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.
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!