So :: he said, calmly stroking his hairless cat :: if that’s out, have any better ideas for killing everyone on the planet?
Something bio. Maybe something agricultural. Or, if I wanted to do cancer one better, could I invent some insidious killer DNA?
Assuming that a nuclear war alone would be what occurred, probably not.However,what many people often forget is that mankind has created a number of particularly nasty technologies which no one knows what will happen to if they are abandoned.
While I would have great faith in nuclear reactors in the Western world shutting themselves down, I would have far less faith in those in China, India,Pakistan,Russia and North Korea. If they were abandoned or their staffs were killed, the possibility that they would fail would be exceptionally high and the radiation that they could release would add to the ambient radiation already in the atmosphere.
Also,who knows what biological weaponry is stored around the planet? Assuming that the major weapons labs would be near major population centers and thus vulnerable to either damage from nuclear blasts, damage from scavengers picking through them searching for food or medicines and the ugly thought of an intentional series of releases (by a state actor or by an insane individual bent on world destruction) there could numerous epidemics spread throughout the surviving populace which could easily overwhelm what remained of the medical infrastructure.
There are also the myriad fires which would occur world wide after a nuclear attack. Many would burn for days,weeks or months and would dwarf even the largest forest fires of today. The particulates and smoke from these fires would blanket the Earth and reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet. While there may never be a “nuclear winter”, even a mild drop in temperatures for months or years would cause widespread famine.
Finally, the numbers of people on Earth currently depends upon an intricate logistical system to supply them with food, fertilizer, clean water and fuel. After a nuclear war, it can be presumed that this will be completely destroyed in West and barely functioning in the remainder of the world. Millions who escaped the nuclear exchange, any pandemic and the cooling of the planet’s surface will likely die as their access to foodstuffs and fuel is reduced. Prior to the discoveries of Norman Borlaug, the Earth’s population was a little over 2 billion. There’s no reason to believe that it wouldn’t easily drop far below that rather quickly after a major nuclear war.
Would the war itself end humanity?
Probably not.
However, the possibility exists that its aftermath might.
Of those weapons most are too old to work anymore anyways and a big problem is a method of delivering them to the place you want to nuke. In most scenarios all the bombers and missiles would be taken out pretty early.
People talk about North Korea having nukes but they have determined those are very poorly designed and weak anyways. When tested the west barely recorded them. Plus their delivery methods might not work either.
The US though, has bombers like the B2 stealth and ballistic missiles both land and on submarines, capable at a moments notice of delivering hundreds of megatons of nuclear destruction on any place on the planet. Those weapons and delivery systems are tested and always ready to go. We also have anti aircraft, anti missile systems, satellites, and killer submarines that can do a decent job of defending US and allied territory. If some country like Iran or North Korea try anything we could turn them into sheets of glass and their is little of anything they could do to prevent it or hurt us back.
So really only the US, Europe, Russia and maybe China have modern, properly maintained, and ready nuclear weapons with usable delivery systems capable of hitting targets across the globe and for right now, none of those are going to start a nuclear war anytime soon. Sure countries like Pakistan, India, and Isreal have nukes but their bombers and missiles are all short range.
That is a good point. To reach the whole earth you need ICBMs or suchlike. Theater nukes aren’t going to have the range to reach remote areas.
I think the idea of the OP is that this is being done with the deliberate purpose of taking out the whole human race, and by coordinating the strikes so as to kill the maximum number of folks. So possibly there wouldn’t be any effort to take out any launchers.
But your point about delivery systems remains a good one. There would be enough to take out much of Europe, and no doubt the SLMs and nuclear bombers could wipe out much of Russia and perhaps even China. And the Russian nukes would account for a similar proportion of the USA. But how many would be left over to bomb South America or Australia? And I don’t think Israel has enough bombs to account for the whole Middle East.
It would be horrible of course, and maybe half the human race would die, either immediately or in the first year afterwards. But probably in a hundred years or less, Africa would be expanding out again into where ever would support life.
Regards,
Shodan
Correct; we’re not talking about a traditional nuclear war with tactical considerations but if we have enough nukes to kill everyone on the planet if that were the deliberate goal. Thanks for the replies so far folks.
