Boomers frequently like to talk about how nuclear war was "solved" in the '80s and '90s and isn't a concern anymore. But the reality is that it was only avoided for a while, and will never be solved so long as nuclear stockpiles are maintained. Our present moment is more dangerous than any point in history, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the only thing you can even compare it to. Yet so many today insist upon seeing this as a non-issue, and largely ignore the problem.

Nuclear war never stopped being a possibility, but it became much less likely in the 90s with the end of Cold War and the USSR. I don't think it ever disappeared from public consciousness, it just fell down on the list of worries. Nowadays, with the US/China stories, I personally am getting worried about it again - but still less than about the climate.

Pakistan/India probably is the greater threat and whatever ensues after that.

In overall numbers, nuclear stockpiles have shrunk significantly since the peak in the Cold War. In spite of rhetoric, they have not grown significantly in recent years, either. The long-term trend in number of deployed nuclear weapons is downward and (if efforts continue) will likely remain so.

Stockpiles peaked at the end of the Cold War in mid-late 1980s with over 60,000 warheads. 40,000 when these children were being filmed. About 10,000 today and falling (although falling slower than it should). https://ourworldindata.org/exports/number-of-nuclear-warhead...

Hum. As always, things are relative. Growing up in the 1970s and early '80s I gave myself zero chance of ever reaching 30 (or even 25). Near miss scenarios were just too frequent. (E.g., compare the "Able Archer" crisis of 1983. The GDR had actually mid-range nuclear strike bombers on the runway with turbines running, ready to retaliate, and the USSR had forces moved into mobilization zones, ready for the worst.) Compared to this, things have become much better. However, the idea of the potential for any nuclear crisis scenarios being "solved" is as accurate as, say, the current idea of natural language recognition being "solved".

> But the reality is that it was only avoided for a while, and will never be solved so long as nuclear stockpiles are maintained.

That doesn't solve anything either, countries could just start building nuclear weapons "in secret" at any time. What are you going to do about it? You can have sanctions, but those didn't stop NK or Iran.

Let's say that nuclear weapons didn't exist, what about biological and chemical weapons? What about endless trench warfare?

The real problem is war, not the means to it. It's conceivable that nuclear weapons prevented many wars, in a "high risk, high reward" type of situation.

> Our present moment is more dangerous than any point in history

Rubbish. We have fewer missiles, and the world is no longer engaging in proxy wars to achieve Soviet or US influence whilst those two are nose to nose in hostile and absurd posturing. There are no longer two or three Nato-Soviet incidents a week. There are no longer weekly scrambles of aircraft to intercept the bomber or spy plane.

The little local difficulty between India and Pakistan doesn't really compare. The decline of Western military spending and sale of former government nuclear bunkers rather gives that away.

The Russians seem to have solved their Cold War problem by buying influence inside the US and UK - which was much cheaper than all-out nuclear destruction.

But they've also been upgrading their civil defence systems and nuclear stock while Nato has been distracted.

IMO the current situation in Europe is very much still a proxy war, but it's a proxy war promoting hard-right regime change within the member countries of the EU and the US rather than a proxy shooting war in another continent.

That's progress of a sort, and it definitely shows signs of more intelligent strategic thinking than the USSR managed. But it's still a political war against the EU's liberal democracies, and a culture war against liberalism in general.

You're right there - it's a proxy war in the sense the old Anglo-Russia Great Game was. Though that style of strategic thinking goes long back in Tsarist Russian history.

I must be missing some serious nuclear brinkmanship going on somewhere. Russia is kind of stirring up trouble, but mainly in a desperate attempt to even get noticed. The tensions between India and Pakistan don’t really seem to have an imminent nuclear dimension.

> And over-population also seems to have largely been solved as well.

Huh? I always thought over-population as the leading cause for global warming.

Emissions can be expanded to Emissions = (Emissions per capita) * Population

Over the last 200 years the population has went up by a factor of 8. It's hard to nail down exactly what factor emissions/capita has went up since the number used to be so insignificant but you can compare countries right now and see the US has more than 10x emissions/capita than India and higher overall emissions output which is the opposite of what you'd expect if population was the problem.

