Topic: The Biggest Gun Wins? - page 2. (Read 4620 times)

My crystal ball works no better than yours. I'm just not blinded by the wonderfulness of your ideology, and thus I'm motivated to think things through - a motivation you lack since it's counter to your ideas. As for my proclamations, it's not my duty or responsibility to engage in lengthy explanations all the time. However, I do honestly feel that I'm justified in making statements from time to time to try and get you to think beyond your ideology.

Sorry, my crystal ball must be on the fritz. Yours is working better, then?

Care to enlighten us poor plebes on how it DOES work? Or are you just going to make vague proclamations of impending doom, like usual?

Size is becoming less and less relevant as warfare become more and more asymmetric.

That being said, I'm banking on moving towards are world where there are no standing armies, not 2,000 separate ones.

That's not how it works.

Well, this is true. Of course, The owners of those bombs would be screwed, too. And they know it. That's why, if they have half a brain, they've hired people to keep those bombs safe. And those people know that keeping those bombs from going off accidentally is a very important part of that job.

Edit: Fuck! I can only find 3 and 4! is 4 stand-alone, or would I be completely confused?

I think everyone having nukes is more like all my neighbors having truck bombs parked in their driveways. Even if they're just for deterrence against other people who might use truck bombs, I'm screwed if one of them goes off for any reason. Guns don't really compare.

The series of novels I talked about is the Fall Revolution series. I think the story of nuclear deterrence for sale is in the first book, The Star Fraction, and again in the last, The Sky Road. The first two books tell a certain future history and the next two books tell what happened after, with very different outcomes, based on the people who run the nuclear deterrence program making different choices at a crucial point in history. The third book is the most exciting, about a future where a hard technological singularity took off and humans left behind in the solar system almost went extinct. The fourth, the alternative scenario, is almost boring, about a "soft" technological singularity (and the history that led up to it) that left Earth like a libertarian paradise, with only voluntary cooperatives and long lives of abundance for almost everyone.

Some people are real foolhardy. They want an  group of strangers to have powers they won't allow themselves to have.

More groups means more opportunities, but more people with guns means more opportunities to get shot, too. Doesn't mean it happens.

Eh. My gut feeling doesn't convince me that Russian nukes are on the black market, either. And since I'm not a black-market arms dealer, I can't prove they are, or aren't. But tell me: Do you know where all those Nukes got to? 'Cause the Russians don't.

What books are these? I'm interested.

If you would be safe from armed men behaving irrationally, carry a weapon.  If you would allow all to be equally equipped, anticipate that 1 in 25 will behave irrationally.  That is the most current statistic I have found for sociopathy.  The other 24 of us can not defend ourselves and each other if we are unarmed.  We can only be shot down by the minority.  If we allow that disarmament in the name of peace, we will eventually find ourselves voting the minority into office, seeing as how they are the only ones left with weapon training.  Somehow, this sounds familiar.

It's true, civilization could be smashed even now by foolish use of nukes. It almost happened before in 1983 and in 1962. More groups with nukes means more opportunities for disaster, though since the Cold War no nation has stockpiled ridiculous thousands of weapons.

Please cite a credible source for your idea that "anyone who wants a nuke bad enough" can get a former-Soviet warhead. Your gut feeling isn't very convincing.

Sort-of-on-topic for the thread: Ken MacLeod wrote a series of SF novels in the 1990s about about competing anarcho-capitalist and anarcho-socialist human factions colonizing space after many nation-states collapsed. One of the story strands was about an ex-Soviet republic that retained its nuclear arsenal and sold outsourced nuclear deterrence on the open market to groups who wanted to live under a nuclear umbrella without building their own weapons.

I find it interesting that you spend two entire paragraphs making my case, and then flippantly toss off 'but I'm afraid some kook's going to get a hold of one', and then use that as the basis of your argument. Do you honestly think that 'accidental or irrational' things can't happen now?

How many nukes did Russia have when it collapsed? How many of those were in border states? I'm pretty sure anyone who wants a nuke bad enough, can get one.

