More on apocalypse

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More on apocalypse

Post by warumich » Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:10 am

As some may know already, I am currently writing a book about the sociology of apocalypse. This is a bit of a funny time to be writing this book. It was going to be about climate change, nuclear war, that kind of sh.t, but I suppose now there's going to be an extra chapter on pandemics as well.

So, here's some of my initial thoughts as I'm trying to piece together what to think about all this. Feedback appreciated, but it turned out a rather long post, apologies.

First, it's about narrative. One of the main research questions in apocalypse studies is why are people and societies at large always so convinced that the end of the world is just around the corner, when all the evidence, from 3000 years of history, is that the world has stubbornly refused to end.
This is not to make light of the current crisis (or, indeed, others, like climate change) - the fact that it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it isn't going to happen this time. Or that, if the cataclysm comes and passes, if we somehow live through it and come out the other side, and the world is still pretty much there, many people are going to suffer and die along the way - it will have been their end of the world, if not ours (for example, for the Sioux, the apocalypse has happened, with Armageddon at Wounded Knee).

Kermode, in his essay The sense of an ending, proposed that we are living in our own narratives, with us as the main characters. As we are the main part of the story, our lives cannot be small or insignificant, one way in which to put ourselves into the bigger picture of the universe is that we must be living in extraordinary times, our generation, our lifetime is special in a way that of previous generations wasn't. The two defining points in the timeline of the world are its beginning and its end, since we're clearly not living at the beginning we must be living at the other end of time. However, visions of us standing at the beginning can be found in the utopian narratives of the founder generations of new societies looking hopefully to the horizon of the future; the end narratives see us standing at the end of time instead, looking back. Often millenarian narratives combine the two, with the end of the world being the catalyst for the beginning of a new world, with our, special, generation at the apex of the cataclysm that brings the change. Within our generation, we are further distinguished between the masses and the select few who know the truth and thus can act upon, and shape, events. That truth may be revealed religiously, or through science, or maybe, if we cannot draw on either spiritual or scientific habitus, through the conviction that we have acquired special knowledge through other means such as uncovered conspiracies - in all cases only a select few can appreciate what is really happening. (And again, a disclaimer that this is not trying to put scientific knowledge on the same epistemic level as revelation or conspiracy theory, however the narrative function special knowledge fulfills is similar, whether that knowledge is justified or not - but there are clearly more conversations to be had about this).

But narrative goes deeper than just fulfilling a psychological need to be special and justify our inclusion of ourselves as one of the main characters in world history. Our narratives are bound by conventions and cultural expectations, for example the need for events to be shaped by agency. For events to be part of our narrative, they need to have a meaning, and for them to have a meaning they can't just have happened. We have largely done away with Providence or fate, directed by God or gods as the agents of change, however, meaning and agency is found through other means. As Ulrich Beck has theorised for example, natural catastrophe gets reinterpreted not as an act of God, but as failures in risk management. Hurricane Katrina was a natural event, but the suffering it has caused was now the responsibility of government for not maintaining the levees, individuals for not heeding evacuation orders, and all of late modern society for increasing the incidence of extreme weather events through letting climate change happen. Man-made risk, and crucially, our collective awareness of it, has replaced fate as the primary imaginary of our future and who is to blame for it. The setting has changed but the narrative structure survives.
Once a risk event is anchored to our culturally inherited narratives of the apocalyptic, wider narrative tropes come into play - we'll have saviours, messiahs and prophets, judgement and redemption, post apocalyptic utopias and distopias, and more, as integral parts of the stories we tell ourselves of late modern, globalised existential risks - and this inflects how we react to them.

Secondly then, it's about the cultural norms and values into which those narratives are woven. Mary Douglas analysed risk stories as dirt taboos - risk is introduced to a society through the unclean (i.e. taboo breaking) habits of outsiders. These taboos may be in origin about lowering risks to a society through prohibiting uncleanliness or certain foods that are perceived as risky, but they can become highly ritualised, so that practices can continue being taboo breaking even if they are no longer introducing a tangible risk. It then becomes a general concern that practices that break with taboos, or a culture's general set of norms, values and ritualised beliefs, introduce potential harm to society. This means that other societies, which may have a different set of cultural norms etc are inherently dangerous as well. They don't eat what we eat, they don't wash like we wash, they don't f.ck like we f.ck.
Risk taboos tend to be associated with the breaking of bodily boundaries - this is where harm is most naturally introduced to the individual. Bad hygiene practices, rotten food, unsafe sex, these are all inherently dangerous, and as such have become the focus of many (most?) ritualised dirt taboos. Breaking cultural norms in these areas introduces harm to a society. But a closely knit society can itself become a ritualised metaphor for the body, breaking cultural boundaries is analogous to breaking the bodily ones. Risk from outsiders is therefore especially salient, illnesses which break through the society's bodily boundary for example are due to the norm and taboo breaking behaviour of other cultures.

