A 1980 British study estimated a short-term survival ratio of about 35% of the population.
Note that Tris’ excellent horror story is mainly confined to the northern hemisphere. Indeed, places like New Zealand seem to have got away largely scot-free even from the vast Chicxulub impact save for a few dark years.
Humanity might well even have gone through a far more drastic and species- threatening bottleneck already.
Let me throw up an alternate… a-la Red Dawn 
Round One -
The sneaky Russians detonate several Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapons 15-50 miles above targets in the US, especially NORAD and Washington DC, doing no physical damage but frying all the electronics in the C&C sites. As this EMP is massive, it will effectively take out the entire Command and Control for the Midwest missile silos and C&C for the boomers and bombers standing at their fail safe points. (If the the US attempted the same sort of attack, due to the Russian C&C and Air Defence being run on electronics using vacuum tubes rather than circuits (immune to the effects of EMP) there is limited damage to the Russian C&C network). Russians then attempt to launch a sea, land and air invasion of Western Europe and the Middle East to secure resources they vitally need.
Round Two -
US missile silos, cut off from their C&C, fire ALL of their missiles at pre-determined targets all across the Northern Hemisphere, including all of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. US boomer subs do likewise at any time up to 90 days later when their comms with home bases are cut off and they don’t get orders to stop (that’s how boomers worked - unless they could surface at regular intervals and be told ‘all is well’ they fire their missiles. Thank God this is no longer the case). US Bombers holding at their fail-safe points turn and attack targets in the Soviet Union (they work the same as the boomers).
Seeing that they are about to be destroyed, the Russians fire all of their missiles and send their bombers orbiting at fail-safes into attack at pre-determined targets in the US and Western Europe (and China - the Soviets didn’t like China any more than we did in the 70s and 80s and in fact had 3 border wars with them), with about the same rate of warheads stopped (10%). Russia is completely destroyed by 5000 warheads from 1500 ICBMs, only a select few of which (10% is one estimate) will be stopped by Russian Star Wars-type defenses. The Soviet counter-attack completely obliterates all major US cities, most rural areas, and a huge percentage of the population of the US (estimates ranges from 70-90% of the population of the US killed in the first 10 hours of full global nuclear war, likewise for the Soviet Union and Europe). Pretty much the entire Northern hemisphere is destroyed. The bombers (on both sides) finish off whatever’s left as they turn and attack targets after the missiles are through with their bit.
Round 3 -
The Southern Hemisphere remains pretty much untouched by first-strike attacks, but fallout causes untold deaths through radation poisioning as it is carried around the globe by weather and currents and the jet stream. I haven’t seen esimates of this, but most of the stuff I read said that about the only country that would be untouched by both primary strikes and fallout would be Australia and New Zealand; everybody else would be screwed. Chernobyl is a good example of this - prevailing winds carried the radiation from Chernobyl 5000 miles across Western Europe.
Round 4 -
Human life continues, but dramatically fewer of us and living much more hand-to-mouth than before. There’s not much on TV, and this guy Humungous keeps yelling at me to “get them” and their oil when all I wanna do is keep my bright red mohawk in shape and wear my buttless chaps when riding my motorcycle across the desert in the middle of Australia with my lover behind me 
.
For reals, though - that is why Mutually Assured Destruction worked as a deterrent. We had bombers, subs, and missile silos that could attack their pre-determined targets independently of higher authority ready at all times on 24x7 alerts, in the event that such higher command was cut off or destroyed in a sneak attack, and so did the Russians. Even if only 60% of these resources carried out their missions (as was thought realistic after war games - these resources are fired or piloted or captained by people, after all, and not everyone can stomach killing billions no matter how well trained) that’s still a hell of a lot of nukes flying back and forth. If a total global thermonuclear war ever happened, the Northern Hemisphere would have been toast.