OK, no sarcasm in paradise either. In a stateless world you can eventually expect every armed group bigger than the local militia to have nuclear weapons. There will be peace or there will be spasms of mutual extermination, not a lot in between. And the relative size of the armies and their budgets doesn't matter. Russia, France, the UK: any one of them could utterly ruin the United States and be destroyed in turn by the counterstrike. It doesn't matter who has more soldiers, smarter tacticians, or greater wealth. Tiny Israel can produce enough nukes to cripple giant China.

If Sam Colt made all men equal, nuclear weapons make all armed forces equal. This is why nuclear weapons are attractive to states like North Korea. This tiny dysfunctional country can't hope to produce an industrial base capable of matching its enemies in conventional warfare. But for less than the cost of a pair of F-22s, nuclear capability can give NK a "get out of invasion and occupation free" card. This is why the states with nuclear weapons enter open warfare only against states without them.

In this sense nuclear weapons discourage warfare generally and their spread is actually a good thing. The problem is the possibility of accidental or irrational use of nuclear weapons, which could quickly kill more people than all wars of the 20th century combined. In my estimation the probability of unplanned disaster rises sharply if there are 1000 different groups with nukes.

Mmm... sarcasm. It is... delicious, yet tangy. The taste of fail.

Yes, people will still be stupid without government. They just won't be in charge:

South Africa covertly spent less than $10 million per year for about 15 years to develop a nuclear arsenal, and succeeded. All this wargaming talk of guns and men is nonsense. Even a "little" army can have nuclear weapons for the price of a handful of new aircraft. And once all the armies have nuclear weapons, the first to strike can destroy any of the others, though they will probably be destroyed in kind.

We probably shouldn't worry about this, though, because after the state is abolished human prejudice and folly will be too. People will only go to war for sound and sober reasons that appeal to homo economicus, the same way they would plan investments for a pension fund. Therefore it is safe to say that a thousand private armies can have a hundred warheads each and we can still sleep sound at night, because only a fool would start a nuclear war and this stateless new paradise will have a big "no fools allowed" sign hanging over the gates.

Point. Weren't for a gas shortage, Hitler might have made it back to the beaches.

Not sure that that is true anymore. For example, I haven't seen any truly successful disruptions of the US supply chain, even though Al Qaeda is perfectly willing to blow themselves up to take out trucks. Modular and standardized supply chains guarded by well trained troops with highly specific regulations (+ sniper towers) create a pretty damn secure situation.

It'd be more accurate to say that armies today travel on their diesel. Disrupting diesel shipments has happened occasionally, even for political reasons. I can't ever recall hearing of troops going hungry or thirsty.


Yeah, just look up how much they spend in Iraq and Afghanistan on A/C alone. That by itself exceeds the GDP of a helluva lot of countries, let alone our entire budget.

Did you know the US spends more on its military than every other country in the world combined?

I just thought that was interesting.

It's also a hell of a lot easier to disrupt said monolithic support structure. Army travels on it's belly.

bitcoin2cash, what really happens (and I base this assessment off of experience with wargames, realmVrealm in online games, history, and common sense) is that unless those 500 small armies band together and become a single big army, they get chewed up and systematically assimilated or destroyed outright. It happens so often that I am shocked when the little guys manage to pull off even short term victories. It comes down to simple logistics.

Economies of scale occur in warfare just as in commerce. It's easier to provide a monolithic vertically integrated supply chain than it is to provide equivalent support to hundreds of smaller units. There's also the psychological impact of facing superior numbers. Any sort of operation, whether it's rapid-fire skirmishes or long-term sieges can be better performed by the army with bigger numbers, assuming commanders of equal knowledge and skill.

You are the worst poster. It's bad enough that the shit you post is nonsensical, but the formatting style would be no different if all your postings were copy/pasted from the chain emails your racist grandfather sends you. Type in a way that people can read easily, and then restructure your postings so they form a coherent point and not some splintered series of half-thoughts.