Infectious disease outbreaks that invade our bodily boundaries, both of the individual and of our society, are due to dirt taboo breaking practices of outsiders. Infectious diseases tend to be named, in popular discourse at least, after their (often merely assumed) country of origin. German measles, Spanish flu, Mexican swine fever, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Trump's "Chinese virus" (though it's heartening to see some international pushback against this name). It's the foreigner's and outsider's unclean habits in breaking dirt taboos that is to blame (and remember, we need someone to blame), e.g. the (imagined) Chinese cultural trait of eating animals we in our culture would deem unclean to eat, in case of the coronavirus outbreaks. Or the sexual practices of homosexuals during the HIV epidemic (though they weren't foreigners, they were clearly dirt taboo breaking outsiders within a heteronormative society, and thus fair game for being blamed). Or the dirty unnatural animal husbandry practices of the British, if you were following the BSE episode from the continent.
Now another disclaimer, poor hygiene or animal husbandry practices can indeed lead to infectious disease outbreaks, so I'm not saying this is all just pure xenophobia. Indeed, Douglas' dirt taboos all tended to have an origin in perfectly sensible precautions (by the standards of knowledge in the given culture at the time), the point is that they have become ritualised so that the taboo breaking behaviour of outsiders and other cultures becomes the culprit rather than the underlying actual risky behaviour on which we tend to have much less knowledge. Long before possible origins for the virus have been identified, popular discourse had already started focussing on the "dirty Chinese" and their "dirty" foods. One of the insidious facets of all this is precisely that the xenophobia and the precautionary risk avoidance behaviour are so difficult to disentangle.


So where are we? In order to make sense of times like this, we construct narratives, of us at the cusp of momentous, world changing events. We are special characters in these narratives not just because unlike our ancestors we live in the pivotal times, but also because we are among the select few who have access to special knowledge and with special knowledge comes access to our special pathways for salvation and further along, redemption. It sets us apart from the masses, the others who are to blame because natural disasters don't just happen, they are the fault of somebody, somebody else who either directs events nefariously, or lets things happen through unnatural, unclean, taboo breaking behaviour. What exactly the wider apocalyptic narratives are, and what precisely the taboos are that the others have broken, varies from society to society; events get narrated through our own various cultural lenses.

But universally we, as a narrating species have a tendency to dramaticise cataclysmic events, to assign roles of heroes and villains onto an uncaring directionless nature. And yet despite all this the world has not yet ended, and like all crises before us, this too will pass. Just pray that we're not the Sioux, and this is not our Wounded Knee.

The end
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by Fishnut » Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:39 pm

That was really interesting, thanks for sharing :) Just wish I had something valuable to add.
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Apr 10, 2020 9:05 pm

Yes, it's a fascinating topic. Looking forward to the book!
Fishnut wrote:
Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:39 pm
Just wish I had something valuable to add.
I don't either. It's not the end of the world.
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by dyqik » Fri Apr 10, 2020 9:29 pm

Ditto - that's really interesting.

A couple of random musings, which may not be relevant in your context as I'm not familiar with this field at all:

On narrative beginning and endings - no human actually remembers their own beginning, and so the narrative of their own personal beginning is always constructed after the fact from minimal evidence - parental stories, photos, video clips, etc. Similarly, most societies don't know that they're beginning when they do, so origin myths are always myths (even for deliberately founded societies like the US, which have a definite day of founding the formal structure, origin myths like the pilgrims at Plymouth are stories whose accepted form was written down century(ies) after the fact). Endings necessarily work the same way at the societal level - no-one can state that "this event marks the beginning of the end of the <x> culture", but humans can and do experience and describe their own personal endings almost up to the last moment. That maybe makes it easier and more enticing to describe the death of a society or culture, or human race?

