Why Isn't Anyone Worried About Nuclear War Anymore?

I went to high school and the mid- and late-80's. And I remember the time well. Reagan was in office. And all people could talk about was nuclear weapons, and nuclear war.

There was a poll taken back then, I remember. It was of young people like me, in fact. And a majority of youths didn't think they'd live to see adulthood. Nuclear was seemed inevitable, for some reason.

And, oh sure, there were insults hurled across the Atlantic. The USSR said we would start the next nuclear war. And we were sure they would. But neither was true, probably. And neither happened, we know.

Now, with these radical Islamic terrorists and Islamic states, that have no compunctions against killing large numbers of people (sorry, but it's true), nuclear war is actually more likely, I should think. But no one talks about it. And clearly no one worries about it.

Should they?

 

Any of the Muslim countries try to launch a nuclear missile it'll get taken down so that option is a pointless activity for them and between China, Russia and the USA, none of them really want to go into conflict with one another it wouldn't matter who wins, the collateral and the damage in general would be too much for them.

Nth Korea can't launch their missiles either.

So what's to be afraid about? Or worried about? Not much I don't think. You've got more chance being donked on the head by a coconut my friend.

 

For the same reason no one is afraid of zombies anymore - we've had it shoved down our throats for so long by Hollywood that we've grown numb to it. We've been exposed to so much of it that we now basically have etched into our brains an intricate map detailing every conceivable scenario and how to effectively handle it. It's become so much second nature that we have no longer have need to ponder such trivial things.

 

Probably is inevitable, nuclear weapons have only been around 70 years or so

A short time frame in the total length of time humans may exist on this planet

 

To me the world seems a more dangerous and unpredictable place than it did during the Cold War.

So many possible scenarios that could lead to a nuclear exchange.

 

I dont think so, every nation seems to be struggling with overpopulation, converns are internal. Which is why russia and china will never really be superpowers.

America is still the only superpower.

The world is a far nicer place than it was during world war 1 and 2

 

simple answer; while the threat doesn't go away, there is a far more immediate and direct threat to the future of humanity as a species, and that is from what we are doing to the environment, by using combustion to generate energy and propel transportation, and by simply being too damd many of us, as a result of excessive fertility and the resulting birth rate.

there are other factors and incentives for them also.

the same things which prevent freedom, i.e.: ostracizing honesty and imagination, while romanticizing and rewarding aggressiveness,
contribute to both threats of course.

well at any rate, the chumpster has increased the threat of nuclear war, specifically the threat of himself initializing it.
but the other thing, the environment problem, which was already real, he has made orders of magnitude, that much more immediate of a threat as well.

 

There are simply too many things to worry about these days and the public has become inured and resigned to their fate with many today assuming the end of the world is near or that science of God will have to produce a miracle if civilization as we know it is ever to survive. For example, within twenty years commercial fishing will no longer be possible simply because there won't be enough wild fish left in the oceans. Within fifty years, every wild land animal larger than a dog is projected to either be extinct or only exist in zoos. By the end of the century some 80% of the surface of the earth will be desert due to global warming, yet, an estimated 100 trillion dollars worth of the world economy is tied up in fossil fuels with 25 countries relying on exporting them for at least 20% of their economy.

Fukushima and Chernobyl are two examples of why nuclear war has become less of a concern. The US sold the Japanese a cheap nuclear reactor that was originally designed for submarines rather than safety concerns and the Japanese designed their own version and built some more. They built them on the most seismically active island on earth routinely subjected to tidal waves and the company responsible was repeatedly prosecuted for safety violations. The idiots built a berm wall around them that only as high as the last tidal wave that hit them and then stacked spent fuel rods on top of them. There are enough spent fuel rods even in the US just lying out in the open to contaminate the entire planet and make it uninhabitable, yet, nobody seems intent on dealing with these kinds of problems and is more concerned with building weapons and supporting the wealthy doing almost anything they want with their reactors and spent fuel short.

In other words, deliberately killing one another is the least of my concerns when it appears the entire world is intent of killing one another through corruption, neglect, and foolishly allowing the money and the guns to do all the driving with nobody actually steering.

 

Don't worry about Nuclear weapons ! Brexit is gonna kill us all

 

im worried

 

They'll get taken down in a matter of seconds and fall back down and explode in their own nations.

Mark. My. Words.

NASA hasn't spent quadrillion's worth of dollars on galactic weapons expenses and R&D without ring able to take down in comparison, a tiny nuclear warhead from those sand people.

 

Nuclear war is possible, but is significantly statistically less probably than a small-scale nuclear attack initiated by terrorists if they ever get their hands on even a minuscule amount of nuclear material. That sort of attack will not end the world, but it will kill potentially hundreds of thousands of people and will change the world forever.

 

that last sentence pretty much sums it up for me too.

 

Whether consciously or not, the whole world knows we are headed for that brick wall and most are simply intent on looking the other way. John Brunner is one of my favorite science fiction hacks who wrote perhaps a hundred books that he just slapped together using the same handful of ideas he merely shuffled in different ways and one of them is "The Sheep Look Up". The theory I'm writing is just based on simple pattern matching where you merely shuffle the metaphors and facts around until they make more sense like assembling a puzzle. Consciousness, awareness, and learning are all about seeing the emergent overall patterns, the ah ha! moment and a theory of everything is about to make countless sheep look up and start paying attention.

Most of Brunner's books are total crap, but half a dozen or so are classics that still ring true fifty years later.

 

Seems to have gotten buried in the myriad of Other Things to Worry About.

As mere humans, we have only a limited supply of fear, and must allocate our resources accordingly--typically to the latest news story.

 

never mind the news,
without an environment,
there's no you's

 

Im more worried about another Fukushima than some organisation or country dropping a nuclear bomb.

 

I don't know.. with the latest headlines it seems like North Korea intends to blow us all to hell! Or at least blow Americans to hell.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/nkorean-media-issue-threat-to-wipe-out-us/ar-BBAeit0?li=BBnb7Kz