Yes, and after we confiscate their assets, we turn them into delicious meat pies. Surely this is not unethical because each billionaire, turned into meat pies, will feed many dozens of us.
it's silly hubris on your part to claim that you know that tetraethyl lead in gasoline was not a net positive for civilization: cheap gas in high compression cars leading to productivity gains? Could things have been better? you, of all people, have no idea.
According to my understanding, burning US dollar bills, donating to the Fed (if such a thing is possible) and donating to the Treasury are approximately equivalent in their effects.
What puts a lid on how much money the Fed creates is the desire to keep inflation to reasonable levels, preferably 2% per year. Your burning your cash allows the Fed to create more while adhering to their inflation target. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that although the Fed decides how much money is created, the Fed is not allowed to keep or to spend newly-created money, but rather must give it to the Treasury (perhaps through some complicated or non-obvious mechanism) which makes it available for the government to spend.
If he has a wife and dependent children, he probably cares more about always being able to provide for them than about how appealing or satisfying his work is -- regardless of the cost of living in Phoenix.
I've never heard any expert in nuclear weapons suggest that Russian nukes don't work, especially the ones that have been modernized since the fall of the SU, which is all the ones attached to ICBMs and SLBMs. Until a few years ago, US nuke experts regularly inspected Russian nukes and Russian nuke delivery systems. If Russian nukes don't work, it seems likely that the inspectors would have been able to tell, e.g., through gamma-ray spectrography.
The ICBMs and SLBMs to "deliver" the nukes are more expensive and harder to develop them the nukes themselves, and Russia routinely tests those.
"harder to develop": London, not having had as much money to spend on nukes as the US and USSR had, gets its SLBMs (along with the launch tubes) from the US (whereas they make their own nukes and SLBM-carrying subs) and a few minutes of searching finds no signs of them ever developing an ICBM. (In fact, they might never have had ICBMs: they certainly don't now.)
If the illuminating plane is not a stealth plane, then it'll get shot by the stealth plane long before it can detect the stealth plane.
If the illuminating plane is a stealth plane, then you've just traded on stealth plane for another. Even worse, there's a decent chance that your broadcasting plane gets shot down, the illumination fails, and the enemy stealth plane still gets away leaving you one plane less for no gains at all.
I am not surprised, drone warfare today requires a lot of people and a lot of manhours, and it does not scale that well. Several guys are often moving the equipment on foot to get as close to the frontline as possible, so that the pilot can have a few shots at delivering a pretty small explosives to a target they might not even found. On the other hand, few conscripts can jump on a Grad and start shooting rockets on a whim.
Even then I question if you can do so. You can level your enemy perhaps, but if the enemy is the US or Russia they have provisions to end the whole world after you level all their cities and so you don't win. If it is anyone else they might not end the world themselves, but there are good odds many countries that otherwise hate each other will join together to destroy you because they don't going nuclear to be an option for the next country. (basic physics and engineering can build a nuclear bomb - it isn't easy, but several countries have proven it can be done and most suspect more would if it was cost effective - but since you can't use them in war it isn't cost effective so they don't)
Industrial civilization can be ended using nukes. Too many interconnected supply chains would fail, including those needed to produce fertilizer for modern agriculture.
Possibly most human and land animal life could be ended if enough ground burst bombs were used to maximize fallout.
Destroying all life is extremely unlikely, e.g. deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, cave-dwelling life, bacteria, and more will survive even deliberate coordinated attempts by all nations to nuke as much as possible with ground detonations to maximize fallout.
Destroying the Earth (a 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of mostly iron) is not happening with nukes.
When most people say "end the world" they mean "end modern civilization", not "make the planet Earth cease to be a body in hydrostatic equilibrium in orbit of Sol".
Nukes cannot be used to end industrial civilization, either.
Nuclear planners have always planned to use many ground bursts: on hardened targets like command bunkers, but also to destroy communications networks. Specifically, a "landing station" where transoceanic cables make landfall or wherever there used to be a 5ESS switch (the locations of which are publicly known) is a great place to hit with a ground burst to destroy much of the nation's non-wireless communications infrastructure. Estimates during the end of the Cold War are that about half of CONUS's area would be covered with lethal levels of fallout from these expected ground bursts. I guess if the Russians and Chinese were deliberately trying to cover as much area as possible with lethal levels of fallout (which they wouldn't because it is not an effective plan) they could cover 70 or 80% -- if they had as many nukes and means to "deliver" them intercontinentally as the Soviets did, which the Russians don't unless they've been hiding them from US inspectors, but I consider it very unlikely that they could've managed that.
