Sure, but the 2000 warhead scenario hits a lot of targets that aren’t military targets. For example, just like in my example, they hit no less than six targets in the greater Houston area in the 2000 warhead scenario- the Wyman-Gordon steel forging plant, the Sealy truck plant, and a whole raft of targets near the Ship Channel/Port.
Either way, the city is screwed, regardless of whether they deliberately target civilians or not. Same thing for Denver, Amarillo, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, etc… Most any city of size is out of luck under the 2000 warhead plan. Only a small handful of smaller cities miss being targeted under the 500 warhead plan but are under the 2000 warhead plan- for example, North Platte, NE (huge UP railyard).
2000 warheads does not mean 2000 targets. To allow for failures, anti-missile systems, and bad aim, the key targets would probably have half a dozen or more separate warheads aimed at them. Missile silos, for example, were allegedly hardened enough that a miss by an appreciable part of a mile would be ineffective. (The John le Carre novel “The Russia House” was based on the speculation, what if the Russians were lying about the accuracy of their missiles?) Plus, The Soviets had most of Europe to deal with too. The problem with any limited response is to be sure you don’t end up with bombs taking out your missile capability before you can use it. This leads to the fear that any attack would very quickly escalate to full power, rather than waiting to see what happened. Not to mention any allies - should they target Australia? New Zealand? Taiwan? What about China - would it see a weakened USSR as an opportunity? If you’re going under, should you drag down everyone else?
Well - first thing to consider, the 2000-warhead scenario is going to have smaller warheads. They’re trying to destroy specific small areas and structures. They need better targeting and they get better targeting. They are definitely going to leave a mark but they’re not going to wipe out the entire Houston metro population.
If you live in Houston under the 2000 warhead scenario, you as a civilian are probably getting killed in the counterforce scenario. But at least in your final moments you can be comforted by the knowledge that it’s nothing personal.
It may become more clear if you look at the locations targeted under 500 warheads that aren’t targeted under the 2000 warhead plan. I may have messed up the link; here it is again. Look for the purple triangles that don’t have black dots in or around them, and vice versa. There’s a lot of overlap, but there are also a lot of disjoint areas as well.
I’m getting a 403 message for both of those links. Could you post a link with a different URL or a search term? I’m really interested in seeing that map.
I might be wrong, but I think that most of those places would be destroyed by the nuclear exchange or deserted by people fleeing fallout.
My main point is the natural disasters that occur now are going to be more devastating after a nuclear exchange because there will be less infrastructure remaining to help with disaster relief.
Also the first winter after the exchange will incredible harsh on survivors because they will have less of means of keeping themselves warm during cold spells. Not to mention if the “nuclear winter” scenario makes winters even harsher than they are. We will probably see people migrating south if they are unable to keep warm through the winters.
That’s my point- in most large cities, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a counterforce or countervalue scenario- you’re doomed either way because most big cities have enough counterforce scenario targets to largely destroy them or kill a lot of people through fallout.
If you’re in a smaller city, it really matters how large your city is and/or whether there’s a military or economic target in it.
Which is why dinky North Platte, NE is only nuked on the counterforce scenario, while Lubbock, TX is only nuked on the countervalue one.
When I worked for Intel, the chips we made in Arizona or New Mexico or Oregon were packaged in Malaysia and then sent back. The chips we made at TSMC got packaged in a totally different part of Taiwan. That’s just the IC that I bet most people assume gets made in one factory. And the equipment that is used to to the fab and the testing and the packaging comes from and is maintained by yet other people.
When you build boards and systems the supply chain is a lot more complex. I bet you can’t get discrete components list resistors and capacitors which are made in the US anymore.
I made servers. Maybe 25 countries, but a lot more than 25 companies, including the fact that the components have plenty of sub-components. Hell, everyone has sand, the raw component of chips, but that ain’t going to get you much without a billion dollar fab.
We tried to do second sourcing, so we weren’t dependent on just one company, but if both your sources get blown up, game over.
As much as people get a hard on for a post apocalyptic mad max world, in reality humans are very good at getting organized. We had a trade area covering millions of square miles in the bronze age. And we have bounced back from plagues, world wars, and plagues happening during world wars.
The question therefore just comes down to how liveable the earth is after the war e.g. how much of the earth remains heavily irradiated, what’s the climate like etc.
Because if we’re talking about an earth more or less as liveable as it is now, with anything more than, say, 10% its current population, the answer IMO is that global trade will resume basically instantly. And getting all the way back to online shopping and vast cities will happen within a generation or two. Because we would not be starting from zero, science and technology -wise.
