[extropy-chat] Freedom and Practicality

[Russell Wallace]

On 5/28/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at tsoft.com> wrote:
>
> Just---pray for us---the very minimum it takes to keep WMD out of
> the hands of small groups and individuals.


Creating a nuclear bomb - the kind of WMD that matters - is far beyond the
capability of a small group or an individual. It takes a big enough group
that they have something to lose when the target nation retaliates.

(We've already seen non-nuclear WMDs in action: the Tokyo subway gas attack,
the American anthrax letters. Both killed far fewer people than a
well-placed conventional bomb.)

Your feelings will change the day that several million people die
> in San Francisco or New York.


Anyone can string together words like "the day that several million people
die"; that doesn't make it correspond to reality.

The type of nuclear attack that could reasonably be carried out by a major
terrorist organization or minor rogue state whose dictator has mislaid his
marbles, would be a 10-20 kiloton device exploded at sea level in a city
harbor. Note the following:

1) Surveillance by the target government on its own people wouldn't be
particularly helpful in stopping this sort of attack in the first place; it
would be carried out by foreigners, with no particular need to use on-site
resources. (Surveillance of foreign countries might, yes, but that's a
different matter.)

2) Granted that New York and San Francisco are larger cities, the death toll
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from such bombs in optimally placed airbursts
against Japanese cities highly vulnerable to firestorm attacks with
inadequate rescue and medical resources and nobody knowing about the fallout
danger was around 100,000 each; this is a far more plausible estimate of the
death toll than "several million".

3) America alone loses many times that number of lives every year already.
The cold truth is that if such an attack were to occur _every single year_,
let alone as a one-off, stopping them still wouldn't be the most important
thing that could be done in terms of saving lives.

This is one area where you should _not_ listen to your heart, because it
will give you completely wrong answers. We are programmed to be
ultra-sensitive to death by murder and war because in our ancestral
environment these were the main killers that we could do anything about. The
cold truth is that nuclear bombs today are a trivial danger against the way
people really die: dribbling in a hospital bed while their bodies wear out
their final hours. _That_ is the death we need to focus on.
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