61–70 of 89 posts
Btw, here is one of recently declassified soviet videos about first nuclear bomb test. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BIDzZygIq0 It's a kind of report, explaining experiment setup, equipment, test process and results. Russian, no subtitles but picture itself explains a lot.
If you're ever in Vegas, the National Atomic Testing Museum is a great place to go: http://nationalatomictestingmuseum.org/
Hard to really say the difference between a nuclear war and the U.S., Russia, UK France and others setting off vast numbers of atmospheric nuclear weapons in the 20th century.
Here's a realistic look at what an all-out nuclear war in 1988 might have been like: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html Spoiler alert: about four fifths of Americans end up dead, and about one third of all humans on Earth. The survivors contend with famine and plague on a scale never before seen. Most of the world's industrial capacity is destroyed. I find it fairly easy to distinguish that scen…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a realistic look at what an all-out nuclear war in 1988 might have been like: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html Spoiler alert: about four fifths of Americans end up dead, and about one third of all humans on Earth. The survivors contend with famine and plague on a scale never before seen. Most of the world's industrial capacity is destroyed. I find it fairly easy to distinguish that scen…
That's pretty fake and assumes a lot of capabilities the USSR never had. Satellite mounted nuclear weapons, anti-ICBM missiles, ground to space lasers, "killer satellites", etc never existed. I think the writer enjoys pro-USSR fantasies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment...
> anti-ICBM missiles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-35_anti-ballistic_missile_sy...
> ground to space lasers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra-3
> "killer satellites"
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Here's a realistic look at what an all-out nuclear war in 1988 might have been like: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html Spoiler alert: about four fifths of Americans end up dead, and about one third of all humans on Earth. The survivors contend with famine and plague on a scale never before seen. Most of the world's industrial capacity is destroyed. I find it fairly easy to distinguish that scen…
That's pretty fake and assumes a lot of capabilities the USSR never had. Satellite mounted nuclear weapons, anti-ICBM missiles, ground to space lasers, "killer satellites", etc never existed. I think the writer enjoys pro-USSR fantasies.
Killer satellites were developed starting in the 60s and deployed operationally in 1991. It seems reasonable to think that some pre-operational capability might have existed in 1988: http://www.russianspaceweb.com/is.html
I'm not sure where the nuke satellites and lasers came from.
When it comes to answering the question of "what would a post-war world look like?" the only significant system out of these is the nuke satellites causing an EMP. That could (and probably would) have been just as easily done with standard ICBMs so I don't think it changes the answer very much.
I was a child of the 1950's. Only 50 miles south of New York City, we little grade school kids were routinely drilled in cowering under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Every time I heard an airplane, I was afraid it was going to drop bombs. Popular Science ran features about how to build your own fallout shelter, and how Dad could prepare his family for the coming nuclear apocalypse. The understated, tragic ho…
Born in the late 60s, so teenager in the 80s in the UK. I recall that exact same fear of every passing aeroplane. In our case the cultural equivalents of OTB and DS were Threads and The Day After, and the Protect and Survive announcements that Frankie Goes To Hollywood sampled in Two Tribes. I find it interesting that the terror of the global thermonuclear war seems to have disappeared from the popular psyche, even t…
"the film was the first of its kind to depict a nuclear winter. Certain reviewers nominated Threads as the "film which comes closest to representing the full horror of nuclear war and its aftermath, as well as the catastrophic impact that the event would have on human culture" (from Wikipedia)
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Born in the late 60s, so teenager in the 80s in the UK. I recall that exact same fear of every passing aeroplane. In our case the cultural equivalents of OTB and DS were Threads and The Day After, and the Protect and Survive announcements that Frankie Goes To Hollywood sampled in Two Tribes. I find it interesting that the terror of the global thermonuclear war seems to have disappeared from the popular psyche, even t…
It's not that strange since all countries are well aware that any country that would start a third world war would get annihilated within minutes by the rest of the world. If World War 3 didn't start during the Cuba Missile Crisis, it's extremely unlikely it would start now, not just because of the increased nuclear arsenals that all participants have accumulated since then but also for very trivial economic reasons.
Some things are much improved since the Cuban Missile Crisis. For example, the US Air Force is no longer eager to wage preemptive nuclear war on our enemies. Some things are much worse, though, such as the transition from bombers to ICBMs, resulting in a need to launch quickly to respond to an attack and an inability to recall a strike, or the change from a bipolar to a multipolar world with multiple conflicting nuclear weapons states.
I think of it in terms of probability per year. The fact that we haven't had a nuclear war yet suggests that this probability isn't super high. 10% would be implausible given history. But 1% is pretty plausible. So is 0.0001%. There's a massive difference between those two probabilities, though! 0.0001% means it probably doesn't matter, and human civilization is very likely to either collapse from some other problem or advance to a point where MAD can't happen long before a nuclear war breaks out. 1% makes it perhaps the most dire threat we face.
I personally think it's closer to 1% than 0.0001%. The systems are error-prone and too many of the people involved are stupid or potentially insane.
I was a child of the 1950's. Only 50 miles south of New York City, we little grade school kids were routinely drilled in cowering under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Every time I heard an airplane, I was afraid it was going to drop bombs. Popular Science ran features about how to build your own fallout shelter, and how Dad could prepare his family for the coming nuclear apocalypse. The understated, tragic ho…
I've heard it hypothesized that the drills were intended, in part, to make the populace fear in order to support certain policies. Without the drills, the threat of nuclear war would be only theoretical. Having lived through it, what is your impression?
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> suggest that large cities would have been spared direct strikes That's an Australian assessment of what they expected the Soviets to do in the 1980s. The actual behaviour largely depends on the specific war-plan and epoch. Actual Soviet documents from the 1950s show the Soviets planned to 'troll' the West by nuking a few non-Central-Front cities, such as Darwin or Perth, and assessing the response. Would the USA or…
If you read "Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser it provides further proof for that. At the height of cold war, US had over 400 missiles ready to strike Moscow directly, purely because of lack of coordination between different forces(so US Army wouldn't share their attack plan with US Navy or the Airforce, so combined they would have launched over 400 missiles at Moscow, a complete overkill).
A major problem when trying to decode nuclear war strategy is that the rational thing to do after the missiles have started flying is different from the rational thing to threaten beforehand. If your goal is nuclear war, you want to threaten the enemy with complete and utter destruction from which they will never recover. Once it starts, you want to focus on the enemy's ability to attack you further, and probably ignore the enemy's civilian population and infrastructure. But it's hard to present the "total destruction" option as a credible threat unless you actually set up your forces to go through with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard it hypothesized that the drills were intended, in part, to make the populace fear in order to support certain policies. Without the drills, the threat of nuclear war would be only theoretical. Having lived through it, what is your impression?
I didn't live through the drills, but they were pretty smart. The popular scorn towards "duck and cover" is completely undeserved. Those drills would have saved a lot of lives if war had actually broken out. The popular misconception of nuclear weapons is that there's a zone of total destruction and that's about it, but in reality there are huge areas where buildings would collapse or windows would shatter but people…
Or that they'll die of starvation and disease 2-4 months later.
Or of the effects of nuclear winter 2 to 4 years later.
Or that virtually everything they're used to - food manufacture and distribution, electronics, machinery, transport, energy, medicine - will no longer be working, and maybe one survivor in a thousand will have the skills and knowledge needed to start even the most basic rebuilding program.