Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a source for this?
Yes.
And can you share your source?
How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
151–160 of 221 posts
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Besides "be somewhere else", make it harder for other people to turn your country into a blasted landscape. Support ballistic missile defense.
ABM is hard. Evading ABM is much easier. Russia has some amazing tech for space based ABM interception evasion.
ABM stuff works okayish against very small numbers of incoming warheads. ABM is completely ineffective against large numbers of inbound warheads.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we go back to 19th/20th century tech it'll be a problem because all the resources which are easy to extract have already been got. Much of the resource extraction done today is only possible because modern technology enables it. We may not ever be able to get back to where we're at now if we have a setback like that.
Economies adapt to their resource constraints. A huge drop in global population means stuff like iron becomes less valuable as there is so much to extract from the remnants of our civilization. People talk about the lack of fuel, but Hydro power was initially built in September 30, 1882. It further scales to plenty of energy to bootstrap a civilization to modern extraction techniques. 15.8% of total global electricit…
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Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#154Earlier 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…
> I think humans would probably be able to build back pretty quickly given the tech and manufacturing capability we have today. I’m not trying to be rude, but I don’t think that you have any knowlegde of the logistics and the advanced electronics, biology, chemistry and processes that is necessary for the current manufacturing we have to work. If you look into this and learn how complex even the production of the mos…
I'm quite acquainted with said knowledge. A small community surviving with a garage full of machine tools, some glassblowing, and a bookshelf of dusty encyclopedias, could easily bootstrap back to the early 20th century. A bit of steam reforming and the gigatons of plastic trash gives an ample source of chemical precursors to replace petroleum for chemical uses, and biofuel/gasification for energy. Not to mention millions of solar panels for the taking.
Just because it's not economical to do these things now, does not mean it would be impossible, especially in dire straits.
Would it cut the human population to a few million? Probably. Reset to the middle ages? Hardly.
What are the real innovations that make the modern world?
- the surface plate and 3-plate method
- steel metallurgy
- certain key chemical processes: Haber, Bosch, etc
- electrical generation
- the radio/telegraph
- the transistor
- calculus and algebra
All would survive a full-blown nuclear attack. Rebuild would be slow and tedious, but completely plausible, if not guaranteed.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a trend where a nuclear attack on Russia is being encouraged as a response to invading Ukraine? Or am I misreading your first sentence?
Not exactly. There is a lot of noise that NATO should intervene directly in the war. An example of that is calling for a NATO enforced "No Fly Zone" (NFZ). Of course NFZs have to be enforced to actually be NFZs and that means NATO shooting down Russian jets/helicopters/missiles that violate the NFZ. This would be a direct attack by NATO forces on Russian forces. Such an attack, would give the Russian's a legitimate "…
This is basically what I hoped the parent might be alluding to. However, while I believe you about what you're describing, my personal experience of people wanting more tangible military action has not been "I think we could win a nuclear war", but rather, "I don't think it will come to nuclear war" (not sure if that's a better or worse attitude).
Related: I usually find these conversations kind of gliding around what I think is the primary point. There's the military tactics, gambles, and trade-offs; and the immediate and long-term effect on societies; but I feel like it's usually kind of glossed over that 10s of millions of civilians will die. It's one thing to talk about putting the lives of your army on the table, and gamble on how long it will take for society to catch back up to where we are, but it's quite another thing to put entire civilian centers on the table. Of course, I really have no idea how far Russia, or anybody, would have to go to make that gamble worth it. Putin's threats of the nuclear murder of millions of innocent people for the "crime" of participating in the war he started essentially puts NATO in a much larger-scale version of the "negotiating with terrorists" situation. I've never been so unsure as to what the proper level of response is.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#156I'm not very comfortable with all the talks I hear or read about how nuclear war isn't so bad since russia invaded ukraine
Psychosis and wishful thinking is pretty disturbing.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#157"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 o…
This is why NA is not really under threat. Europe, on the other hand really should be preparing for the possibility of an attack. Which is where we get into trouble -- European NATO members _believe_ they are under the 'MAD' umbrella, but Putin doesn't believe it. And so they really should prepare their infrastructures for that possibility, rather than just waving it away as an impossibility.
Yeah if Putin drops a single tactical nuke on an airfield in Poland would we actually commit to nuclear war over that? Probably not?
That is a thing to be worried about since he is the batshit crazy one in the room who likes to assassinate people publicly using methods that only he would have access to, causing random deaths specifically for the purpose of showing that he doesn't care and you can't hide from him. Plus the callous ability to order his army to grind cities into to rubble and randomly rape and murder the population into creating a refugee crisis.
That's the problem with playing this kind of a game with someone who will always escalate back -- and who certainly has the ability to destroy the world as we know it.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we go back to 19th/20th century tech it'll be a problem because all the resources which are easy to extract have already been got. Much of the resource extraction done today is only possible because modern technology enables it. We may not ever be able to get back to where we're at now if we have a setback like that.
Economies adapt to their resource constraints. A huge drop in global population means stuff like iron becomes less valuable as there is so much to extract from the remnants of our civilization. People talk about the lack of fuel, but Hydro power was initially built in September 30, 1882. It further scales to plenty of energy to bootstrap a civilization to modern extraction techniques. 15.8% of total global electricit…
Don't forget the billions of solar cells that would be literally all over the place, ready to be scavenged.
Biofuel can provide most of the roles of coal and oil. The rest could be obtained from cracking the gigatons of plastic trash.
We could be doing all this now, it's just not economical.
Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#159Re: How destructive are nuclear weapons really?
#160You can definitely survive a nuclear war -- but you might up envying the dead.
Someone will, probably won't be you or I though.