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I can't see wars breaking out over a global pandemic, or any stupid poo poo like a nuke firing, because every country in the world is going to be primarily concerned with maintaining order inside their own borders. Maybe a particularly opportunistic state that has managed to largely avoid the full brunt of the conflict intervenes in a limited way to smash & grab certain contested areas or whatever, but I can't think of a better vector to spread a disease than a literal armed engagement. Either way, you're going to see mass quarantine programs, major economic shocks and the resulting shortage crises in daily life, and major social breakdown. But regardless of how high a mortality rate the virus has, the key factors that are gonna determine the full effect are going to be (a) it's vector (b) how fast that disease is recognized as a potential pandemic, and then have it's vectors recognized (c) how well you can contain the initial spread, and then 'plug' any holes you get. So, how easy is it to recognize if someone is infected, and how well can you enforce quarantine? If you can get on top of all 3 problems, I think most well-organized and modern states should be able to come out mostly unscathed, but still with a massive pile of bodies. It's the countries without a strong, legitimate central government that are going to have problems.
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Feb 18, 2017 11:38
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Dealing with a pandemic-scale disease places institutional & resource burdens on any government. Now, if we're assuming the disease is hitting both India and Pakistan within, say, weeks of each other, they'll be an implicit understanding on both sides that a war wouldn't really benefit anyone, so long as the crisis is ongoing. You're assuming wars are only done to 'distract' people, which is kind of a weird assumption to make, usually the people doing them have a reason. But none of them really work while a pandemic is on-going. It doesn't make sense.
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Feb 19, 2017 00:49
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I'm not totally convinced that even a virus with an impossibly high mortality rate, that somehow doesn't kill the victims faster than it spreads, is necessarily going to be apocalyptic. Once governments recognize the threat, there's obviously going to be a lot of incentive to act, and the resources you can throw at the problem are, in this day and age, fairly substantial. The only real way through that is if you somehow can't recognize the threat, until it becomes uncontainable, and how the hell does a virus do that? But okay, let's assume that's somehow the case. There's an extended 'downfall' period, where it becomes obvious that the situation is irreversible, and strategy switches from containment to adaption. So rather than quarantining the infected, because that's now impossible, you isolate (reverse-quarantine) the people you can guarantee are healthy, into limited societies. Assuming some % of such experiments succeed, you're going to end up with a collection of what are essentially city-states, which operate with a high level of vertical top-down control (ie the citizens won't have things like freedom of travel, or a lot of other freedoms, because the idea of a high level of control, and the trauma of the pandemic, would have normalized that idea). How well they succeed is gonna depend on how they're set up, what technical expertise they have, and what their environment permits, because everything is going to have to be produced locally. Social stability is going to be the #1 priority of the citizens of such states. Assuming that anyone can actually survive the pandemic, and become immunized (not actually a guarantee), they're gonna be stuck wandering mostly uninhabited countryside. If they're lucky, they'll run into other survivors and form small tribal groups, operating as hunter gatherers. It's going to be impossible for them to do anything else, because you won't have enough of them (even if the disease only kills 99% of the population exposed, not everyone in that 1% is going to be lucky enough to have avoided all the other knock-on effects from social breakdown, nor the opportunity or personal ability to actually live that kind of life in the first place). In general, I'm gonna guess that the city-state pop >> hunter-gatherer pop.
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Feb 20, 2017 05:19
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