To be honest, this article reads more like one of Randall Munroe's "what if?" posts than anything that should be taken seriously.
Is there any point in investigating the maximalist claim that a nuclear war would kill literally every person on Earth? Hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of deaths wouldn't be bad enough? How about the almost certain collapse of what we currently understand as "human civilization"?
What's the point of all the pedantry around calculating kinetic or radiation damage? Or the various scenarios for nuclear winter?
> The most likely outcome is that most people starve to death. Many would freeze too, but starvation is likely the greatest risk. Even in this model, it appears that in equatorial regions, some farming would still be possible, enough for some populations to survive. After a 10-15 years, agriculture in most of the world would be possible at reduced capacity.
Thank goodness, after a decade of starvation, the remaining population would be able to start growing food again :))
> There appear to be several interventions possible for reducing existential risk from nuclear war. At the policy level, a commitment from the largest nuclear powers to refrain from targeting the majority of cities would reduce risk of accidental omnicide.
The idea of a nuclear war that doesn't target cities seems, to my mind, completely implausible. Why would somebody bother to use weapons that can obliterate cities strictly on military targets? Isn't that simply overkill? Not to mention that a commitment from the largest nuclear powers to refrain from targeting the majority of cities would most likely be broken once nuclear weapons start being used. What would such a commitment even look like? We promise to only destroy Moscow and Beijing, you promise to only destroy New York and Los Angeles? Preposterous.
> Improving the maximum resilience capacity of human populations best positioned to survive a nuclear winter would also make humanity less vulnerable to nuclear winter, and could also protect against other existential threats.
I have never understood this line of reasoning. Should I be consoled by the fact that, even though billions might perish, somebody somewhere will manage to scrape by and survive the holocaust? Are we supposed to be so collectivist in thought as to disregard the obliteration of a significant part of our species, just because some other part of it might live on?