On acts of God etc. - I think a large proportion of the human race still interprets bad events as an act of providence, fate or God. The number of people who say "maybe this was meant to be" in order to provide an opportunity in response to events like losing a job, or "maybe it wasn't meant to be" in response to relationship breakups is large, and I think that that does still infect a lot of human thinking (not _necessarily_ in a bad way). While academic authors and some subset of the population will seek a narrative with "rational" causes, the demand for simplicity/reductionism/lack of randomness in the causes is often still there, and that's maybe part of a continuum with the Providence as a cause.

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by secret squirrel » Sun Apr 12, 2020 3:54 pm

Very interesting. Over the last couple of years I've read a lot about nuclear weapons (specifically, Daniel Ellsberg's book about his experiences as a nuclear war planner, Eric Schlosser's more journalistic book, William J Perry's autobiography, and various articles I can't recall). My conclusion is that pretty much everyone who's seriously looked into the subject is amazed we're still here in our current form. We really are in a historically unprecedented time with respect to our ability to collectively destroy ourselves. But strangely people seem much less concerned about nuclear annihilation than the actual risk seems to warrant. People worked themselves up to be reasonably afraid during the Cold War (though probably not as afraid as they would have been if they'd known what is now public knowledge), but now nobody seems to worry about it. Obviously the risk is lower now, but it's still much higher than say, a specific random person dying in a plane crash in a given year. It's as if people got burned out on worrying about nuclear war, and as soon as the most immediate risk went away they mostly forgot about it.

As an aside about 'dirty foreigners spreading diseases', here in Thailand, people, including, rather unfortunately, the minister of public health (who is also the deputy prime minister), have been angrily pinning blame on dirty white people for not wearing masks and, apparently, not washing enough.

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by Gfamily » Sun Apr 12, 2020 4:40 pm

secret squirrel wrote:
Sun Apr 12, 2020 3:54 pm
Very interesting. Over the last couple of years I've read a lot about nuclear weapons (specifically, Daniel Ellsberg's book about his experiences as a nuclear war planner, Eric Schlosser's more journalistic book, William J Perry's autobiography, and various articles I can't recall). My conclusion is that pretty much everyone who's seriously looked into the subject is amazed we're still here in our current form. We really are in a historically unprecedented time with respect to our ability to collectively destroy ourselves. But strangely people seem much less concerned about nuclear annihilation than the actual risk seems to warrant. People worked themselves up to be reasonably afraid during the Cold War (though probably not as afraid as they would have been if they'd known what is now public knowledge), but now nobody seems to worry about it. Obviously the risk is lower now, but it's still much higher than say, a specific random person dying in a plane crash in a given year. It's as if people got burned out on worrying about nuclear war, and as soon as the most immediate risk went away they mostly forgot about it.
Are you familiar with the Dan Carlin "The Destroyer of Worlds" episode from his Hardcore History series?
As usual with him, it's long, 5hrs 50 minutes, but well worth listening to (IMO, at least)
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by Fishnut » Sun Apr 12, 2020 6:36 pm

warumich, I've been mulling on your post and one thing that I'm not clear on (and this may be because it's not your intention to do so) is whether or not you're suggesting that fearing an apocalypse is rational or not. You make the very valid point that the world has not yet ended despite many claims of it about to do so, yet you also note that for many civilisations the end has indeed come. Do we need a distinction between an apocalypse and the apocalyse?
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by warumich » Sun Apr 12, 2020 11:28 pm

Thanks guys, sorry im a bit late in answering things, family easter and all.

Fishnut, yes you're right. The easy answer in a way is not so much that I've been intentionally vague, but that as a sociological analysis its about describing and explaining behaviour rather than prescribing what the rational belief should be. It's the experts on climate change etc that should guide us as to what to worry about, not the sociologist.

But thats a bit of a kop out, I know that. One point is that taking a step back lets us appreciate the cultural moment through which we see our own worries and fears, but that seeing this in others we must realise that we inevitably interpret the signals that we get through our own culturally contingent norms, values, etc; we are analysing our own culture from the inside which makes it hard to arrive at prescriptions as to what is rational or not. So yea, kop out.

