I hear and read alot about how close we are/were to blowing ourselves to kingdom come with nuclear bombs. It sometimes sounds so trite. Not to belittle the obvious desire we all have to not die in an atomic fireball, but the obvious question is…
…Could we really do it? Wouldn’t some people survive in remote out of the way places? Would all food and water be destroyed? I somehow don’t think anyone could do it without being hit back hard enough to stop obliterating all human life on Earth.
I think that unless someone covered the entire surface of the earth with nuclear mushrooms, humanity would survive. But I also believe that civilization as we know it won’t.
Here’s the thing. No, of course a massive full-scale launch of every nuclear weapon on the planet wouldn’t kill every human on earth. There would probably be hundreds of millions of survivors. But how many of them would be left alive a year after the attack?
Of those who aren’t killed outright many would be sick and injured and would die within a week or so. After a few months without a food distribution system people are going to start to starve. It can take a surprisingly long time for a well-fed person to starve to death. But lots of people are going to starve. And they are going to have to make it through the winter with no fuel, no electricity, no medicine, no water, no sewage, no food. Radiated areas will be everywhere, and very difficult to avoid. Even if agriculture can be restarted, it will be small scale subsistence agriculture. No transportation network means that even if global food production is enough to keep everyone alive most people will never get the food that could save them.
OK, even given that there will be survivors. But even after the mass deaths from the war there will still be lots of people dying over the next 10 to 20 years. You could survive the holocaust, survive the radiation, and learn to live self-sufficiently, but if you break your leg and no one is around to feed you for several months until you heal then you’ll just die. And of course cancer rates will skyrocket, even if you weren’t directly exposed.
And then you have to consider how many children will be born in the generation after the war. After the die-offs people are going to reproduce…but how will they feed their children, when they are going to have a hard time feeding themselves? And how many people will survive radiation attacks but have compromised fertillity aftwards? And society will have been destroyed. People are going to have to re-establish communities somehow, a project that will take dozens of years. An atomized society isn’t going to be very good for family life. So along with a death rate much much much higher than we have now, we also have a fertillity crash.
If the death rate spike and the fertillity crash extend for more than a few generations then extinction suddenly doesn’t seem so unlikely.
I don’t agree. From what we’ve seen of refugees throughout history communities simply grow automatically and immediately. The people fleeing New York are just going to be another refugees group.
I agree that many people don’t undersand agriculture and the communities may have a hard time feeding themselves, but the communities themsels, as in coherent groups of people, will develop rapidly.
And there are functional rural communities worldwide who would suffer only modertae change. The loss of electricity, manufacturing and medicine would be the worst effects they would suffer from a war.
In fact quite the opposite seems to be the rule. People under stresses of this kind always breed faster than they did beforehand. Once the direct therat is overhumans seem to have a natural urge to repopulate. Given a total lack of contraception I se no reason wh most of the owrld wouldn’t experience a huge per capita leap in birth rates. Childhood mortality would probably level this out, but the reproduction itself would be occuring.
Of cousre the effects of nuclear war usually seem to be overstated. The effects of fallout are only short term, and are apparently only rapidly lethal for a few years at most. Beyond that the effects probably won’t be felt until people are in their 30s. More than suffcicient time to work and breed.
I suspect that in reality a fll scale war woul result in serious population crashes and a massive recession. It may well be that centralised services would cease effective operations for a few years. But I can’t see any reason why civilisation would collape.
The thing about threads of course (besides the fact that it’s fiction) is that it focusses on one hard hit community on a small isalnd. There will be numerous other communities largely physically untouched by the bombing.
Is there consensus on nuclear winter? I was under the impression that enough nukes to knock out a decent portion of humanity outright would kick up enough dust ‘n’ stuff to significantly and catastrophically alter the climate. Am I wrong?
I think very isolated communities such as the Laplanders, the Bushmen in Africa and Pacific Islanders will survive.
They might find a nuclear winter harsh, but they would survive.
Isolated populations all over the globe could easily repopulate the Earth. How long that would take is anyone’s guess.
you are ignoring the radiation causes sterility and the radiation causes horribly disfigured kids factors. humanity has the best chance of surviving in areas where there are few major cities nearby (so radiation wouldn’t be close in the first place) and avoid any major windstreams (so radiation isn’t blown in.) eventually much of the radiation will dissapate in the outlying areas, but it will do damage to the people iiving there.
