[extropy-chat] Freedom and Practicality

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 12:54:54PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote:

> 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

I disagree. If you have the fissibles, it's straightforward.

> that they have something to lose when the target nation retaliates.

You can't retaliate against a group which has no fixed location,
or a group that doesn't mind dying.
 
> (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.)

Excuse me, you have not seen anything in action yet. If you
want to kill lots of people, you have to do it right. Not just
cargo cult/going through the motions. A little gravity-drained
dilute sarin in acetonitril is an annoyance, nothing more.
 
> 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:

You're still trapped in the cargo cult thinking. If you want to kill
many people, you would put the weapon where it hurts. 20 kT Manhattan
penthouse/skyscraper roof, on a tower would be more realistic.
 
> 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".

Skyscrapers are glass, and Manhattan is effectively a 3d stacking
of people during business hours. Nevermind millions, but destroying
a major business center would hurt.
 
> 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.

Terrorism works by not killing people, but creating disruptions.
A single nuclear blast in a major city would cause widespread
fear of inner cities. *That* would hurt.
 
> 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.

Agreed, but people are not rational.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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