Why are nukes a thing of the past?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Keiko

It could copy itself. If for no other reason than to have someone to play "Kill all Humans!" with.

This isn't a stretch, when you think about it. Consider that the real world has the Voluntary Extinction Movement, and similar fringe outfits. With THS tech and assuming a single member of such a group with access to substantial money, you could well enough magine the more fanatical members of such a group 'ghosting' themselves. The only reason such ghosts would not then xox themselves to multiply their numbers is...well, there is no reason other than law/custom. Once you assume a group with such motivations, it's not probable that they would balk at that.

Xoxing is like nukes, in that respect, the absence of it is necessary at a meta level, because it changes the whole setting into something else.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Greetings, all!

I've noticed that nukes, both as the strategic WMD, and as a terrorist device in the face of miniaturisation and easier production processes affordable at TL10, are not a thing that gets any sort of attention. I've seen a couple of phrases along the lines that 'nuclear apocalypse did not arrive', but I'm more interested, what is the cause of that? I'm particularly interested why nukes are no longer a factor as a terror weapon used by organisations and régimes that are not above ignoring the principles of common sapient international decency? Maybe I'm missing some some entry here or there that would explain it.

Thanks in advance!

The meta reason is this below:

Originally Posted by Astromancer

I suppose the main reason for getting rid of nukes is simply that the focus of the setting would shift to much. Either people would be forced to live behind brutal layers of security, which would make adventuring a very limited and controled thing (main a version of millitary SciFi), or society would collapse, which would eliminate most or all of the cool tech.

As Astromancer notes, you pretty much have to assume no nuclear weapon use for the THS setting to exist at all. From a meta-POV it's a prereq. For that matter, you have to assume not much in the way of big wars at all for that setting to make sense, even the Pacific War isn't all the big or influential compared to either the Great War or World War II.

(Compare the political map of the world in 1900 to 1920, or 1938 to 1946, and then look at the effects of the PacWar.)

Originally Posted by malloyd

No longer? They never really have been.

On the contrary, the threat of them has been in play since 1946, and probably prevented WWIII.

Luckily for us the fact is nuclear explosions are *hard* to set off. Presumably there are still optimistic terror groups who attempt this. But since they are almost certain to fail even if nobody was trying to stop them, and plenty of people with very good surveillance technologies are trying to stop them, it just isn't considered a very serious threat compared to stuff people actually can manage to do without the backing of a national budget, an engineering college faculty and a bunch of materials being watched by 10 different intelligence services.

In the THS setting, though, bypassing most of that wouldn't actually be all that hard. Even today, the main restraining factor is the fear of retaliation, that's what keeps state actors (so far) from using other groups as nuclear proxies.

Most large nations in 2100 could presumably build a nuclear weapon if they really wanted. But nukes aren't a weapon you can conceal the use of, and despite what goes into everybody's propaganda, very few regimes are actually insane.

The problem with that is that you don't have to be insane to use a nuke offensively. You just have to make an evaluation that the risk/reward ratio is worth it.

A nuclear exhange between the USA and USSR during the Cold War, for ex, would almost never produce that for a sane evaluation, because the immense number of weapons and multiple delivery options would make MAD the near-certain outcome no matter one did.

OTOH, consider India and Pakistan as an example. Given the number of weapons available, and the delivery tech available, it would by no means be impossible for India to win a nuclear war with Pakistan. Such an exchange could leave India functional and Pakistan dead. So from the Indian POV, given the right other social and cultural conditions, use of nukes in war could look quite rational. It would depend on what the rest of the world was perceived as being likely to do.

(I'm not talking morality, I'm talking strategic calculation.)

Likewise, if a nation was on the verge of utter defeat, like Germany in 1945 or Carthage in the Punic Wars, it could look like a good way to take the enemy with you, if you're about to get wiped out anyway. Whether that would be 'insane' would depend on your definition of sanity.

A nuclear arsenal may discourage somebody else from pushing you into a situation where you have nothing left to lose - which may help explain why almost no borders have moved in 150 years - but isn't much use otherwise. If there are 90 members of the nuclear club instead of 9 but still nobody crazy enough to use them offensively, well, not much has actually changed.

