Nuclear war and destruction of mankind.

Great Debates
1

I got to thinking about how much damage could be done with all the worlds nukes. What I have found out is pretty impressive really, but what I wonder is- how big of a country could we annialate with all the worlds nukes, or just ours.

According to what I can find- http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0617-04.htm

Which give us 18,820. Russia is estimated to having around 28,000 themselves. China is speculated to have about 3000. Dunno what Inda and pakistan has, or Isereal, France or any of the other countries have- but several articles I have read estimate the worlds arsenal at 40,000 nuclear bombs of some type.

The biggest bomb- a Thermonuclear hydrogen bomb is 50 megatons. The smallest is a .3 kiloton tactical nuke. (that I have heard of anyhow)

Given an average of 25 Megatons- well, it is a crappy guess at an average, but I only have the damage ratio for such a blast, and cannot find estimates on say, a 10 megaton or 15 megaton blast. According to PBS- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/25mtblast.html

The effective blast radius is as follows-

Radius of destructive circle: 6.5 miles- 98% of people dead, massive damage and destruction.

Radius: 10.7 miles- 50% are dead, lots of destruction, buildings blown out, etc.

Radius: 20 miles- 5% are dead- residentual buildings are heavily damaged, windows blown out, and so on.

Say, each 25 MT bomb you drop you overlap so it covers 18 miles by itself. With this kind of destruction, we can blow away 180,000 square miles. Right? Or is my math wrong? Of course this does not take into account mountains and such getting in the way.

We could blow away N. Korea- 46,541 square miles. We certainly could not blow away China- 3.7 Million Sq. Miles or Japan- 377,835 Sq. Miles.

Ok, how about if we confenscated ever bomb on the planet, say it IS 40,000 bombs. We can clear an area of 720,000 square miles. Say bye bye to Japan. (not saying the US would bomb em, please, just stick with me as it is intended, an example.) :slight_smile:

The U.S is 3.5 Million Sq miles or so, so it would take nearly as many bombs to wipe us as it would to wipe China. - about 195,000 nuclear warheads at 25 megatons. Almost 5 times the amount the entire world possesses today.

So we certainly could not wipe off every city on earth. Or destroy ourselves many times over as claimed by so many people.

The radiation could pose a problem, but it is highly unlikely that it will spread to all corners of the earth. If all the bombs were surface bombs, it could cause some problems, but many places on earth would go untouched. In fact, many sources say that if Pakistan and India throw down, the Radiation will not effect America signifigantly for a health problem to exist. -

http://198.65.138.161/org/news/2002/020610-indopak1.htm

2

Hey, I’m almost hoping India and Pakistan will go at it, simply because I’d like to see how it plays out, from a safe distance.

Anyhoo, I find it unlikely that even a full-scale attack by everybody would eliminate humanity. There are isolated pockets of humanity that are of no strategic value and would never be used as targets because no-one would waste a nuke on them. The secondary effects (nuclear winter, etc.) remain largely unknown, but I’d like to point out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were directly hit by (admittedly small-scale) nukes, and there are still people living there.

3

40,000 bombs at 1000 square miles each (pi*18^2) gives us 40 Million square miles of destruction.

Land area of earth is about 25% so that gives us about 48 Million square miles. So we could toast 83% of the land surface.

Nasty, but the area could be smaller assuming that the majority of the bombs are under the 25 Mt range.

4

Uhm, yes but you don’t really need to wipe out every square metre. Knocking out the important cities would be enough to destroy a country.

So, with 40.000 nukes you can destroy 40.000 cities, at least.
If I get my maths right.

5

Oops, seemed my math was wrong.

I think it is safe to assume that most of the nukes are signifigantly under the 25mt range. I do believe most of the nukes we dismantled were the bigger ones. We kept the tactical nukes because they actually held a military use. One that wasn’t so dehumanized anyway.

Latro: How many cities does the US have? How many cities in the world? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Sure, quite a few people live in cities, and the deaths would be astronomical, but 40,000 cities is far from the end of the world. That is if those 40,000 bombs were all the big ones meant for civilian population as well. Many of those will be duds (old russian POS’), small suitcase bombs, tactical nukes, outdated nukes that have very small warheads, etc.

