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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24235 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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The nuclear non-proliferation treaty was not about preventing nuclear apocalypse. They just wanted a fantastical global regulatory regime.

Correct. Notice great powers were sure to get the bomb before locking in their hegemony. And all serious countries maintain a turnkey program in case the US stops having the will or ability to enforce it.

Political coercion is so seldom selfless that I'm willing to stand by the idea it never is. And call it realism.

And yet, I can't help but notice that the nuclear apocalypse has still not occurred.

It did occur and the Japanese surrendered

I don't see how that affects my point that the ultimate goal of such maneuvers has never and will never be disinterested.

It's evidence against "The nuclear non-proliferation treaty was not about preventing nuclear apocalypse". Whether or not the people involved wanted a global regulatory regime, it seems pretty likely that they wanted to avoid a nuclear apocalypse, and that the treaty was an attempt to do so.

Formally it is not.

Let's say me and my friends start charging you to protect your business from being set on fire. You pay, no fire ignites. Is that evidence that we wanted the protection over the money?

Now if you said that nuclear weapons are actually dangerous that would actually be evidence of favor of that thesis. But then we'd have to go into how that apocalyptic evidence of things like nuclear winters is fraudulent.

Preventing nuclear terrorism and deterrence by the enemies of great powers is the reason GPs agreed to a cartel, by equivocating destroying GPs with destroying humanity.

AI's the same. The managerial class is afraid of their displacement by technology and is trying to lock in their extant power by establishing another cartel.

People afraid of losing their power and shielding themselves with the purported welfare of humanity is as old as time.

Speaking of nuclear apocalypse, though.

Plan B is the real one here. Implementation probably involves going to war with a near-peer, nuclear-armed superpower so sophisticated they are on the edge of ASI.

You probably do need a credible path for how a full-scale conventional conflict avoids escalating to nuclear exchange and then avoids escalating to nuclear apocalypse, if that's an at-all viable Plan B.

It would be quite ironic if the way AI managed to kill all of us is that we were so afraid it might go to a fast takeoff that we decided a nuclear apocalypse would be better than risking it.

Nah, not even that. The NNPT is just about the big kids deciding the big stick club should be exclusive to them only. And its enforced by big sticks, not some figleaf of global regulation. It would only work if AGI already existed but was a closely held secret of the militaries of the various signatories.

For the most part (excluding e.g. rambling threats of the odd insane world leader), the NNPT is not enforced through nukes. The primary tool to discourage nuclear weapons programs are economic sanctions. Coupled with the big powers signaling willingness to defend their non-nuclear allies (excluding demented world leaders, again), this creates an environment where it is not in the interests of most states to have a nuclear weapon program.

I will grant you though that the UN security council is very much a club of nuclear powers regulating the behavior of everyone except for themselves. Still, the SC is more born of pragmatism, and sometimes works to police small states who are not client states of any of the permanent members, which is still better than nothing.

the NNPT is not enforced through nukes.

It hasn't yet, but as recent events show, it is enforced through stealth bombers dropping 30,000 lbs bunker busters and massive air raids. Or full scale ground invasions deposing the existing governement. All of which I would classify under "Big Stick" diplomacy.

Time will tell if Trump's adventures will actually result in a strengthening of non-proliferation.

"If you do not own nukes we will bomb your nuclear facilities, military installations, government leaders, civilian infrastructures, and schools whenever we feel like it" seems exactly like extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country, which is a condition for leaving the treaty after 90 days.

Is there anyone you think would take that lesson to heart, who didn't already after Libya?

You say fantastical global regulatory regimes and I hear big kid threatening to blow up the Three Gorges Dam if they don't comply.

Same difference really.

The trick is, there's undoubtedly some sociopathic subset of people who did in fact just want to gain a global regulatory regime's power and weren't all that worried about nuclear war.

And these are the people who most want to control that regime, and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should be allowed to.

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