[QUOTE=slaphead]
Dude, you’re hilarious. The US can’t even occupy and build up the infrastructure of a scrappy little country of less than 30 million people. Russia’s population is five times that, China’s nearly forty times. The US couldn’t occupy either in its wildest masturbatory fantasies, never mind both. As for the whole destroying civilization thing, AK84 is correct and you are not - a nuclear exchange would probably scrub mammalian life off this planet, leaving nothing but ectotherms and politicians to ‘rebuild’.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think you’re reading Lust4Life’s post correctly. He specifically is not saying we could occupy and build up the infrastructure of China or Russia.
I also think people tend to drastically overestimate what a nuclear exchange would entail.
If it was between Russia and the United States, these are the two countries in the world which have multiple-thousands of active nuclear warheads. The United States genuinely has enough nuclear capacity to strike every single major Russian city, even many of the minor ones and other areas of interest. Likewise, Russia still has the capacity to do this to us.
However, I see no reason that in such an exchange Russia and the United States would necessarily destroy certain relatively civilized third-party countries.
I imagine Brazil would get out of it unscathed, India, probably even China, even Japan.
Most of Europe would probably go under with us though as the United States would probably in this doomsday scenario launch missiles from continental Europe earning a Russian response there.
It would be a greatly destabilized world, the United States and Russia would effectively no longer be great powers (or powers at all.) Probably 40-50% of the U.S. population would be gone and all of its major industrial and commercial centers (it’s actually IMO an overestimation that either the U.S. or Russia would be anywhere close to totally depopulated just by the missiles–mass starvation and lawlessness combined with lingering radiation sickness may lead to that after a few years, though.)
I imagine whatever damage Europe would suffer would be much less, as I imagine Russia would send most of its warheads into the U.S. mainland and regions of Europe and some of Europe’s major cities/industrial centers would come out of it okay.
Life would get worse for Brazil, India, Japan, et cetera in the short term because the entire world is so international, and so much trade is done with the United States, that wiping us out over night as a major economic power would be devastating for the world economy. But these countries would still be way better off than the U.S. and eventually would recover.
If the exchange was between China and the United States, unless Russia or another country decided to get involved, the damage would be even lessened. China actually does not have the capacity to reduce us to rubble like Russia does. They only have about 200 warheads and not all of those equipped to hit the mainland United States.
In an exchange between the United States and China, China would probably suffer a 70-80% population loss–primarily because of how many missiles we have and how much smaller China is geographically than Russia. To compound China’s problems a huge portion of its population is more or less “captured” in the very dense eastern part of the country. The United States would definitely lose its major cities, too–those would be targets China would definitely be going after (Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Chicago, definitely gone. But cities like Omaha and Pittsburgh for example might come out of it okay. I imagine both of those cities would be destroyed in an exchange with Russia.)
In this scenario the U.S. would still be seriously fucked as would China–but Europe would probably come away unscathed, as would much of the rest of the world. China might nuke Japan though, due to long standing differences–and China would be in “doomsday” mode anyway so why not.
