i dunno, do you mean if you carefully spread them out? Cause if you detonate all of them in their centralized bunkers, your blast areas would be limited.
also, radioactivity doesn’t destroy the arability of land, it just makes the produce grown thereon radioactive in some cases, if/when the growing plants absorb radioactive dust. Take note that a few gingko trees survived the hiroshima blast, and melons were growing the next year in the rubble.
Maybe you’d wipe out the human race, but life would go on, and evolve to deal with the radioactivity. And then slowly man would be replaced as some species evolved smart brains, I put my money on the HYPERCHICKENS
I think it was Pat Frank’s book “Alas Babylon” that described a relatively small nuclear war about 1960. IIRC there is an area of Florida that is unscathed, and some other parts of the USA. Surprisingly, he assumes none of the remaining states - Argentina and Brazil, South Africa, etc. - are attacked. Doomsday scenarios of the time (Failsafe, Dr. Strangelove) usually introduced large scale cobalt bombs, specifically designed to spread lethal long-term fallout across the world as a sort of final MAD guarantee.
The question is if the entire population of the world would be destroyed and it simply would not. Defining a city as something over 100,000 leaves a lot of smaller places intact.
I’m not spending forever tracking down all the data, but there are lots of estimates of the number of smaller cities. This one shows 1290 cities in the US, with a population of greater than 25,000 in 2002. There a far more with a population greater than 10,000.
There are over 700 cities in Japan with a population of 3,000 or more, and countless other villages.
This does not count all the towns in India, China, Africa, South America, etc.
This population drop was caused far more factors than the Mongols.
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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.
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Not on a world-wide basis. Anyone who has traveled around third-world countries would understand that.
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.)
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So to summarize for the OP question - it would be pretty difficult to arrange the blast pattern to kill every human with the blasts themselves; between protecting mountains an other terrain, remote islands, etc. humans are too widely dispersed, especially with today’s smaller arsenals of lower yield weapons.
Would the “right” arrangement of blasts create nuclear winter, dust-induced climate change? Who knows? There’s only one way to determine the environmental effects, but there may not be anyone left after to observe the answer. If it takes a few generations then would that satisfy the OP criteria?
The final question is fallout. Would fallout be an immediate threat, sterilizing the planet in a month or two with a universal duststorm? Or would it leave some of the remote backwaters with the right wind patterns relatively unscathed? Again, only one way to find out. It also depends on the placement of the bombs and what they stir up.
What if you targeted one spot in the crust with all of them, either at once or in a long series of blasts. Aiming to set of a massive eruption by piercing the crust or weakening it enough to allow a huge volcano to form. All that radiation would be scattered in both the blasts and the resulting eruptions and the Dinos died at least in part from a mega volcano.
while you are at it drop all the cobalt and other saltable crap on the pile before you start blowing shit up.
I’m not disputing that the blast effects wouldn’t come close to killing every single person even only in the countries involved in a nuclear exchange, nor that even the effects of fallout, the destruction of transportation, communications and other infrastructure and the ensuing deaths to starvation and disease would wipe out the entire human populations in the countries directly involved in said war. A full scale nuclear exchange at the height of the Cold War would not have been the end of humanity, but it would have been the end of civilization as we know it in all of North America, Europe, and most of Asia at the very least for the time being.
I only intended to point out that the figure of 10,000 cities in the US can be very misleading; particularly when compared to the numbers of warheads, as most ‘cities’ in the US tend to be quite small, I grew up across the river from a city with a population of 2,500. While meaningful with regards to a claim that nuclear war would end all human life on earth, I’m sure you would agree that a ‘city’ of 2,500 is not a meaningful strategic target unless something vital is located there, and a population of that size could just as easily be described as a town or a village.
I’m not saying that you were doing this as of course you weren’t, but the last time the 10,000 cities in the US alone figure came up someone was trying to use it to ‘prove’ nuclear war wouldn’t have been that bad and the amount of overkill wasn’t that great. If a full scale nuclear exchange took place between the US/NATO and the USSR/Warsaw Pact in the 1970s or 80s every major population center in North America and Europe was going to be hit by multiple warheads. Churchill was spot on in his observation that “if you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.” At its height SIOP (the Single Integrated Operational Plan) had 16,000 targets in the National Target Base in 1985; they had long run out of meaningful targets and were assigning multiple warheads to individual Soviet cement factories.