However, talk of apocalypse hides a large variety of thing that can go wrong, its a polysemic concept that can be fitted to a variery of meanings. As you say what is the end for one culture may not be the end for others. That means that we can have a counter to people who use my opening gambit (this is nothing to worry about because end predictions have always turned out wrong) to argue we shouldn't worry about this or that - to the contrary, the end has happened and has happened often, however not to us because obviously we are still standing.

Or something. Going to bed now :)
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by secret squirrel » Mon Apr 13, 2020 2:37 am

Gfamily wrote:
Sun Apr 12, 2020 4:40 pm
Are you familiar with the Dan Carlin "The Destroyer of Worlds" episode from his Hardcore History series?
As usual with him, it's long, 5hrs 50 minutes, but well worth listening to (IMO, at least)
Not heard that one, but I'll have a listen. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, so 6 hours is pretty short for me. Thanks.

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by Brightonian » Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:25 pm


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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:44 pm

Thanks for that, very interesting.

Firstly, having read a few of the prepper blogs over the years I think there may be a slightly different narrative going on, and that's one of spite.

We can imagine a mass shooter as being so filled with hate that they try to destroy targets of their ire. Someone who believes in an imminent apocalypse can take pleasure in the thought of people they despise meeting a horrible end. As they are particularly misanthropic they can fantasize about almost everyone coming to a grizzly end, especially people who mocked them. The prepper is of course prepared and able to survive, and that adds a power fantasy to the mix, as they are one of the few left with food, clean water and guns, lost of guns.

This includes elements of being special, and the dirt taboo. But I think that neither seem to encompass the pleasure taken in imagining the death of almost everyone else.

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:47 pm

secret squirrel wrote:
Sun Apr 12, 2020 3:54 pm
Very interesting. Over the last couple of years I've read a lot about nuclear weapons (specifically, Daniel Ellsberg's book about his experiences as a nuclear war planner, Eric Schlosser's more journalistic book, William J Perry's autobiography, and various articles I can't recall). My conclusion is that pretty much everyone who's seriously looked into the subject is amazed we're still here in our current form. We really are in a historically unprecedented time with respect to our ability to collectively destroy ourselves. But strangely people seem much less concerned about nuclear annihilation than the actual risk seems to warrant. People worked themselves up to be reasonably afraid during the Cold War (though probably not as afraid as they would have been if they'd known what is now public knowledge), but now nobody seems to worry about it. Obviously the risk is lower now, but it's still much higher than say, a specific random person dying in a plane crash in a given year. It's as if people got burned out on worrying about nuclear war, and as soon as the most immediate risk went away they mostly forgot about it.
Yes, I agree. The profile was raised a bit by the negotiation of the Nuclear Ban Treaty (unfortunately the nuclear armed states didn't join). But overall concerns about nuclear war are much more muted than they should be.

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by Gfamily » Mon Apr 13, 2020 9:10 pm

Brightonian wrote:
Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:25 pm
Hurry up with that book, end looks increasingly nigh:
https://twitter.com/ottocrat/status/124 ... 92225?s=19
https://twitter.com/ottocrat/status/124 ... 91617?s=19
Also, a bacterial infection threatening Olive trees in Italy, Greece and Spain.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52234561
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by warumich » Mon Apr 13, 2020 11:08 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:44 pm
Thanks for that, very interesting.

Firstly, having read a few of the prepper blogs over the years I think there may be a slightly different narrative going on, and that's one of spite.

We can imagine a mass shooter as being so filled with hate that they try to destroy targets of their ire. Someone who believes in an imminent apocalypse can take pleasure in the thought of people they despise meeting a horrible end. As they are particularly misanthropic they can fantasize about almost everyone coming to a grizzly end, especially people who mocked them. The prepper is of course prepared and able to survive, and that adds a power fantasy to the mix, as they are one of the few left with food, clean water and guns, lost of guns.

This includes elements of being special, and the dirt taboo. But I think that neither seem to encompass the pleasure taken in imagining the death of almost everyone else.
Yes preppers are interesting. There are general differences in how the apocalypse is processed as we all understand it based on our own various cultural narratives. Catherine Wessinger divided apocalyptic movements based on whether they are actively trying to bring it about, whether theyre trying to avert it or whether they are fatalistic about it - preppers being a good example of the first one (alongside other even more proactive people like the Manson family or Aum Shinrikyo). (I had been looking forward to meeting Wessinger at next month's apocalypse studies conference, but it's been cancelled due to the apocalypse).

