Or in the immortal words of the great Klattu
“Nothing ever truly dies. The Universe wastes nothing, everything is simply transformed.”
When my son was in grade school, he actually got in an argument with the neighbor kid, who said there was a bomb big enough to blow up the world. When the other kid realized it bothered my son, of course he used that to tease my son. We asked his mom if she would ask him to stop, and she asked, “How do you know there isn’t such a bomb?” After we tried to explain it to her, she concluded, “Well, the kids will have to agree to disagree.” :smack:
From 35 yrs ago when I was an undergrad studying such things, I recall that the US and USSR could target something like 60-70% of each others’ population and/or industry. To exceed those numbers, you’d be targeting small towns, and mom and pop stores. Sorry, no cite.
As I recall, at the time there was no firm agreement on the implications of “nuclear winter.”
Cell phones are well on the way to doing this.
I thought they’d retired those in favor of the B61-12 by now…
The United States deploys approximately 4,000 nuclear weapons, at least 1,500 of which are in operational use and are strategic-level yield.
Assuming the U.S. has the delivery systems and targeting capacity to hit any target in the world at its discretion, that means up to 1,500 population centers can be hit. Of course, one nuke would not actually be enough to kill everyone in a VERY large city; you might need several to kill everyone in Sao Paulo. But I think we’d all agree one nuke in the middle f a big city, even if it did not kill everyone, would certainly make things very bad.
I decided to figure out just how many big cities the United States could nuke. Interestingly, there isn’t a super duper clear consensus on how many big cities there are (part of the problem is you can’t do “cities with more than a million people” because it leaves out cities were the city boundaries aren’t really a reflecting of how big the urban area is, like Boston.) However, most sources agree there’s about 500-600 such cities. I thought it would be higher, but, there you go. So the United States could most definitely nuke every metropolis in the world, and would have many extra nukes to do a real number on the super-cities like Guangzhou, Tokyo, New York and Mexico City.
That would not destroy the world in a literal sense, and would leave a fair number of people unaffected at least until they started wondering why their Internet wasn’t working. If you were in Darwin, Tallinn, or Thunder Bay, you wouldn’t even hear an Earth-shattering kaboom.
Such widespread destruction would, however, quite certainly result in the end of modern civilization as we know it. A substantial nuclear holocaust would cease almost all agriculture for at least a year or two. The destruction of the world’s economy means the survivors would have only whatever was around and that they couod make and hunt; within six months gasoline would stop working, and diesel starts going bad in about a year, so even that’s no longer available. The people not incinerated in the initial attack would face dramatic, widespread radiation dangers, climate change, and massive unrest and civil strife. Human extinction is possible, albeit unlikely, as it would not take a great many survivors to keep the species going.
And that shows you how little damage a total nuclear war will do. Assume 600 cities, average population 2M, average fatality rate 50%, that’s ~600M dead. That would be recovered in a decade.
This site says there are 4,037 cities with a population of over 100,000 housing 2.1Bn people. If all of them got nuked, assuming the same 50% fatality rate, then a billion would die. Not really that many compared with the world population of over 7 Billion.
I am, of course, ignoring knock-on effects.
But as you say, you’re ignoring the other effects.
The casualties would by no stretch of the imagination be limited to people killed in the blasts. The resulting chaos would essentially end the world economy as we know it. Agricultural output would collapse far, far below the ability to support the world’s population. Billions would starve.
The world population, if it ever got back to seven billion, would take centuries to get there.
Sooo…it’s only his last name that is unknown?
I’m really not sure you’re correct, especially for America. Disruption in trade would be very short term. The docks and ports would still be there; they’d require clearing of rubble, of course. The US has huge fossil fuel reserves, both refined and in the ground. And if we have to make do with last year’s CPUs, so be it. Sure there would be a period of ‘make do and mend’ but the US is self-capable, especially in the longer term.
As for the UK, nearly half the UK’s population would die, but that would be to the survivors’ relief as the country currently imports half its food. Exotic foods would disappear in the short term. Again, we have substantial on-shore fuel reserves - the largest on-shore oilfield in Europe is in the UK. Fossil fuel power stations can be built very quickly - the first gas-powered one was constructed in less than two years. Organisation would still be there, to get it all done. The first winter would be very hard, but after that, I’m optimistic.
And so on.
No, I’m not sure your dire prediction is correct. I’ve no desire to put it to the test, mind!
Just the EMP from all those bombs would be really bad.
Nikita Khrushchev is said to have remarked that, in the rubble and suffering of the postwar world, the living would envy the dead.
Yeah, that is where targeting is tricky. I never encountered a scenario where it was imagined that all largest population centers would be targeted - at least in a first strike. Instead, you’d want to target military sites - including missile silos, power plants/transmission sites, industrial/infrastructure sites - which could be outside big cities.
Presumably there is some intended purpose in targeting. If a first strike, do you wish YOUR nation to continue to exist? If a 2d strike, are you just saying, “We’ll take you down with us?” Unless you want to assume a nation state just intends to be as big of a dick and create as much havoc as possible.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that. I’m located near Charleston, SC and we have a strong port system with deep water ships going in and out each day. In addition, we have a couple of military bases. Hitting the downtown would eliminate the port pretty much completely. There would be no shipping out of the peninsula for the foreseeable future.
In addition, as said above, the gasoline would go bad within six months and most refineries are located near target sites. Not all, certainly, but Houston, the Bay Area, Los Angeles/Long Beach, Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans. None of those will be passed up by a respectable first strike.
Unless you’re planning to Doc Brown petroleum distillation on an enormous scale, having stockpiles of oil won’t actually keep transport going.
As RickJay points out the initial death count is only part of the picture. Consider this paper Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences
Now consider the impact of sustained drops in temperature on North American, Chinese and Russian cereal production. Remember, those 3 regions make up about 40% of the global cereal supply. Assume we only remove half of that production from global supplies giving us only enough to feed 80% of the current population of 7.5 billion. That would mean roughly 1.5 billion starve but lets’ drop that to under a billion since we’ve killed off +600 million already.
The impact would be horrific - it’s not something we could just walk off.
So disappointing, we must try harder!
It’s very easy to fix up a port if that’s your only problem. It’s exceptionally difficult when your economy doesn’t exist anymore because tens of millions of people are dead, air travel has creased to exist, the entire system of currency is gone (all the major banks were vaporized, remember) and everyone is running and hiding in panic. Best of luck organizing the cleanup crews! How’re you planning to pay them?