A Nuclear Engineer's View on War - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Startalk

Added: 2026-05-29

[00:00:00]You know what we say to each other? We need more data.

[00:00:02]>> Yes. And that is the real telling aspect about scientists. Today, we're going to be looking at a scientist's view of war.

[00:00:10]And you're going to hear a nuclear engineer's view of war. He says, "Let's be rational." It would appear that that is not always the case. Let's see what this is all about. Ever since we've recorded the history of human conduct in what we call civilization and even before there have been people who didn't get along on a level where it wasn't simply a matter of let's talk over our differences. It's we cannot resolve our differences so therefore I must kill you.

[00:00:42]>> Okay. So his framing of war is based on humans repeatedly failing to solve disputes peacefully. I would frame it a little bit differently. Again, I'm not saying he's wrong. I mean, this is starting out a bit more philosophical than anything based on hard science here, at least so far. And this could be the difference between looking at it from an engineering perspective versus a scientist perspective. But I see war as what happens when competing groups conclude that the expected utility of violence exceeds the expected utility of negotiation. so similar. And I'm not saying I disagree with what he says in that regard, but that's my way of looking at things because civilizations are energy processing systems competing over territory, resources, trade routes, ideology, and the list goes on. More recently, I would add information dominance. Though the uncomfortable reality is that peace is not or it doesn't seem to be the default state of intelligent life. Peace emerges when violence is too costly. Trade without violence is more profitable or deterrence is credible enough that nobody wants to stress test it like in the case of nuclear war. So you'll end up with cases where powerful empires historically create long periods of stability. Not because people are more enlightened, but because for a time overwhelming force can suppress opportunistic conflict. And this stability can often come from credible overmatch. No, I don't claim to be an expert in geopolitical game theory, but if you see it as a stable operating system operating in a cycle like a nuclear power plant, that's one way of looking at it. Feel free to disagree because this is a little more out there. I realize >> this as a mode of operation, >> okay, >> within our species, within civilization itself is disturbing.

[00:03:08]>> Yeah.

[00:03:14]>> So, let's go way back when it's just fisty cuffs.

[00:03:17]>> Okay.

[00:03:17]>> What's the most damage I could do? I can like maybe harm one person, possibly kill one person at a time. Now I have a bow and arrow. I'm one person and I can take out 10 people at a time.

[00:03:32]>> Okay. So he's getting at escalation framework here.

[00:03:36]>> Notice this ratio is getting steeper and steeper.

[00:03:39]>> Mhm.

[00:03:40]>> I now have a gun. Actually, it's a musket gun initially. I can take you out at 50 yard. I don't even know what you look like and I can kill you. Then I have automatic weapons. One person can take out. I like this little sketch of here.

[00:03:54]>> It's kind of goofy for something this serious. And I can see why he's doing that.

[00:03:58]>> Reload. Take out another 20. A missile.

[00:04:02]You fire a missile. I can take out hundreds of people. War continues to quote advance. What else can I have? Oh, bombs. Yes. So now one person can kill thousands. Once you have an airplane, you can fly over someone's head. It renders the trench warfare obsolete. So what he's really describing here is increasing energy projection efficiency.

[00:04:28]So using a unit of energy, jewels. Jewel is a pretty small unit of energy cuz after all a human fist can transfer a few hundred jewels. Getting up into talking about rifles, that's up to several thousand. Artillery shells, missiles, you're getting into the millions of jewels, billions of jewels.

[00:04:49]and nuclear weapon, you're getting you're starting to get well into the trillions of jewels to the point where you don't really measure them in jewels anymore. You're going to be measuring them in kilotons of TNT or megatons of TNT in the case of the really really big ones. And looking at it like this, war is about fundamentally concentrating energy onto targets faster than the enemy can absorb or mitigate it. which is why this industrialization of warfare is what changed it permanently. It's less so about better weapons the way I see it and it's more about metallurgy, chemistry, mass production, energy density with power generation going from fossil fuels to nuclear power plants and of course your logistic systems to support all of those abilities to concentrate energy. I believe there was a quote from Napoleon that was something to the effect of God fights on the side with the best artillery or something similar to that. And nuclear engineering would probably update that quote to history favors the civilization with the highest sustainable energy throughput and industrial conversion efficiency.

[00:06:04]And that's why a modern aircraft carrier, a nuclearpowered aircraft carrier strike group would look like literal magic to a medieval civilization. And a high-end type 2 civilization like the Empire from Star Wars would utterly trivialize any modern Earth military.

[00:06:23]>> Airplanes can go over cities. You drop bombs on people's heads whether or not they're combatants. So now you just make more and more powerful bombs.

[00:06:38]Now the bombs are no longer just explosives like with gunpowder or anything. It's nukes.

