saidnooneever6 days ago
all bombs are bad. nuclear bombs the worst..if you try to argue for them you are hopelessly lost.
The biggest danger of a nuclear weapon is being hit by flying debris.
Fusion airburst bombs of the modern era are incredibly clean and radiation is only a risk in a very small area (tens of miles) for a short time (days to weeks). In a modern conflict a significant fraction of nukes would be intercepted before they reached the United States. There are far fewer of them than there were in the 1980s (A few 1000's vs 40,000). Most would be used on strategic military targets, ships, bases, etc. Not to say it would be a good time, but it wouldn't be the "end of humanity" or anything even remotely like it.
The specific damage of a single nuclear weapon is far outweighed by thousands of them hitting population centers in an escalation of force
It's very likely that a nuclear conflict between major nuclear-armed states (US, China, Russia, but it could be starting in India or Pakistan as well) would bring an end to humanity as we mean it today.
I really hope that behind all the today's communication bullshit there are deep state masterminds that do not have personal interest in dominating a doomed world.
Nuclear war would be terrible but it would be a lot more like Ukraine than The Day After or Threads. If you’re not at ground zero, don’t act stupid and quickly evacuate, manage not to be impaled by debris your chances of walking away are far higher than anyone realizes. They literally did hundreds of atomic tests in Nevada to prove this.
Are all potential adversaries up to date on this?
I thought it was being burned alive in the resulting firestorm because the intense light starts fires over a large area: way beyond the blast zone. This risk could be reduced if we painted everything white- a double win since it would also help reduce the city heat island effect.
You do realize firebombing all major cities could develop into "end of humanity" (no, not everyone will die) for reasons not at all to do with radioactivity?
Sure, humanity survives. But in a state akin to Europe in 1918. Massive casualties, destruction, horror, economic calamity, famine, general chaos, which will persist for at least a decade. And this would be in every major developed nation. So... perhaps it is not a good idea to use them. Perhaps the "misconception" that the world will end is the only reason they haven't been used.
There will be people on both sides who know how many warheads are required, and in which locations, to destroy the capability to generate electricity and refine petroleum at a national scale. This kind of industrial capacity, once destroyed, takes years to replace. Reserves of fuel, food, and clean water will not last nearly that long. You are looking at hundreds of millions of deaths in weeks or months.
The only people who can seriously entertain this live close enough to a high value target to be assured of their immediate demise.
Untrue. A survey done by nuclear-war planners in the 1980s found that there is enough food stored on or near farms to feed half the US population for about 3 years. During peacetime, most of this food is fed to farm animals, but there is no reason it cannot be used to keep people alive instead.
This food, mostly grains and soybeans, must be milled to be nutritious to people, but the (diesel-powered) equipment to do the milling tends to be stored near the food, so the trucks that bring the food from the farms to the population centers can just bring the milling equipment, too (and maybe the equipment for toasting grains, which I understand is widely done to grains fed to farm animals).
Water is continuously falling out of the sky and can also be obtained from underground.
Repurposing feed grain reserves is interesting, but you need fuel for that as well (plus significant coordination, which seems unlikely in a scenario where many people with the required knowledge and authority may be dead and telecommunications infrastructure is destroyed).
Fuel is similar: the amount currently used by the average person is much higher than the amount needed (i.e., to transport food and other essentials) just to keep people alive until our industrial base can be reconstituted enough that survival becomes easy again, so we can expect to be able to survive for a few years on fuel that was produced before the attack. Most motor vehicles will probably survive the attack, for example, according to analyses made by US war planners during the cold war, and the fuel tanks of each of them will on average be about half full even if no warning of the attack reaches the general public. Home heating is not strictly necessary for survival except maybe on the coldest nights of the year, which is good because I doubt there is enough firewood in the continental US to keep the survivors of the attack warm every night for a few years.
Urban centers are not set up for large-scale rainwater collection. There literally isn't enough open space for all the people in cities to leave a pot outside to collect rain water, when it is raining, and it won't be enough water anyway. Even if every person in a city had a receptacle large enough to collect all the water they needed, many of them simply won't be able to haul it up and down stairs. It's completely infeasible.
What would actually happen is the military and national guard would be mobilized. They would use pumps and water trucks to visit acquifers and wells, and distribute water by truck neighborhood by neighborhood. A continuous stream of trucks constantly resupplying cities. If things got really bad they would get water from streams and boil it before distributing, but that wouldn't last long as it would take too much fuel and time. And they would need to completely secure the water supplies, both as a security concern, and to stop all removal of water except for what was absolutely necessary. Water isn't just for drinking and sanitation, it's also needed for a wide variety of processes, businesses, etc. Water really is a huge problem.
There is no way that gasoline, diesel, LPG, etc production/distribution would remain stable. It would be severely hampered and there would be shortages everywhere. Even during previous "normal" wars, fuel was a huge issue.
I don't know where you got the idea that heating wouldn't be necessary in winter? If you mean "humanity would survive", sure, but also a huge chunk of the population in cold places would die from cold and malnutrition over the first and second winter. Most people do not have a -20F sleeping bag, snow boots, wool underwear, etc even in cold places, because they have heating.
This is correct. Even in suburban areas, rainfall may be irregular and supplies to collect it (and render potable, depending on the manner of collection) also unavailable to most people.
> What would actually happen is the military and national guard would be mobilized. They would use pumps and water trucks to visit acquifers and wells, and distribute water by truck neighborhood by neighborhood. A continuous stream of trucks constantly resupplying cities.
At this point, I will be explicit concerning my opinion of your 28 million direct casualty estimate upthread. I think this only makes sense if you think in terms of individual city centers being destroyed, which is a massive underestimation. Modern weapon systems with independent reentry vehicles and warheads yielding around 100 kilotons do not destroy cities; they erase whole metroplexes.
In such a scenario there are no major population centers left to supply or contingents of military to supply them at a meaningful scale. I don’t have much interest in arguing how survivors in outlying areas might migrate in response to the supply chain collapse that follows.
I'm not defending whatever OP's point was, I'm just saying we would have a whole lot of people left. Very few resources, and very poorly distributed, but a lot of people. If we lost 40% of the population it would still be a lot of people.
I do accept that towns far from both major metropolitan areas and high value military targets could survive. However, the short term social impact of supply shortages and the longer term agricultural effects of atmospheric changes are difficult to predict.
Even if we assume fission and fusion bombs have become completely efficient in using up their fissile materials, there's still the threat of nuclear winter. Nuclear winter has nothing to do with residual radioactivity. Powerful explosions loft fine particulate matter so high into the atmosphere that it takes years or decades to settle. While it's up there, it blocks sunlight and it spreads around the world. If enough bombs explode and enough sunlight is blocked, agriculture fails and the environment collapses globally. Even a completely unopposed unilateral strike, were it large enough, could doom the aggressor to starvation, social breakdown, and civilization collapse. An exchange on the other side of the planet (e.g. between China and India) poses a direct threat to the U.S., the same as every other nation.
There are people who will be happy to throw shade on the research on nuclear winter, and AI are no doubt lending them equal weight. However, even if they were just as likely to be right as the research that has highlighted these risks, is the risk worth taking? Are you willing to make that bet? An AI that doesn't reason as humans do and can't do basic math without making mistakes might say, "yes".