It would be interesting to get some kind of lists or average and figure out how many nukes we have of each magnitude.
Only ~57 million sq miles of land on earth?

6

Well I got 48.7 Million square miles, but I used 6300 km as my radius and then converted.

7

How about secondary effects?

For instance, I could use my little bombs, and blow up the world’s most important dams. This would kill millions of people by flooding, and would also ruin the crops upon which billions of people depend for food.

In the same way, I could use the small and mid-size bombs to wreck bridges, ports, aqueducts, levees, etc.

Now, yes, if I stopped there, civilization would recover rather swiftly: everyone would mobilize to re-build the water system, and starvation would be averted.

That’s why you’ve got to polish off the big cities with the big bombs. That throws things into enough chaos that they can’t rebuild the agricultural system. And that leads to the death of approx. 5.8 billion people, one way or another.

i.e., I don’t have to bomb, say, Mexico City, in order to kill it. Cutting off its water does the job very nicely indeed. (But I probably do have to bomb it in order to keep people from re-connecting the water sources…)

Um… Tennis, anyone?

Trinopus

8

“[A]n attack on 1,000 city centers targets essentially every city in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Eastern and Western Europe with populations over 100,000.” From Tony Rothman’s “A Memoir of Nuclear Winter” in Science a la Mode (Princeton, 1989).

9

Let’s not forget the Nuclear winter. The damage is not all directly bomb related.

10

Even without any effects of a nuclear winter, I imagine world agriculture would still be devastated. Radioactive fallout might not physically damage crops and other existing food supplies, but it would sure make them pretty worthless to would-be survivors.

This is not to say that pockets of humanity could not survive, of course; just to say that they would need to live in an area favored by post-war wind conditions and to grow their own food.

11

You guys are also speculating on the most worst case scenario possible which is detonation of overlaying targets. The reason that the US and the soviets had a huge arsenal of ICBMs and nuclear ordinances is survivability. They expected that a certain number of nukes will be destroyed or rendered un-operational by some sort of first attack. The sheer number of nukes will guarantee that a counterstrike is capable of rendering pretty much the same amount of damage as the first strike. Thus the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)

ICBMS also have redundencies built into their targeting. Several warheads are aimed at key locations to ensure destruction of that target. So overlaying targets are improbable since targets are overlapping.

But when all is said and done and for some reason humans have decide to commit nuclear suicide, even the most liberal of scientists still esitmate a probability of killing only 96 to 98 percent of the worlds population of people. 2 percent of 240 Billion people shouls still be enuf genetic diversity to repopulate the earth in a few thousand years. Those that survive will adapt. Cavemen survived part of the ice age, didnt they?

12

This is a bit of a hijack, but I remember reading an article that the US Strategic Integrated Operating Plan targeted no fewer than eleven nuclear warheads on targets in downtown Moscow, and even reserved multiple warheads for things like rural railroad bridges.

For some reason I haven’t been able to find a copy of the actual SIOP ;), but I guess if I had as many nuclear weapons as the USA or Russia I wouldn’t be stingy with them either.

13

I do think people underestimate the survivability factor of humans, but I apparently underestimated the power and number of nukes. (not to mention vastly overestimated my ability to do basic math)

Now my question being, why would anybody nuke Africa or say, South America? If they didn’t, being pretty separated by say, Jet streams and such, wouldn’t they weather the aftereffects pretty well?

14

It depends on how nasty, petty, and selfish your strategic plan is…

Let’s take a really simple situation: U.S., Russia, China.

Suppose that, for whatever evil reason, the U.S. and Russia go into a full nuclear exchange.

BOTH of them would have a powerful incentive to lob a few at China. Why? Because if they don’t, the Chinese, surviving in vast numbers, would have nothing to stop them from moving across the borders into the new power vacuum.

Game theory really stinks sometimes…

Trinopus

15

Humans are fairly adaptable. The area directly around Chernobyl is evacuated, but if I recall the province (district, whatever) is still inhabited and the people, while not the paragons of health, are still alive. Hell, Kiev is still around and that got seriously irradiated.

16

At one point my Dad had a job of figuring out what would happen if the US and the USSR threw down. This was back in the 80’s.

