China has an order of magnitude fewer nuclear weapons than either Russia or the US.
I'm not concerned about it deciding to end civilization. It can't. All those weapons can do for it is to provide a guarantee that anyone starting a war with them will lose a lot more than they gain.
If you're concerned about Chinese nuclear weapons, my best advice for you is to not go to war with China.
It might be worse if we were to allow another holocaust because we base our risk assessment on faulty analysis whereas our enemies feel free to threaten because they are working from an accurate risk assessment.
I think it’s almost always better to have a more accurate mode of the world than a less accurate one.
For example if Russia were to commit further atrocities worse than actual nuclear war, and the civilized world refused to call their bluff because the cost of imaginary nuclear war is worse still.
Of course there are also scenarios where bluffs getting made and called are net-negative utility, and maybe you wouldn’t make those bluffs if you thought them being called would end the world? However Putin is already making threats of nuclear retaliation, so this point is probably moot.
> if Russia were to commit further atrocities worse than actual nuclear war
Is this even physically possible? I mean imagine Hitler was winning WW2 and the only way to stop him was to cause global nuclear war with today's arcenal - are you confident which is the better option?
While this is certainly a different model of the world - it would be incredibly irresponsible to operate if this were accurate, or that almost any model of the outcome would be in any way accurately predicable or controllable in the end.
Most of my non-tech friends believe that nuclear apocalypse would entail at least the end of all human life. I think this only makes them more complacent in a strange way. They can shrug it off with gallows humour - if it happens, well, that was that, I only hope it’s quick. They don’t have to think about the reality of how life would change in the years following a nuclear war. The myth of nuclear apocalypse is a kind of licence to stop mentally engaging with the issue, which I don’t think is good. Not to mention the nihilistic side effects of believing one is going through life on borrowed time. Pushing falsehoods for the greater good always has unintended consequences.
>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 exaggeration of nuclear weapons on anti-nuclear and anti-proliferation.
It would seem likely to me that the exaggeration is more due to pro-nuclear forces and nuclear state powers, with the aim of promoting peace through power and deterrence.
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, and it isn’t because of “anti-nuclear activism.”
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 suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles. The assumption that both sides haven't done some planning for both scorched earth targetting approaches, and "survivable" exchanges also seems suspect. Who's to say that Russia wouldn't target conventional military infrastructure, and civilian population centers, having assumed that all deployable warheads would already have been fired? They could reasonably assess that the value of targeting silos which have already fired their missiles is low, and the need for post-war food production will be high.
Alternately, they could adopt a scorched earth targeting policy to maximize fallout and leave the US in a permanently weakened state. I'm sure all nuclear powers have tried to maximize their choices in how to deploy weapons in any conflict.
"The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles."
That's what SLBMs are for. An SLBM launched off the Oregon coast could hit missile silos in Montana in under 5 minutes. Launch in the middle of the night and there's not enough time to get the President out of bed and brief him before the missiles impact. (For that matter, if you park an SSBN 500 miles off Washington DC, it can get nuked in 3 minutes, probably killing the president as there's not enough time to get him down into the bunker. That's why the U.S. developed the SOSUS network, so you can't park an SSBN 500 miles off Washington without us knowing about it.)
Modern SLBMs (1980s and onwards) are explicitly designed for this role, with depressed flight trajectories, low CEP, MIRVs, hardened silo penetrators, and warhead yields calibrated to destroy typical silos, given an accurate ground burst.
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.
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.
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.
Elsewhere in this thread he links to David Teter's OPEN-RISOP as his source. [1]
The quality of OPEN-RISOP is generally pretty good, and the author worked at Sandia National Labs about 10-20 years ago. Targeting at least is pretty consistent with what I'd expect as high value targets. OPEN-RISOP's counterforce + countervalue scenario only tallies about 60M fatalities (~20% of US population) from the original attack. chakalakaps must be assuming cascading failures of infrastructure & food production after the initial attack (a la Threads [2]). While this is a distinct possibility, it's far from a given - and this is also one of those areas where being prepared (eg. having a year of dried foodstuffs stored, or a small personal garden) can give you a distinct survival advantage.
David has mentioned on Twitter and Reddit (when asked) that he estimates 90% to 95% of all people living in the U.S. would be dead within 18 months after either of his attack scenarios that involve countervalue due to complete breakdown of all infrastructure, production, supply chains, communications, etc.
The article mentions nukemap
and says it targets the center of each city, whereas in real life infrastructure (of military significance) would be targeted. As far as I can tell that's the assumption on which the entire article rests.
As a wannabe libertarian, I believe in freedom of speech and information. But if I had to choose a single topic of all that has to banned, it would be this.
Due to several cognitive biases human perception tends to lean towards black & white depiction of the world. In nuclear war topic black is "we all are gonna die so there is no point to use the nukes" and white is "well, it's not that bad after all, maybe we could nuke those evil Russians/Americans". Black depiction must be maintained in public space even if the preconditions are false. The Overton window must stay where it is now.
If you want to force people to lie or remain silent about what you consider a dangerous truth despite it being discernibly false in order to maintain a convenient fiction soviet style you probably aren't actually a libertarian.
Well, yeah, this is an imaginable scenario, because it's impossible to "ban" such things because of Streisand effect. I would oppose anything like this in the real world.
