Well, that’s why you are here, to expand your knowledge.
Now, it’s not just cities that get burned up and ash thrown into the air, it’s dirt, rocks and everything else. We dropped a bunch of nukes, some really big, on land and on islands.
Did you actually read the paper cited by the article? If so, then you would not be saying 100, but 250, as that is the number that they are using.
They also use lots of caveats like, “might”, and “could” and have estimation ranges that have over 100% uncertainty. All I’m saying is that that is a horrible cite from which to extrapolate what a full scale exchange would look like.
Anyway, I’m really not sure what your point is here. If you are saying that nuclear war is bad, then there is no disagreement here, it’s bad, it’s really bad. If you are saying that nuclear war will cause the extinction of the human race, then I don’t think that you have come even close to backing that up.
Basically, all I’m hearing is that if we see the missiles coming, we should just give up and die.
The greatest number of above ground nuclear tests performed in one year was 178 in 1962, which would seem to contradict the “nuclear winter from 100 warheads” scenario but it is important to consider the differences between those tests and what would occur in an actual war.
The tests were, by and large, conducted in remote areas that might have had vegetation that could burn. Basically, radioactive forest fires (except in places like deserts or islands that had little to burn). In a war the targets would be places like cities, which potentially might burn differently and release greater amounts of smoke and problem particles into the air. Additionally, those targets would be centers of population, industry, transportation, etc. A lot of the people required to run the infrastructure and systems of civilization would be killed. A lot of the infrastructure of civilization and transportation would be destroyed. Even if there is not, in fact, a “nuclear winter” the disruption of civilization will be enough to kill hundreds of millions, on top of all those who died from the blasts and severe radiation effects.
I’ll also point out this site which provides temperature data by year. If you examine it, you can see a fairly steady rise from around 1910 until the mid 1940’s, after which it either leveled off or dropped slightly until around the 1970’s, after which it resumed an upward trend to the present day. I’ll also note that above ground nuclear testing was banned in 1963 - the year after the year with the greatest number of tests ever. There was a notable drop in global average temperature after 1962 - connected to above ground tests or not? Food for thought. Again - these tests were conducted in areas where they would cause minimal damage, as opposed to generating firestorms in cities. The nuclear winter scenario takes this into account, along with adding in information from extensive forest fires and major volcanic eruptions to model the atmospheric effects from burning major cities as opposed to nuking a coral atoll.
I’ll also point out that part of the impetus to ban above-ground testing was the detection of fallout products in various types of food all over the world. There may not have been much iodine-131 in the milk (as a random example) but you ideally don’t want any. This was something absolutely everyone was exposed to, not just the poor or someone far away so the leaders and the powerful had some incentive to take steps to avoid that getting into themselves and their children. Nor was milk the only product affected. It would be interesting to see if case numbers of thyroid cancer went up after the 1950’s.
Since no one wants to run the actual test of “what would the results of an actual nuclear war be?” there will always be some room for debate and much hot air exchanged over the matter. However, it’s probably a safe assumption that blowing up 100 nukes over actual targets is going to cause a LOT of problems, aside from just killing a lot of people, and some of those problems will kill additional people.
I would prefer we never try to actually find out what all the potential consequences might be.
I think it was the cesium-137 in children’s teeth that really started that PR ball rolling.
Right, and it’s an experiment I’d rather not run either. But the question here is not “Is nuclear war bad?” the question is whether an attack by Russia on the US is going to harm Russia enough that they are no longer able to impose their will militarily, both conventional and with threat of further nuclear strikes?
If we feel confident that Russia’s attack on the US will destroy Russia’s infrastructure such that they are no longer able to field a military or launch a missile, then retaliation becomes strategically pointless, and is just to follow through on our promise, rather than allowing them to call our bluff.
I am not so confident, and would like to degrade Russia’s capability of exerting power over the world, even if that means things turn out a bit worse for everyone.
Another analogy to think of. Let’s say that there is an escaped violent serial killer who has broken into your house. You have a little standoff, and he shoots you. You are bleeding out and dying, mere seconds left till you shuffle off. Do you shoot him back out of retaliation? Or do you shoot him back so that he doesn’t go upstairs and murder the rest of your family?
So expand my knowledge. I suggested there have been two city-sized firestorms caused by nuclear weapons. Your condescending snark above must certainly mean that you know of some that I don’t.
