As you know, Middle Eastern countries are fighting again. One of them, Israel, is alleged to have the Samson Option in their back pocket: If Israel is existentially threatened in some way, its nuclear weapons will spread the pain to more cities.
New York City, of course, has a large rationalist community, clustered in Overcoming Bias NYC. It also has a large Jewish diaspora population, which is notably culturally different from Israel’s population. (Please keep the comments extra-civil here.)
What I’m saying is, conditional on Samson, NYC may be targeted.
(I may write a longer better-evidenced version of this, actually if you reply asking an obvious question, that may lead me to reply with explanations I use in the full post. Also the full post would be like “Consider Evacuating from large/capital cities in general”, just mentioning NYC because it’s my closest seemingly-likely-nuke-target city.)
Am up to hear what y’all’s cruxes/flinches-away are about this, so I can have my mind changed and/or edit for broader LW audience.
This makes no sense. Per Wikipedia, the Samson option is a “‘last resort’ against any country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel” (emphasis mine). It’s about deterring enemies (if you murder us, we’ll take you down with us), not nihilistically hurting third parties—especially not the U.S. (Israel’s patron) and diaspora Jews (however “notably culturally different”). “Consider evacuating from Tehran, Damascus, Riyadh, or Cairo” would at least make sense.
NYC is not even in range of Israel’s Jericho III class missiles, so the whole thing is especially nonsensical. They couldn’t do that if they wanted to, which of course they don’t.
Egypt is at peace with Israel, KSA at least is not at war (and in reality is a cobelligerent in Israel’s war against Iran), Syria is not involved in the current war and nuking it would make no sense at all.
Nuking Tehran is also not likely to happen. Probably Israel will just fold under American pressure and the war will end. Or maybe they will continue to fight a conventional war with Iran and Lebanon. They are very unlikely to nuke anyone.
E.g. in the full post I’d add a “for those who can’t evacuate” section. For NYC in particular, my best informed-non-leaving advice would be “hide in the subway tunnels”. Obviously global tier-1 cities have different configurations here, and I don’t know a ton about most of them.
RETRACED (see Guive’s reply below)
Consider Evacuating from NYC
Obligatory sentence on how weird this is.
As you know, Middle Eastern countries are fighting again. One of them, Israel, is alleged to have the Samson Option in their back pocket: If Israel is existentially threatened in some way, its nuclear weapons will spread the pain to more cities.
New York City, of course, has a large rationalist community, clustered in Overcoming Bias NYC. It also has a large Jewish diaspora population, which is notably culturally different from Israel’s population. (Please keep the comments extra-civil here.)
What I’m saying is, conditional on Samson, NYC may be targeted.
(I may write a longer better-evidenced version of this, actually if you reply asking an obvious question, that may lead me to reply with explanations I use in the full post. Also the full post would be like “Consider Evacuating from large/capital cities in general”, just mentioning NYC because it’s my closest seemingly-likely-nuke-target city.)
Am up to hear what y’all’s cruxes/flinches-away are about this, so I can have my mind changed and/or edit for broader LW audience.
This makes no sense. Per Wikipedia, the Samson option is a “‘last resort’ against any country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel” (emphasis mine). It’s about deterring enemies (if you murder us, we’ll take you down with us), not nihilistically hurting third parties—especially not the U.S. (Israel’s patron) and diaspora Jews (however “notably culturally different”). “Consider evacuating from Tehran, Damascus, Riyadh, or Cairo” would at least make sense.
NYC is not even in range of Israel’s Jericho III class missiles, so the whole thing is especially nonsensical. They couldn’t do that if they wanted to, which of course they don’t.
Egypt is at peace with Israel, KSA at least is not at war (and in reality is a cobelligerent in Israel’s war against Iran), Syria is not involved in the current war and nuking it would make no sense at all.
Nuking Tehran is also not likely to happen. Probably Israel will just fold under American pressure and the war will end. Or maybe they will continue to fight a conventional war with Iran and Lebanon. They are very unlikely to nuke anyone.
E.g. in the full post I’d add a “for those who can’t evacuate” section. For NYC in particular, my best informed-non-leaving advice would be “hide in the subway tunnels”. Obviously global tier-1 cities have different configurations here, and I don’t know a ton about most of them.