Yeah, I assumed the bomb described my Oppenheimer wouldn’t end all life directly from the blast or heat or radiation, but from hosing up the environment in a very quick and dramatic fashion.
That does look like an interesting page, thanks! I’ll check it out later when I have time.
Pop out to the main page- there’s a whole lot more to it.
Well, there is always nuclear winter to kill everyone off as well.
Never seen it, however it is a stupid thing to say.
Crack the mantel? Blow the atmosphere off the planet? Dear lord man! The largest bombs ever denonated was 15 megaton the Castle BRAVO test in 1954. That left a crater about a mile in diameter and 250ft deep
http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Usa/Tests/Castle.html
What kind of megatonage do you think would be required to crack the mantel (100s of miles deep), blow off the atmosphere, ignite the atmosphere or knock the Earth out of orbit? More than every nuclear weapon ever made.
Also, civilization has survived volcanic explosions in the 10,000s of megatons (Mt. Pinatubo, Mount Tambora).
That’s not to say a nuclear bomb landing on every major city would not majorly fuck shit up. I’m sure countries in South America, Africa and other places not directly hit by the bombs would be relatively fine.
I always thought the radioactivity released by nuclear weapons had half lives of thousands of years? Am i wrong?
If it was, surely all the nukes on earth now would destroy all complex life on earth?
I dont think even blowing up ecery nuclear bomb on earth is going to wipe out mankind in its entirety. There will be certain regions that will be unaffected by a full scale thermonuclear warfare. (Tibet comes to mind) most ICBMs are directed towards major metropolitan areas, they arent going to target the middle of the Amazon basin or the plains of Serengeti, all of the deserts of the middle east, asia and Australia. All of these remote barren non-stragetigic areas are inhabited albeit sparsely. Therre will be enuf diversity in genetic makeup of the remaining 3 percent to repopulate the earth …in a few tens of thousands of years.
No, you’re not wrong about the half life. Some of the elements created in a blast will have half lves in the millenium range.
However that doesn’t mean it will wipe out all life. It’s a bit more complicated than simply having a radiocative element nearby.
These elements emit radiation when the break down. They do that on average every half life. So if you’ve got an atom of 14C in your body you will live and die without it ever having any effect, because the odds are that it won’t break down anytime in the next 5000 years. Hence no radiation emmission for 5000 years. You can be born, die and get buried with the same 14C in your system.
It’s actually the elements with the shorter half-lives that are the problem. 60Co, with a half life of about 6 years will almost certainly break down within your lifespan, and emit radiation in the process. That’s why Co is such a big killer. 131I is another major problem immediately after a blast because the half life is only afew days. Any that you ingest will affect you almost immediately.
Right back at you, since as you haven’t seen it.
Note in my comment, I said IF it’s anything like that film. And I stand by what I said. See the film and then decide if you would want to live through that particular scenario.
Castle Bravo was the largest US nuclear device tested, but it pales in comparison to the largest nuclear device tested by the Soviet Union:
i’m no expert on this, but;
a simple google will come up with various references to the amount of nuclear weapons in the world, and almost all of these say that there are enough nuclear weapons around the destroy the world several times over.
to paraphrase the opening lines “K-19: Widowmaker,” in 1961 the USSR and the USA had enough weapons to destroy the world around 10 times over. now i understand that significant dismantling has taken place, however also since then many other countries have joined the club and acquired nuclear weapons, and particularly more volatile ones at that.
as for the southern hemisphere not being targeted, i doubt it.
The following is a hypothetical situation:
With that many bombs, an all out war (with sufficiently insane commanders in charge) would likely end up targeting, say, Australia because they’re friends with the US. Then Britain would get even more upset, and try various counter-attacks. as a result, every commonwealth nation on the planet would become a target.
im not sure what mite happen next, but you can see that it is POSSIBLE for the entire world to be targeted. adrenaline and pride are powerful things, as is stupidity and insanity.
while I dont think a total extinction is probable, id say it was possible.
Well, not a total lack of contraceptives. Some anthropologists believe that contraceptive knowledge is as old as civilization itself. Women have always found a way to control their fertility through herbs and contraceptive devices. (I know of three common, indigenous plants that grow in my area that have contraceptive properties.) Birth control information would be spread the way it used to be: woman to woman, sharing recipes or techniques by word of mouth.
