It used to be a common theme thrown around, that nuclear war would wipe us all out. More realistically, even if during the Cold War the US and USSR engaged in a full nuclear exchange humanity would survive.
But would a launch of nuke guarantee human extinction - if that were the goal? Assume evil FBI space aliens mind control key individuals in the military and governments of nations that possess nuclear weapons. Their goal - launch the nukes without warning and wipe out humanity in one fell swoop (it’s a one-time only thing), for fun and profit.
Could they be absolutely guaranteed that humanity will be wiped out, or will it be like one of those 99.99% antibacterial products - some tenacious bastards overlooked in the Siberian tundra or Sahara desert survive and restart?
Humans are scattered all over the planet, even Antarctica. I cannot imagine how a nuclear weapon could possibly kill off every last one. (Well, actually, one survivor would still guarantee extinction, if she’s not pregnant with a boy.)
To do it, you’d need a biological weapon. Unless maybe the nuclear fallout would kill every human, but that would be pretty severe…
He didn’t say “a nuclear weapon”-He said “nuclear war”. Now, if every single nuclear weapon out there was fired off, would there too much radiation for anybody left over to survive and, if people did survive the radiation, would there still be enough humans left over to sustain the species?
Especially if they were both dudes . Or just on opposite sides of the planet.
Even in the depth of the cold war anyone was ever thinking that every single person would be wiped out by the blast, or even by the fallout. It was always that enough of the government and communications would be lost that society would effectively collapse, and that nuclear winter/ground contamination would make crop yields too low to feed all the survivors even if distribution could be coordinated.
I don’t think there was ever any doubt that small pockets of hardy, self-sufficient survivors away from the main blast areas would make it, albeit with a much reduced quality of life.
A full nuclear exchange between major powers (say, the United States and the Russian Federation) would certainly result in hundreds of millions or possibly billions of deaths, devastation of industrial capability, dramatic reductions in agricultural yields and (potentially) arable land available, severe economic damage to international markets worldwide, possibly a huge loss of electrical infrastructure (from a high altitude EMP attack) and would generally be a holy clusterfuck for everybody even remotely involved.
Extinction of the human race, however? Highly unlikely; unless saltation devices which dispserse “short lifetime” highly radioactive fallout around the globe are applied, even major attacks over the North American and Eurasian landmass will be far from killing everyone. Based on those targets, fallout will be largely limited to Northern Hemisphere and for obvious reasons there won’t be much traversal of fallout south of the equator unless weapons are deployed there. (And really, who would bother with nuking Argentina or New Zealand?) Although the concept of decades-long “nuclear winter” was promoted by the TTAPS report and subsequent politicking by the nuclear disarmament crowd, the reality is that most of the material lofted into the atmosphere by the initial blasts is fairly heavy and will not be persistent; the real Sun-choking material will be ash from firestorms, and even that will only last for two or three seasons before subsiding. This isn’t like a supervolcano eruption which pumps superheated steam and fine ash into the atmosphere for months on end, changing regional and even global air currents; the amount of heating, while large is localized in both duration and area.
We might push mankind back decades or (in the worst case) even a few centuries, and certainly the centers of global influence would shift; Brazil or Malaysia might become the new dominant world power. And those nations which remain will probably start rethinking the entire philosophy on nuclear weapons and how little “protection” they provide anyone versus the danger they pose to everyone. But extinction of the human species? Unlikely to the extreme.
A very large bolide impact, errant gamma ray burst, sudden extreme solar flare activity, or a supervolcano, on the other hand? Could wipe us and 99% of all other species out in days or less.
The inbreeding would be ferocious in a two-survivor scenario for many generations, and such a limited gene pool greatly increases the chances of some sort of lethal gene becoming widespread through the remaining population, but extinction is not guaranteed. It would be more likely than if you had, say, a 200 breeding pair survivor community.
Humanity might have been reduced to as few as 10,000-15,000 people around 70,000 years ago, so if that happened again we might well recover in a few tens of thousands of years to our current population.
