I have often read that there are enough nuclear weapons to wipe out earth’s population several times over. I have also read that this is a myth, and that actually a lot of people would survive (Critique of nuclear extinction and Ch. 1: The Dangers from Nuclear Weapons: Myths and Facts - Nuclear War Survival Skills ). However, the claims that it’s a myth seem to be arguing only that total nuclear war would be survivable, not the detonation of every single weapon. What I would like to find is some actual science and math to back up either claim.
If every nuclear weapon was detonated to ensure maximum long-term casualties, how many people would survive? Could we irradiate enough of the arable land to poison any food grown? Could nuclear winter reduce global food production to essentially zero? And finally, is the answer different for the height of the cold war than it is today?
The fallout isn’t nearly as dangerous if the survivors are able to hide from it for a couple weeks, due to the 7-10 rule.
The earth has a lot of surface area. In your scenario, you can assume all the urban residents who are conveniently clustered would be hit, and some fraction of the rural population. Of course, in reality, there are not enough airplanes and missiles to use all the available nuclear weapons at the same time, so weapons would have to be used in waves, giving urban residents who were not hit in the first round a chance to spread out and flee.
54% of the world’s population is urban residents, so, for a first order estimate, that sounds like about how many people would die.
In any case, the world’s nuclear arsenal is not intended for this purpose. If humans wanted to wipe out their own species, they could potentially use the same technology to devise a form of nuclear weapon that would kill everyone, the cobalt salted bomb. Apparently, fusion bombs have no upper limit to how large their designs can scale, such that oil tanker sized fusion weapons are possible. These oil tanker sized warheads would have massive plates of cobalt metal placed at the right places inside the warhead to maximize the percentage the cobalt metal transmuted to cobalt-60. The detonations would be in the gigaton or even teraton range, shoving the fallout into the upper atmosphere and presumably contaminating whole continents at once.
Humans might survive, since it’s likely at least some arable land on the planet would be missed, or well equipped groups might react to the building of such weapons by devising some kind of sheltering plan that has a chance of working. However, there’s a reasonable chance of total extinction here.
My 10 minutes on Google fails to show how many cities and towns there are in the world, but google answers (for all that’s worth) has a post with the following math, based on US Census date.
city 10,016
comunidad 147
municipality 1
town 4,431
urbana 78
village 3,770
------------------
total 18,443
There are about 16,000 nuclear weapons, so you couldn’t kill everyone living in cities, towns and villages in the US, let alone the world.
That’s the kind of answer I was trying to avoid. The claim I’d like to see refuted is not “No one would survive nuclear war”. It’s (from the daily mail):
It’s phrased in the context of trying to wipe out human life with our available weapons, assuming we all cooperated in trying to kill ourselves. Not used as part of an actual nuclear war.
I see this claim everywhere, but my gut feeling is that it’s wrong. The earth’s land area is a staggering 57 million square miles, about 24 million being habitable and over 5 million of that being arable land. Back of the envelope it seems like our 7,000 megaton or so nuclear arsenal would only be able to directly impact a small fraction of that*. It’s hard for me to be sure though. Estimates of fallout effects vary widely, and I can’t tell if nuclear winter is real or not.
Let’s assume a 20 kiloton bomb can kill everyone in 8 square miles (overly generous). If we assume our 7 Gigaton arsenal is made of 350,000 of these (it isn’t), that’s only 2.8 million square miles we have nuked. Still far short of what we need.
The problem with this is that many places of human habitation cannot support themselves at their present population without modern technology, especially our transportation infrastructure which moves food and fuel to places just in time for use. In addition almost all our systems rely on fuel and electricity, both things are going to be difficult to distribute in a post exchange senario.
They might not get hit, but they will die. Of starvation, disease and civil disorder.