There is also the element of theodicy in apocalyptic thinking particularly in Wessingers "progressive" cults, i.e. the apocalypse being the occasion for imminent judgment of evil people and thus something to look forward to; thats where I would place the prepper fantasies you describe. Anyway, I would be looking forward to picking your brains about this later!

Re nuclear war, I've been reading a chap, name escapes me right now though, who argued that nuclear fear has been horribly overblown - not being an expert on that I wasn't sure what to make of it though
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by jimbob » Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:17 am

warumich wrote:
Re nuclear war, I've been reading a chap, name escapes me right now though, who argued that nuclear fear has been horribly overblown - not being an expert on that I wasn't sure what to make of it though
I really don't see how it could have been overblown, given how close it came with Exercise Able Archer '83 for example. Or the occasion where the Soviet warning system misidentified something as a US attack, and was luckily sat upon by the civilian observer, against protocol.
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by shpalman » Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:19 am

jimbob wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:17 am
warumich wrote:
Re nuclear war, I've been reading a chap, name escapes me right now though, who argued that nuclear fear has been horribly overblown - not being an expert on that I wasn't sure what to make of it though
I really don't see how it could have been overblown, given how close it came with Exercise Able Archer '83 for example. Or the occasion where the Soviet warning system misidentified something as a US attack, and was luckily sat upon by the civilian observer, against protocol.
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by jimbob » Wed Apr 15, 2020 8:34 am

shpalman wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:19 am
jimbob wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:17 am
warumich wrote:
Re nuclear war, I've been reading a chap, name escapes me right now though, who argued that nuclear fear has been horribly overblown - not being an expert on that I wasn't sure what to make of it though
I really don't see how it could have been overblown, given how close it came with Exercise Able Archer '83 for example. Or the occasion where the Soviet warning system misidentified something as a US attack, and was luckily sat upon by the civilian observer, against protocol.
Soviet submarine officer averts nuclear war
Another one, yes... looking back on it, with just those three incidents, let alone the Cuban Missile Crisis, we were lucky to have not had a nuclear war.
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by secret squirrel » Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:15 am

Or that time the US accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on North Carolina. And these are just the noticeable incidents. As a matter of routine there were frequently situations where the decision to launch some form of nuclear attack rested with fairly low ranked officers, and it wouldn't have taken a tremendously implausible communications failure for them to believe they were on a real mission.

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by warumich » Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:25 am

jimbob wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:17 am
warumich wrote:
Re nuclear war, I've been reading a chap, name escapes me right now though, who argued that nuclear fear has been horribly overblown - not being an expert on that I wasn't sure what to make of it though
I really don't see how it could have been overblown, given how close it came with Exercise Able Archer '83 for example. Or the occasion where the Soviet warning system misidentified something as a US attack, and was luckily sat upon by the civilian observer, against protocol.
From what I remember (books' in my work office so I can't really check), the argument was more that the destructive power of nuclear war was exaggerated (compared to conventional war) - so he didn't argue that many people wouldn't die, but more that it won't be a paradigmatically different type of war (the fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo came close to killing a similar amount of people - not saying that either that or Hiroshima was acceptable, but the argument was that if we accept Dresden, then we should also accept Hiroshima). So, if a nuclear war had broken out, then it would have been bad, but it wouldn't have been apocalyptic, or no more apocalyptic than the (conventional) second world war already was. It suited both sides of the cold war to claim nuclear weapons were more destructive and apocalyptic than they really were, so there was no incentive to tone down the rhetoric.
One of the reasons nuclear weapons had not been used in the Korean war was not because the US had suddenly become squeamish about civilian loss of life, but because they feared that using them would demonstrate their relative uselessness in strategic warfare. Much better to not use them and let people run wild with imagination of what they could do.

