Doomsday Clock: Three minutes to midnight

[BumRushDaShow]

14. The use of nukes would not make sense for the argument you make

regarding a potential battle over reduced habitable land. See Chernobyl and more recently, the Tōhoku, Japan earthquake & tsunami.

If you look at the stockpiles, there has been a massive reduction that has occurred since the 1989 peak (per here) -



One nuke is too many but you can't dismiss a drop from some 60,000 nukes down to 10,000.

The irony is that as long as countries have wealthy despots in charge, they are not going to unleash what could destroy their wealth, which also (as we have seen with dictators like Assad) encourages them to tighten up any destructive weapons that they possess. They don't have the benefit of a "Blade Runner" way to flee Earth for "outer space colonies".

I also disagree with predicting that nations would continue using nukes as a means to gain more land or even have for self-defense. We are actually seeing the low-tech means for achieving land grabs - mass killing with conventional weaponry (guns and missiles), which preserves the area and control of the scarce resources without contaminating it with nuclear fallout. It often ends up that the cost of production and maintenance becomes counter-productive. IMHO, we are seeing the last gasp of this form of supposed self-preservation, given the rise of drone warfare.

I do agree that the loss of coastline areas and the pressure of populations that live along them, demands ways to actually come up with long-term strategies to reduce the human-induced causes (which will take a long time and will not be seen for some time) but also short-term strategies to better manage the habitable land. For decades, China has looked over its shoulder at Japan (who beat them badly in a series of wars during the last century and before), and it has recouped and fortified for such. But what island countries like Japan (and even England in the 1700s) do, is "export" their populations elsewhere (see Hawai'i and Australia).