This is not to say nuclear war is no big deal – the “if the earth is still liveable” thing is a big if.
The problem here is that the ancient trade networks you mentioned build on top of a continuum of earlier, smaller societies. I read somewhere that prior to 1800, 99% of every person ever born made their living off subsistence farming. So whatever plague or calamity happens, you’re starting in a better place (a group of farmers rather than tax attorneys), and reaching a lower peak standard (a feudal society driven by farming). That is not the case today.
It would be a space-age civilization being returned instantaneously back to the stone age, but without stone age life skills. There would be no Mad Max. Nobody would be driving vehicles. People would mostly be clawing roots out of the ground and starving because they only know how to buy food, and nobody has any to sell.
Not happening. I think you do not appreciate the global supply chain coordination needed simply to repair a car or run a container ship. And knowledge of sailing-ship technology isn’t a widespread thing now.
If everybody is reduced to foraging for food and trying to farm, and spends just one generation doing that, then all tech skills are gone in a generation. Most of the tech infrastructure needed to use those skills is damaged or destroyed.
I could see places like Africa and South America bouncing back… places where much of the population still practice subsistence farming or small-scale mercantile farming. But most places… including the rural US that fancies themselves farmers and cowboys… possess only skills that are useful if there’s a global supply chain.
Well, I don’t think the survivors are going to grab rocks and hammer out a Maersk Triple E-class container ship out of whatever scrap metal they can find.
What happened to all the tech? If a nuclear war were thorough enough to scour the earth of every piece of electronics, every power tool even, then there’s no life either.
21st century earth is quite literally littered with amazing technology, and there’s no plausible scenario where it disappears but humans themselves still survive.
And the survivors know how to use this technology. Reverse engineering it, and getting back the supply chains…just a matter of time. In the grand scheme of things, not very much time.
I posited that global supply chains would be up and running quite fast, so suggesting we need global supply chains…is consistent with what I am saying.
As for the ship sailing, again you seem to be making the assumption that it’s a literal start over from page 1.
I understand that’s how sci fi often likes to portray it. But the reality is, they’ll be a ton of our technology left around. And humans are very good at cooperating and improvising when it comes down to it.
Firstly I would agree that if agriculture is not possible then we’re in big trouble. That’s why I specified about how liveable the earth is at the time of this hypothetical. If it’s a giant desert, radiated to shit, then yeah I am fine with saying civilization is done, maybe for centuries or more, maybe for good.
But if it’s at least proportionally fertile (i.e. enough nearby farmland to support whatever the new population is), then I return to my optimistic position. There are plenty of people who know how to do modern, efficient farming.
On the tech skills thing, though, no, it doesn’t disappear even if no-one in this generation knows it. Because there is no plausible scenario where all of human records and data disappears. It’s redundantly stored in hard and soft copies many times all around the globe.
I was just reading about updated simulations on all-out US vs Russia nuclear war and what sort of nuclear winter would result. I don’t have the newspaper article in front of me but I remember the prediction being 7 years of continuous winter for the whole northern hemisphere with temperatures 20-30 C lower than average. So that’s 0 C in summer and -50 C in winter for my home town. I’m no biologist but that sort of devastating freezing hell would surely kill most life around these parts.
Trade would be very far down the list, most of the available energy would go to simply scavenging enough food and fuel to survive. I assume large areas of Northern Atlantic would be covered in ice, as would be all rivers and lakes in the current temperate areas. Roads would be filled with snow that doesn’t melt even in summer. Most fuel would be used for heating and especially in lower population density areas travel would only be possible with skiis and snowmobiles.
Sounds fun, eh? I would just prefer to die than suffer through years of something like that.
Let’s say the war destroyed all the fabs, but the plans for them, and masks and netlists for every chip we make survive. And the experts survive, which is really the best case.
You can’t build a fab to make new chips with stone knives and bear skins. You need lots of complex equipment. The complex equipment uses chips one or two generations older than the ones you want to make. So you can’t build the equipment needed for the fab without the fab.
If you’re lucky, you’ll be at transistor radio and '70s minicomputer level and build your way up. Which is going to take decades.
And that is best case.
What about the actual chips?
I mean, there are billions of chips in storage right now, and hundreds of millions more at some point in the production cycle. And of course hundreds of billions of existing devices employing microprocessors.
They are all just gone in this scenario, yet humans survive? How did that happen?