They could destroy all life on Earth with a single bomb.
In the book “The Making of The Hydrogen Bomb” by Richard Rhodes, the author describes how there is no upper limit to the size and strength of a thermonuclear bomb (unlike the fission bomb). During a meeting of the H-bomb designers, they described how to deploy different sized bombs. The biggest one could be deployed by throwing it in your back yard, because it would kill your enemy by ending all life on Earth.
That’s like saying that a thimbleful of some kind of poison can kill humanity- sure, but only in the most theoretical of ways.
I’m sure what Rhodes was talking about is that there’s theoretically no limit to the number of stages of a fusion bomb, and no upper limit on yield for that reason. Fission bombs top out around 1 megaton or so.
These days, the majority of weapons are relatively small compared to the monsters of the 50’s and 60’s. There’s absolutely no way we could destroy all human life with atomic weapons- we could make things very uncomfortable for the survivors and completely transform the world political structure, but it wouldn’t likely result in another dark age or anything like that.
No, I’m just treating it realistically. The only real life experience we have with nukes is WWII Japan. The actual sterility rates for those directly exposed to both the blast and the ‘black rain’ were relatively small. Of course I’m talking here about permanant sterility. The radiation produced temporary male sterility much the same as a hot bath does.
The birth defect rate among Hiroshima survivors is no higher than it is in the rest of the world’s population.
Death rates were of course high, but if you survived the first few months the chances of any long term reproductive effects are actually fairly minimal.
The big risks aren’t related to reproduction, they are long term development of leukemia and other cancers, and even these are simply ‘significantly higher’ rather than being so common as to cause the population to crash.
The consensus I’ve seen is that it was very overstated by Sagan et al. It’s always hard to tell without trying it, but it seems like the amount of debris pushed into the statosphere would be fairly small, and that it would tend to come down fast. It would have a mini ice age effect similar to what was experienced in Europe a few hundred years ago, but nowhere near enough to wipe out any species,
Those are itty bitty bombs compared to the massive stock we have rotting in underground silos right now, with multiple warheads. This is akin to using the first world trade center attack to say the second one won’t be that bad. Granted i don’t want to really test this theory so i hope we never know the answer.
The size of the bombs is irrelevant. It’s the radiation dose that’s important. Those people who get a dose that’s lethal within say 12 months will die. There will possibly be more of those with a bigger bomb. Those who get a sub-lethal dose will show no major signs of reporductive problems. It doesn’t matter if we get more of these. That’s the whole point. These people are the survivors, and the survivors won’t show any problems with fertility. The size of the bomb is totally irrelevant to the survivor’s ability to reproduce. As such you could drop a 100gT bomb and the suvivors still wouldn’t exhibit any 'sterility and… horribly disfigured kids".
Any war between likely nuclear powers would involve the bombs being concentrated in certain areas of the Earth, leaving large swaths of the Earth untouched. Most of the Southern Hemisphere would be free of explosions in any conceivable scenario.
Could we wipe out all life on earth with atomic weapons?
Not with the ones we have now, no. A bigger bomb, or several, would be enough to increase the temperature of the Earth’s surface to beyond the tolerance of any extremeophile- but why bother?
Perhaps more efficient would be careful use of nuclear weapons to deflect a Near Earth Object onto the Earth’s surface…
but even this would probably only cause a mass extinction, not sterilisation.
If you mean it’s theoretical because no ones bothered to make a bomb that big, then I agree. If you mean it would be as difficult as distributing poison as you described, then that’s wrong. Or, at least that’s not how Rhodes described it.
The understand I left the book with was that once a county was able to make thermo nukes, they could almost just as easily make the blow-the-PA-sized-chunk-of-atmosphere-into-space bomb and end all life on Earth.
I’m still unconvinced on the feasibility of a weapon big enough to kill everyone via blast/heat/prompt radiation, but I think we may be talking about two different things here.
What you’re probably thinking about would be some sort of “On the Beach”-esque fallout bomb- I think Leo Szilard described a large h-bomb with a cobalt jacket as a “doomsday device” due to the relatively high gamma emission and long half-life of Co-60(5.26 years). This is plenty long enough to get distributed around the entire world before it loses any radioactivity.
However, the question is how much cobalt and how big of a bomb would you need to actually kill everyone on Earth, as opposed to just giving them a higher than normal radiation dose.