Or of course we might not recover. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, here as in the market. But it’s certainly within the realm of possibility.
And Stranger on a Train, a gamma ray burst would have a hard time of it, too. A close enough one could flash-sterilize half the planet, but those things are over in a few seconds at most, so the other half of the planet would have a whole heck of a lot of rock shielding them. They’d still be put in pretty rough shape from the atmospheric after-effects, but that’s the sort of thing that can be survived with food stockpiles.
Uh, Stranger, has anyone proved that cobalt salting bombs will actually work? I couldn’t find any research or calculations showing if existing fission bombs can actually create the right kind of neutrons to mass-transmute the quantities of cobalt you would need to make an area uninhabitable for a prolonged period of time. Similarly, without data on how much of that nasty cobalt-60 a given fission bomb can produce, it isn’t clear if it is even possible to manufacture enough weapons. (I mean, there’s a big difference between it taking 10,000 fission bombs and 10 million to get full coverage of the earth)
I wonder if there would be any geopolitical “advantage” to be gained from a nation being able to hold the entire planet hostage like that. “mess with us, and we’ll make humanity extinct!”
Humans could nuke themselves into near-extinction,with a paltry number of survivors (say, less than a million). Whether nor not those million could survive as a species would be contingent on other factors. Otherwise viable human colonies do not necessarily survive, even where condition seem fairly hospitable The Roanoke Colony in Virginia is an example.
A nuclear war wouldn’t do it, because even a nuclear war would have quasi-sane goals other than guaranteeing total human extinction. However, if you were really trying to obliterate humanity?
Conventional nuclear weapons generate large amounts of fallout but it tends to be either one of two things: intensely radioactive but short-lived isotopes, which could be avoided by a year or two underground, or longer-lived but relatively low intensity isotopes that would mainly contribute to cancer, depressed immune systems and birth defects over time. So if your survivors avoided the immediate aftermath, their main problem would be enduring poor health for a few generations, and even that would taper off after about a century.
To use fallout as an extermination tool therefore, you would need bombs designed to maximize mid-term fallout: intense gamma emitters that would remain lethal over a prolonged period- five to twenty years. Hence the infamous “cobalt bomb”, which was theorized to be the optimum element to use for the purpose. With a half-life of a little over five years, it would persist too long for anyone to survive, outside of long-term habitats able to support people for at least a generation.
This is easier said than done however. At a minimum you would need hundreds or a thousand multi-megaton devices to generate enough fallout (cladding your bombs in cobalt instead of U-238 reduces their explosive yield). It was theorized that a few very large devices would do instead, allowing an economy of scale; but since nothing like that has ever been (or plausibly ever could be) tested, whether a 20,000- 50,000 megaton device would work as intended is unknown. Such a device would probably have to be detonated deep underground, possibly a mile or two, or else the blast would simply punch a hole in the Earth’s atmosphere allowing most of the blast and fallout to radiate out into space. And of course for greatest effectiveness you would have to cover the northern and southern hemisphere separately.
At that point it’s a question of the vagaries of the wind; could you be certain that there would be no untouched regions anywhere in the world? Presumably your doomsday bombs could be supplemented with strikes against any areas deemed unlikely to be otherwise harmed, as well as any deep redoubts. And if there were any survivors they would have to cope with an ecologically devastated world poorly suited for supporting human life. But an absolute guarantee of human extinction? Iffy.
As a postscript, the idea of a doomsday weapon has been strategically obsolete since the early 1960’s. If the point of such a weapon is to be effectively unstoppable, and to inflict an apocalyptic level of harm on one’s enemy, then our regular nuclear arsenals were capable of that from 1965 onwards.
Herman Kahn proposed a “doomsday machine” in 1960, blanketing the planet with radioactive fallout. I can’t say how seriously this was taken inside Washington or the Pentagon but it hit popular culture like kudzu. People freaked out about it.