Nor would anyone suggest such a thing. For one thing, in any plausible scenario where humans still survive we still have access to most of our existing tools, large and small.
For another, I didn’t suggest that chip fabrication plants would still be operating. If you’re asking my opinion on that, yes it’s plausible they could all be inoperable; they are very precise and sensitive facilities.
But as I say, it’s largely besides the point for answering the OP since needing to manufacture new processors is not an immediate requirement.
Billions of chips in storage? One of my “hobbies” was doing traceability, so that when a bunch of systems failed we could see if any of their components came from the same lot. Thus I had a good idea of when a chip we used was manufactured. The answer was, not that long before. Just-in-time manufacturing means that you don’t have massive inventories of parts built up.
Now if you can cannibalize existing computers you should be okay. But don’t expect to get the microprocessors off the boards. They have hundreds of connectors (no pins anymore) are very difficult to remove and there is no way of putting them back on. The field replaceable unit is a board, not a processor. Aligning the damn things is pretty hard also.
And chips halfway through the production cycle are going to be pretty useless. Yeah, wafers not yet packaged would be okay. But the power going out in the middle of a fab process isn’t going to be conducive to good parts coming out the other end.
Like I said, best case. It wouldn’t take much to destroy a fab, or at least make it useless in a postwar environment.
You don’t need world trade if you are digging laptops out of the rubble and reusing them. You are not going to be making lots though. And as I said, even if the parts existed in large quantities, they’d be nowhere near either the assembly factory or the intended consumer.
Well I am not implying chips being stored away like the ark in indiana jones. The point is there are huge numbers of chips being made now*. If it all stopped tomorrow we would still be awash with chips. They wouldn’t vanish.
As an aside, I have found it a difficult topic to google. But at least one stat – that 20 trillion transistors are produced per second implies the number of microprocessors per year is of the order of magnitude I estimated.
Firstly, not digging out of the ground: using the chips and circuit boards we are fabricating right now. Along with just continuing to use the existing electronic devices we have.
But secondly, and more importantly, note the excluded middle that has occurred here.
Several here are saying we’ll be back to the stone age, wearing bear skins, and world trade will be halted. When I’ve pointed out why I think this is unlikely, we’re now talking about the difficulty in fabricating brand new electronics.
There is a big gap between “stone age”, and Apple releasing a new iPhone straight after peace is declared.
You seem to have a model where these chips are sitting in warehouses somewhere. Not true. In the 2001 crash, Contract Manufacturers (who make boards for practically everyone these days) got royally screwed because they bought components in order to make board which then get sold, under contract, to system companies. When the crash happened the system companies canceled the orders and the CMs ate the inventory. They are not making that mistake again. There are chips in airplanes on the way to the CM, there are a few days of inventory, but that’s about it.
System manufacturers don’t keep inventory either. They build to order.
Re: stone knives and bearskins. Go thou and watch “City on the Edge of Forever” where Spock complains that he is being asked to make an advanced circuit with “stone knives and bearskins” - in other words 1930s technology.
Rebooting our current capability from the kind of chips I used in college in 1970 is pretty much doing it with stone knives and bearskins. Chips with big feature sizes don’t need really clean clean rooms or advanced lithography - but you’re not going to be able to build much of a microprocessor out of them. We’d get there, assuming people put the resources in, but it will take a while.
OK, let me address a couple of overlooked points here.
EMP effects (electromagnetic pulse) will be powerful, widespread, and will hit small electronic circuits hardest. Nobody knows exactly how bad it will be, but it’s a reasonable planning assumption to expect that every piece of electronics not specially shielded will be damaged beyond usability in North America, Europe, and large parts of Asia.
Many electronics components are highly specialized and depend on certain types of boards, chips, power sources, tools, etc. Furthermore - manufacturers have tried their hardest recently to obstruct the ability to repair them, using DRM and encryption keys and what not. It’s hard if not impossible to assemble usable tech out of random found parts, especially if you lack Google to help you, especially if you can’t order that random spare part from China.
Every year that humanity turns its back on technology is a year that more people lose intuition and knowledge for it. Google is gone. Do you know where they keep their offsite backups? Do you know how to recover and restore them? That’s proprietary information. Can we find anyone from Google?
Basically I think you’re severely discounting network effects - not meaning the internet, though that’s certainly a factor, but the degree that parts of complex networks(logistics, technological, human) are useless if the network is gone, and cannot be used to build a comparable network.
Yes, we may be awash in chips and circuitry, but if the networks of knowledge and logistics that they depend on no longer exist, then they’re of little use.