Although it is theoretically possible to continue to “stage” thermonuclear weapons indefinitely, there is almost certainly an upper limit to how effectively this can be done, and certainly before they get to the gigaton yield range. Increasing the theoretical energetic yield is not really valuable as it just results in pushing more atmosphere “up” rather than out, and local heating effects become more pronounced but don’t increase the total blast area. Fusion weapons, because they used the neutron yield to power fusion stages, are not ideal for “salted” nuclear weapons, which are generally tritium-boosted fission designs designed specifically to enhance neutron yield but achieving only very low yield from fusion. Such salted nuclear weapons are designed to increase persistent radioactive fallout using isotopes of cobalt, zinc, strontium, tantalum, et cetera would not incorporate the materials into the physics package itself but would be added as a jacket outside the casting which would absorb the high neutron flux and be transmuted into their radioactive isotopes and then distributed into jet streams; as such, they are most effective when detonated at altitude. Note that it would be necessary to detonate weapons in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in order to thoroughly contaminate the surface of the planet there is relatively little transfer of atmospheric material across the equator.
Other sources (TNTL) are in general agreement. Note that this includes not only weapons on alert (ready for deployment upon command) and in active stockpiles (assembled and can be readied for deployment in a short period of days or weeks) but weapons in reserve stockpiles (available but not ready for operational deployment); it may not include weapons that are in a state of disassembly or materials which are in fabrication or refurbishment which could be made into nuclear weapons in an intermediate term (months).
Despite fears of a “missile gap” that Kennedy successfully campaigned to the Presidency on, the US had an early lead in both weapons and usable intermediate (IRBM) and intercontinental (ICBM) ballistic missiles, as well as accelerated developing on solid propellant submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBM). US nuclear arsenals peaked in the early 'Sixties, while Soviet arsenals didn’t reach those levels until the 'Eighties, peaking in the middle of that decade (FAS Nuclear Handbook September 2013: “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945-2013”). Note this isn’t normalized to yield or effective destructive capability; the later Soviet arsenal was probably more threatening given the higher accuracy and capability. World inventories are at roughly 1/3 of what they were at the height of the Cold War, but delivery systems and effective destructive capability on extant weapons are generally as good or better than in the most modern systems deployed in the 'Eighties.
This is true, but as long as there are isolated places where a sustenance culture can survive, the human race is likely to persist, albeit as pre-Industrial levels for the foreseeable future. More likely in any realistic nuclear exchange is that major areas of currently developed nations would be heavily impacted, leaving less developed nations in the Southern Hemisphere to dominate economically and politically. In such case we might expect nations such as Brazil, Indonesia, or Australia, which have an existing industrial base, to come to dominate the remaining world. Other, somewhat isolated and inaccessible nations that are relatively self-sufficient, such as Iceland, the Philipines, Cuba, et cetera may recover more quickly.
One potentially positive impact (if anything positive could be said to come from the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people) is that lacking the complex and expensive infrastructure to extract and process fossil fuels for use, mankind would have to turn to more sustainable alternatives for combustion-powered processes, and look to other methods of energy conversion (solar, wind, wave, et cetera) to power future industrial development. The thing that we cannot bring the willpower to do now would become almost inevitable by virtue of being no longer able to afford petroleum.
I loved “A Canticle for Liebowitz”, but after reading it, I had to ask myself, “Through how many cycles can we bootstrap ourselves up to an industrialized status?”
I’m not sure we could do it again (without records to show us the way, and maybe not then). Most of the “easy to use resources” have been drilled or mined. Maybe scrapyards could provide a source of “urban mining”, but energy would be a real bottleneck.
That is, unless renewables could be used to build up with from the start, as Stranger proposes.
I was only giving the example for the US, and left it as an exercise for the reader to picture the much greater number of small villages in rural China and India. I guess I wasn’t clear enough.
As I said, not even close. The number of nukes available wouldn’t even kill everyone in the US, and then you have all those small villages in rural China and India, which don’t rely on that much modern technology even now.