Another very real scenario was that C&C would break down very quickly in the event of a nuclear war on both sides, and that would actually save a lot of lives. Whitney Striber co-wrote a novel with someone else who I can’t remember called Warday that discussed this - the C&C broke down so fast that only a couple of cities got pasted on either side (unfortunately, it was NYC, Moscow, and Washington DC, so pretty big cities :(), and the rest of the attacks just kind of fizzled out. Quite a scary book, really, because at the time it was emminently possible. :eek:
Whether people survive the initial bombardment, which is probably likely, although standards of living will be sharply reduced. The next danger is that of nuclear winter.
Even if the war was confined to the northern hemisphere the effects of the winter would be a worldwide phenomena. Read the link Carl Sagan describes it much better than I could.
Inevitably some people would survive, but I think that some posters are overly optimistic as to how quickly we could regain our feet.
Don’t forget that with the destruction of the infrastructure most scientists, teachers, engineers etc will also have died. Combine that with the loss of libraries, universities, the internet there will be little or no resource of information to base the rebuilding on.
I think we would be stuck at a fairly low level agricultural or possibly even hunter/gatherer level for some time possibly even centuries. Of course some information will survive and some technological improvements will come about faster, but I don’t think we would get back to our current level of technology for a long time if ever.
If there were a more limited exchange for example between India and Pakistan, which is the current most likely flashpoint, as long as the rest of the world did not get involved in the actual bombardment then recovery for both countries would be much quicker, due to the relatively low number of weapons involved and the presence of external nations with undamaged infrastructure to provide assistance.
Norad would almost certainly have thier vital C&C be EMP hardened and unver several tons of rock so it’s highly unlikely that an EMP could disrupt C&C. Besides, wouldn’t NORAD have several minutes to hours of warning before the bombs arrived and give out orders during that time?
Why would Russia fire off EMP nukes and then sit on their thumbs and do nothing while waiting for a US response?
Fall out reached 5000 miles as detected by sensitive radiation equipment but actual instances of cancer and birth defects only happened in relatively large numbers quite close to Chernobyl.
First of all, Shalmanese, fair points… but I have to say I think I can refute all of them.
Far too lazy to look it up, but I read a story where NORAD was secured against 50k volts of EMP energy (? not sure if the measurement is right) but the average size of Russian warheads put out 100k volts or whatever.
As to the warning, didn’t I say they were “sneaky” Russians? We’re talking Wing Attack, plan R, here!
They think they’ve decapitated our C&C, therefore we can’t respond.
I think if you had Chernobyl-sized disasters every 40-50 miles throughout the entire Northern Hemisphere… the Northern Hemisphere would be toast.
And isn’t it enough that I let you Aussies survive without you going and poking holes in my pet Armageddon?
In order to harden against a 100kV EMP, all you would need to do is surround your hardware with a faraday cage of wires that are capable of transmitting 100kV. moderately expensive but not prohibatively so.
If you can envision NORAD responding, I severely doubt that Russian High Command would have somehow missed this point.
I don’t know what the effects of total saturation would be, anybody got any cites apart from On the Beach?
Wouldn’t you rather play a nice game of chess?
School joke: Why shouldn’t you wear Russian underpants? Chernobyl fallout.
The Northern Hemisphere would indeed be thoroughly nobbled, but that would be from the immediate blast/neutron/gamma damage and local fallout. If one could get underground or otherwise shield oneself from local dust, as a fair portion of the population certainly could, then even in the Northern hemisphere,
… and thus a good number of Northerners would not receive an LD50 dose.
In the Southern hemisphere, things are even more promising. Only very fine particles containing only long-lived isotopes would be carried there, and thus worldwide fallout is much less serious than local fallout: cancer and birth-defect rates would rise, but civilisation would largely be left intact.
The only major difference in the Southern hemisphere would be the winter. Even here, the wikiarticle suggests that only the northern hemisphere would be drastically affected, and in any case that Sagan et al. rather overestimated the cooling effect.
Looks like everyone in the South, plus every Northern survivor who heads there afterwards, might be only inconvenienced!