I’m not arguing that a nuclear war would not be devastating. My point was, and I’ll quote it again for emphasis is
The problem if you start to target infrastructure is the inherent tradeoff of maximizing civilian deaths against infrastructures. There are over 2,300 coal burning power plants worldwide. Over 1,600 hydropower plants in the US alone and 8,200 world-wide (with 50,000 dams, half of those are in China).
Specifically targeting them will reduce the number of nukes for killing babies. You would want to destroy petroleum processing facilities as well. And solar power plants, especially in China.
The lesson we learned from strategic bombing in WWII was that transportation systems need to be targeted to really destroy a country’s economy.
However, I disagree with your conclusion. While the hypothetical would be horrific, and would cause the types of deaths you list, I think everyone is forgetting the size and populations of India and China.
Yes, it would be devastating, but with the number of nukes available, it can’t cause the world-wide end of civilization.
As it was, I was including that total with the number of villages as well. My point was that in the Us alone, there were too many places where people in in close proximity to kill all of them outright. Let alone China and India.
As I said above, it would be horrible, but once the entire world is targeted, then the destruction becomes spread out and reduced for each country.
This would not be something which the world could shake off in a decade. It would be scores of years to rebuild civilization, at a minimum, if not in the hundreds. But it wouldn’t take thousands.
That’s the thing though, there really is no tradeoff between targeting the major population centers and the transportation infrastructure in a nuclear war; they’re essentially the same thing once you’re talking about 150-200kt warheads, much less larger megaton range ones. The rail and road network nodes and ports are located in cities; when all of the cities have been reduced to radioactive ash the entire transportation infrastructure of a country has effectively been destroyed almost as a side effect.
India probably wouldn’t have suffered directly from an all out nuclear exchange in the Cold War, but China would almost certainly be hit by the Soviets if not by both the Soviets and the US. The USSR was in the same situation as the US with far more warheads than meaningful targets with which to use them on; the Soviet arsenal peaked at over 40,000 warheads. They could easily hit every major population center in China.
Dammit. A detailed post got eaten, and I don’t have the time to reconstruct it.
In short, the number of warheads have been tremendously reduced since the 1960s by and order of magnitude, while the expansion of industrial throughout the world has increased by at least the same factor.
Yes, blowing up all the nukes would be the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of humans, but it wouldn’t kill everyone and not all civilizations would be wiped out.
for the folks commenting about nuclear winter -
a nuclear induced volcano winter would probably be WORSE -
the # of nuclear weapons is easily much larger than the # of active volcanoes worldwide
and we’ve already had the 1815 eruption of Tamboura cited as an example.
however - given that the biggest worry of most nuclear generals is
the enemy’s probable use of their nuclear weapons, I seriously don’t think
a Dr. Strangelove warlord would send his missles at the enemy’s volcanoes instead.
but it might make a rather good James Bond plot -
if evil Mr Blofeld decides to drill a horizontal frack hole into a volcano
and then plant a nice big nuke bomb inside there and demand payment
of such&such billions or ELSE . . . . . . . . .
Barring nuclear winter or a Dr. Strangelove style set of cobalt bombs whose entire purpose would be to end all human life on earth, not everyone even in the countries involved in a nuclear war was going to die, and a Cold War exchange was only going to hit North America, Europe, most of Asia and a smattering of other places. The South America, Africa, and the rest of Asia would only be directly affected by fallout and indirectly by the sudden disappearance of trade and economic disruption; otherwise civilization would continue chugging along just fine in those places.
The decrease in the size of arsenals from the peak numbers in the 1960s-80s, while it is in orders of magnitude, isn’t really very great and hasn’t actually changed that much; the amount of overkill in the US and Soviet arsenals was that great. The size of the British, Chinese, and French arsenals hasn’t changed that much from the Cold War. The UK had the Moscow criterion as a requirement for its force - that is if needed the UK had the ability acting entirely on its own to destroy Moscow. France’s Force de frappe was and is based on weak-to-strong deterrence or in the words of de Gaulle “Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill 80 million Russians. I truly believe that one does not light-heartedly attack people who are able to kill 80 million Russians, even if one can kill 800 million French, that is if there were 800 million French.” The ~1,500 deployed strategic warheads possessed by each the US and Russia is still far more than is needed for each side to completely destroy each other as functional countries. The size of the Cold War arsenals was just absurd overkill.
Absolutely, there is nothing to ague with there. If it were a Cold War type of exchange, both counties and direct allies would be toast, but that’s not the question posed in this thread.
I suspect that in the Chinese may be the dominant power post world-wide atomic apocalypse.