We could cut population by 99% and say "no more problem" but that's an indirect fix to the main cause: increase in emissions/capita.

It's strange to just dismiss the significance population after saying it increased our emissions 8x. An 8x decrease is far more than what the Paris Agreements call for to keep global warming under 1.5°C. We wouldn't even be talking about climate change if we had 8x less emissions.

Let's further breakdown (Emissions per capita) into (Emissions per GDP) * (GDP per capita). We can see here[1] that emissions per GDP have been decreasing as far back as that data set goes (the past 25 years).

So it looks like the two main factors currently driving emissions higher are increased wealth and more population. No surprise that the US has more emissions per capita than India - the standard of living is much higher.

[1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD.KD

Edit: linked the wrong chart.

China has higher emissions per capita than places like (nuclear-powered) France even though France has much higher standard of living. (And before you say it's because of China's exports, it's not... only about 20% of China's emissions are export-related.)

It's not wealth and population, it's the use of fossil fuels (primarily) and, to a lesser extent, ruminants (cows, sheep, etc... both methane emissions from gut bacteria and land-use for grazing). We can have ~10 billion people at US standards of living if we solve the technopolitical problems that keep us on fossil fuels.

> It's not wealth and population, it's the use of fossil fuels

It's all three. Our formula was emissions = (GDP/capita)(emissions/GDP)(pop). Reduce any of the three factors and emissions drop.

Your phrasing is off. You can't say "it's not factors 1 and 3, it's factor 2" as that implies factors 1 and 3 don't affect emissions. We could choose to focus our efforts on (emissions/GDP). That doesn't mean the other two factors don't affect it. Reducing human population 10x would have the same effect on emissions as improving our (emissions/GDP) 10x. Spending $10k/year instead of $100k/year will almost certainly reduce your carbon footprint.

France and China are a good example of why the other two factors might be important. Looking at their wealth (GDP/capita (PPP)) and emissions, we find that France is about 4x more efficient in emissions/GDP. But France is one of the top countries in emissions/GDP and China is one of the worst. If we assume the whole world becomes as efficient as France in emissions/GDP and the population increases to 10 billion and the world average GDP/capita increases to match the US (~3.6x increase), we end up with about 1.2x our current emissions.

So you could focus all your efforts on trying to make the whole world much more efficient than France in emissions/GDP, or you could look at the trade offs between all 3 factors and try to reason about how we'd like to balance those factors.

Pretty much every demographer agrees that the world is on track to top out at 11 billion people due to rising standards of living, access to health care and reductions in infant mortality, electricity, specialization in agriculture, and access to financial instruments. Basically, everyone reaching the same conclusion that Westerners reached in the 80's: having a bunch of children doesn't really make sense any more.

The problem being that the world, by a pretty long shot, can not withstand 11 billion people leading a Western lifestyle unless there are giant leaps in green tech.

> just like we avoided nuclear war

That's reporting bias. If nukes had been used we'd quite likely not be having this discussion.

> These big, nasty collective-action problems CAN be solved.

I used to think so too. Now I don't believe it. We muddle though, but one day we won't be able to any more. I fear climate change will be that think.

> If nukes had been used we'd quite likely not be having this discussion.

Exactly. No matter how that bias is named. There's no system where the accidents never happen. We were just lucky up to now, but it doesn't prove anything.

Instead of naming it, I prefer to quote Nassim Taleb:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/nassim-talebs-black-swan-...

"“A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher, every day is a confirmation to his team of analysts that butchers love turkeys” with statistical confidence increasing daily. “The butcher will continue to feed the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving Day. And then comes the time when it’s not really a good idea to be a turkey. Being surprised by the butcher, the turkey reviews his beliefs when his confidence in the assertion that the butcher loves Turkeys is at its peak and the Turkey’s life is “very serene” and mildly predictable. This example is based on the adaptation of a metaphor created by Bertrand Russell. From the Turkey’s story, we can also identify the source of all prejudicial errors: confusing the absence of evidence (damages) with the evidence of its absence“"

That's why I really don't understand those who claim that the nuclear doomsday can't happen because it didn't happen up to now.

