Capto Iugulum Background Thread

[ChiefDesigner]

Will respond more extensively later, but I'd add a fourth category to that -- middle-tier states looking to deter Great Power neighbors. In OTL, these would be your South Africa/Israel/Taiwans of the world, which all actively sought (and achieved!) some measure of nuclear capability. [1]

Off the top of my head, in Europe I count Occitania, Scandinavia, Germany, and Hungary; in Asia one of the better-educated Indian states, Guangxi and China; in the Americas, Argentina, Peru, Vinland, Florida and the UPRA.

Notably, these are all states with reasonably functional economies, that are threatened with destruction by their neighbors. The Asian candidates are a bit of a stretch, and Argentina and Vinland enjoy largely friendly relations with their neighbors; Germany could easily make the choice to invest that money into a conventional army and airforce, and they might not be wrong.


[1] blah blah blah Taiwan coming under the US nuclear umbrella totally counts

 

[Nuka-sama]

From a game mechanic standpoint, I am very pro Nuclear weapons. As many people have pointed out, we have a massive imbalance between nations. Russia, Germany Britain, and Japan all have massive ammounts of money and manpower, how are the other nations supposed to survive, nevermind competing with them. You even have local examples; how is Vinland or Jacksonia or the UPRA supposed to survive long term against the USA? Maybe right now they could win a war, but as time goes on and the USA's population continues to balloon while smaller states don't have as many people, the USA is going to overrun all of us in a conventional war. Nuclear weapons could make alot of smaller powers still be able to survive and prosper later into the game, and considering how many players you have, and how many of us have smaller powers, I would think that might be an important factor for you to consider

 

[Luckymoose]

How could nuclear weapons save smaller nations when the big nations will just invade them to stop nuclear development?

 

[Terrance888]

What nuclear development? Oh, you mean this? This is for peaceful purposes. Eeyup, peaceful nuclear power. Those "underground tests" were just earthquakes. wink wink

 

[spryllino]

I just think discussion of whether we are conventional-warfare stick-in-the-muds, and would like a world to exist where there was no such thing as nuclear weapons and we just kept on doing the same thing for another half a century, is very much beside the point...

 

[Luckymoose]

You better believe I'll be using nuclear weaponry liberally.

 

[TheLastJacobite]

Ditto

 

[talonschild]

Likewise, if and when.

 

[Luckymoose]

Ditto

It'll be just like TWTUD! We can be nuking everyone but each other again. :3

 

[Lord of Elves]

How could nuclear weapons save smaller nations when the big nations will just invade them to stop nuclear development?

What nuclear development? Oh, you mean this? This is for peaceful purposes. Eeyup, peaceful nuclear power. Those "underground tests" were just earthquakes. wink wink

Somehow I don't see anyone being particularly concerned about humanitarian uses of nuclear power by foreign states. If they look like they want bombs then they're dead.

 

[ChiefDesigner]

Somehow I don't see anyone being particularly concerned about humanitarian uses of nuclear power by foreign states. If they look like they want bombs then they're dead.

The answer is cobalt bombs -- "invade me and I end the game."

No good defense against radioactive cobalt-60 -- too long to live out in shelters, and just radioactive enough to kill every human on the planet.

 

[Crezth]

The answer is cobalt bombs -- "invade me and I end the game."

No good defense against radioactive cobalt-60 -- too long to live out in shelters, and just radioactive enough to kill every human on the planet.

Vaults.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Vaults.

"Colleague, you have been selected for a scientific experiment by the Revolutionary Commission for Knowledge and Progress! This is a great honor. Please submit yourself and all legal dependents, codependents and familial relatives to a large hole in the ground Workers' Revolutionary Protection Vault #A2315 immediately. Rations will be distributed upon entrance."

 

[bestshot9]

Dangit, every time I see this thread updated I get excited until I realize it is the Capto Iugulum Background Thread, not the 1920-1939 thread.

Anyways, to add to the discussion, with my nearly non-existent knowledge of physics and nuclear bombs and what have you, I would say a world without nuclear weapons would be interesting but, as mentioned before, I think chemical/biological weapons would end up replacing them as the go-to WMD to cause mass casualties over a large area, and functionally the only difference between chem/bio weapons and a nuke would be no radiation and fallout after the blast, which from what I have seen in NESes doesn't really impact the game anyways, so mechanically there wouldn't be much of a difference if we had nukes or not. It would simply be a flavor change, though story-wise it would make things interesting, game play wise, I don't see it being too huge of a difference. To mitigate WMDs and make the world really interesting, you'd have to make it so no one develops ICBMs capable of delivering WMDs accurately, and that is too much of a long shot to happen, even in a world where nukes never leave a scientist's brainstorming phase.

Alternatively, nations could pray really, really hard for a meteor to land on their enemies capitals and see what happens.

 

[Symphony D.]

Per R&D dollar, chemical and biological weapons are more effective at contaminating areas and exterminating people than nuclear weapons, respectively. What they lack is precision of control and hard target kill capabilities. When one goes back to Douhet's original theories of air war, he assumed chemical munitions would be used as a matter of course against civilian populations. This was in some ways updated with nuclear weapons in the countervalue theory of nuclear warfare.

If nuclear weapons are delayed, the money not spent on them will go into conventional munitions and these other WMDs. Unit 731 had already stockpiled enough chemical agents by the end of WWII to kill the entire Human population by weight. The chem and bio programs of the US and USSR were both massive, even with the lion's share of funds going into nukes.