[00:06:44]>> Nuclear weapons birthed at the end of the Second World War. Now one person flying an airplane can kill tens of thousands, even millions.

[00:06:57]>> So and this is where where nuclear weapons step in. That's where some of the historical models and again you can even look at it using energy like I talked about earlier in terms of jewels before nuclear weapons this energy deposition on targets scaled relatively linearly and now the destruction became nonlinear. So, a single strategic thermonuclear weapon compresses the destructive capability of thousands of bomber sordies, mainly talking about bombers from World War II, into just one delivery vehicle. It could be a bomber, it could be a missile, could be a sublaunched missile, and it arrives in minutes. That changes. And while nuclear warfare, the overall destruction has been exaggerated by a few estimates, this still is enough to change civilization because in a lot of cases, the destructive power of a state can exceed the resilience power of the state. And before nuclear weapons, that wasn't necessarily true. Because again, going back to historical examples that he's alluding to, ancient Rome could lose battles and survive. The British Empire at their peak can lose several cities and still survive. And during World War II, the Soviet Union lost tens of millions of personnel and still survive. But thermonuclear arsenals introduce the possibility of very fast industrial decapitation strikes which is unprecedented historically. Um no weapon system before that could really do that at least not nearly as quick. Tens of thousands initially with the atom bomb.

[00:08:41]These are the fision bombs that split uranium and plutonium atoms into lighter atoms releasing energy in the process.

[00:08:49]Those were the two bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The first and only two times nuclear weapons were used in warfare.

[00:08:59]>> Yep, that's the right explanation. And yes, those indeed did use fisionbased weapons without say a fusion booster stage. Those were not thermonuclear weapons. So the Hiroshima weapon, Little Boy, used highlyenriched uranium 235.

[00:09:14]The Nagasaki weapon, Fat Man, used plutonium 239. Both of those rely on rapid superc critical assembly. Zooming into the nuclear level, a neutron splits a fistal nucleus, releasing energy and more neutrons, producing an exponentially amplifying chain reaction.

[00:09:31]And the reason why nuclear weapons are so destructive is because of the time scale. Chemical explosives propagate through electron bond rearrangements and the density is relatively low compared to nuclear. talking a few dozen electron volts. Per fision event, you're talking hundreds of millions of electron volts in terms of energy release. So millions of times more energy depths. So even these 10 20 kiloton nuclear weapons, while relatively small by today's nuclear weapons standards, compare that to a World War II era bomber comp carrying conventional explosives. It's not even remotely car uncomparable.

[00:10:11]You're talking it would take many squadrons of those bombers operating in a much longer time frame to equal this destructive force. So, can they destroy cities? Sure. Can they do in rapid industrial decapitation strike? No.

[00:10:28]>> The bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima were like 20 kilotons, something like that.

[00:10:33]>> Kilotons.

[00:10:34]>> Rough order of magnitude.

[00:10:35]>> What unit is that? Oh. Oh. Huh. We don't have a way to measure the energy of atomic bombs. So you you >> I mean you do but you're using absurdly high numbers when you compare it like in jewels. You're on the order of trillions. 20 kilotons figures out to about 8 * 10 13th power.

[00:10:57]So 80ish trillion jewels. So big number that isn't it's difficult to compare to the uh use of conventional weapons >> measured in terms of what the previous >> explosive powers were TNT.

[00:11:12]>> Mhm.

[00:11:12]>> TNT is dynamite discovered by Alfred Nobel by the way got rich put in money to create the Nobel Prize. Kilo is thousand. We all >> the Nobel irony prize.

[00:11:23]>> No ton is a ton.

[00:11:25]>> Yeah. Thousand tons of TNT.

[00:11:29]Not just one stick of dynamite.

[00:11:32]Thousands of tons.

[00:11:33]>> Mhm. Metric tons, too. So, slightly bigger if you're used to the imperial tons.

[00:11:37]>> You take that, ignite it in an instant.

[00:11:40]You incinerate everybody below you >> near ground zero. That's broadly true, but it's a lot more complex than people realize it is. There's a lot of coupled mechanisms of destruction. There's the prompt radiation. There's the thermal pulse. And note, when I say prompt radiation, just talking about neutron dose, gamma dose. Not talking fallout, just from the nuclear reaction itself.

[00:12:05]The blast over pressure, that's probably the most destructive in most cases, depending on the weapon. Firestorms, depending on the target and the weather, fallout, which is more dependent on the weather than a lot of people think. That has to do with activated radioisotopes.

[00:12:21]So things that became radioactive from the neutrons and fision products being carried away from the initial zone by the wind. And then you get into the indirect effects. So the damage and the suffering caused from the collapse of the infrastructure in the target zone.

