I’m currently reading a rather well done alternate history timeline that posits a global nuclear exchange in 1984. If anyone is interested I can post the link.
The author posits that while things are pretty devasting overall, in the UK at least enough of the population and central and distributed command authority survives to begin to pull the nation back together.
Most of the contributors seem to agree with this analysis but a minority are of the ‘global nuclear war is so devasting there’s no point even attempting to survive’ school of thought.
I always found the mockery and hatred directed towards the ‘Duck and Cover’ cartoons and their UK equivalent ‘Protect and Survive’ somewhat unfair, sure hiding under a desk isn’t going to help when a multi-megaton device goes off overhead but it probably will help if said device detonates ten miles away.
So starting from the basis that the global situation is as it was in the early to mid-1980’s is civil defence on an individual or a national level pointless or not?
Per this wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_stockpiles_and_nuclear_tests_by_country, Russia/USSR had 39,197 nuclear warheads in 1985. The US has a land area of 3.79 million square miles. dividing that out, it comes to 1 warhead per 96 square miles. That means that if they wanted to, they could drop one bomb every 9.8 miles. Of course, with the population distribution of the US skewed towards the coasts, most of the Plains and Mountain areas could be ignored except for the few urban centers. Of course the nuclear silos in the Plains would also be a target. I think that this gives a practically zero chance of survival in the densely populated areas, but a pretty good chance if you lived on a farm in Wyoming. How long you could survive is another story, with clouds of radioactive material blowing in from the West Coast.
AIUI, the de-emphasis on civil defense came about when it was realized that surviving a nuclear war in the short term (6-8 weeks in a fallout shelter) would do little practical good when those survivors would almost certainly starve to death in the following year. The destruction of the infrastructure that makes it possible to produce and distribute food would mean that long-term survival would be limited to a small percentage of people in rural non-irradiated areas.
I wish I could remember what book it was, but I remember reading somewhere that once city buster hydrogen bombs and ICBMs became standard nuclear arms, most governments decided that civil defense and fallout shelters weren’t worth the cost to build on the scale needed to protect large amounts of the civilian population. With aircraft delivered Hiroshima type atomic bombs there was theoretically enough time between detection and delivery for people to seek shelter, and shelters didn’t have to be built to the tougher standards needed to survive an H-bomb explosion.
ICBMs equipped with thermonuclear warheads didn’t give enough lead time for most to seek shelter, and their sheer destructive force would make any shelter except for the most hardened, purpose built bunkers, ineffective to withstand a nearby nuclear detonation.
I was in the military in the mid 80s, we received specific training for individual survival on the nuclear battlefield. Totally plausible you could survive and function.
Would the overall political situation devolve to complete anarchy? Maybe, maybe not would seem to be the best answer.
And of course people far away from the excitement will survive just fine. New Zealand, Hawaii, lots of places and lots of people.
Depending on where you were stationed, it was most probably a feel-good effort.
Survivability for troops stationed in Europe was measured in minutes to hours from the start of a nuclear war - sometimes *negative *ones for troops in key strategic locations who would get taken out through various covert or conventional means even before the nukes started flying.
But then, only 5 to 10% of them needed to survive and slow down the Russkies to be considered as having achieved their strategic objectives and anything beyond that was pure gravy, so…
Here’s the cheerful (if really fucking long) take on the Cold War from a veteran of its later days, who was thrust in the position to sort of know what would be going down and damn his sanity. It’s on SomethingAwful though, so the link may or may not work for ever, and it may get disabled from time to time with their paywall nonsense.
Well, maybe. But then again, if at the onset of the Cold War that might have been a consideration, from the time the Russians caught up with the actual missile gap any location that had any economic, strategic, or morale worth whatsoever would have been showered with dozens upon dozens of warheads if only to get the statistics looking just right.
Like, if we’re talking about survival chances in Wakamazoo, Kentucky (pop. 3 and a donkey) then yeah, by all means, duck and cover for all the good it’ll do you, you ghoul in waiting.
But only a fool could think anyone within a 100 miles radius of, say, New York city or London wouldn’t have been burnt to a fine powder 5 minutes after the big red lights started flashing.
That’s where you’re wrong. A hundred miles from New York you could have a good chance of surviving.
Depends on which way the wind is blowing, and other factors, but it’s fully plausible.
A nuclear weapon is a big bomb. It’s really, really, powerful, but not *magically *powerful. It’s just a bomb.
The number of nuclear warheads stockpiled does not mean that all of these were mounted on missiles and capable of launch. That number would have been much smaller.
After the initial launch, and the counter strike from the opposition, that would be it. There isn’t going to be any reloading of whatever silos could still be in operation.
Not to mention that nuclear weapons come in different sizes, and that there’s a HUGE difference between a 2 kiloton artillery tactical nuke and a 500 kiloton ICBM warhead.
The only ones worth worrying about for civil defense purposes are the big ones- and there are a lot less of them than the tactical ones.
Chances are, both sides had the ability in terms of warhead numbers to hit some pretty small towns after hitting the big targets, but it’s a lot more likely that some more important targets had multiple warheads aimed at them to ensure their destruction.
So it’s unlikely that if you lived in say… Lawrence, KS that you’d have to worry about direct strikes, but you’d probably have a lot to worry about fallout-wise from Kansas City, Leavenworth and Topeka. (I’m guessing they’d hit KC because it’s a major rail hub, Leavenworth for Ft. Leavenworth, and Topeka because it’s a state capital and KS National Guard HQ).
