>“a substance or invent a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale destruction that wars should thereby become altogether impossible”.
I don’t see Nobel as being entirely wrong here. The proliferation of nuclear weapons did ensure that the Cold War stayed mostly cold, and open conflict between nuclear powers remains rare and limited in scope. Sure, it didn’t end all war, but the world has been remarkably peaceful for a very long time. I can only hope it stays that way.
While we don’t have a counterfactual history for the post-WW2 decades, this interpretation seems at least plausible. At the same time, there were almost-catastrophic events in those decades that suggest that our timeline contains a good amount of luck. (Additionally, I also hope that there will not be a nuclear war in the future, but a situation in which several major powers are armed with nuclear weapons does not seem as stable to me as the Cold War was.)
Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest that Nobel was entirely wrong, although I can see how people might read it that way. I really didn’t want promote any simple specific conclusion. I just think it’s complicated and it’s informative to look at historical examples.
Personally, I feel a lot of sympathy for all these people, including Nobel, who I tend to think has gotten a reputation as a merchant of death that’s substantially undeserved. But I do think he was entirely wrong on the sub-point that it would make wars impossible. Not because wars still exist, but because nuclear weapons have been used, could easily have been used much more, and may end up being used much more.
As long as there are only few nuclear states, absence of nuclear wars doesn’t seem unusual or unexpected, but if the non-proliferation paradigm was to fall apart and multiple new states got bombs in a decade or two, the situation would be likely to worsen significantly
>“a substance or invent a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale destruction that wars should thereby become altogether impossible”.
I don’t see Nobel as being entirely wrong here. The proliferation of nuclear weapons did ensure that the Cold War stayed mostly cold, and open conflict between nuclear powers remains rare and limited in scope. Sure, it didn’t end all war, but the world has been remarkably peaceful for a very long time. I can only hope it stays that way.
While we don’t have a counterfactual history for the post-WW2 decades, this interpretation seems at least plausible. At the same time, there were almost-catastrophic events in those decades that suggest that our timeline contains a good amount of luck. (Additionally, I also hope that there will not be a nuclear war in the future, but a situation in which several major powers are armed with nuclear weapons does not seem as stable to me as the Cold War was.)
Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest that Nobel was entirely wrong, although I can see how people might read it that way. I really didn’t want promote any simple specific conclusion. I just think it’s complicated and it’s informative to look at historical examples.
Personally, I feel a lot of sympathy for all these people, including Nobel, who I tend to think has gotten a reputation as a merchant of death that’s substantially undeserved. But I do think he was entirely wrong on the sub-point that it would make wars impossible. Not because wars still exist, but because nuclear weapons have been used, could easily have been used much more, and may end up being used much more.
Check this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PiD8eS33umRrvGcMe/david-james-s-shortform?commentId=k4jpWmksetk3M9xdK
As long as there are only few nuclear states, absence of nuclear wars doesn’t seem unusual or unexpected, but if the non-proliferation paradigm was to fall apart and multiple new states got bombs in a decade or two, the situation would be likely to worsen significantly