Doomsday weapons and weapons to end all wars

The saga of RAF Bomber Command and Neville Chamberlain is a timely warning on the risks of deterrence frightening the wrong person.
Chamberlain was so impressed by the ability as he believed it for air forces to inflict a knock out blow on an enemy that he became more frightened of the Luftwaffe than Hitler was of the RAF.
We see something similar today. Putin has NATO stunned into inaction by his nuclear forces. NATO's own impressive nuclear systems seem neither to scare Putin nor reassure NATO countries.
 
zen said:
Do they?

I suspect Russia is reassured command and control of NATO Nuclear Weapons is a thorough and professionally run matter.

But current events are taking place outside of NATO.
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Considering the performance of the Russian military, were I Putin I'd worry about the the thorough professionalism of my own nuclear troops.
 
The logic of nuclear deterrence relies on destroying the bulk of an opponents' cities.
In order to forestall this, the US and Soviet Union tried to allocate nuclear warheads to destroying the opponent's nuclear forces.
However, smaller nuclear powers like UK and France focus on removing the key cities of their opponent.
In Europe the use of even tactical nuclear weapons would lead to high civilian casualties.
Unfortunately we now have a situation similar to that in the 1930s where bombing cities frightened the democracies more than the dictatorships.
The rulers of the Soviet Union were not willing to sacrifice their people in a war so deterrence worked. Putin like Hitler has no such restraint.
 
Justo Miranda said:
There should be some means to detect the radiation produced by a nuclear device, in my opinion it should be a priority for the national security of all countries. Considering the volume of goods that enter the ports of the United States daily and that cross the Panama Canal, the system (if any) should be some kind of very fast and discreet scanner.
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Those exist. I don't know any details of their method of detection.

There are stories of SOCOM types swarming onto a cargo ship in the middle ocean at night, and then DOE NEST shows up. Nuclear Emergency Search Team. You see those guys show up all of a sudden, ask how far you need to leave town and travel upwind.


Rhinocrates said:
Yeah but do we want to piss off the creatures that could live in a gas giant? :)

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes (aka Out of the Deeps). Essentially he recycled the plot of The Day of the Triffids, but this time it's invaders from Jupiter who decide to make Earth a waterworld.
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Anything living on Jupiter couldn't live here on earth, atmosphere is completely wrong.

Doesn't mean that they couldn't rock us back into the stone age or even Chixulub, but they're not landing here.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Those exist. I don't know any details of their method of detection.

There are stories of SOCOM types swarming onto a cargo ship in the middle ocean at night, and then DOE NEST shows up. Nuclear Emergency Search Team. You see those guys show up all of a sudden, ask how far you need to leave town and travel upwind.



Anything living on Jupiter couldn't live here on earth, atmosphere is completely wrong.

Doesn't mean that they couldn't rock us back into the stone age or even Chixulub, but they're not landing here.
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To be fair, the origin wasn't certain, only some characters thought that it was Jupiter. and when Wyndham wrote it people really didn't know what the deeper atmosphere of Jupiter was like. The aliens are never seen directly and it was only known that they were aquatic and adapted to high pressure - humans just see some examples of their technology above the surface.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Anything living on Jupiter couldn't live here on earth, atmosphere is completely wrong.
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Anything coming from *Europa* will look like it;s coming from Jupiter. With current understanding, anything that could live under the ice of Europa could potentially live in the deep oceans.
 
Putin is not Hitler, and it is not the 1930s. One could argue our neocon/neolib warhawks are a whole different breed from the men of the 1930s, imo.

The previous cold war was much safer imo as both sides knew the cost of nuclear armageddon. They had men who saw world war first hand and saw the horror of nukes on the japanese people.
 
Nuclear weapons have not lost their terror factor. Putin had been around for most of the Cold War. He is former KGB as well.

The desire for land and resources has not diminished, especially if they can be taken by force.

I also lived through most of the Cold War. It was not safer by any stretch of the imagination. In the 1980s, I saw a Russian targets list. My city was number 5. Surveillance was not as sophisticated during the 1960s, and the risk of false alarms was higher. The former head of Soviet Rocket Forces from the period appeared on TV. He related how his station received an alert. It showed the U.S. had launched all of their ICBMs. He had 15 minutes to decide on what to do. Soviet agents in the U.S. were contacted. They had observed no launches. The fastest aircraft were dispatched to a certain geographic area, and they also observed nothing. He stood down from the alert. Later, it was determined that the sun striking clouds at a certain angle and altitude caused spy satellites to send the warning.
 
