mylifeinrambles.blog

Fair warning: what follows is a series of thoughts I had this morning while brushing my teeth. These are not the thoughts of a nuclear strategist, a policy analyst, or a person with any relevant credentials whatsoever on the topic of geopolitics. These are the thoughts of a woman getting ready for her day, whose brain apparently decided to solve global existential risk between the shampoo and the conditioner.

So take all of this with the appropriate salt. This is my opinion. It is also, arguably, none of my business. Both things can be true.

Before I say anything else, I want to acknowledge that a lot of people are genuinely worried about the possibility of nuclear war, and their concerns are not unreasonable. There are serious people who study this professionally and have real, informed reasons to think about it seriously. If you are one of those people, I respect it. I am simply not one of them, and I would like to tell you why, in the deadpan and slightly ridiculous voice of my own personal risk assessment framework.

Here we go.

Reason one. Everyone has one.

The nuclear weapon used to be a scary object because only some people had one. In the very early days, before everyone else caught up, the calculus was different — if you were the only person on the block with a nuke, you could theoretically use it and nobody could nuke you back. That was terrifying and made sense as a thing to worry about.

But that is not the situation anymore. The situation now is that a large and slightly alarming number of countries have nuclear weapons. Which means that if any of them press the button, they are pressing the button with the full understanding that somebody else is going to press their button in return. Roughly twelve minutes later, everyone involved will have a very bad afternoon.

Under these conditions, the nuclear weapon has quietly transitioned from device of destruction to status symbol. Nobody is really planning to use the nukes. They are just standing near them, in a somewhat aggressive posture, hoping other countries notice how big theirs is.

Which is silly, but it is the kind of silly humans have historically been good at maintaining for long stretches. I trust it will continue.

Reason two. Resources.

This is my main argument, and it is what any business person would tell you if you asked them politely: whatever you destroy stops being useful.

A nuclear bomb does not selectively destroy only the annoying parts of a country. It destroys everything. The people, obviously. But also the buildings, the roads, the farms, the manufacturing, the ports, the natural resources, the technology, the infrastructure, the supply chains, the intellectual property, the workforce, and everything else that gave the target area any economic value in the first place. And then, as a bonus, it irradiates whatever is left, so that even if you wanted the land afterward, it would be broadly hostile to human occupation for a long time.

Can you imagine the resource and financial loss? Can you imagine the quarterly earnings report? Whoever launches the bomb is essentially setting fire to the very thing they might have wanted, plus some things they definitely wanted, plus a bunch of other things somebody else wanted and now cannot have. It’s the world’s worst return on investment. The math is aggressively bad.

And I would like to point out — because this is the part that quietly reassures me — that the people who currently have their hands on the nuclear buttons are, by and large, people who care very much about resources, money, and having things. These are not people known for burning down valuable assets on impulse. They are people known for hoarding valuable assets with an intensity that has often required international intervention.

You do not become a person with access to nuclear weapons without having a certain kind of relationship with what things are worth. And what things are worth is: a lot, especially when they belong to you.

Setting fire to trillions of dollars of infrastructure, whether it’s yours or somebody else’s, is not the move of a person who values things. It is the move of a person who has genuinely lost the plot.

Reason three. And this is the part that I want to be honest about.

The logical arguments above assume that the people at the buttons are behaving logically. Which, unfortunately, is not always guaranteed. Humans are capable of anger, spite, hatred, and the occasional deranged worldview, and any of those could theoretically override the economic reasoning.

So I would be lying if I said I was not aware that emotion could, in theory, drive somebody to press the button anyway. It could. That is a real thing that could happen. I just think it is less likely than people fear, because — and I say this with some confidence — the specific type of person who ends up with access to nuclear weapons is usually also the type of person who is deeply attached to their own survival, their own comfort, and their own ability to enjoy the trillions of dollars they have carefully accumulated. The emotional impulse to nuke somebody tends to run headlong into the calculation of and what does that leave me with? And the answer is very little, which tends to cool the impulse considerably.

The bigger risk, if I am being honest with myself, is not deliberate emotional launch. It is accidents.

Which is fair. Accidents happen. There are documented cases in which nuclear systems have come alarmingly close to launching for reasons that were entirely mechanical or clerical. Somebody misreads a screen. A drill gets confused for the real thing. A sensor picks up something ambiguous and the humans on duty have to decide, quickly, whether to interpret it charitably or apocalyptically.

This is the scenario that I actually think about, briefly, when the topic comes up. And then I think about the fact that these systems have been in place for eighty years, and they have not yet resulted in accidental nuclear war, and that at every one of those close calls, a human being somewhere in the chain of command chose to interpret the situation with skepticism instead of paranoia. Which suggests to me that the systems, imperfect as they are, have some redundancies built in — including, quietly, human beings who have decided that they do not want to start a nuclear war on a Tuesday because a sensor twitched.

So even the accident scenario, terrifying as it is on paper, has a soft floor underneath it. Which I find, again, mildly reassuring.

In conclusion, delivered from the bathroom mirror.

This is a longer answer than the topic probably deserves. It is also entirely a product of my brain in the morning, unfiltered, before the tea had fully taken hold. I have no expertise on this. I am just a woman who thinks about resources, incentives, and human behavior, and has concluded — with the calm confidence of somebody whose entire evidence base is vibes and one econ class — that nuclear war is unlikely enough that I am not going to spend my finite worrying capacity on it.

If you are a person who does worry about it — I understand. I really do. The topic is not silly. The concern is not silly. It is a legitimate thing to be aware of and to want the adults in charge to keep taking seriously.

I am simply choosing, this morning, to trust the following: that logical minds will prevail, that resource incentives are stronger than emotional ones for the specific personalities involved, that the accident scenario has been kept at bay for eighty years by a series of people who did not want to be the one who ended everything, and that my personal worry — while it may feel productive — is not going to change any of the variables in this equation.

So I am going to go make more tea. And I am going to let the people with actual nuclear physics degrees, actual policy experience, and actual professional obligation to think about this, do the thinking about it.

I have decided, tentatively, that this is what specialization is for and I definitely need more tea.