The problem is mainly fallout. this was a concept even in the early 60’s. (Nevil Shute wrote “On The Beach” in 1959).
The question nobody wants to answer is what is targeted. If you were the paranoid Soviets, anticipating a crippling nuclear attack - would you limit the response to the USA or NATO and would you leave South Africa or Argentina or Indonesia or China untouched? If you were the USA, would you leave Cuba or China or North Korea alone while the Soviets rained missiles down on you?
The popular “wisdom” about the OP’s question that I recall was that as the accuracy of missiles increased, the megatonnage decreased. A decent part of the first strike was configured to knock out the opposition’s launch sites. Originally, this was “hit them as hard as you can” but as accuracy increased, if you could hit a silo or ship within a few dozen yards or better, a much lower yield was sufficient. Cruise missles did not need to and could not carry multi-megatonnage. For this reason, it was believed the overall destructive power went down toward the end of the cold war. From what I recall reading, more than half the nuclear weapons have been dismantled since then.
Of course, fallout depend on a lot of things. Air blasts likely created less radioactive dust fallout than bunker-busters that penetrated deep in the earth.
So nobody knows for sure, but certainly the spread of fallout could mean that anyone not in a shelter would be dead; and after that, between nuclear winter and an almost destroyed ecosystem and high background radiation for decades, what are the chances of survival?
Just to note, having seen this 10,000 cities in the US figure come up before in a prior “could you kill everyone in the world with nukes” thread, that number can be extremely misleading. There is no population requirement for a location to legally be a city in the US; it is “An incorporated municipality in the United States with definite boundaries and legal powers set forth in a charter granted by the state.” Neither is there one for a town; meet the town of Lost Springs, Wyoming, population 4 in the 2010 census, up from population 1 in the 2000 census. Using a metric closer to what most people would associate with the word ‘city’, there are 294 incorporated places in the United States with a population of at least 100,000.
Hmmmm. Well for Pakistan, many of these “not using modern technology” villages (how many are there anyway) are still reliant on irrigation system for support, such as canals and tubewells. And many of them are in flood plains. It does not help you, that no one bothered to strike you with a warhead, if your supporting infrastructure is gone to hell and the dam upstream had been blown up.
We don’t need to imagine what would happen, we have examples. The destruction by the Mongols of millenia old irrigation systems in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan caused a lot of the area to revert to arid land, leaving causing a massive drop in population which has still not been reversed, N Africa was a lot more greener in Roman times also. Many of the tribes in both region came into being, their ancestors were urban sedentary folks.
Every last human dies? Unlikely, even a handful of people are enough to repopulate the Earth and we are a sentient species. End of civilisation, buy which I mean settled communities? Oh yeah, sure.
Using a metric closer to what most people would associate with the word ‘city’, there are 294 incorporated places in the United States with a population of at least 100,000.
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And you don’t have to use one detonation per city. A four mile radius around where I’m currently sitting encompasses eight cities or census-designated places, and that number would increase rapidly with radius.
(I’m not saying this changes any conclusions. I’m just adding to the point that number of cities isn’t a great proxy.)
As I said, the problem is not blowing everyone up. The problem is fallout and nuclear winter, ecological damage and survivability after all that.
Would nuclear winter, for example, be enough to kick the world into a new ice age? Maybe that depends on whether it happens during summer (so winter follows winter) or winter (so once the dust settles, it’s spring)?
The dinosaur killer, for example, is believed to have killed off anything over about 5 to 20 lb. weight, depending on your calculations. The surviving creatures were a potluck and presumably the ecology of what they could eat was severely limited. The same would likely be true if fallout was severe enough to kill most plants and animals. (Which then suggests - what happens to the ecology? Would continents of dead plants erupt in uncontained forest fires also darkening the sky, pushing the world deeper into nuclear winter? What about the CO2 levels, soot, etc.
