Never underestimate confusion and stupidity.
Out of curiosity, how did we shoot down 4 ICBMs and how do you get only hundreds of millions of casualties when the death toll is over a billion?
It crosses my mind that a lot of Russian ICBM’s won’t be in working order any more, and China hasn’t got all that many anyway…
anybody got figures on those?
I have found this-
http://www.armscontrol.ru/start/rsf_now.htm
is this considered to be accurate?
and china- (1999)
http://cns.miis.edu/research/china/coxrep/wdepdat.htm
how many now?
it seems there might be fewer weapons around than some people think… or are there a great number of reserve warheads which could be made ready in short order?
You’ve forgotten that a single ICBM may have multiple war heads.
speculation that there are a few prototypes of Patriot missiles capable of knocking out inward bound ICBMs. They would be many and they may not all work.
Why more deaths than casualtties? Have you seen what an H-bomb can do? it doesnt leave that many survivors and those that survive the blast, the flash fires, the concussion and the intense radiation eventually die anyway because help would be prevented from entering a blast zone. You may thank FEMA for that protocol. China and Russia may have similar protocols to preserve their medical and disaster fighting human resources.
DOH!
why do I always drop the negative contraction?!
that should read:
*
speculation that there are a few prototypes of Patriot missiles capable of knocking out inward bound ICBMs. There wouldnt be many and they may not all work.
preview is your friend.
*
Need I remind you that the USA just invaded another country on what now appears to be flimsy intelligence (and some would say that was the presidents IQ) When everybody is rattling their sabers at each other, its hard to hear the voice of reason.
Let’s say that alien space bats hypnotize all world leaders and order them to simultaneously launch every nuclear weapon on the planet. OK, all major cities on earth hit, most infrastructure destroyed. Lots of people vaporized. But even so, even in the major cities, there are still going to be lots of survivors of the first strike. The vaporized and the crushed and the burned are the first wave of deaths.
But what happens to the survivors? Lots of people are going to die in the first few weeks. The severely injured, who might have been saved except there is no medical attention. The severely injured or radiation burned who would be hopeless cases anyway. People who die of thirst because there is no clean water. People who die of hypothermia because there is no safe shelter. Don’t underestimate hypothermia affecting people who have no shelter, perhaps no warm clothes. This is the second wave of deaths.
Then comes the third in a few months…starvation and disease. Transportation infrastructure is destroyed. No food enters the cities. Crops die in the field, animals die in their barns. Places with abundant food are unable or unwilling to transport it to places that are starving. The more people who survive the first and second waves the worse the third wave is going to be. Diarrhea from drinking unsafe water kills people. Yes, simple diarrhea can kill you if you don’t have medical care, clean water, and food to restore your electrolytes. Radiation compromises people’s immune systems, and people dependent on medication–diabetics, the HIV+, etc start to get sick. Flu, cholera, etc, all the diseases that are prevented through public sanitation start to move through the population. Without medical care, shelter and food many people die of otherwise treateable diseases. Also many people die from untreated injuries…those minor burns and scratches you got when your hourse collapsed become infected and gangrenous. Penicillin would cure you, but there is no penecillin. While it takes longer than people think, within months most of the survivors are going to be starving to death. By a year from the strike, huge numbers are dead from simple starvation, and cannibalism is rampant.
Then comes the fourth wave. Civil breakdown. The world is much much more dangerous now. Even though you have found some source of food, any injury is now life threatening. Break your leg, and you die. Cut your hand, and you die. Talk to the wrong person and breathe the wrong germ and you die. Society starts to reconstitute itself. Meaning you probably join a group of people who work together. In other words, a gang. But you are vulnerable to other groups, who try to take what you have. Or you get killed trying to steal food or goods from someone. Death by violence is common. Full scale warfare between groups–many psychologically disturbed–is possible.
Next comes the fifth wave. Demographic breakdown. For several years, perhaps decades, the birth rate is severely depressed. Who is going to be able to raise babies in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Even if you are able to somehow survive yourself, raising children is going to be almost impossible. Radiation, disease, and starvation reduce fertillity. Many people have severe psychological problems that render them unfit parents…they are now cannibal scavengers, or burnt-out loners, or they have lost too many children already to risk trying for more, or they can’t adjust to the new state of affairs. So the next generation of children largely doesn’t exist. Since the survivors have very few children, then the functional surviving population two generations later is very small, even if a surprisingly large number of people survived the apocalypse itself.
Of course, the number of people living on the planet 1 minute, 1 month, 1 year, or 50 years after the strike is unknowable. But the problems aren’t over just because the bombs have stopped falling.
It’s probably changed since the end of the Soviet Union, but I believe that they targeted not only the US, Europe and Japan, but also many targets in the southern hemisphere, including Australia, NZ, and South America. Apparently the Kremlin decided that in the event of a full thermonuclear war, the entire non-Soviet aligned world would have to go.
It was just a tongue in cheek comment - “casualties” includes both wounded and dead, so it’d be logically impossible to have more deaths than “casualties”.
:smack: I differentiated casualties from deaths… my bad.
Bolding and Italics mine
There was never oneSIOP , there was many depending on how the president wanted to respond.
Counter force = emplaced nuclear silos and military targets
Counter value = citys
counter economy =self explanatory
counter populations =self explanatory
Declan
There’s a very good movie on nuclear war called Threads, from 1984. It was made by the BBC. Very hard to get now, I managed to get it off emule after weeks of trying.
Look for it out there, it’s really something. Humanity isn’t destroyed, but is turned into a fedal system of hunter/gathering and such.
Personally, I think nuclear war is likely in the next 10 years in some scale, most likely an islamic attack on the USA or from North Korea. The US response would then decimate the regions that are behind the attacks. So no more islamics, no more north korea. Otherwise, the world would go on fine. The downside is that it’ll take a destruction of a US city to do what’s needed to be done pre-emptively right now.