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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about nukes, but large conventional bombs have an unintuitive survival distance profile. Something like 30 units away you survive.
Why is that?
I was looking at this the other day, and was wondering how nuclear weapons would actually be targeted against the US. Would they be aimed at city centers or nearby infrastructure? Would each city be targeted with one warhead, or blanketed with several over a large area? Because if there's a full-scale nuclear war, if the Russians only target the center of my city, I probably have a chance of surviving. However if the…
we're collecting better sources, but eventually you should be able to visualize a heatmap if you will of locations at higher risk.
We're working to add variables like wind travel direction, known military bases, etc. - super speculative, but I think it's better than what currently exists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about nukes, but large conventional bombs have an unintuitive survival distance profile. Something like 30 units away you survive.
Why?
I was looking at this the other day, and was wondering how nuclear weapons would actually be targeted against the US. Would they be aimed at city centers or nearby infrastructure? Would each city be targeted with one warhead, or blanketed with several over a large area? Because if there's a full-scale nuclear war, if the Russians only target the center of my city, I probably have a chance of surviving. However if the…
Well Russia has about 6000 nukes so they could definitely afford to hit every major metro area in the west potentially dozens of times. Unless you live hundreds of miles from the nearest town I’d think it’s safe to assume you’d be dead, if not from a detonation from the onset radiation and / or climate catastrophe following the nuclear fallout
Having 6000 nukes ≠ 6000 nukes with operational readiness. If nuclear war were to break out, it is extremely unlikely that they could successfully use more than 1000 of those.
Not that that should make anyone feel any better about the situation, because even 1 nuke is too many.
Common pet peeve with this site: Most people trying to share a scary screenshot will choose the largest one (Tsar Bomba 100t), of which 1 operation one was ever created, and that one has already been detonated. It's also not at all a practical bomb that would be used in practice.
I was looking at this the other day, and was wondering how nuclear weapons would actually be targeted against the US. Would they be aimed at city centers or nearby infrastructure? Would each city be targeted with one warhead, or blanketed with several over a large area? Because if there's a full-scale nuclear war, if the Russians only target the center of my city, I probably have a chance of surviving. However if the…
I recently learned about the "nuclear sponge" strategy. The US has a bunch of ICMBs stationed in remote areas in hopes of drawing nuclear strikes to those areas, away from population centers[0]. [0] https://kottke.org/20/10/americas-nuclear-sponge
History shows that targeting civilians is by far the most effective to make the opposition concede.
Interesting. I didn't expect the thermal radiation to be farther away than the blast radius. I would've thought they overlapped. Almost makes it sound like you're most likely to survive a nuclear bomb if you're closer to it than farther away, up to a certain point.
How so? All of the effects get stronger the closer you get. The thermal radiation gets you the furthest away, but if you're close by, you get the pressure and a much higher level of thermal radiation.
(There is some discussion to be had about the reflected shockwave but if you're close enough for that to matter, it doesn't matter...)