You need them if the neutron production required is so high that it would be impractical to produce enough fission triggers for a large number of separate bombs. The primary source of neutrons in thermonuclear devices isn’t fission but the neutrons released by deuterium-tritium fusion. Refined Pu-239 and U-235 are very expensive to produce compared to deuterium and lithium. That’s why most C-bomb proposals centered around either the largest designs then known to be workable (100 megatons, requiring ~500 devices), or a single hugamongus “Doomsday Bomb” (20,000- 50,000 megatons), of unknown practicality. As an aside, Leo Szilard thought that a “ship bomb” of a mere 1000 megatons yield might be adequate to blanket the North American continent.
Yes, which is why you would use a tritium boosted fission design to produce a large prompt neutron yield which can then be used to transmute jacket material into unstable isotopes that are aggressive gamma and beta emitters. This is the principle behind “enhanced radiation” (i.e. neutron rich) weapon such as the W66 used in the Sprint ABM interceptor.
Although no realistic proposal for a “Doomsday Device” has ever been seriously advanced (again, for the reason that it is not a sensible proposal) the number of moderate yield devices necessary to distribute a large amount of large amount of radioactive material across the six major land masses (setting aside Antarctica, which except for research stations is essentially unpopulated) is probably a few thousand or even less. A rigorous assessment would have to evaluate the amount and biological potency of yielded material and the dispersal patterns over populated and arable land, and the resulting casualties and persistence in the environment, but qualitatively I think it is entirely plausible to produce a radioactive background that would be lethal to any complex organism.
Stranger
So the only countries capable of such massive destruction are basically the US and Russia and neither one of us would do it besides it would also destroy ones own country.
Well there is a view that all humans today descended from about 400 breeding pairs so 2 may be too small but if it was two hundred might be ok?
I read that during the last major ice age the human race would have been down to around 700 breeding age females.
Without a mitigating explanation, that would be absurd on its face. The last Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago. By that time, humans had already settled south India and Australia, besides the population that remained in Africa., The human populations of those three continents would surely not have been impacted to that extent, and most probably, not to any extent at all…
The bottleneck due to the eruption of Mt. Toba supposedly occurred about 70,000 years ago, at the beginning of the last glacial period, not the end. At that time modern humans would not have been so dispersed. In any case, the idea is controversial.
I believe he’s referring to the Toba Event, which is believed to have been global in impact.
Speaking of Toba there’s been some interesting recent research suggesting it wasn’t that bad for humans or the planet in general.
Here, kid, have a period. Have two or three. It’s on the house.
“.”
Stranger
Cheapskate! Why didn’t you also offer the needed apostrophe?
We don’t want a nuclear apostrophe- period.
Exclamation point!
Note that we would have to do this without many of the natural resources used in the first industrial revolution. I think nearly all of the readily exploitable iron, oil, other metals, are already gone. There is still a lot of coal (cough, cough), but you don’t build an industrial civilization from just coal. Once our technology fails, it is unlikely to arise again.
I’m trying to get him hooked on simple punctuation, then once he gets addicted I’ll offer him “the good shit” at a markup.
And it should be noted that the Industrial Revolution didn’t just occur in one place or due to one factor; a confluence of seperate technological innovations (fungible and tradable energy sources, metallurgy, mathematics, the printing press), socioeconomic developments (literacy, modern public hygiene, high yield agriculture, modern banking and investment tools), and political developments (liberalized democratic institutions, the rise of a mercantile class that was genuinely independent of royal or government patronage, the exploitation of cheap labor and resources from colonies) came together that various points to allow for the conditions that created industrialization, as well as some of the specific technologies, such as the steam engine, interchangeable screw fasteners, hydrocarbon- and alcohol-powered portable heat engines, public universities and trade schools that anyone could qualify to attend, et cetera.
A post-apocalyptic Re-Industrial Revolution would likely look very different. Much of the textbook knowledge would still be intact, but many of the precursor skills and capabilities which have faded into obsolescence would either need to be recreated or would be skipped over entirely. Basic fabrication materials such as iron, copper, and aluminum would likely have to be largely reclaimed from salvage rather than mined, and new sources of energy would have to be found to power this development versus the heavy coal and petroleum resources which would now be too difficult for a pre-industrial society to extract. The “bootstrapping” described by the quoted poster is nowhere near as simple as just reading about the technology in a book or specification and then following the steps like a recipe, any more than you could recreate a modern microprocessor by just having the circuit schematics in hand; for any complex manufactured item you actually have to recreate the entire chain of manufacturing and production capabilities or come up with some workable substitute. And to do all of this, your aspiring society needs to have enough excess productive capability in order to allow for the “leisure” time that can be devoted to technology development and research, which requires some critical mass of population lest everyone is just pushing plows and harvesting corn to survive.
Stranger