Would it be as safe and effective as The Pill? No. But it could reduce fecundity quite a bit, especially if there were no efforts to repress the knowledge.
Then again, society would be drastically changed. Frightened people are very succeptible to superstition and supression. For all I know, we could go back to a mind-set that allowed for women who were knowlegable about the uses of herbs to be burned as witches.
Point taken Lissa. These natural contarceptives tend to be fairly ineffective of course. And most people these days don;t know what they are. And given the desire people always feel to repopulate follwoing catastrophe I doubt they’d be used. So the main thrust of my point remians true.
um… so whats the probability that we are not exterminated but end up looking like the borgs from star trek…
Neways hopefully if dubbya keeps his mouth shut and his ‘nulkear’ missiles in his pants we wont have to find out…
The question was could we do it so I think its not unreasonable to suppose that the bombs would be detonated evenly around the globe or distributed according to population size.
It’s stupid to say because I have trouble believing it’s better for the world to go extinct just because nuclear war has made life a little difficult.
I have seen enough post-nuclear war movies and I have enough imagination to postulate what such a life would be like. Would I want to live in such a world? Not by choice. I don’t think I would prefer to be dead just because all of a sudden indoor plumbing, fresh food and cellphones disappeared.
People live in Hiroshima now, so no.
Even at 100 megatons, these tests pale in comparison to the energy released by the most massive volcanic eruptions. And those don’t split the Earth or plunge the world into endless winter (although they do effect temporary climate changes)
think of it this way… nearly 1000 nuclear bombs have been set off in america, (in utah alone!) and you can still live in america.
I dunno. In a post-apocalyptic world, I might want to delay having children until things were more settled, back to some semblance of normalcy, in that there should be social order and reliable resources.
I also would want to tell other women what method I was using to help them as well. They, in turn, could tell others. Informed women could even set up mobile clinics, and revive the tradition of the healer/midwife. I do think that there would be a “market” for such information, especially if the food supply was tenuous, or if the people were concerned about birth defects.
The difference in this scenario and other post-disaster population booms is that the envionment would be permanantly and drastically changed. After a war, or plague, the basic infrastructure of society is still in place. Not so after total, global nuclear war.
On another note, you might be surprised by the efficacy of some of the traditional methods of fertility control. The book * Eve’s Herbs * talks about some of them. One common plant, the author noted, was very effective, indeed, and is actually still used by a lot of rural women who can’t afford The Pill with notable success. Of course, nothing can beat The Pill, but some of these methods are relatively reliable, especially when used in combination. It’s better than nothing, I’d say.
Oddly enough, I just finished reading “On the Beach”, actually for the second time. It scares the hell out of me.
I realize that it was written nearly fifty years ago, but is it still possible, under the circumstances outlined in the book, to have all out destruction of humanity?
One thing that struck me while I read it is the description of the places were the people were already wiped out. Wouldn’t radiation wipe out the plants too? I seem to remember reading about Hiroshima and seeing a description of the leaves falling off the trees.
The other thing that struck me was the total lack of any attempt to build some kind of shelter. It was only supposed to take five years or so until the Earth became livable again. Don’t tell me they couldn’t have got together enough food and oxygen for at least a small group of people.
On the whole, I think I could handle five years in a bunker relatively well, especially if I had enough books!
PS: Its radioactive elements that have an half life not radioactivity itself. Years after the nuclear explosion and the meltdown in Chernobyl, the illeffects of these radioactive elements as they spew out radioactivity (gamma rays) are seen.
We would definitely be better-off without a nuclear exchange, this much is certain.
Unlike Blake,[, I do think that civilisation would mostly collapse following a full nuclear exchange- which is an unlikely prospect at this very moment, as many of the old Soviet weapons will no longer be serviceable…
give it a few years, perhaps, and China, India, Pakistan will have a few hundred megatons to throw about…
but there would probably be a fairly swift recovery, after a year or two of nuclear winter and radiation related deaths, the world’s environment will fairly soon repair itself.
The dust and global cooling caused by the eruption of Tamboro in 1815 was several times as bad as any dust burden that would be raised by a full nuclear exchange-
and the world suffered, but survived.
However, as I said earlier, using asteroids as weapons is feasible, and can be effected by careful use of stand-off nuclear weapons-
this is a non-trivial danger for the future, and far more effective than using the weapons directly.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html