[00:12:37]And talked about on the subject of blast effects, they do not scale linearly.

[00:12:44]Doubling the yield does not double the destruction radius. and approximate scaling its cube root. So in order to increase the destruction radius by a factor of two, well the yield of the weapon has to go up by a factor of eight. And this is why shifting away from really really big bomb on the order of megat tons in individual strikes occurred. And targeting doctrine was smaller weapons but more of them. So using multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles to cause more widespread destruction. Accuracy improvements meant that you could scale them down and still reliably hit your target. Cuz that was part of the reason why historically nuclear weapons were more powerful. It's like, okay, even if you're off by a kilometer or so, you're still probably going to destroy what you intended to destroy. And it's became more of a counterforce metric of how to hit the enemy's nuclear weapons once you assume both side has access to nuclear weapons. So engineering optimization occurred rather than just having really big individual nuclear weapons to improve the accuracy, improve the reach and the range and um how to disable the enemy's nuclear weapons.

[00:14:04]And we have magnified the power of that weapon by a hundred.

[00:14:08]>> We call them hydrogen bombs. Just the way the sun makes energy. Taking hydrogen atoms, bringing them together to make helium atoms. That also releases energy. Way more energy than you'd get by fisioning heavy atoms.

[00:14:21]>> So this is a bit of a simplification. So talking about thermonuclear weapons, they still use fision though. They use a fision primary to compress and ignite a fusion secondary. The sun operates through sustained gravitational inertial confinement fusion. Hydrogen bomb is more like briefly, and when I say briefly, I'm talking on the order of nanconds, creating stellar core conditions within the confines of a bomb casing, which is still pretty powerful when you think about it. that human civilization learn how to manufacture miniature artificial stars that can last for a nancond before they learn how to start to stop arguing online. Even before they even invented the internet, we're a species with an interesting set of priorities here.

[00:15:09]>> No longer is it kilotons, it's megatons.

[00:15:13]Not just >> you can get that high, but I think he's mainly talking historic. And then yes, this is when a lot of the use of the multi- megaton nuclear weapons did exist. But the modern ones are fusion weapons that are in the hundreds of kiloton range and maybe a few singledigit megat tons. But what makes them devastating is their reach, their accuracy more so than just their uh yield.

[00:15:38]>> Thousands of tons of TNT, millions of tons of TNT. Now, one person who pushes a button >> who has a rocket to deliver ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missiles. I can sit here in the comfort of my chair, control a missile on my sovereign land.

[00:15:57]It'll enter suborbital cuz it leaves our atmosphere.

[00:16:01]>> Okay, so I get what he's trying to get at in ter he's talking about the destructive potential increasing energy density, but we're drifting into nuclear mythology here. There's no cartoon red button, one random officer, one random dictator, if you will, that does nuclear launch authority like that. They involve authentication chains, command verification, launch protocols, and it's all based on redundancy, second strike doctrine. So you which is a bit of a way to discourage one person from doing something like this cuz a lot of nuclear powers have nuclear submarines for instance that even if you do hit the targetable um nuclear weapons platforms there's still the ones that are hard to find. So I don't know if this makes it less terrifying cuz it's not one madman losing control. It's that you have rational systems interacting under severe time pressure. So on the order of minutes to make these decisions with incomplete information. So nuclear war risk historically comes less from person in cozy couch maliciously pushing giant red button and more about miscalculation, false alarms, escalation spirals. Can even argue it's a bit of a game theory trap if you want to go there. That's uh the more realistic portion to be concerned about.

[00:17:34]>> Can't travel that far without resistance through the air. It leaves our atmosphere, goes its distance, comes back out of the sky, hits its target.

[00:17:42]You can kill a million people. Clearly, that's >> again, you could, but ideally, you're going to start with hitting the enemy's nuclear weapons platforms, which typically are not going to have a million people clustered around them. a highly unstable situation because now we are beholden to the sanity of anyone who has access to that button given the neurodeiversity of our species. Not everyone.

[00:18:12]>> There's multiple checks though. So I would argue rather than one person losing it, it's more about a system and how do I and making sure that its flaws are documented and contingencies are dealt with. So, it's more about I'd look at it from more of the system engineering perspective than um dictator psychology >> has the rational capacity to make a decision that would be in the interest of the world's health, wealth, and security. I'm old enough to remember mad mutual assured destruction.

[00:18:54]So this this is still I mean yes that's what the doctrine was really called and still is and that works. You could put that in as many layers of quotes as you want because no side can guarantee disarming the other entirely. So therefore first strike guarantees retaliation. Therefore nobody rational is going to strike first. So survivability creates stability. And Ohio class ballistic missile submarine for instance is basically a secondary stealthy revenge strike machine. That is to say, well, even if you destroy all of the landbased nuclear weapons, you take out all the airfields that have the nuclear bombers, of course, they can still take off before you destroy them.