Justo Miranda said:
The necessary technology already exists to deflect the trajectory of small asteroids or create mutant viruses that selectively attack certain human groups... and they would look like accidents.
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Woudln't be surprised to be honest, particularly the latter.
 
Stephen Baxters dark sf. novel 'Titan' has both bioengineering virus targeting a specific group as well as asteroid deflection as a weapon as side plots
 
Well, there's a doomsday weapon that people would rather sleep on: memetic weapons.

No, I'm not stealing from the SCP Foundation; they only took the concept and gave it the Rule of Cosmic Horror treatment. It's a surprisingly real field that doesn't get much attention (I've seen a DARPA research project on it, and it basically said that while more research is needed on the field of memetics, those within the field are onto something), and in our very info-dense world, it's surprisingly devastating.

Why fight your enemies when you can effectively hack their brains?

The sad reality is that, to fight such weapons, you can't use non-authoritarian means, as that means you're doing the definition of insanity. You have to utilize authoritarian means to mitigate and prevent the spread.

If you want to see how bad it can get, take a gander at conspiracy theories and their resilience at dying... and most of those (except anti-vax, the USSR brought about that particular brand of insanity to spite the US) are just natural things that came out of extreme events.
 
GruntFox said:
Well, there's a doomsday weapon that people would rather sleep on: memetic weapons.

No, I'm not stealing from the SCP Foundation; they only took the concept and gave it the Rule of Cosmic Horror treatment. It's a surprisingly real field that doesn't get much attention (I've seen a DARPA research project on it, and it basically said that while more research is needed on the field of memetics, those within the field are onto something), and in our very info-dense world, it's surprisingly devastating.

Why fight your enemies when you can effectively hack their brains?

The sad reality is that, to fight such weapons, you can't use non-authoritarian means, as that means you're doing the definition of insanity. You have to utilize authoritarian means to mitigate and prevent the spread.

If you want to see how bad it can get, take a gander at conspiracy theories and their resilience at dying... and most of those (except anti-vax, the USSR brought about that particular brand of insanity to spite the US) are just natural things that came out of extreme events.
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At the basic level, propaganda is a memetic weapon.
 
GruntFox said:
Well, there's a doomsday weapon that people would rather sleep on: memetic weapons.

No, I'm not stealing from the SCP Foundation; they only took the concept and gave it the Rule of Cosmic Horror treatment. It's a surprisingly real field that doesn't get much attention (I've seen a DARPA research project on it, and it basically said that while more research is needed on the field of memetics, those within the field are onto something), and in our very info-dense world, it's surprisingly devastating.

Why fight your enemies when you can effectively hack their brains?

The sad reality is that, to fight such weapons, you can't use non-authoritarian means, as that means you're doing the definition of insanity. You have to utilize authoritarian means to mitigate and prevent the spread.

If you want to see how bad it can get, take a gander at conspiracy theories and their resilience at dying... and most of those (except anti-vax, the USSR brought about that particular brand of insanity to spite the US) are just natural things that came out of extreme events.
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Weirdly enough Communism is very enticing for social rejects, nepo babies and attention seekers.
 
Scott Kenny said:
At the basic level, propaganda is a memetic weapon.
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... yes and no. When talking about memetic weapons, propaganda is in the same boat as internet memes in general: not all propaganda is memetic, but it doesn't mean none of them are.
yeetmahboi said:
Weirdly enough Communism is very enticing for social rejects, nepo babies and attention seekers.
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The problem is that people forget that technology (and the understanding of the universe it entails) determines practically everything, including rights and freedoms. Combine this with the fact that the political philosophy pessimists are (at best) close to the money on the human condition, and you've got problems.

Capitalism, even in its original form, where government oversight is considered absolutely necessary, is breaking down due to the evolution of technology. Capitalism can't function if you can automate the jobs...
 
GruntFox said:
Why fight your enemies when you can effectively hack their brains?
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On a related note...

On the principle that flashing lights at a certain frequency can induce seizures and people with epilepsy are particularly vulnerable, David Langford, slightly tongue-in-cheek proposed the BLIT or "basilisk."

BLIT (short story) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org


The story introduced the concept of the "basilisk" to science fiction literature. A basilisk is a legendary reptile said to have the power to cause death with a single glance. In the context of "BLIT", it is a type of highly dangerous image that contains patterns exploiting flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction, effectively "crashing" the mind the way a computer program crashes when given data that it fails to process. It does this by triggering thoughts that the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking.

