How destructive are nuclear weapons really? • Hacker News Board

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#121

Post by medvezhenok » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:31 PM UTC

empthought wrote: post #94

pixl97 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They survive on subsistence farming because their near large urban cities don't. The moment those cities are not fed the terrible order they already exist in gets worse. A supersaturation even can only exist as long as energy is being applied. When that is lost (fossils fuels) then a corrective event occurs.

No, they survive on subsistence farming regardless of what any cities do. That's the definition of subsistence farming. I agree that the situation in cities would be dire, but over 40% of people live in rural areas and half of them are already growing their own food.

Well, the point is if the cities can’t feed themselves the people would go out into the countryside to search for food, and food wars would break out. So even if you have your own farms, property rights are basically over under a catastrophe of that scale

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#122

Post by chakalakasp » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #46

matthewdgreen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Studies done in the 60s and 70s were aimed at much larger scale conflicts than would occur in 2022. However the general sentiment is accurate. Food production post-nuclear war is a wildcard, dependent on both fallout pattern, global capacity to increase food production, global interest in helping countries devastated by nuclear war, and targeting. The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems susp…

There are multiple plans for multiple contingencies. A couple of different examples are here:

https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP

The fallout thing is kinda a unlikely thing. Fallout from typical ground-bursts is something that denies area for weeks at most.

There are weapons systems that can do area denial for much longer by using weapons salted with materials that will remain radioactive for many years (essentially the plot of Dr. Strangelove -- that "doomsday" system is based on realistic weapons possibilities, and the Russians in the past decade intimated that they have developed a submersible drone system designed to cross the ocean and detonate huge salted weapons to poison the U.S. coasts for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_... ) -- but as far as anyone in the open source info world knows, these kinds of weapons are not deployed.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#123

Post by betwixthewires » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

patall wrote: post #36

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…

There were under 2 billion people in the world at the beginning of the 20th century. There are now about 8. This is a large increase in biomass, largely driven by the use of petroleum fertilizers. This means, on average, roughly, a human being is 3/4ths made of crude oil. You are what you eat.

If you take targeting of oil production infrastructure as a given, that means 3/4ths of all human beings starve to death. What's left might not have the know how to farm without oil, and that doesn't take into account contaminated farmland.

Now, that oil that has been pumped and turned into food is now biomass in the biosphere, so the earth can now support that increased level of population after a period of regrowth. It isn't the end of this scale of civilization, but it is a reset back to agrarian civilization for a time.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#124

Post by zardo » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:38 PM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #113

extheat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, I think humans would probably be able to build back pretty quickly given the tech and manufacturing capability we have today. Yeah, 95% of it may have been destroyed worst case, but even at The biggest problem I see is the amount of habitable land on the Earth. For short periods of time, people wandering in nuclear wastelands will mostly be OK, however it's not safe to inhabit so we'd have to move t…

Absurd. This kind of war destroys the government. You can only speculate what replaces it. And it'll probably be the winners (or non-losers) who dictate. 95% dead is a lot of corpses and demolished infrastructure with no fuel to operate heavy machinery to clean up anything. Europe after WW2 had the Marshall Plan. Who does this for WW3? China? India? Why not just take the intellectual property? There's no longer anyon…

> Who does this for WW3? China? India?

A strong possibility every nuclear armed state with a hated enemy winds up firing. I wouldn't count on India and China coming out of it much better than the US or Russia.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#125

Post by ben_w » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:40 PM UTC

chakalakasp wrote: post #77

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encounter a lot of people with the "species-ending nuclear winter" false belief, and their attitudes are usually something like, "Oh, what can you do? Just have a drink and enjoy the fireworks." I get the sense the author is working against this line of thinking, because there is in fact a lot you can do (both in terms of preparing and in terms of responding).

How do you prepare for the complete breakdown of society and 200 million survivors competing for resources that will support maybe 15 million people in a blasted, utterly destroyed landscape with no infrastructure or production.

The same way you win a gun fight when you only have a knife: be elsewhere.

America isn’t the only place in this world where someone can have a good life.

That said, how (200-15) million people can all simultaneously enact the same plan, that’s much harder.

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#126

Post by somenameforme » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:45 PM UTC

> "Broadly speaking, we can expect nuclear weapons to be aimed at one of three types of targets: strategic (nuclear) targets, conventional military forces, and industrial/infrastructure targets. Notably absent is a direct interest in killing the opposing population, although people tend to live near infrastructure, so it is going to happen."

This is unsubstantiated and seemingly just poorly informed. Our initial nuclear targets from the 50s have been declassified [1] and it's no doubt other countries have similar targets. We planned to specifically target population centers as well as things like medical production facilities.

The reason propaganda is so heavily interweaved into war is because a war is won by breaking the will of the enemy to resist. See: Afghanistan, a country which has the GDP of a moderate sized city in a developed country and relatively primitive weapons, has now won wars against both the Soviet Union and the USA. Both had dramatic superiorities in every measurable category, except willpower. The will of the invaders broke before the will of the Afghans. And so the Afghans won.

In nuclear war, where all rules and ethics have long since been tossed aside, the only goal will be to break the will of the enemy by any means possible. And I can think of no possibly better way to completely break the will of a people to fight than finding their most economically developed and heavily populated locations, and sending the nukes square center. Even "better" is that these will be some of the softest targets. Nuclear facilities are built with the anticipation of being nuclear targets, Manhattan isn't.

[1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear...

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#127

Post by edgyquant » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:47 PM UTC

trhway wrote: post #58

happytoexplain wrote: post #10

>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…

>and start back up 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 diff…

This is a huge logical leap and not backed up by any actual data

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#128

Post by edgyquant » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:47 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #86

happytoexplain wrote: post #10

>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…

Different perspective: at least they will delay the singularity, which could be a life-saver, overall.

The singularity is science fiction at best

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#129

Post by edgyquant » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:48 PM UTC

chakalakasp wrote: post #83

nostrademons wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be a fair amount of internal dissension within the government on that point. Nuclear War Survival Skills [1], also a government publication, explicitly calls out this attitude as both scientifically inaccurate and irresponsible, as there are a number of things the population can do to dramatically increase their survivability in a nuclear war. [1] https://ia800501.us.archive.org/35/items/NuclearWarSu…

Yes, the publications the U.S. made for the population back then were reassuring. The people who actually plan the wars these days expect maybe 15 to 20 million people to still be alive in the U.S. a year and a half after a full general war.

Do you have a source for this?

Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

#130

Post by lamontcg » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:49 PM UTC

"The world can have a little nuclear war... as a treat."

Honestly the normalization of nuclear war on this forum is so disgusting that this article doesn't deserve a better response than that.

Stop crawling up your own contrarian asshole that far.

The "best" outcome of nuclear war will be so bad that you'll probably wish you were just incinerated in the blast.

(And Russia will never in a million years show any kind of restraint once it comes to launching nuclear missiles at the United States. If their nukes are like their tanks many of them may not work, and they should now know that. And once they start shooting the United States will quickly treat the remaining arsenal as an existential threat so seek to destroy them all. That means that Russia must launch all of them. Its a game theoretical problem with an optimum that exhibits bang-bang control).