[00:19:43]So even that's not hard fast. then you're still going to get hit badly from the second strike. And what's interesting is that threat has likely prevented more great power wars since it existed for decades than historical precedent. So nuclear weapons are horrifying, sure, not going to debate that. But large-scale conventional great power wars might be even worse over long time scales such as World War II. Tens of millions without nuclear exchanges. Nuclear deterrence might have frozen conflicts below the threshold of industrial total war. I don't think that's going to make anybody feel any better, but that still makes it strategically significant. It was the realization that if there's a first strike while the weapons are airborne, space born, while they're leaving the atmosphere, that's enough time for you to launch your weapons.

[00:20:43]>> Space nukes.

[00:20:44]>> If the country wants to really get at you, they'll attack you and your allies.

[00:20:48]So now everybody starts launching weapons. If you have total nuclear exchange and you ignite the forests and the vegetation of the world, this converts living plant tissue.

[00:21:04]>> Okay, here we go with the nuclear >> carbon soot that goes into the air blocking sunlight.

[00:21:10]>> Now, you could argue that hitting cities could cause even more just because the density of the soot there if if you're going to go that route with this argument. This was the famous nuclear winter that was described in the early 1980s.

[00:21:25]>> So yes, and there were some seriously outdated assumptions there.

[00:21:30]>> Computing power was just becoming good enough >> to address the question of what happens if you darken the skies. All around the world, the temperature of the earth drops. Plants that depend on sunlight die. Animals that depend on plants.

[00:21:48]>> There's a just enough with this model is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here.

[00:21:53]When you see these numbers on screen >> die, animals that depend on animals that depend on plants die in sequence. And you have nuclear holocaust not only affecting earth life, but plant life and other animal life as well.

[00:22:08]>> Fullon opaque to sunlight earth here.

[00:22:12]All right. So there are kernels of truth here. Soda injection, sunlight reduction, not absolute sunlight reduction worth 100%, but sunlight reduction and agriculture collapse are concerns. But it's still heavily debated among climate scientists in terms of severity and assumptions of this nuclear winter effect. So the original models assumed extremely high urban fire ignition rates like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, largely wooden structures and the absence of modern fire protection engineering. Questionable optimal soot lofting that lingers for years to decades rather than hours to days, which is also questionable. um global distribution efficiencies of a northern hemisphere nuclear exchange that's going to affect all the way down to the South Pole which is also questionable and very large exchanges with even more nuclear weapons than what we have today. So modern models are more sophisticated but there's even more uncertainty than a lot of people think. So there's no neatly packed end of the world scenario here.

[00:23:20]What is true is that a massive nuclear exchange would still be globally catastrophically, economically, and agriculturally. But civilization ending apocalyptic winter conditions everywhere on Earth is unlikely. Now, localized effects, sure, like the zones that were hit directly, and a lot of that will just depend on the weather, just like anything else.

[00:23:44]And targets are also not going to be evenly distributed. Again, the targeting priorities are going to be the enemy's nuclear weapons. So, silos, air bases, command centers, naval bases, military targets, and then it's going to be to the industrial hubs. It's not going to be as random. And that matters a lot more for s injection and climate effects. So, not deliberately targeting agriculture and forests.

[00:24:08]>> The nuclear winter scenario, it assumed that the weapons would be equally distributed on Earth's surface. That's generally not how this works. Okay, thank you for Thank you for pointing that out.

[00:24:22]>> If you're launching nukes, you're going to launch it at the missile silos that might have other nukes that haven't launched yet.

[00:24:28]>> And you're going to launch it towards cities with multiple nukes coming into the same city.

[00:24:33]>> So you >> and that's because some nukes might not go off and some nukes might miss and some nukes might get shot down. don't you won't get the spread that that initial calculation had presumed >> and you're going to get like a patch a weird uneven patchwork. Some areas are going to be flatout destroyed. Some are going to be moderate to anywhere from low to severe levels of devastation and then some areas are going to look completely unscathed. It's just it's not even it's not a as easy. Easy is not the right word at all, but as clean of a scenario, a a binary scenario being a onoff switch for Nuclear Winter that completely blocks out the sun.

[00:25:16]Everyone's doomed. It's going to be patchy like everything else. Just like the Fallout effects, just like the thermal effects, just like really any effects of war. It's it's going to be sloppy. But what it did do was birth an entire science of long-term climate modeling >> from assault.

[00:25:35]>> That that that paper right there that he's showing is the the study that a lot of people reference >> on the environment >> from the 80s.

