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Area of a sector with angle a in radians and unit radius is a/(2p)*(p*r^2)=a/2 for any a.

However (and your point about the wee fellas I did see) if the Big 5 disarmed (which was the thought experiment I was running) and the UN banned nukes, then we and our allies would be part of the coalition having the ugly task of enforcing the ban. If, say, Pakistan and NK failed to start dismantling their nukes as the rest of the nuclear countries were doing, they would quickly find themselves very unsafe. If the Security Council ever came together on this, the little holdouts would become the turds in the punchbowl. You may say I'm a dreamer.... Someplace like here? https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/10/europe/russia-putin-empire-restoration-endgame-intl-cmd/index.html Or from one of hundreds of other news outlets that have covered Putin's public remarks directly referencing his plans to rebuild the Empire. x-post with @iNow

I guess they are distinguishing between objective measures of safety and more subjective (clinging to nuclear teddy bears) political forms. Politics has a lot of threat gesturing. Like baboon troupes.

Relying on Nuclear weapons as a guarantee of safety is a bit like using a tight-rope across the Grand Canyon as a shortcut. You can laugh at the people going the long way round, taking days for what you do in minutes, with them stumbling and tripping along the way while you are enjoying the fabulous view. You might even say "where's your evidence that I'm going to fall ? " You might even be right, and might never fall. But most people with any sense can see the flaw in your argument. It's just that nuclear war is harder to picture, than slipping off a high wire. Which is a bit odd, when you look at the people with their fingers on the trigger. Maybe Sleepy Joe might think twice, but Donald Trump might be about to rest his finger on the button, and nobody here seems to doubt Putin's readiness to shout fire, in the right circumstances. And the Israelis have never been more unstable, and Iran is working away in the shadows. And who knows who will be in power in China this time next year? For nuclear war to kick off, all it takes is for a stand-off where nobody will back down. Like Ukraine, but with nukes. And history tells us the worst can and does happen under those circumstances.

Absolutely, nuclear war is a zero sum game so for the deterrent to work efficiently, both sides need trusted information; without trust escalation is almost inevitable, with trust de-escalation is perfectly possible. For exqample America missed a trick in the Cuban crisis, the reason Russia wanted to place nukes on Cuba is because they perceived an imbalance in the game, which means they think it's a winnable game, but only for their opponent. It was averted because America promised to take theirs out of Turkey (IIRC); but that perception of imbalance remained in the Russian culture, the result of which meant a spiral of escalation/investment to the point that each side had 10 or 20 (or more) times the amount of nuclear ordinance needed to ensure it remained a zero sum game. All of which could have been avoided, if America not only promised the Turkish nukes but also promised to level the playingfield and were prepaired to prove it, Russia wouldn't feel the need to invest anymore, not only would escalation be avoided, but it shines a light on the path to de-escalation, take one away each, one step at a time and before we know it we're past the event horizon of peace without mutually assured destruction, while the game remains zero sum. More difficult now for sure because power corrupts; if America had taken note of some strong philosophical thinking on the subject (I've skimmed some of writing's but can't remember the authors names, I'll do some digging), available a decade before the Cuban crisis.

The whole thing is MAD

Putin himself has repeatedly said he wants to return to the days of the Soviet empire and that the worst day in his country’s history is when the Berlin Wall came down (he was stationed there as a part of the KBG and had to help burn documents in their embassy when it happened).

It is encouraging when someone grasps the essential lie that nuclear weapons make the world safer. Until we can forge some kind of international and binding treaty that reduces then eliminates nukes, no one is safe. Those of us who live near an AFB with a nuclear bomber wing, or GCHQ or a missile field don't so easily enjoy the luxury of imagining we are safe. Even a fairly limited Herman Khan scenario of nuclear war would make current spectres of climate catastrophe, polar melting, PFAS toxicity, plasticmageddon, lethal pandemics, etc look like a few ants at a picnic by comparison. The kids of Generation Z give me some hope because so many of them seem to grasp these realities and their sharing of awareness easily crosses the porous international borders of the web.

Who is going to vaporize you? Russia? North Korea? What leads you to believe you are going to be vaporized? I don't see the connection. Finland did not add or delete nuclear weapons.

This style of conversation delivery doesn't promote continuation; it sucks the oxygen out of it, killing all participants. It is the thermobaric bomb of conversation killers.

That study also underscores the way the placebo effect gets at subconscious processes in the brain, so that even someone told it's a sugar pill and we presume will no longer consciously believe in the treatment effectiveness, still shows a benefit. That is how powerful suggestion can be, bypassing our rational mind.

Either that is contradictory-the above two statements-or we are agreeing given my statement-your second statement above and my statement. We are together in planet Earth in the same universe whereby when your are doing algebra what you are just doing is probing properties of the basic framework(spacetime fabric). In this case special relativity (invariance of light speed) is a constraint to maintain stability in the universe. When you look up to see the stars and everything you are simply probing information about the basic framework(spacetime fabric) that happen to be conscious..therefore contain memory about the past...you are looking at the past events. The ship to go FTL need to mask itself from the effects of special relativity not to induce instability(paradoxes, causality effects and energy conservation disorders) to the basic framework(spacetime fabric). It seem we are in a delicate universe..going FTL is not the issue.. the issue is how to learn and know how to mask ourself from the effects of SR.