51–60 of 221 posts
> For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live. This person is delusional. The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario.
That really depends on what people 'think' is a lot. About 7 million Germans died in WWII (civilian + military), clearly a lot, but still 'only' 10% of the population. The Ukraine military has reporter their own casualties as 3'000 men so far, which is huge, yet 10+ times that many people go into sport arenas every week. If nuclear war now would kill 50% of the global population, it would certainly define our history…
Food is the reason. In 1900 before the green revolution there were less than 2 billion people on the planet and huge portions of them grew their own food. After that point industrialisation and mass fossil fuel production of fertiliser allowed our population to explode. Now were completely dependant on those factories that have massive supply lines fed by specialists.
The conclusion: >Nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be. Some of this is because the threat has routinely been exaggerated by anti-nuclear groups, and some of it is the result of arms control efforts over the past half-century, which have significantly reduced the potential human toll of a nuclear war It’s odd to me that he blames exaggera…
Internal US government documents estimate something like a 90% population loss after a war that only targets our ICBM silos. (Ie not one missile hits a populated area.) The fallout destroys our food supplies and wipes out livestock, making farming impossible: most of the US population starves within a year. There is a reason the US government doesn’t spend a lot of effort preparing the population for a nuclear war, a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US frequently inspects Russian nuclear facilities and vice versa per the New START Treaty.
Playing dumb here but there’re not going to invite each other to the secret nuclear warhead stash are they?
There were over a dozen inspections last year IIRC.
Nothing known to science produces gamma rays at the rate per unit of mass that fissile material does, so that is how the US would detect sham fissile material. In fact I suspect that the inspectors measure the entire gamma-ray spectrum and would be able to distinguish Russian fissile material from, e.g., Chinese or French fissile material using that spectrum. I imagine so because after a nuclear explosion there is a US agency that can determine from which country's stockpile the bomb's fissile material came from (by measuring isotope ratios in the fallout).
My guess is that the inspection regime is not airtight but if the Russians are cheating then it has cost them 10s of billions of dollars (to produce new fissile material).
The conclusion: >Nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be. Some of this is because the threat has routinely been exaggerated by anti-nuclear groups, and some of it is the result of arms control efforts over the past half-century, which have significantly reduced the potential human toll of a nuclear war It’s odd to me that he blames exaggera…
Internal US government documents estimate something like a 90% population loss after a war that only targets our ICBM silos. (Ie not one missile hits a populated area.) The fallout destroys our food supplies and wipes out livestock, making farming impossible: most of the US population starves within a year. There is a reason the US government doesn’t spend a lot of effort preparing the population for a nuclear war, a…
The conclusion: >Nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be. Some of this is because the threat has routinely been exaggerated by anti-nuclear groups, and some of it is the result of arms control efforts over the past half-century, which have significantly reduced the potential human toll of a nuclear war It’s odd to me that he blames exaggera…
Internal US government documents estimate something like a 90% population loss after a war that only targets our ICBM silos. (Ie not one missile hits a populated area.) The fallout destroys our food supplies and wipes out livestock, making farming impossible: most of the US population starves within a year. There is a reason the US government doesn’t spend a lot of effort preparing the population for a nuclear war, a…
> For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live. This person is delusional. The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario.
What? So civilisation is collapsing around you, and instead of a port and ships that can move grain and life-saving goods, you would rather have an army of bankers so that they can trade triple-A rated collateralized debt obligations for newly radiactive real estate?
>not an existential threat to humanity ... [but] it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back…
it willn't be back up to and not even in the direction where we are today. The surviving population will be afflicted with a lot of decease, even several generations later. The minority capable of at least some level of being productive wouldn't be able to provide for and care for all the disabled/ill in their communities. Thus communities successfully surviving in say 100 years will have very different social "norms", at best at the level of hunter-gatherers of 20K+ years ago.
There are some good points here mixed with some large assumptions. The good points: - Weapons fuzed for high-altitude air burst, which maximizes the damage area at the expense of not being able to kill hardened targets, are not going to produce dangerous fallout. - The typical warhead now is significantly smaller than the multi-megaton ones that were typical during the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The large assum…
This also ignores our continuing need for modern medicine as our use of antibiotics has grown some rather nasty things that would greatly reduce our densities if left without things like chlorine for water purification.
>not an existential threat to humanity ... [but] it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back…
> So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. My thoughts exactly. Setting the world back 100+ years is a disaster of gigantic proportions. I also find it odd that the author didn't even attempt to provide an estimate of the possible victim count. I'm basically sure it would at least be in the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions. This is to say nothing about a possible future arms race that would increase the numbers…