[00:25:42]>> And out of that we got to have great confidence that the dinosaurs were taken out by an asteroid. An asteroid the size of Mount Everest that struck the Yucatan Peninsula uh off of Mexico. Cast dust into the air. plunging Earth into darkness.

[00:26:00]>> This also shows that there's nothing magical about nuclear weapons that are capable of doing this. It's really anything with a ridiculously high yield.

[00:26:09]And the impact, that asteroid impact right there makes nuclear weapons seem insignificant. So, talking about the escalation of destructive forces here, this is taking you well up into like sci-fi civilization territory here, >> rendering 70% of all species of life on Earth and in the ocean extinct.

[00:26:33]>> And here's one other bit of baseline there. So, that asteroid many millions of times higher yield than all of the Earth's nuclear weapons at once. That did not end all life on Earth.

[00:26:46]>> The world quickly realized how deadly this is.

[00:26:51]It's not just a bow and an arrow. It's not just fisticuffs.

[00:26:55]>> We're still um a ways away from asteroid diversions into Earth technology.

[00:27:04]Yeah, we're we're we're not quite there yet. So, you don't need to worry about that one for a little while. 21.

[00:27:09]>> It is an asymmetry in warfare that had never been seen before.

[00:27:17]I'm reminded of a quote from Albert Einstein. I don't know how World War II will be fought, but I know that World War I will be fought with sticks and stones.

[00:27:32]>> Yes, I'm familiar with that quote. I mean, it's less of an absolute thing and it's more of just him trying to make a statement. He didn't there wasn't like analysis behind that term. I mean, that's not even really a science thing.

[00:27:44]That's more of a geopolitical thing.

[00:27:46]Anyway, >> that's where war and the science of war has taken us. Scientists >> though, it's interesting is that also brings up the point if you're talking about the whole asteroid thing, here we are going back to throwing rocks, just the rocks are a little bigger.

[00:28:02]>> Have historically been complicit in the waging of war. Governments uh be they wararmongering or otherwise have always reached for the ingenuity and creativity of scientists and engineers.

[00:28:16]>> And that's true. But scientists and engineers are tools of civilization. I mean the same nuclear physics gives you nuclear weapons but also life-saving nuclear medicine. safe, clean, reliable nuclear power plants, RTGs for space probes, cancer treatment, and the ability to power systems in deep space.

[00:28:40]The technology itself is morally inert.

[00:28:42]Civilizations decide how to apply it. A reactor operator and a bomb designer reference overlapping physics textbooks while producing radically different outcomes. And military funding often accelerates technological development that isn't necessarily just about making weapons. You can look at radar, jet engines, the internet, computers, satellites, and the list goes on since the beginning of human civilization. So this is the uh bit of an uncomfortable statement here is war is horrific, but war can also massively accelerate applied engineering, which isn't exactly a comfortable statement. of all stripes.

[00:29:23]You know, where do you get chemical weapons from? You go to the chemist, >> bow warfare, you go to the biologist, the astrophysicist. We don't make bombs.

[00:29:32]We don't >> You can deflect asteroids into planets.

[00:29:35]That's coming.

[00:29:37]We're We're kind of leaning on that one with this video, it seems.

[00:29:40]>> No, but we care about multisspectral imaging in dark places. We care about coordinates on Earth and in the heavens.

[00:29:50]We care about >> coordinates that you can drop bombs.

[00:29:52]There we go. All right.

[00:29:53]>> Timing. What is a physicist an expert at? It's matter, motion, and energy. And what is a military battle of any kind?

[00:30:02]It's I have energy over here.

[00:30:04]>> Okay.

[00:30:05]>> And I want to put it over there. It could be I have a bullet here sitting in my gun, but I want to put that bullet over there with energy that I give it.

[00:30:13]>> Okay. So, wow. All right. I think we actually agree on a lot of things in terms of in terms of this aspect cuz yeah, he's getting at the energy transfer.

[00:30:21]>> I have a bow and arrow. I pull the string pumping potential energy into the bow. When I let go, >> the bow springs forward, the arrow goes, >> sending kinetic energy over here to over there. That is the basis of essentially every military conflict. There is no war that is won without the exploitation of science and technology.

[00:30:50]>> Yep. Warfare is essentially applied industrial physics under adversarial conditions. So yeah, the side that detects faster, computes faster, moves energy farther, faster, and more efficiently, sustains logistics slart longer, and replaces their losses faster, generally wins, at least militarily.

[00:31:11]Politics not withstanding. And the other uncomfortable thing that I think Hollywood gets wrong about war is industrial base matters a lot more than any sort of heroics at scale. The heroics are more of outliers, rounding errors, um, relatively insignificant compared to the overall base throughput of everything. Industrial powerhouses such as the US or the Soviet Union during World War II were terrifying because they became continental scale industrial reactors. Ships, tanks, aircraft, steel, fuel, logistics, relentless throughput >> at its center.