And bomb fallout is very different from radioactive contamination from accidents at nuclear power plants: basically no area continues to have lethal levels of bomb fallout 4 weeks after the last bomb explodes. The method for decontaminating your house is to get up on a ladder and wash down your roof with a garden hose, then wash down all driveways and sidewalks.
So, again, nukes cannot be used to end industrial civilization. Note that this means that if the US ever nukes Russia with everything it has, Russia would bounce back and would again be a military threat (whether that takes 3 years or 15 years I don't know) so it makes little sense to nuke Russia unless the US is going to follow up with a long-term occupation of Russia's ports and maybe some key transportation hubs.
The USSR knew it had no chance to occupy US ports or occupy a substantial portion of US territory: their plan for followup was to grab the rest of the European plain, which includes most of Germany and all of northern France to the border with Spain.
I think enough people will die that we cannot sustain civialization. It takes a lot of people to get oil from a well to the pump and too many of them will be dead. You can keep things going in degraded form but eventually you can't make replacement parts for the refinery to a level of quality that allows for current output and so you lose trucks and tractors. Steel refineries need some weird subblies that you won't be able to source well enough.
There are many different things that we need that nobody thinks of and all those are disrupted with loss of important people at once.
How bad it is very much depends on how long it takes to restore meaningful amounts of the power grid. If it’s north of 60 days, forget it, you’re losing 90+% of your population.
And bomb fallout is very different from the radioactive contamination from accidents at nuclear power plants: basically no area continues to have lethal levels of bomb fallout 4 weeks after the last bomb explodes. The method for decontaminating your house is to get up on a ladder and wash down your roof with a garden hose, then wash down all driveways and sidewalks.
Assuming they all have enough supplies to shelter in place for 4 weeks. Sure, they do. Oh, and where does all that runoff go?
Most of the runoff probably ends up far enough away from your house that it doesn't harm you. Again: its very different from power-plant contamination: its radioactivity is diminishing very quickly.
If you were lucky enough that your home was not covered in lethal levels of fallout, then it is likely that all the land within miles of your home is similarly safe, so you can range around looking for water, and most people can survive without eating (or eating only what food they happened to have around at the time of the attack) for a few weeks. It wouldn't be pleasant, of course (and I sure would prefer to be in a fallout shelter pre-stocked with food and water when the attack happens) but the point is that many people would survive even in the countries that were attacked.
There's probably enough food in the US right now (mostly intended to be fed to farm animals, mostly stored on farms) to feed half of the US population. 2 weeks after the attack, it starts to makes sense for altruistically-inclined people (particularly if they have a Geiger counter) to load such food (along with a mill with which to turn it into flour -- also a common item stored on farms) on a truck and take it to where hungry people are. Old people are a good fit for this task: if you are 60 years old, then the prospect of developing cancer in 20 or 30 years is not exactly pleasant, but not particularly scary either.
Which most folks know how to do, of course. And we can be sure that when they encounter other groups of people at their favorite puddle, everyone will get along just fine.
Most people can survive without eating (or eating only what food they happened to have around at the time of the attack) for a few weeks.
And wouldn't be in the least motivated to leave their shelters. Howabout you try it first, and report back to us?
Look, I'm not trying to be cute here. And we agree that it won't end global industry capacity (and even the countries directly affected would eventually spring back, as after WW2). I've also done my time in physics classes, and know about all that neat physics stuff.
But your arguments sound very hand-wavy, and something tells me you're glossing over lots and lots of additional factors, and are basically trying to spin the situation as being far less of a calamity than it actually would be.
Let's take a step back and recall what I'm arguing against: I never argued or meant to imply that there wouldn't be tremendous suffering and death. I'm only arguing that nuclear war is extremely unlikely to end industrial civilization (though it can sure suppress industrial capacity for a few years and possibly if we get very unlucky for a few decades) and is extremely unlikely cause human extinction.
basically no area continues to have lethal levels of bomb fallout 4 weeks after the last bomb explodes
While this may be true enough for 'conventional' nukes, there have been proposals to intentionally salt bombs with elements such as cobalt that can render large areas of territory unfit for habitation for many years.
This isn't fiction or speculation, it's basically what MacArthur wanted to do in Korea.
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