Though he was rightly satirized in Dr. Strangelove (one of a number of candidates for a composite, including Edward Teller) he was trying to make a deeper point. The more or less official doctrine at the time was Mutual Assured Destruction but he, a game theory expert, noted that this worked only as long as each side really believed that the other would respond that way in the real world. If one side were bluffing then the other side had incentive to strike first. The only way out of this was to make the retaliation automatic, taken out of the hands of people who might fail to act.
Whether cobalt bombs would indeed kill off all life is unknown, although it’s good enough for government work. (A phrase I hate, but the right one in this special case.) The concept alone seems to have been enough to get all sides to back off from anything that didn’t leave a large out. There have been a sufficiency of close calls and mistakes since, making a good case for keeping people in the equation and making it very, very, very hard to start something nobody wants to see finished.
With our current arsenals I don’t think it would be possible to wipe out humanity, even deliberately. There are about 17,300 nuclear warheads and most of them are not big enough to destroy a city by themselves. So you would need to allocate several to each population center, and that would leave large swathes of lightly populated countryside untouched. Yes, lots of people would die either immediately or eventually, but extinction for H. sapiens? I doubt it.
In your “FBI space aliens” scenario, it’s only just barely possible, and even then unlikely, and I think that enough people would survive to continue the species, though maybe only at stone or bronze age levels. The internet suggests to me that there are on the close order of 17,000* nuclear warheads of varying strength on the planet. Not all of those are deliverable by missile (North Korea, for instance, has nuclear weapons but not the capacity to deliver them outside their own borders). Still, let’s assume a ideal spread of weapons, whatever “ideal” is. The Earth has a total land area of about 150,000,000 square kilometers, so each weapon would need to devastate an area of about 8,800 square kilometers, or a circle about 53 kilometers, or about 32 miles, in diameter. Further back-of-the-envelope internet research suggests to me that even the most devastating nuclear weapons ever built (the Tsar Bomba, in comparison to those firecrackers that the North Koreans have) could maybe, just barely, get that job done. So no, if our goal is to totally devastate every piece of land at the same time, we can’t do it.
Now, if we assume that we only need to devastate, say, 100,000,000 square km of land, because nuking Greenland, Antarctica, and the middle of the Arabian desert and similar uninhabited areas is not really necessary, then we can do better. It may not be necessary to nuke the whole of Alaska and Siberia, for instance, because they’re going to get so thoroughly hammered by the nuclear winter that vanishingly few people will survive. In that case, we’re talking about needing to devastate a circle 43 km around for each bomb, which is a little more feasible. If we can get away with nuking only 75,000,000 square km, or half of the Earth’s surface, we need a circle 37 km around, and even that I don’t think we can do with every weapon because many of them are smaller than that specifically because they were designed to be used tactically without devastating a large area. I don’t think we can reasonably nuke less of the planet than that and knock the highest remaining society back any further than the Middle Ages, technologically.
In addition, I think that with a surviving population with modern technological knowledge and training, such as you might find in a single medium-size city and surrounding area, you’d be able to bootstrap yourself back up to industrial revolution levels inside of a generation. Personally, if I wanted to place a bet on who’d do the best job restarting society, I think it would be the U.S. Navy. A single carrier group not caught in port (and they’re never all in port at the same time, even different ports, ever since Pearl Harbor) would have some ten thousand or so people, mostly young, well-motivated with good training and in possession of nuclear power plants on boats. They’d be able to pick some place not terribly affected and restart a reasonable technological society, maybe at the level of the Industrial Revolution inside of a decade. If they could co-ordinate and get three or four carrier groups together, they’d be a force to be reckoned with.
*Assuming that no one’s lying, and by “no one”, I mean the U.S. and Russia, because anyone else lying is basically a rounding error.
The idea of a doomsday weapon was valuable throughout the era of Mutually-Assured-Destruction based deterrence. If a country can, with certainty, completely annihilate any other country that attacks, then they are protected against overt attacks from that country. That country knows if they launch missiles, they are dead, so they don’t launch missiles.
But, that other country might still attack if they can disguise the origin of the attack (or at least make it non-obvious where the attack came from). In that case the attacking country might not be deterred by the threat of counterattack directed specifically at them, but they still will be deterred by the stronger policy of “if I get attacked, I am ending the world”. Of course, being able to credibly end the world requires more firepower than just being able to take out your largest enemy.