[00:31:51]A little bit about me and my history. I grew up in the 60s and 70s. All I ever knew was the Vietnam War. I grew up in an era where war is bad.

[00:32:02]>> Yeah, >> war is bad. How could war ever be good?

[00:32:07]But meanwhile, I'm still observant and I look around town and there's statues to war heroes, military servicemen standing proud. And I said, "How is it that I could think war is bad where apparently at all these other times, >> not the time coincident with the Vietnam War, >> but at all these other times war was commemorated with pride and dare I say even celebrated.

[00:32:40]>> What's that's what kind of Memorial Day and Veterans Day is all about. You are celebrating those who fought in wars and commemorating those who died in wars.

[00:32:52]This is a celebration and this is more about sociology and psychology here. Um, so with what I say next, good chance I'm going to be wrong about it. So be worried. So, and that's to do with public perception of war changing dramatically based on proximity, the media exposure, whether or not you won, and the overall narrative of the state of what country you're in. That is to say, a victorious war against an enemy, an unambiguous enemy like World War II gets memorialized. But a traumatic inconclusive war or just a straightup loss. I think there's a few historical disagreements on the Vietnam War about that that's going to get questioned which is less of h um hypocrisy and more about psychology interacting with historic outcome. So I don't necessarily see that as hypocritical. It's more of depends on the war kind of a deal. a recognition. Whereas in in the Vietnam era, there was none of that. So that's where I was forged. My sense of war was forged. But my rational mind was saying, "What is the rest of this about?"

[00:34:13]>> Yeah.

[00:34:14]>> There are occasions where Yeah. war is necessary.

[00:34:17]>> A bad >> yes actor rises up >> whose interests do not comport with what we might think of as civilization.

[00:34:28]>> Yeah. And I would agree cuz ultimately rational engineering logic has to collide with the reality of the place in which we live. If a hostile power is expansionist or existentially threatening, negotiation might fail, deterrence might fail, sanctions, really anything less than force might fail. Not saying it should be the default option, but at some point force does indeed become the enforcement mechanism behind civilization and progress. So, and you can see this I mean this isn't really a debate. This is why every stable society ultimately maintains some organized violence capability like police force, military force, some form of enforcement and some form of deterrence. You don't even have to call it the military. You can call it the defense force, but it's still there because after all, without enforcement, the rules become suggestions. And again, this is harsh and I guarantee you people are going to disagree with this, which is fine. But engineering, especially nuclear engineering, doesn't really care about emotional preference. Bridges either hold load or they collapse.

[00:35:43]Nuclear power plants are either stable or unstable. Deterrence either works or fails. reality grades on performance, not wishful thinking.

[00:35:51]>> The preservation and prolonging of civilization as we have built it and as we have come to embrace it easily who comes to mind of course is Adolf Hitler.

[00:36:02]>> Mhm.

[00:36:03]>> Yes, there are times when you are fighting evil forces, but you have to ask who defines who's evil.

[00:36:11]>> Yep. In starting and making a war, not the right is what matters, but victory.

[00:36:21]The strongest has the right.

[00:36:24]>> And in terms of strongest, go back to the whole discussion on energy throughput, replaceability, sustainability, logistics, and all aspects of that. I mean, yeah, getting a bit mechavelian there. It's hard to argue against the idea that to protect freedom is a good thing and the fact that freedom isn't always free. It reminds me I saw a comic long >> freedom cost a buck05 though with today's inflation it's probably true fitting >> ago where two people are facing each other with a bow and arrow pointed right at each other's necks and each one says at the same time the harder I pull >> Mhm.

[00:37:06]>> the safer I feel. It's like really >> Yeah. And that's a good analogy for arms races. And keep in mind nuclear weapons did not they're the most well-known arms races but you can look at from historical naval buildups for instance.

[00:37:24]So one side builds defenses the other side interprets that as offense preparation. Both escalate and both generally feel less safe. And with modern technology so it's not just in terms of energy in this case it's also speed. the the automation compresses timelines of some of these processes. So cyber warfare um AI assisted targeting that can reduce the reaction time which have the potential to increase in stability.

[00:37:53]>> As a scientist when we disagree with one another we might argue our case voseiferously. Some people are a little more emotionally invested in their ideas than others.

[00:38:04]>> So it can get heated but at the end of the day you know what we say to each other. We need more data.

[00:38:12]>> Yes. And that is the real telling aspect about scientists though in the case of engineering and in case of operations you don't always have that luxury.

