worse as technology advanced, and ALSO failing to change world governance to put a stop to it. But I guess humanity has disappointed me before, so it could definitely happen—maybe each nuclear war just makes affected nations dramatically more fractured and broken and chaotic, so after the first big war there’s no alliance of countries powerful/functional/responsible enough to impose order and stop the next round.
One potential crux here might be the importance of the “nuclear taboo” (which in the real world is intact, and in alt-1950 would have be broken almost immediately) and the idea of something like nuclear conflict contagiousness. In the real world, we have this vision that once even small nukes start flying, possibly things might escalate extremely quickly, and also draw in more third parties until every country is flinging their missiles around as part of an omni-apocalyptic conflict. I’m not sure how realistic this vision is for alt-1950 or the real world (although obviously nobody wants to find out by testing) -- wouldn’t all third parties want to make very clear that they are staying totally out of any ongoing nuclear conflict? But I’m no nuclear strategist, so idk.
OK, you’ve convinced me! Nice!
Interesting! For (1) how do you expect the economic superpowers to respond to smaller nations using nuclear weapons in this world? It sounds like because of MAD between the large nations, your model is that they must allow small nuclear conflicts, or alternatively pivot into your scenario 2 of increased global policing, is that correct?
Yes, that’s what I’m thinking. As I’m continuing to develop this thought (sorry for being a bit repetitive in my posts), perhaps the main things that determine where the world might fall between scenarios (1) and (2) are:
-How hard it is to establish stricter global governance: Is there an easy proliferation bottleneck that can be controlled, like ICBM technology or uranium mines? Can the leading nations get along well enough to cooperate on the shared goals of global governance? When everyone has nukes, how easy is it to boss around small countries? If the leading nations don’t have the state capacity to pull off global governance, then we’ll be stuck in a multipolar anything-goes world no matter what we think is preferable.
-The “contagiousness” of nuclear conflict helps determine the value of strict global governance: if conflicts are extremely contagious (such that something like the real-world Syrian Civil War ends up with the superpowers at DEFCON 1), then small-scale wars are still extremely dangerous, and global policing is very desirable. If nuclear conflict isn’t contagious at all and it’s easy to stay out of a dispute, then it would be a lot more acceptable for the leading nations to just let nuclear wars happen, in the same way that the modern world often lets civil wars happen without intervening too much. Just play defense by being really paranoid about your ports/borders, and threatening to first-strike anyone who develops suspicious new long-range capabilities.
I really don’t know much about the question of contagiousness. Is there something special about nuclear weapons and the “nuclear taboo” that affects contagiousness? (Maybe nations feel like they have to “use or lose” their ICBMs before they are destroyed by opponents.) Or does all war seem contagious because it naturally erupts at the center of complex knots of geopolitical tensions and alliances? (Like the rapid domino-like declarations of war that set off WW1, or the agglomeration of seemingly disparate atrocities and conflicts centered around WW2.)
If nuclear attacks are specifically and specially contagious, we should be most worried about something like a nuclear Israel-Iran or India-Pakistan conflict. Aside from the horrific direct cost of an India-Pakistan exchange, how likely would it be to eventually draw in the gigantic arsenals of the USA and Russia?
If it’s more about the underlying geopolitical conditions and the universal logic of escalation, we should be most worried about small direct conflicts between the biggest nuclear powers getting rapidly out of hand. Maybe the USA feels pressured to confront China early over Taiwan since China’s power is only rising over time, and the vision of having a limited-casualties, mostly-naval battle in the South China Sea ends up being wrong, with geopolitical energy fueling rapid massive escalation between the two.
Here is a sliding scale of global-policing, extending my original scenarios:
3.0 -- 100% literal single world government with totalitarian surveillance (established after a devastating WW3)
2.5 -- closely cooperative alliance of all major governments (perhaps but not necessarily established after a devastating WW3)
2.0 -- colonial/imperial system where there’s plenty of competition between empires, but no great power is deliberately supplying nukes to rebel groups, and rouge nations are reliably punished. (In 1950, Africa was still mostly colonized! Maybe Britain and France just keep it that way, the USA covers latin america, and the USSR & China exert similar nonproliferation pressure in their spheres of influence.)
1.5 -- proxy-war system where the two superpower teams are simultaneously suppressing and encouraging proliferation as they fight over declining european empires (like the coups and revolutions of the real Cold War but with lots of actual detonations)
1.0 -- multi-polar world where the superpowers play defense and the developing world is defined by regional tensions (like the India-Pakistan standoff but everywhere, between eg Turkey & Greece or South Africa & Angola) and the most damage is done by medium-scale nuclear exchanges (like a war between Iran and Iraq / Saudi Arabia)
0.5 --anarchic, hyper-fragmented world where independence movements succeed everywhere and random nukes are going off all over whenever local mexican standoffs break down (eg Maoist China collapses into multiple warring states, Northern Ireland experiences nuclear terrorism, etc)
I think the most likely (and perhaps best-case) scenario is that the world eventually makes a serious attempt at the neo-imperial system of 2.0, although this scenario only really works if the USSR and China decide to play along. It would obviously be a more totalitarian world than the real world, and it still wouldn’t stop a lot of nukes from going off. But I think in a neo-imperial system, although it world would be much more fragile than the real world, could still have a basically-normal future that is not guaranteed-doomed. Versus everything from 1.5 and down feels like it might work well for a few decades, but would slowly drift farther and farther off the rails as each nation’s capabilities advance.