The aliens’ nuclear option does seem a bit silly. Why can’t the FBI Space Aliens mass-possess all humans at once, and force them to commit suicide en masse? That way, all the planet’s resources and infrastructure are preserved, plus there’s an endless supply of fresh food left over for the incoming FSA colonists.
An energetic gamma ray burst (GRB) would basically fritz the protective ozone layer, which would require years to recover. In the intervening time unprotected humans would have to live below the surface in shelters, and anything composed of organic materials such as polymer or cellulose would break down rapidly. There are also longer duration GRBs which can last hours or days. The actual probability of a GRB intersecting the Earth is unlikely, to be true, but if it happened there would be absolutely nothing we could do to protect the planet or near environs.
Actually, the notion of a “Doomsday Device” was proposed by Herman Kahn as mentioned upthread with the specific intent of highlighting how ridiculous the deterrence theory of what became Assured Destruction was. See Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War (a compilation of lectures Kahn gave regarding strategic deterrrence which was largely used as the basis for some of the most hysterical bits of dialogue in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) and Thinking About The Unthinkable. Kahn’s essential point was that relying on a presumed set of conditions which underlie Assured Destruction to prevent people from making uninformed or irrational decisions was not a sensible solution to avoiding nuclear war, and the “Doomsday Device”, by taking away human judgment didn’t prevent the human failings (a derranged general, damaged communications, a headstrong officer) from causing the device to automatically destroy humanity (minus the few thousand men and the “generously endowed females” they bring with them into the mines) to be destroyed. Of course, Kahn also favored just going ahead and planning for war, and then triaging afterward by feeding contaminated foodstuffs to elderly people, so one might argue that his position also became untenable when US and Soviet arsenals achieved ridiculous destructive capability such that both nations would be reduced to pre-Industrial standings.
As far as the quantity of weapons, when using salted bombs the energetic yield or initial distribution of radioactive elements but the amount of induced radiactivity and its persistence in the environment. [SUP]60[/SUP]Cobalt is a vigorous gamma emitter with a half-life of 5.3 years, meaning the radiactivity is still 12% of the original in 15 years. It is persistent in the environment (it doesn’t strongly bind to commonly found materials) and is excreted after intake, so it isn’t just absorbed by creatures and contained. [SUP]140[/SUP]lanthanum (produced by beta decay of [SUP]140[/SUP]barium). And the beta emitters which are produced either by the initial irradiation or by decay projects can be deadly when injested. The sum total is that you don’t need massive multi-megaton weapons; you need a wide distribution of fast neutron-rich weapons with suitable jacket materials fired into the jet stream or other areas of regional circulation such that the material is carried across wide regions and dispersed in ground water. The persistency of the longer duration elements assures that organisms which survive the initial radiation will suffer from long duration exposure due to consuming contaminated food and water.
As far as anyone is aware, no nation has ever fielded salted weapons, and the real purpose of doing so would likely be area denial for so-called ‘tactical’ use, with intense short-term radiactives dispersed. The entire notion of a “Doomsday Device” is fundamentally insane (again, Kahn’s point) and does not serve any legitimate military or even political purpose, unless of course you are a Bond villain with your own orbiting space station/underwater habitat/desire to irradiate the gold repository at Ft. Knox. But in theory it would be feasible to salt the Earth with enough radioactivity to make vast tracts of land uninhabitable and nonarable with even a few hundred devices of moderate yield such that maintaining anything like the current population of the Earth–or even enough to sustain an industrial society–would be on nigh impossible.
Do you have sources as to whether it is *actually *feasible or not? As I mentioned in my post above, if it took 1 million warheads, it’s not really feasible (while it would be feasible if it only took ~10,000). Does anyone have even back of the envelope estimates on how much fissionable material in a bomb is needed (in a practical device) to transmute to y grams of cobalt 60?
. Or just on opposite sides of the planet.