The point I was trying to make was not that it was possible, but that we didn’t do it as it was only after released Russian nuclear secrets a couple of years ago that we figured out that not only were we vulnerable to EMP (because of inadequate shielding of our C&C factilities) but that the Russians weren’t (as they still used vacuum tubes and didn’t need any shielding)
There are dozens of scenarios where this wouldn’t apply, everything from the ‘mad leader’ to rogue elements launching an attack to other terrorists taking over missile sites and firing them at us to destroy both nations in the counter-attacks, etc… etc… etc…
No cites, but if we pose Chernobyl as the equivalent fallout of 1 thermonuclear ground strike, and posit that of 10,000 total warheads (5k US, 5k Soviet, including bombers, ICBMs, and Boomers) 60% hit their targets all in the Northern Hemisphere, that would mean 6,000 Chernobyls dotted all over the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the highest population areas and most fertile areas of Europe, Asia, and North America. I am not a nuclear scientist, but I think that would be pretty much the end of life as we know it north of the equator…
Triskadecamus - Nope. This is more fun, because it’s never been less possible than right now…
**SentientMeat ** - [Slim Pickens Voice]Well, hell, let’s just nuke them dang Ruskies right now! Go toe to toe and see what happens! I bet us Yanks is gonna beat them dang Ruuskies into the ground in this here nu-cyu-ler combat![/Slim Pickens voice]
6,000 50 mile^2 blasts would only cover 1/4 of the earths surface assuming no overlap. Assuming no nukes hit the sea, then it seems theoretically possible to get total saturation.
50 square miles is a little much, me thinks. Most us nukes are total destruction for 3-10 sq miles from impact, serious damage from 10-30 miles. Russian nukes are a bit bigger, but not hugely so.
I also think it’s a moot point, and that that many nukes going off in quick succession would have catastrophic effects…
You guys are vastly overestimating the destructive power of this stuff. ** SentientMeat ** got it right- by and large, if the fallout is going to kill you, it’ll do it in the first 3-5 weeks or so, since the half-lives of the really bad stuff are pretty short. The long-term stuff will give you cancer, but that isn’t necessarily going to collapse civilization.
According to this site, the Chernobyl accident was “was comparable in extent to what might result from a “small” nuclear war in which a dozen or so weapons of nominal yield were exploded at altitudes intended to maximize blast damage”, with nominal yield probably being in the 300 kiloton- 1 megaton range.
Or, as this site says, “Chernobyl released 200 times as much radioactivity as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions put together.”
In other words, Chernobyl was the equivalent of a BIG fallout event, and it wasn’t particularly lethal outside the immediate area. People still live in Kiev and Gomel after all.
Here’s a good site for getting a better idea of how destructive nuclear weapons are- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/mapablast.html.
Use the 1 megaton examples- the 25 megaton one is the largest weapon we ever made, and stopped using in 1976. Even the 1 megaton examples are something like 2 times the size of the majority of weapons in use.
3-10 miles of TOTAL destruction from ground zero for most US bombs is a tad of an exaggeration. Most of our strategic warheads seem to be roughly 300 kilotons, with a few outliers like the B-83 bomb and the W-88 Mk5 (Trident) coming in higher.
With a 300 kiloton bomb, total destruction, as determined by the rule of thumb that everyone inside the 5 psi contour is considered dead, is roughly 2 miles in all directions from ground zero. Granted, this is just a rule of thumb, but that’s the one that the planners and other folks use to determine destruction and casualties.
The Nuclear Weapons Archive
is a good site to read up on- it has very good information on all aspects of nuclear weapons.
Yes, the exact number of bombs dropped and cities destroyed makes a difference, but the bombs, radiation and fallout are only a small part of the picture. The first strike is only going to kill (WAG) maybe 10% of the population. Devastating, yeah, but we could recover. Yes, there will be long term radiation effects, lots more cancer in the future, but the future cancer deaths pale next to the people killed by the blast and acute radiation poisoning.
But surviving the first strike is only the beginning. Power, water, and food distribution is now gone. Transportation and communication infrastructure is concentrated in the now-obliterated cities. Farmers in rural areas probably won’t starve, but they will see most of their crops rot in the fields because there won’t be any way to get the food to the cities. No running water means no flush toilets, which no sanitation, which leads to cholera, dysentery, and god knows what else. No food, no medicine, no shelter, , no communications, no way to evacuate…the people near cities who aren’t killed by the first strike are going to die by the millions of thirst, starvation, disease and lawlessness.