For the week or two latency period after exposure to moderately high radiation before your body shuts down from radiation sickness and you die, sure. That was the whole point of the Enhanced Radiation or Neutron bomb; it wasn’t to kill people but leave cities intact, it was to deliver such a massively high radiation dose as to cause acute radiation sickness and immediate incapacitation even through tank and other AFV armor.
There is a very slight possibility New Zealand wouldn’t get nuked, but I wouldn’t take odds on it. They are an American ally, and it isn’t as if the Soviet Union didn’t have warheads to spare. Hawaii is going to be nuked hard, full stop. There are 11 military bases in Hawaii, including Pearl Harbor, Hickam AFB and the Schofield Barracks. Honolulu in particular would be glowing in the dark after a strategic exchange.
No, it’s not “just” a bomb. A really, really powerful bomb just makes a really, really big explosion. A nuclear weapon releases radiation, causes fallout, and continues to kill long after it has exploded through irradiation. Chernobyl still has a 30km radius exclusion zone and won’t be fit for human habitation for 20,000 years.
The only common thread between Chernobyl and nuclear weapons is the fact that both involve fission in some fashion. Chernobyl was a reactor mistake and containment failure- there wasn’t anything approaching a nuclear explosion.
Most nuclear weapons are intended to be heat/blast weapons, i.e. really big bombs. The fallout and prompt radiation are secondary, and in most weapons of a useful size, anything that’s going to be promptly irradiated will likely be destroyed by heat or blast anyway. Fallout can be minimized significantly by using airbursts, and like aNewLeaf says, if you’re 100 miles from NYC in the right direction, you could conceivably be just fine if the wind blows right, and you’re not near another target (like say… West Point).
Yeah, but it’s not like they’d just lob one at Manhattan and call it a day. They’d have strike packages headed for every army and AF base in the area, large & mid-size railway hubs, power stations and large relays, port installations, possibly key bridges and heavy industrial zones too. Redundancy on all of those in case of problems or missiles flying off course (which I expect would just strike in inpredictable wherever, as a little “bonus”).
It would not have been a good day, not even in New Jersey
As for England, fuggedaboudit. Small surface area, high population density, military installation in the North but government and military HQs in the South, a nuclear arsenal of its own to knock out AND a key part of the GIUK anti-sub net crimping the style of missile boats headed for the US East Coast. Oh, and in range of a lot more nuclear boom, too. Protect and Survive ? More like Squeak and Get Glassed.
I would expect the numbers on the Wiki page to be for ICBM strategic warheads only, else they seem pitifully low. Like, we had bunker networks full of nuclear artillery shells and batteries of “tactical” face melters squirelled away all over Europe. Man-portable nuclear recoilless rifles. We had nuclear landmines dotting the Fulda gap, fer chrissakes.
Which would mean they don’t include bomber-borne weapons at the very least, and possibly leave off submarine-based warheads as well.
If the bombs don’t kill everyone, then we have a bunch of people alive, but with no food, no water, no energy. So they start panicking, rioting, looting, and staggering out of their suburbs to outlying townships like a swarm of locusts, killing farm animals (without knowing how to dress the meat or prepare it,) setting fires, and bringing disease.
Could play out a million ways, from total annihilation to a tiny fizzle that does nothing much, and every possibility in between.
But I think the most like outcome of such a ghastly exchange would still leave plenty of people alive and basically unbothered. Humanity would continue, IOW.
To be clear: many millions, possibly billions, would die. Granted. But billions would survive also.
Sure, but a) those were firecrackers compared to 80s style [del]death rays[/del]strategic warheads and b) since I doubt the putative Russian nuclear warplan ever included an invasion of US soil since they simply didn’t have the means or logistics to do it (maybe Alaska, but even that’s a big maybe) ; no reason for them not to lob the dirtiest shit imaginable and mess up the land for good. Throw in Weaponized Virulent Black Ebola Anthraxified Typhoid Doomplague too while they were at it, who would’ve cared at this point ? If you’re ending the world and return fire is already on the way, might as well go out in style, right ?
This is the era where the US brainstormed a nuclear ramjet missile that would have flown low altitude zig-zags over as large an area as possible, using its own exhaust and used-up fuel to irradiate it all beyond recognition before finally blowing up on target. Thankfully that one never saw the light of day, but still. “Salt the earth” was very much the name of the game.
Agreed. It might manage to be limited to, say, one submarine taking out one frigate, and then being contained without escalation. ETA: “The Bedford Incident.” I can’t remember if that movie implies the necessary escalation to total war, but it doesn’t absolutely have to.
There, I don’t think so. Not in the “full throw” scenario, where everything that can get launched gets launched. Maybe a billion people would survive the first explosions, but not the subsequent disruption of the food supply. Hundreds of millions…maybe. More than two billion? It seems horribly unlikely.
(And that’s without the additional complication of a “nuclear winter.” Throw that in the mix, and I don’t hold hope for even a hundred million.)
There’s no evidence that radiological warfare was the point of Project Pluto. It sounds much more to me like 2 things happened here- the military liked the idea of a constantly airborne cruise missile in an era prior to effective and long-ranged ICBMs, and back in those days, government engineers were looking at ways to make just about everything nuclear powered.
They also considered a nuclear powered bomber for the same reasons, as well as nuclear rockets, and actually implemented things like nuclear submarines and nuclear powered satellites.
Finally, a Project Pluto missile would almost certainly circle in peacetime over our soil or allied nations. Making it spew radioactivity would be a bad idea.