That's true as far as it goes, but not a sure thing. If the nuclear club has 90 members, that doesn't automatically mean you can't use a nuke on someone who isn't part of that club. It would depend, again, on what you think the club members are likely to do about it.

Add in the infomorphs and other game-changing technologies of THS, and the situation gets way more complicated. For ex, somebody planning to nuke 'x' might first engage in a memetic campaign to produce a 'social space' where that was acceptable.

For another ex, a really fanatic organization could kidnap the people with the necesary skills, and make 'shadows' of them.

The way to go would be to grab a lot of people with a broad range of skills, including those necessary for making nukes, makes the shadows, and release the people alive, and run some kind of cover story of what your conspirators were supposedly doing while you use the shadows to make the nukes.

Or other ways could be put together with THS tech. Ditto the issue of getting the necessary raw materials.

(And of course an old nightmare of intel and security people since 1945 has been the 'false flag' attack, 'x' nukes 'y' and sets it up to look to 'y' like the nuke was sent by 'z', who had nothing to do with it. THS tech would provide new routes both to do that and fight that.)

So the absense of nukes in the THS setting isn't really all that obvious a thing, except at a meta level.

In-game...there really isn't an adequate explanation. It's kind of skimmed over from necessity, kind of like some aspects of the Martian terraforming.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

I've always vaguely assumed the "brutal security" answer. However, pervasive microtech enables brutal security to be amazingly polite most of the time. Any identifiable political radical who starts, say, reading biographies of Robert Oppenheimer may well get a couple of SWAT combat shells arriving through his front door, though.

Privacy? Yeah, largely shot by 2014 standards. But even with AI support, processing all that data on everybody is a bit like hard work. So security organisations have learned to focus on the important things. Like the ones that involve uranium.

Solid points Mr. Masters. Although, given the power of the tech, why be obvious. A little well targeted poison and the target calls an ambulance. No matter the prognosis, the perscription is a nice long rest in an attractive "Rest Home" (maybe it could be by the sea in Wales and have Italian architecture ;-). Some of his visting friends would get sick too. Sublety makes for better adventures and easier bagging of terro-wannabees.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

I thought the near severing of the Mars beanstalk by terrorists was done using a nuke?

That seems to only complicate matters. It happened once, but the society doesn't seem as obsessed about preventing it from happening again as it was obsessed about cold war nukes, or plane terrorism, or whatever, in other eras.

Oh, and there's the issue of antimatter warheads/bombs too. After all, AM seems relatively easy to get, since it's being used in space propulsion. Well, easy to get from non-Terran merchants, anyway.

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Solid points Mr. Masters. Although, given the power of the tech, why be obvious. A little well targeted poison and the target calls an ambulance. No matter the prognosis, the prescription is a nice long rest in an attractive "Rest Home" (maybe it could be by the sea in Wales and have Italian architecture ;-). Some of his visiting friends would get sick too. Sublety makes for better adventures and easier bagging of terro-wannabees.

There's something disturbing about either of those proposed senarios.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Solid points Mr. Masters. Although, given the power of the tech, why be obvious. A little well targeted poison and the target calls an ambulance. No matter the prognosis, the perscription is a nice long rest in an attractive "Rest Home" (maybe it could be by the sea in Wales and have Italian architecture ;-). Some of his visting friends would get sick too. Sublety makes for better adventures and easier bagging of terro-wannabees.

I get the reference, but with TS era Technology, is a long rest (more than a month or two) ever required for anything?

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

I get the reference, but with TS era Technology, is a long rest (more than a month or two) ever required for anything?

Who says it's the patient that requires the rest?

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Who says it's the patient that requires the rest?

The implication was that the excuse would be plausible in setting.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Oh, and there's the issue of antimatter warheads/bombs too.

No, even antimatter _triggered_ bombs will require you to be on the end of a very large and elaborate industrial production facility. It's also LC0 and a million $ a gram. I don't think any spacecraft in the setting needs a whole gram either. Probably not even 10 milligrams.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

The implication was that the excuse would be plausible in setting.

It seems fine to me. It shouldn't take any longer than a month or two to reprogram your brain so you are no longer a threat either, after that there's no reason not to send you home.