[00:38:21]Sometimes you have to make decisions with, you know, 20% of the data. And a lot of times that's enough, but I know that kind of gets people who succumb to the whole analysis paralysis thing.

[00:38:34]>> When more data come in, and then it resolves the conflict, then we agree, go out, have a beer, and then move on to the next frontier question. That's the brainwiring of a scientist. So here's one caveat.

[00:38:52]Unfortunately, states, governments, nations, civilizations do not operate under laboratory conditions. Scientists seek truth whereas countries seek survival. Those are not always aligned. So that is to say, sometimes you might operate under some level of uncertainty because waiting for perfect data could mean well losing the war. So, as much as I love pure science, um, you can't necessarily use that logic everywhere.

[00:39:22]>> There's not the brain wiring of politicians or, >> ain't that the truth, >> many other sort of sectors of society where they need to interact with others. I've had some exposure to military operations and I never served in the military. Uh, not as a >> neither have I. Just full disclosure, I know a lot of people in a nuclear background have a lot of my co-workers did, but I did not >> as a soldier, but I did serve on a board of the Pentagon, >> the Defense Innovation Board. Okay.

[00:39:56]>> It was an attempt to >> that's not nothing >> alert the military that the strength in armies going forward, the strength of nations going forward is not measured by how many soldiers are on the ground.

[00:40:08]It's not even necessarily measured by how many nukes you have in your silos.

[00:40:13]It could be measured by how clever you are with either computing or calculations or or strategies that come from a place that's not just how big is your weapon. So I would look at this as far as um system engineering computation, AI computation, automation, going to add manufacturing, going to add energy production cuz that's that's my thing. That's getting into future dominance and ultimately about orbital infrastructure, which we're not quite there yet, but that's we're talking about the future. So that's so yeah um rather than weapons it's can be about grids so power power generation and distribution semiconductors supply chain of course you can argue that's been the case since early human history just the materials are a little bit different and of course AI models so yeah I I see civilization warfare as system engineering competition >> you look at the reasons why people have fought wars over the A common one is access to limited resources.

[00:41:20]>> Mhm.

[00:41:21]>> I want what you have. I need what you have. Oh, you're not going to share it.

[00:41:27]You're not going to give it to me.

[00:41:28]Therefore, I'm going to take it. Well, you can only do that. You can only threaten to do that if you have >> the resources, >> the financial resources, the scientific resources, the engineering resources.

[00:41:42]Other reasons why people >> nice mention engineering >> fight with limited access to resources.

[00:41:48]Yes. Uh religion again I come to it as a scientist. If there's a batch of scientists over there who say >> E doesn't equal MC². E= MC cubed.

[00:42:00]Are we going to go to war?

[00:42:02]>> That's why hyper matter reactors in Star Wars are so powerful that they use E greater than MC². No, but seriously it's kind of interesting >> over that. No, I would say no. Let me show you why that is not true. And I would demonstrate it with experiments and examples. That doesn't work as well when you have belief systems.

[00:42:22]>> If you come from a belief system, then what you believe doesn't have the evidence that science would normally require to establish what is objectively true.

[00:42:35]>> That's why they're called belief systems, because you believe that something is true.

[00:42:40]So, I'm going to extend this one a little bit. This is an interesting point he brings up just strictly calling it belief systems though, and that's because a lot of wars might not seem to be irrational within the participants of the belligerance perspectives. They can appear to be internally rational within the belief structure of the society involved. Now, that doesn't make them morally good. that but that can make them strategically understandable if you view it from that lens and you essentially plug that in, plug that belief system, that programming when you do your risk assessment as far as war is concerned. So you can get some level of strategic certainty about another side's perceived certainty around a system of beliefs which I think is fascinating.

[00:43:34]Now you may believe it so strongly that you know it's true >> but that's an internal emotion that you carry.

[00:43:42]>> Belief systems are such that >> it may be true for you but it's not really true for other people unless you convince them of it. And since it's based on belief, rational arguments tend to not work. You need methods of coercion or force, ultimately threat of violence, perhaps even threat of death.

[00:44:08]>> And so some of the most violent encounters civilization has ever had with itself is when one waring faction has a belief system that differs from that of their adversary. It's interesting to ask of ourselves in society, is there anything you would die for?

[00:44:30]>> You get one chance in life. What I have found is that the less tangible the thing is you're fighting for, the more abstract it is, the less evidence there is in support of it, >> the more willing people are to die for it. can almost just look at it as like a pre-programmed algorithm that generates when dealing with this adversary. It's it's fascinating.

[00:44:57]And so war always seems to be this glorious thing at the beginning and then the body bags start coming back and not only uh military casualties but civilian casualties. And this I don't know if that's still as much true today, but that was certainly true historically.

