Ok man is so smart :rolleyes: we invented a way to wipe us out. That’s right the big one baby the mother of mothers the nuclear bomb. Some time you wonder if we have intellegent life on this planet.
So I was wondering say the people we put in office here and the yahoos the foreign whacos put in charge there decide to end the world because of some stupid political crap.
Would anyone survive or would everything be destroyed by atomic dust cloud that happens after a out out stupid attack.
If you think I got a beef with nuclear bombs, I do. I think they are stupid and should have never been invented by the people who were supposably smart enough to invent them.
Err, I think your question is out of date by about 10 years.
As for whether anyone would have survived had the Soviets been a little more afraid fo Reagan than they were, no one really knows. There were definitely enough weapons to do it had they been targeted with total human extinction mind but the fact is that many were redundantly targeted to insure destruction of certain installations. There were a lot of thoeries about global climactic changes but these were obviously never proven.
What is this crap about “question is out of date by about 10 years”, “there were definitely enough weapons”, and “were redundantly targeted” sewalk? Where do you think all of the nukes from that era went :rolleyes:? Did they just magically get transported to the great beyond Left Behind style after the evil Soviet empire disolved? Just because there is no impending threat today does not mean that there will not be one tomorrow. Therefore, it IS still a relevant question. Besides, the countries of the Soviet Union still have many, many nuclear warheads that can be reaimed at the U.S. and ready to launch in an eyeblink. Who says the U.S. has to be directly be involved at all. This would be all out thermonuclear war after all. Think about it, countries like Isreal and India are nuclear ready and they have plenty of enemies ready to MAD any time.
Like sewalk mentioned if you retargeted every ICBM to cover the globe (i.e. overlapping circles of destruction on all landmasses) then we could destroy all life…at least human life on land.
However, also as sewalk mentioned, multiple ICBMs are targeted on the same spot to ensure a kill of whatever is there (to overwhelm defenses, penetrate a hardened target, allow for some missiles to screw up, etc.). As a result even if every missile flew today you’d mostly ensure annihilation of the northern hemisphere.
Of course, now you have tons of radioactive clouds floating around and whatever climate changes might be expected from such an occurrance. Chances are it’d be pretty miserable for anyone left alive…even in the southern hemisphere.
Still, life has this crazy tenacity to it…even human life. My money would be that some people, somewhere, would manage to muddle through (although I wouldn’t be surprised at a 90% or better depopulation of the planet–no cite…just a guess). If we go with that 90% figure that’s still leave roughly 600 million people left or more than twice the population of the United States. Easily enough to perpetuate the species once everything settled down.
Err, maybe if you live on Mars. Have you ever heard of these nutty countries called “India” and “Pakistan”? How about the “Balkans”?
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” representing the potential for nuclear war, has stood at 9 minutes to midnight since the India/Pakistan tests in May 1998. That’s the closest it’s been since the end of the Cold War.
OK, if we assume any sort of “reasonable” targetting plan (or at least, what the folks pushing the buttons would consider reasonable), then a lot of folks would die in the blasts, and there’d be fallout left for everyone else. The thing about radiation, though, is it doesn’t kill reliably. Mostly, it kills by doing things like increasing a person’s chance for cancer. Life expextancy would probably fall worldwide, but not so far that people wouldn’t be able to have kids first, which is all that’s needed for the species to survive. Certainly, it would be an all-time bummer, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
This article has a nice picture of what a single Trident II submarine could do to Russia.
The collapse of technological civilization would probably result in more deaths than the blast and radiation, and God only knows what nuclear winter would do to the rest of us. Of course, like global warming, nuclear winter is only a theory.
What a great article. It gets very informative towards the end. My favorite bit:
192 onboard one sub! The results:
Wow. We are dangerous.
One of the things you get from the piece, though, is that it’s much easier to kill every Russian civilian than it is to stop their military forces. (That would require 1,289 warheads and still result in about 17 million casualties.)
So it is kinda of what I thought nobody knows for sure. It is all based on theories. So do you think it would still be worth going to live in Rocky Moutains or in some third world country say like Central America and hope for the best.
I saw a cool show on the Discovery channel the other day about secret passages. The biggest one in the US was made to house Congress and their families for 30 to 45 days underground. The press got wind of it so they had to tear it down.
Which was the right thing to do. I mean if me and my family can’t survive, why should the polititians that we elected to prevent the war get to survive? Right?
Public backlash was not the reason for shutting down the Congressional retreat. The rationale behind shutting it down was “Why pay all this money to maintain it secretly if the Russians now know where it is and will taret an entire regiment of missles at it?”
We would have to be very very lucky (well unlucky) to actualy kill every person on land, sea (ships, subs, off shore platforms), and for that matter the I.S.S. It would take such a coordinated effort that it is almost unfeasable. Plus you have the problem of duds, mistargeting and ones that didn’t make as big of a bang as expected.
To go further we have no way to kill off all life on earth, and we certainly can’t crack this ball in half ;).
Don’t stay in the US! Enough nukes would be aimed here to probably make the entire landmass unliveable.
Central America? You might be ok there but if you’re moving somewhere like Bora Bora in French Polynesia is probably best (or any of dozens of little South Pacific islands). At least you can live off what the sea provides there and avoid the zombie cannibals found on larger mainlands. You also have the best chances of avoiding nuclear winter effects there as well as dodging radiactive clouds (inasmuch as they can be dodged).
Actually, I’d bet the people on the I.S.S. would go pretty fast. I imagine that one of the high-altitude detonations employed for its EMP abilities (for instance, the Russkies would likely pop one high above Nebraska to fry most of the unshielded electronics in North America) would also knock out Alpha’s electronics and leave them dead within a day or so (although they could bail out in the Soyuz escape capsule…into a wasteland).
This also works vice versa; in the Soviet Union, the fear of an American nuclear first strike was certainly not much smaller than the fear of a Soviet attack in the US. During the Korea War, for example, many American officers (McArthur, for example) demanded the use of nuclear weapons against the Northerners. This is of course pretty different from wiping out entire continents, which would have happened in a massive atack against a superpower’s homeland, but it shows the readiness among the Army to use nuclear weapons. The NATO’s entire Massive Retaliation policy increased the danger for the final bang quite a lot - not to speak about a scenario similar to Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove which was not too far away from some American officers’ mentality.
This is the basic thing about nuclear deterrence: Everyone is threatening the other one to wipe out both sides. It works mutually and in both directions with both opponents simultaneosly being afraid of and threatening with a nuclear holocaust.
Tristan del Cunha, in the south Atlantic, is probably also a pretty good bet; it’s the most remote permanently-inhabited spot on the planet. Be prepared to be bored, though: The residents are so insulated from the culture of the world at large that it seems to most outsiders that they can’t ever discuss anything but sheep. If the Big One ever does come, I suppose that boredom would be a blessing, but I wouldn’t recommend moving there just as a precautionary measure.
The Rockies in general probably aren’t a very good hideaway: There’s various military installations scattered throughout the mountains, all of which are probably on somebody’s target list somewhere. If you want to insist on the US, then you’re probably looking at northern Maine or some parts of Alaska.