If BLITs were real, a virus could turn the graphic into a doomsday weapon. Of course Monty Python was there first with the deadliest joke sketch (link not included out of considerations for the safety of our German members).
 
Brett Davidson said:
On a related note...

On the principle that flashing lights at a certain frequency can induce seizures and people with epilepsy are particularly vulnerable, David Langford, slightly tongue-in-cheek proposed the BLIT or "basilisk."

If BLITs were real, a virus could turn the graphic into a doomsday weapon. Of course Monty Python was there first with the deadliest joke sketch (link not included out of considerations for the safety of our German members).
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Langford thought about that last point, and the answer was the classic one, vaccination.

Different Kinds of Darkness - Dave Langford (2014 reprint of the 2000 story)
 
Brett Davidson said:
On a related note...

On the principle that flashing lights at a certain frequency can induce seizures and people with epilepsy are particularly vulnerable, David Langford, slightly tongue-in-cheek proposed the BLIT or "basilisk."

BLIT (short story) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org


The story introduced the concept of the "basilisk" to science fiction literature. A basilisk is a legendary reptile said to have the power to cause death with a single glance. In the context of "BLIT", it is a type of highly dangerous image that contains patterns exploiting flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction, effectively "crashing" the mind the way a computer program crashes when given data that it fails to process. It does this by triggering thoughts that the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking.

If BLITs were real, a virus could turn the graphic into a doomsday weapon. Of course Monty Python was there first with the deadliest joke sketch (link not included out of considerations for the safety of our German members).
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Graham1973 said:
Langford thought about that last point, and the answer was the classic one, vaccination.

Different Kinds of Darkness - Dave Langford (2014 reprint of the 2000 story)
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This isn't without precedent, oddly enough. The McCollough Effect is a real-life phenomenon that causes visual problems when you look at certain images, and it was later discovered that looking at other images can reverse the effects. We still don't know how the human mind works, meaning that we'll (inadvertently) discover stuff like the McCollough Effect and the Longford Basilisk for quite some time... and likely inadvertently discover the SCP Foundation's Memetic Kill Agents or what the antagonist John Paul from Project Itoh's Genocidal Organ discovered (a phrase that, when said enough times, literally flips a switch in the human brain to become genocidal maniacs).

So, yeah, live with that knowledge.

EXTREMELY LATE EDIT TO PREVENT DOUBLE POSTING:
Foo Fighter said:
Or a plague/virus that terminate ALL wars by destroying ALL human life. About the only way to do it, imho, of course. It could take a hundred thousand years or more for the replacement to evolve highly enouigh to replicate us and our insanities.
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... I'll up this biowar insanity and go straight to Spacebattle's Little Boy, a biosphere killer that is basically immune to fire (helps it spread), radiation doesn't do much to it, bacteria countermeasures do practically nothing to it, eats through NBC gear, extretes what amounts to paint thinner, and once it hits an ocean it kills the entire planet within months... and can survive in vacuum so going into a space habitat to escape isn't a surefire thing.

Oh, and this sort of designed organism could be done with mid-20-teen biotech.
GTX said:
Maybe doomsday weapons have already been released. Its called misinformation and the politicisation of facts and threatens our society already - just look at the lunacy around COVID.

www.theguardian.com

Fake news is a threat to humanity, but scientists may have a solution | Dana Nuccitelli

Dana Nuccitelli: “Technocognition” proposes that we use technology and psychology to break through the mental barriers that make people deny threats like climate change
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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... if you look up the field of memetics (the study of the life-adjacent properties of culture and information), then this doesn't look as insane as it looks.

Once you've got the pipeline going, you can effectively make 2+2=fish.
 
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Humanities last hope for real peace was lost with the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process.

Wasn't WWI alone going to finish off the remaining bat guano saltpeter reserves?

Yes, you could still have napalm....but that destroys men more easily than material.
 
publiusr said:
Humanities last hope for real peace was lost with the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process.

Wasn't WWI alone going to finish off the remaining bat guano saltpeter reserves?

Yes, you could still have napalm....but that destroys men more easily than material.
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No, Haber-Bosch is a technological development certainty. Much like humanity not actually being united under one banner ensures that humans fighting each other is a certainty.
 
There is but one solution if you want to end ALL wars. Create a bio weapon that targets ALL Homo Sapiens.

No humans = no dick taters = no reason for war = peace. Drastic I grant you but, the only way to be sure short of nuking from space.

Besides, that method reduces the opportunity of insects like the Giant Cockroach becoming the next dominant species. We have enough of those already...
 

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