Sarin is every bit as good a contaminant and lethal to anything with a nerve system as radiation is. One simply substitutes one apocalypse for a slightly older one. And of course you can't delay nukes forever, only perhaps long enough for them to be viewed as superfluous in comparison to oceans of chemical and biological agents. And one will develop them anyway when the restrictions on these become apparent. To stop this, you basically have to somehow stop science absolutely dead in its tracks at roughly an 1890 level of advancement.

 

[Jehoshua]

All this talk of how its inevitable that humanity will develop nukes or form stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons large enough to eliminate the entire world population is all terribly deterministic for me. People seem to be forgetting that people have free will, and choice.

Simply put, even though people are likely to do all those things you say (of that there is no doubt), it is not inevitable because people (and governments are run by people) can simply choose to not do something be it because the prompt isn;t there, or simply because they don't want too for any given reason. The Capto Iugulum scientific community community could decide that all these WMDs are so terribly crass and vulgar, with the whole thing becoming taboo for example. Our state governments could likewise choose to restrain themselves out of fear or some other moral compunction from ever starting a nuclear weapons program. Ergo, social norms could restrain state behaviour in this area, just as they do IRL in terms of international relations.

Translating this purely into game mechanics as such. I see no problem with EQ simply deciding, if he so desires it, to delay the realisation of WMD's, or just ignore the possibility of the things alltogether. They are not inevitable even if they are very likely to be developed, and if he wants to explore a world where they never come to pass or where they come into play much later than IRL, than I see no reason why he can't indulge one of his, presumably many, guilty GMing pleasures.

 

[Luckymoose]

We also haven't had widespread use of gas attacks on white populations. I used some on the black proles, but that is all I can think of. There is no reason the scientific community would be opposed to the weapons on those grounds, simply because they have not been used enough to make people feel bad about it.

 

[Symphony D.]

The Capto Iugulum scientific community community could decide that all these WMDs are so terribly crass and vulgar, with the whole thing becoming taboo for example. Our state governments could likewise choose to restrain themselves out of fear or some other moral compunction from ever starting a nuclear weapons program. Ergo, social norms could restrain state behaviour in this area, just as they do IRL in terms of international relations.

Just like the Moon Landing was a hoax and everyone with a sufficiently high powered telescope, including the Soviet Union, went along with it and does to this day, right? Buy a strong enough set of optics and you'll get your invitation to the conspiracy and special access to the clubhouse where you can chill with JFK, Elvis, and Tupac.

You can talk about free will all you want, and I will counter with mob mentality. Governments, organizations, and corporations aren't people, they're short-sighted, interest-driven conglomerations usually focused on their own survival and supremacy, because until extremely recently in Human history, success was predicated on hierarchy, not on networking. Your suggestion is one in which an entire professional body or organization elects to effectively handicap itself against the competition. In a zero-sum game, that is tantamount to suicide.

You then go on to posit that everyone will elect to suicide out of some moral obligation or whatever. The simple fact is they won't, due to your own free will argument. The only reason the Cult of Pythagoras was moderately successful at keeping his work secret was because they went around murdering everyone they could find who independently rediscovered it. Someone will always make the choice you won't, eventually. This is why the military industrial complexes of the 20th century pursued every avenue of weapons research: fear that if they didn't, the other side would. I don't think I need to emphasize how competitive CI's world is.

People do not work the way you are describing. They never have. They never will. You can declare this is simply the way things are, but then you're declaring that the game does not involve anything like Humans as they actually exist.

Also, yes, scientific progress is relatively deterministic. You know why? Because the fundamental physical facts of the universe are determined. There is some uncertainty in the particulars but certain outcomes, given certain preconditions, are overwhelmingly likely. Welcome to the quantum world. You know, the one that would've inevitably been discovered.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Figuring out quantum physics isn't particularly 'crass and vulgar'. Eventually, these topics will come under investigation, especially given that we've already reached a rather advanced state of science in this timeline. Eventually, the understanding will come, unless this universe spontaneously deletes individuals from the timeline once they come up with particular ideas that EQ dislikes.

Certainly governments could agree to not develop these chemical, biological and nuclear superweapons... but NESers being who they are, I think that this is kind of unlikely.

 

[Grandkhan]

I guess its a bit late, but I suppose its 'theoretically' possible to not have any nuclear weapons worldwide, or at least to delay them by a few decades. If I remember something I read once correctly (and I may be wrong) OTL, the German physicists working on the nuclear bomb made some mistake in his calculations (the jury is out on whether the mistake was deliberate or not). The result indicated to them that the best material for absorbing radiation was deuterium (as opposed to what it actually is, graphite).

As such the Germans had to invade Norway to get the deuterium, but the mistakes made in the mathematical calculations meant that their experiments weren't working properly and the program was scrapped.

I guess its theoretically possible that if nuclear fission research is done in the public domain in universities in this TL, because we're at that stage of scientific development but there's no war currently going on, the researcher might publish that and as such nuclear fission is delayed by a few decades until another scientists publishes a paper saying "Hang on, thats wrong."

Either way this is a dumb argument because its missing the fact that there's reasons not to include nuclear weapons into a NES that aren't "What if its cool?". Specifically, I suspect EQ might not be trying to include nukes because I suspect they aren't fun. How would you implement them in a NES? "You drop a nuclear bomb in Rio, -100EP, -10 Stability, -30 Infantry Brigades for Brazil, game over."? There's no way to implement them both realistically and not make them annoying as hell for players.

I know when I was designing my Superpowers NES, I made nuclear weapons as difficult to use as possible, with the full expectation that nobody would ever get to use them because A) i had no idea how to implement them properly and B) any way to implement them would result in a tri- or quadripolar world, which I was trying to avoid in the first place.

Put simply, I'm with EQ in not wanting nukes in the game simply because I feel they'd make the game boring as hell.