However, it takes a long time to actually starve to death…months, really. So while millions starve to death in a few months, many more survive. While millions die of preventable communicable disease, millions more surivive. But then the next problem hits. Global economic dislocation. The global economy is wrecked, making the great depression look like a Sunday walk in the park. How many people can go back to subsistance farming, with no tools, no training, no seeds, no help, no land? How many factories are left? How many corporations are functioning? Does ANYONE have a “job” anymore? What valuable goods and services can the average person produce anymore, given that the economy is wrecked? There won’t be much demand for Barristas, receptionists, web designers, Wal-Mart greeters, or the whole panoply of service industry jobs. Even factory jobs are no longer worthwhile…who is going to buy the stuff anymore? Pretty much everyone is concerned with somehow producing food or getting food from the people who produce food. Could turn pretty ugly very soon.
So…death and destruction, multiplied over and over, several waves of it. But the end of humanity? Nah, I don’t see it. But we could be knocked back to the feudal system for generations.
Actually for every doubling of destructive radius you need a seven-fold increase in yield. So a 10 megaton bomb isn’t ten times as powerful as a one megaton bomb, more like two and a bit times more powerful. So modern weapons even those in the megaton range (of which there aren’t many) aren’t that much more devastating than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is another reason why a lot of smaller bombs are a lot more efficient than a few really large ones. By the way the largest weapons fielded were by the Russians, with 25 megaton warheads they were few and far between, mostly with stuff like “Cheyenne Mountain” writing on the warhead. Most Soviet weapons were in the low megaton range and most US weapons were in the hundreds of kiloton range.
Anyway this thread has been fascinating and as I said to my friends while arguing the outcome of global thermonuclear war, “You’re being overly alarmist, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get out hair mussed. But I do say no more than two to three billion killed, tops. Depending on the breaks.”
I had some extra time to do some background checking, and I misremembered the numbers posted earlier.
Here is a link to an HTML version of a August 2001 CDC report to Congress on deaths due to cancer that can be linked to fallout.
In case that doesn’t work, here is the PDF document.
The CDC estimated 11,000 deaths in the United States alone as a result of nuclear testing 1951-2000.
While this may seem an insignificant number compared to the millions or tens of millions bandied about, remember that nuclear testing was performed in very isolated and uninhabited areas. I hate to think of the results of so many nuclear detonations in inhabited areas.
I have to side with the “it would be really horrible, but we’d live” camp.
For instant death via nuclear explosions, the total deaths would be small in the scheme of things. I would, frankly, be surprised if we could kill 1 billion people via the explosions alone.
Fallout would kill more, but probably still not nearly as many as dysentery and the like as sanitation utterly breaks down.
And cancer would be a problem, maybe even for centuries in some areas, but let’s look at this honestly: even if cancer increased by such a tremendous amount as to lower our life expectation by half, we’d still be doing as well as human beings have done throughout most of our species’ history.
It would suck, and the balance of power would definitely change (much of the third world might become the new first world, and Wellington, NZ might well become the First City of the world), but we’ll muddle through.
“A strange game, Dr. Falken. The only way to win is not to play”
Does anyone know what the rates of cancer were in the Hiroshima survivors? My understanding (which may be completely wrong) was that, while there was an increase in cancer, the increase was relatively small. The second generation was, I believe, perfectly normal. The human animal is somewhat tougher than we think.
So, no “Beneith the Planet of the Apes”-style mutants running around.
Found this site, and thought it was really interesting and pertinent to this discussion.
It lets you map blast contours onto cities based on a number of parameters- airburst, groundburst, yield, city.
Actually, reconstruction might not be possible at all, because the supplies of various resources (e.g. oil) you can access with 18th-19th century tech were, well, used up in the 18th-19th centuries. This wasn’t a problem the first time around (since we could just move on to harder-to-access supplies as the technological infrastructure improved), but would obviously be a show-stopper with that infrasturcture wrecked. We (well, a successor species) would have to wait until geological phenomena reconstituted some accessible supplies.