We’re not just talking about stuff that gets thrown up in the air and settles into earth a few weeks later. We’re talking about stuff that actually combusts and turns into soot. Stuff that doesn’t exist in any appreciable amounts on an uninhabited desert island or desert. Wooden buildings. Plastic. Tires. Asphalt. Forests. Things that burn and burn for months and blot out the sky.
If you don’t how I extrapolated about the India/Pakistan exchange, fine. We’re talking about a full nuclear exchange. Here’s a peer-reviewed paper you can peruse to get up to speed.
But my main concern is really not about how the direct effects or indirect climate effects will kill people (though it certainly will be an inestimable catastrophe). The bigger points I am trying to call out is:
People are underestimating how interconnected and interdependent the world is, and are overestimating the ability of certain parts to survive with other parts.
People are not appreciating that the global economy with all its interconnections is not a feat of resource provisioning and labor (or not entirely). It is the network effects that make it all work. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And network phenomena are not reducibly resilient - i.e. destruction of a small percent of it can degrade its effectiveness much more than that few percent. Beyond a certain point, you can have the majority of the physical assets in place, but if they aren’t configured and communicating right, then the network simply fails and has to be bootstrapped again, using expertise and resources that no longer exist.
You’re hardly the first person to point out that one of the many paradoxes of nuclear deterrence is that if it fails there’s no point in going through with it. Which is why we don’t actually have a pure deterrence strategy. To an extent we still go through the motions of planning to use nuclear weapons in some sort of militarily rational fashion, the chiefmost of which is escalation: fight conventionally first, then use tactical nukes, then try counterforce targeting, and only then incinerate civilization. The point of escalation is that, in yet another paradox, it makes nuclear weapons more usable and therefore less likely to be used.
I recall reading once that, if humans were knocked back to a pre-industrial tech level, we probably wouldn’t be able to reindustrialize. We’ve mined out all the resources that were reasonably accessible, and can only get more using industrial methods that we wouldn’t be able to reinvent, because we don’t have enough resources to build the industrial base necessary to invent those methods.
That is what I am getting at. At least partly. Most of society depends on a certain level of industrialization to eat. If we lose that, most of us die in weeks/months, and the survivors regress to early feudal status. They are so preoccupied with bare subsistence that nobody has time for education, and within a couple of generations, today’s knowledge is essentially inaccessible.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say humanity would never again be industrial. We evolved industry once, and we could probably do it again. But I emphasize, it would not be a restart. It would be a total reboot from almost nothing. Best case scenario, it’s like starting in a depopulated Europe after the Black Death in the late 1300’s. Nobody’s is going to dust off the owner’s manual of civilization and pick up where we left off.
This is where I call “Bullshit!” I will grant the second clause, but that’s about it. Show me the slightest bit of evidence other than your fevered imagination that the system we would revert to would be “early feudal.” Also be aware that there was still a mighty lot of learning going on even during that period. I also doubt that the system would default to a very western, very euro-centric system either. Especially since the majority of the survivors would be anything but.
Who said anything about “pick up where we left off?” I certainly didn’t.
Do we have simulations as to who we expect would survive? My WAG is that South Americans would be in the best position, but that is exactly that, a wild ass guess. In the back of my head, my worst case scenario plan, assuming my family and I survive the initial blasts, would be that we would start the walk south into Mexico (starting in south Texas) and hopefully reach some place like Chile or Argentina with the hopes that civilization is still hanging on there. Of course I could very well be deluding myself as to the feasibility of such a plan and what I would find upon getting there.
That’s why we need a doomsday device. Because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand… and completely credible and convincing.
You’re the one throwing it out as the inevitable end, not me. Just admit that you are pulling things out of your ass just like I am and we can move on to more important things, like the airspeed of an unladen swallow.
There is a reason nuclear war is often described as “unthinkable”. Everybody in this thread is pulling speculation out of their asses. My strategy in a situation where the outcome can range from mere inconvenience to death is to expect the worst and do everything possible to avoid the circumstances that might lead to that happening.
New Zealand would probably be the best place to be. There are very few priority targets in the southern hemisphere, and atmospheric effects tend not to cross the Equator, so they’ll be spared the vast majority of the fallout. And they have a lot of geothermal energy, for which they’re not dependent on anyone else.