Anyway, at the time I asked him what would happen. He said that a full on attack would get about 80% of the US population(worst case). The worst hit would be the east. The west has two things going for it, a)a whole lot of empty space that wouldn’t get hit and b)a prevailing east wind that would blow the fallout to the east. Of coarse some fallout would stay in the nuc’ed areas but it would be far better in the desert than in any city. So if it ever happens head west young dopers.

I don’t remember all the details but I do remember that he said that our house in Albuquerque would probably survive a hit on Kirtland Air Force base. Our house was about 15 miles straight line from the base. The windows would break from over pressure and the curtians might catch on fire but the house would probably still be standing.

IIRC. he said that radioactivity would be a minor issue for those in the west compared to lack of electricity-food-water due to the loss of power plants and water treatment centers. Radioactivity doesb’t matter if you starve to death.

He also had scenerios with less than a full exchange.

When I see him tomarrow I’ll ask to make sure I am remembering correctly.

Slee,
Who finds having a mathmatician-physicist for a Dad really handy

17

The nuke yield average is nowhere near 25 MT. To take the biggest construction bomb and cut it in half is a lousy method to determine that.

Most nukes are in the 300-700 KT range, for various reasons. A rough average would probably be something like 500 KT.

The only way those “we have enough nukes to destroy the world 7 times over!” things work is if “destroying the world” means killing every last human and you rounded up every human on the planet and herded them like cattle into, say, iowa, with 2 inches of personal space for each person and then nuked the hell out of it.

18

Well then let’s scale our numbers down by a factor of 100. That gives us 400,000 square miles of mutant infested waste land. :slight_smile: Now if we assume that major cities occupy 1% of the planet’s land mass that would be 480,000 square miles of city. Now if cities hold a bare majority of the population (i.e. 55%) then 3.3 billion people die or become seriously maimed right off the bat. Still not nice.

19

Les try this (farfetched) scenario I call the Korean Escalation
North Korea is getting fed up being the ignored brat of the pacific. It announces full and steady production of nuclear weapons and rolls out its new long-to-medium range missile with a projected range of 4,500 miles. Bush decides on a surgical strike to remove the nuclear weapons plant and other sites.

NK retaliates by bombing Seoul with artillary from within their borders and a hasty troop infusion into south korea. However, NK fires 2 nuclear missiles at Japan. USA, Russia and China are on full alert.

Japan defense forces are steam towards North Korea.
NK fires another missile at Japan
NK fires a missile at Sakhalin

Russia fires an ICM to Pyonyang over China
China misinterprets the icbm flyover, fires missiles at sakhalin and siberia. Fires at a US task force near korea, fearing a first strike.

2 US Subs fire cruise nukes at China, 4 missiles total.

China launches a full wave at russia, some at the US

Russia retaliates even before the chinese missiles hit halfway point

US Launches full wave at china

28 days later:

60 to 70 percent of China is radioactive. Most major metropolitan areas are unlivable

80 to 90 percent of North Korea is gone

30 to 40 percent of South Korea is uninhabitable, Radiation levels are far above acceptable safetly limits

3 major cities in Japan are hit. Wind from Korea is intensifying radiation levels in Japan to near top safety limits.

Russian bases in Sakhalin are gone

60 to 70 percent of Russia is uninhabitable

California, Nevada, New York, Montana, Illinois, Oregon, Washington DC, Montana, Parts of Canada were hit by 40 Megaton nukes. 4 nukes were shot down over canada and South Dakota, Wyoming and one fell into the pacific.

Death toll has reached the billion mark
Casualties are in the hundreds of millions
Radiation throught the globe has peaked at 10 times normal levels

Everyone is moving to Australia. Average IQ is raised to triple digits.

20

Oh comon, how likely is the possibility that communications and misinterpritation is going to go so badly in this day and age.

Nuclear missle launches from NK with an apparent trajectory towards the western US.

China notices this, with all its intelligence and modern technology that didn’t really have back when this outrageous scenario was first concocted and does not retaliate initially. They may go on standby, but probably the most that is going to happen.

That whole slippery slope whole world just starts lobbing things at each other JUST IN CASE they were aiming at me is rediculous and so far fetched for todays technology. It is archaic and silly that people bring it up constantly. It might have been logical to think that would happen back in the 70’s, but now? Please.