Errors happen in any complex system, and any probability of the total annihilation of the whole civilization is simply to high to be tolerated.

There are many people who can trigger it at any moment, it's definitely not "the president only" and it never was. Who doesn't believe that should read the books that cover that subject. I've already referred to one, written by a former nuclear war planner. Search for it (that former job of his is a part of the book's title), read it and act. Before it's too late.

To nitpick, a thousand-day old turkey is going to be pretty tough.

You shouldn't be downvoted. I understand your point: we may only be the 1 success to avoid global thermonuclear war out of 10 universes where such weapons were developed. And same may be true in other situations, as well.

However, this is a sort of fatalistic view that denies human agency (I guess I am fated believe in the fantasy that human agency exists as those who believe in that fantasy are more likely to take the actions necessary to survive in seemingly hopeless situations and I am descended from such people?).

We are the timeline that muddled through these collective action problems in the past. We have experience with doing so and were selected (in the evolutionary sense) out of all those possible human society timelines to have the ability to solve these collective action problems.

So let us choose act to solve these problems as if we were, indeed, capable of solving them. Even if part of us might think we can't.

I've been very critical of people here who are fatalistic, it didn't occur to me I was doing the same thing. You're right to pick me up on that.

My sad point is I've been trying to get stuff done on climate change for 20 years, and nothing got done because nobody cared. They didn't care because humans mainly don't care for anything beyond their local environment. The reasons for that are often down to lack of feeling of ability to change anything, which fatalism feeds into, but also down to, quite frankly, indifference. Mainly indifference. "Climate change? Whatever. Look, cheap flights!!"

I no longer care because that wore me down and made me ill. I accept that it's too late to avert climate catastrophe and, barring some miracle, I don't expect to live out my full life. I've come to terms with that.

I think it’s survivorship bias not reporting bias.

That is so absurdly true :) Thanks for catching it.

Well the nuclear problem is arguably easier to solve it just requires no side to start getting into a fight they won't survive.. climate change actually will require significant cooperation and action across borders. Also are you sure automation is as overblown now as back then.

Automation is or was an overblown fear? Consider that when these children were making their astute predictions, a company would have entire rooms filled with secretaries and typists handling mail. Each individual could read, compose a response, and mail out a few dozen letters a day to communicate with suppliers, vendors, customers, etc. Today, a companies communications department might be a couple people. And they can handle a few hundred emails before lunch. And they don't get paid any more (adjusted for inflation and all that jazz) than the individual working as a typist in 1980 would have been.

One of the ladies in the video shared a concern that there would only be jobs for high-IQ people who could use a computer. That certainly didn't take into account that computers would become tremendously easier to use, but I do think it hints at a problem. It's easily seen that our societies have been eliminating the middle class and splitting into a much more widely disparate lower and upper classes... but I think it might more be moving such that the 'middle class' is only knowledge workers, particularly those working in software. This movement likely would have been quite abrupt if not for the establishment early on of wage fixing by the largest companies (which they were convicted for), but it seems to have been accelerating the past 10 years. It makes some sense economically (not its magnitude, it should be much larger, but its existence) because software is a productivity multiplier unlike anything in world history, but doesn't it bear out her concerns?

Sure when factories came around, craftspeople could transition to working in restaurants, or as cashiers, or working in the distribution chain, etc, because those were things that could be picked up on the job. While using computers has gotten simpler, building systems fundamentally cannot beyond a certain point. If you're building a system which must track 100 things, you must be capable of dealing with those 100 things. If that's something which is beyond your capacities, then its not just a matter of getting trained.

I don't expect automation to be a large-scale problem as quickly as some do (how long have we been hearing about automated factories and how many do we actually have? A long time and not many. They are hard problems.) but I do think concerns are warranted. Concerns were warranted when factories were developed, and we probably would have benefited from some forethought there too. We still carry many of the social changes that occurred to handle the densely packed urban centers that grew up around factories despite none of their original motivating factors still existing. We will most likely see changes on that scale, and strife to match if we just let things happen.