NB, this is me trying to summarise the argument, not my opinion.
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by secret squirrel » Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:39 am

warumich wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:25 am
jimbob wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 7:17 am
warumich wrote:
Re nuclear war, I've been reading a chap, name escapes me right now though, who argued that nuclear fear has been horribly overblown - not being an expert on that I wasn't sure what to make of it though
I really don't see how it could have been overblown, given how close it came with Exercise Able Archer '83 for example. Or the occasion where the Soviet warning system misidentified something as a US attack, and was luckily sat upon by the civilian observer, against protocol.
From what I remember (books' in my work office so I can't really check), the argument was more that the destructive power of nuclear war was exaggerated (compared to conventional war) - so he didn't argue that many people wouldn't die, but more that it won't be a paradigmatically different type of war (the fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo came close to killing a similar amount of people - not saying that either that or Hiroshima was acceptable, but the argument was that if we accept Dresden, then we should also accept Hiroshima). So, if a nuclear war had broken out, then it would have been bad, but it wouldn't have been apocalyptic, or no more apocalyptic than the (conventional) second world war already was. It suited both sides of the cold war to claim nuclear weapons were more destructive and apocalyptic than they really were, so there was no incentive to tone down the rhetoric.
One of the reasons nuclear weapons had not been used in the Korean war was not because the US had suddenly become squeamish about civilian loss of life, but because they feared that using them would demonstrate their relative uselessness in strategic warfare. Much better to not use them and let people run wild with imagination of what they could do.

NB, this is me trying to summarise the argument, not my opinion.
I wouldn't take that argument very seriously then. The US air force estimated in the 60s that the causalities from executing its nuclear war plan would be around 600 million people in the first 6 months after launch* in the USSR, China, and parts of Europe unfortunate enough to be close to either. And they didn't model the effects of fire in their calculations, or the long term effects of radiation on harvests etc., or the effects of any counterattacks.

Maybe fission weapons could be approximated by conventional warfare, but fusion weapons are orders of magnitude worse. Also, the dangerous thing about nuclear weapons is not just that they could destroy the world, rather that they can destroy the world by accident over the course of a few days. It would take a huge amount of deliberate effort from hundreds of thousands of people over months and years to destroy the world with conventional warfare, but once they've been made nuclear weapons can do it at the flick of a few switches.


*Figures again from Ellsberg's book.

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by individualmember » Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:48 am

Every time I read the title of this thread my brain goes Moron Apocalypse.

Like Zombie Apocalypse but driven by morons.

Sorry.

As you were

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by warumich » Wed Apr 15, 2020 10:22 am

individualmember wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:48 am
Every time I read the title of this thread my brain goes Moron Apocalypse.

Like Zombie Apocalypse but driven by morons.

Sorry.

As you were
Pun intended, glad someone spotted it!

Squirrel, yes I too was somewhat underwhelmed by the argument, it was quite polemic, which always sets alarm bells ringing. Just trying to give a fair account of what I read. The high casualty figures was something he disputed, even for fusion bombs, can't quite remember on what grounds though. As for radiation, the effects on populations living close to bomb sites should be pretty well known since the early testing sites were scarily close to Las Vegas, so again the argument was that while the risks are there and tangible, they're not apocalyptic. No I'm not sure thats right either.
It was published by a proper university press (oxford i think), so it will have undergone at least some peer review. Thanks for the reading recommendations though, will try to get stuck in the Ellsberg book when I have library access again.
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secret squirrel
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by secret squirrel » Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:29 am

warumich wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 10:22 am
Pun intended, glad someone spotted it!

Squirrel, yes I too was somewhat underwhelmed by the argument, it was quite polemic, which always sets alarm bells ringing. Just trying to give a fair account of what I read. The high casualty figures was something he disputed, even for fusion bombs, can't quite remember on what grounds though. As for radiation, the effects on populations living close to bomb sites should be pretty well known since the early testing sites were scarily close to Las Vegas, so again the argument was that while the risks are there and tangible, they're not apocalyptic. No I'm not sure thats right either.
It was published by a proper university press (oxford i think), so it will have undergone at least some peer review. Thanks for the reading recommendations though, will try to get stuck in the Ellsberg book when I have library access again.
I appreciate you don't necessarily endorse that view. Re the Ellsberg book, it is also unapologetically polemical, but he was in the middle of it all. I can give you a link to an epub file if you like.

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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by warumich » Wed Apr 15, 2020 12:17 pm

Yes, please!
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secret squirrel
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Re: More on apocalypse

Post by secret squirrel » Wed Apr 15, 2020 1:15 pm

warumich wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 12:17 pm
Yes, please!
Sent you a PM.

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