[00:45:17]You you talk about honor and duty or war for liberation or something. And then the attrition arrives and I think that's pro that's one of the reasons why it's looked at less so today is because modern warfare in industrial civilizations is fundamentally attritional. whether it be personnel, machines, resources, infrastructure, and that's why war, especially prolonged wars, even the side that wins can lose.

[00:45:52]And I'm not even getting into nuclear war yet. I'm just talking about a war that just is costly. just trying to live their lives who are now susceptible to decisions made by people in power who generally are not themselves the same people who go do the fighting. I find that dismaying just being human >> in civilization as a scientist.

[00:46:18]But it's real and it happens. And that's how the world is put together.

[00:46:24]>> Mhm.

[00:46:24]>> With or without the League of Nations coming out of the First World War, with or without the United Nations after the Second World War, with charters that are signed, Geneva Conventions.

[00:46:37]>> At the end of the day, you can ask the question, can we just all get along?

[00:46:44]Let me end on a slightly more positive note. All the UFOs people have been seeing in the sky. Lights that we can't explain.

[00:46:55]>> Sure.

[00:46:55]>> I'm glad some part of the military budget is going to investigating them.

[00:47:01]>> Cuz people have been seeing them for decades. I've never seen anything that I couldn't identify. I know a lot about weather and climate and sky conditions and planets and moons and what they do and weird things that they do. So, I've never seen anything I couldn't explain.

[00:47:14]So, it was all ifos to me, but maybe some of these UFOs >> or just UFOs >> would pose a danger to us.

[00:47:23]>> Okay.

[00:47:24]>> Again, to our health, our wealth. So, I'd want the military to check it out.

[00:47:28]And if it's a threat from space, maybe the greatest task of all would be to protect Earth from aliens.

[00:47:39]So, this is a recurring sci-fi theme here about external threats unifying fragmented civilizations. So, you get the Federation, United Federation of Planets from Star Trek, the UNC from Halo, the Systems Alliance from Mass Effect. You can kind of argue it's the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars, but that's that's a little bit different.

[00:48:00]But yeah, the point being that shared existential threats can suppress internal divisions. And there's historical examples of this, too, not just talking sci-fi. So, but yeah, I I don't disagree that a genuinely hostile extraterrestrial civilization would probably unify Earth almost instantly.

[00:48:20]Not out of enlightenment, but out of survival instinct. Now, the problem is we're pretty low on the totem pole relative to any theoretical extraterrestrial civilization coming for us. and we would not stand a chance against threats like the Borg, the Covenant, the Reapers, or the Empire.

[00:48:40]Uh-uh.

[00:48:43]And probably my favorite example of this is if you've ever played the game Stellaris and you look at a primitive civilization there from you're the perspective of the advanced alien civilization you just see them as a teeny tiny speck smaller than a speck cuz a spec is a solar system in Stellaris as fragmented nation states on a single planet and even the weakest units you start with at the beginning of the game would effort effortlessly conquer them. So yeah, our our civilization isn't ready for that type of adversary.

[00:49:21]>> In fact, in the 1980s, President Reagan addressing the UN said just that. He said, "Here we are with all of our differences." He was still in the Cold War, by the way, with all of our differences. Imagine how close we would be together if we had to fight a common enemy such as an invader from space. Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize >> universal threat. Okay. So, yeah. Um, type four civilization. Yeah.

[00:49:55]I I don't think so.

[00:49:56]>> Is this common bound? If that's what it takes for us to get along, I I guess so.

[00:50:04]But I still believe >> No, it's it would be worse than our existing conflicts >> if taken literally. I I get what Reagan was trying to say. I believe in the power of conversation and the power of coexistence because that's what makes a beautiful world.

[00:50:22]That we can all be different but yet all be together with common causes, common goals that are sensible, rational, sane, and will feed the future of our health, our wealth, and our security. Thanks for listening. This was an interesting one because at least in terms of the philosophy, I think I agreed with him at least 80%. I mean after war, war is energy, industry, psychology, logistics and survival pressures interacting simultaneously. And nuclear weapons changed a lot of that because they broke the relationship between industrial effort and destructive output. And the real lesson here of the nuclear age, I don't think, is that humans became too violent. It's that humans became powerful enough that losing control for a short time could end these industrial level systems. And that makes that reshapes that the more important technologies going forward aren't more powerful weapons. It's better power generation and infrastructure, resilient infrastructure, command systems, safeguards, warning systems, and the overall energy abundance sufficient enough to reduce the resource competition itself, such as generating large amounts of abundant carbon-f free base load energy the way nuclear power does. Because at the end of the day, our civilizations are still running on some ancient software, and that is us tribal humans inside exponentially more powerful machines. Thanks so much for the recommendation, and thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.