If the actual aim was to exterminate human kind using existing weaponry, I would say that aiming them all at a particular part of ocean, over the course of 3-4 days, would probably do it.
Or could we get enough of them to the moon to break it up? That would surely work.
We don’t need petroleum to get up to 19th century Industrial England; arguably, we don’t even need coal, provided that relatively pure steel can be reclaimed. Prior to coal, the most popular fuels were oil extracted from whale blubber and other animal sources, peat (which almost turned what is now the Netherlands the Holland Inland Sea before coal took over), and alcohol. In fact, the first automobiles were powered by methanol and ethanol with good effect, with petroleum derivatives taking over due to a confluence of concerns. Prior to that, the biggest use of petroleum oil was the thick tars (bitumen) as a binder for asphalt pavement (pitch macadam and later tarmac), which gave a smooth and readily maintained surface for higher speed motoring. Provided that current knowledge was maintained, it is certainly possible–albeit more difficult to expand, and with lower energy usage per person–to rebuild civilization using sustainable resources rather than fossil fuel, and in particular with the use of crop-based energy sources. The sticking point is actually the dependence upon fresh water resources which we are consuming well beyond replenishment in many areas.
The degree and duration of effect of the supposed cataclysmic “nuclear winter” hypothesized and promoted by Carl Sagan, et al, based upon the conclusions of the TTAPS report, is uncertain at best. Certainly the models that were used at that time were very primitive; however, even modern climate models to not well represent the effects and persistence of suspended particulate matter (soot and other debris) cast up into the upper troposphere. However, the very limited empirical data we have suggests that the majority of heavy material will settle out within the period of a year, which may leave a famine-inducing single year of poor crop production as experienced in 1816 due to the Tambora eruption of April 1815. This may have other long-ranging effects, but will probably not result in the end of humanity. A more detailed discussion of the assumptions and conclusions of the TTAPS report can be found [THREAD=331219]here[/THREAD].
Unless large chunks of the Moon were deflected out of orbit and toward the Earth, [THREAD=382719]the effect of fracturing the Moon into chunks would be minimal[/THREAD]. Making it disappear entirely (somehow) would have more of an effect insofar as releasing all of the stored ‘tidal’ (e.g. gravitational potential) energy, but still probably not utterly catastrophic, if you don’t mind some increased seismic activity for a few millennia while everything settles down.
I was wondering–what if there was an accident, and all the nuclear weapons in the world exploded right where they were? Deep in submarines and silos, the orders are given to release the bombs, but they don’t make it to their intended targets; they just explode where they are. I realize this would be highly unlikely, but let’s just pretend divine intervention caused this situation. Would the resulting destruction be less? Or more?
Say goodbye to Puget Sound and the Greater Seattle-Tacoma area; same for southeastern Georgia and northeastern Florida. Also write off property in eastern Montana, the Dakotas, and the Wyoming-Nebreska-Colorado corner, with prevailing fallout probably sweeping over the US continental “breadbasket” of Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. Texas, from the Panhandle east over Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama; all covered in fallout. Also, random explosions in the Pacific and Atlantic, albeit pretty isolated and producing radioactive steam that will probably rain back down pretty quickly before reaching Europe or the Pacific coast.
Over in Europe, both Britain and France have blowups at near Faslane and Brest, respectively. The State of Israel becomes the Burning Crater of Palestine. Russia goes up in flames from Moscow to Novosibirsk, as well as the naval bases at Severomorsk and Vladivostok. China has blowups in the north and east (silo and road/rail mobile) and at Hainan. North Korea might have a little poof but nothing of consequence.
Although the targets would be less distributed, the ground or below-ground detonation would cast more radioactive fallout. There would be less destruction to primary strategic targets but possibly as much or more damage overall to the industrial capacity of the nuclear-equipped nations. On the other hand, most of Europe gets largely spared (except for fallout from Britain and France) and Hawa’ii probably decides it is time to go for independent nationhood.