• UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
    16·
    1 year ago

    Luckily we lived to live under nuclear threats again. Great thing our ancestors didn’t get rid of those warheads, it’s really great to share this experience.

    Although if they are in the same condition as the rest of the their military, at least the country that worries me most is hardly a threat.

    • spauldo@lemmy.mlEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think so. Things got kind of dicey a few times back in the first couple decades of the cold war.

        • spauldo@lemmy.mlEnglish
          9·
          1 year ago

          The Doomsday Clock is a judgement call on the likelihood of a global catastrophe. These days use of nuclear weapons would trigger a global catastrophe, but that hasn’t always been the case.

          Back when the global nuclear arsenal was a lot smaller, was delivered by aircraft instead of ballistic missiles, and the negative effects of nuclear war weren’t well understood, nuclear weapons were still on the table for regular use in warfare.

          If a war had broken out between the US and the Soviet Union in say, 1950, nuclear weapons would almost certainly have been used. Mutually assured destruction wasn’t a thing then, and many people believed a war between the US and USSR was inevitable. And it would have been bad - but not nearly as bad as that same war if it had happened in 1980.

          Plus there’s the Cuban Missle Crisis. That was a wake-up call. Measures were taken afterward to ease back on the itchy trigger fingers after that.