Interesting that your comment exemplifies the black & white depiction of the world that you describe. A grey depiction is exactly as the article describes - nuclear war would be bad but here are its realistic effects, and here are ways that you can protect yourself from the worst of these effects.
There's a communalist vs. individualist divide here. It may be better for everyone if everyone believes that nuclear war is unspeakably bad and so is off the table as an option. However, it's better for an individual, given that they can't influence world events, if they're armed with a realistic portrayal of nuclear war and steps they can take to protect themselves.
How can we be sure of even a conservative estimate of current warheads. Why wouldn’t US/Russia have significantly more nuclear war heads than they are a) allowed and b) saying they have? Surely it’s in their interest to have more than the other.
The most expensive part of a warhead by far is the fissile material. I imagine the Russians show the US inspectors their stockpiles of fissile material that would need to be melted, cast, then machined before it could be incorporated into a functional warhead.
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).
Russia has about the same economic output as Texas. Trying to keep a massive number of weapons is a stupendous expense already. That many more weapons is throwing money in a pit that you cant use for things like building an economy, or a palace for a dictator.
What do you gain from having additional warheads? If you have enough to kill all enemy decision makers and effectively destroy the enemy nation then having more doesn't do anything for you. The big cost is that your enemy will discover you are secretly amassing nuclear weapons and will escalate against you. Incentives seem to align to keeping relatively low numbers of nukes to me.
>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 up.
So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. I get it - some people focus on the worst case scenario of a human-species-ending nuclear winter. I'm not actually particularly interested in how likely or unlikely that specific outcome is, as the "lesser" outcomes are plenty horrifying enough, and don't call for a general downplaying of nuclear attacks like this.
I've played with the nuke map occasionally for years, though I've never taken it too seriously in terms of estimating realistic damage. I'm not sure what targets would be hit, and by which bombs, and even then, the circles don't provide a holistic, long-term description of damage. But it is a lot of fun.
This tells you nothing about number of people that would die as a result. Remember what happened to global trade when 1 ship was stuck in Suesz?
It takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy all large-scale deepwater ports in the world. Global Trade is crippled. UK and Japan depend on food imports, so people there starve.
It only takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy most oil refining capacity in the world. Czech republic has enough gas to last 6 days
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 of warheads substantially.
And this would be back hundred+ years in civilization, with the easiest energy extraction sources for coal/oil etc already gone. Humanity would have a very hard time following the same tech/energy ladder back to now.
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 <5% capacity, if humanity worked together, we could scale things back up in maybe 10 years. The hardest part I argue isn't necessarily manufacturing, the labor part or even the mineral sourcing, but the technological breakthroughs necessary to advance society. For example, we'd still know how to create electronics with semiconductors and silicon, planes, rockets, missiles and so forth, just not at scale. And all the important books, software and media would be preserved in safe places like the Github code vaults. Of course, this is all assuming we have ego driven passionate people remaining at the helm, ala Elon Musk. But that's not a surefire thing.
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 the remaining infrastructure to safe places on the planet, wherever that may be. But I think it does underscore the need to diversify off of the Earth.
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 anyone, person or government force or leverage to protect it. If cities are destroyed expertise is probably not 95% destroyed, but closer to 99%.
I think the current geopolitics is wiped out. At least the belligerents. Not only are their governments physically destroyed, but they have no legitimacy. They just allowed the worst failure in human history to occur.
I don’t think it’s absurd. Maybe overly optimistic, but life has found a way to make it to where it is today. I have no reason to not believe that humans would still be around and kicking (even some of the Dinosaurs survived to today...). Yes most of the governments would be gone—natural law would take over. But in the end, there are going to be survivors. Some of them are smart. Most of them can talk, read, write and so forth. If you view a nuclear war as completely destroying the planet, I think that’s the problem. Even with all the (known) present nuclear warheads on the planet, we don’t have enough to destroy every meter of land on the planet. That would require deliberate and pinpoint precision, most likely not going to happen.
The Earth is just too big. There will be technologically advanced places that will persist—no matter what. And they’re the keys to gradually returning the planet to where it once was. It’s not going to be a quick process, it’s going to happen on the scale of 10+ years, but it will get done. If this was not the case we can forget about going to Mars or even the Moon and just call it impossible.
> But in the end, there are going to be survivors. Some of them are smart.
Agreed. They however will be spending their time doing subsidence agriculture, basic medicine, hunting, building etc. just like anybody living in premodern conditions.
With 95% population loss you can be damn sure there will be no internet, electricity, water/sewage, refined fuel for transportation etc.
People will quickly revert to the middle ages because they'll have to. There will be no time to tinker with reinventing microelectronics.
> There will be technologically advanced places that will persist—no matter what
You can be basically sure that there won't. The 5% left will be in small remote communities, not in a few big cities.
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.
> 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 most simple objects and devices is, you may lose some sleep.
And this is only about infrastructure - not engineers/specialists who know how to build and operate it.
On top there are no easily available hydrocarbons left to bootstrap an industrial civilization a second time.
If we fuck up this time, or are fucked up by a major extinction event, we’ll be stuck in early middle ages until we die out.
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.
With a nuclear winter, incoming sun energy for solar would be attenuated. Crops would be contaminated and yields due to the same solar attenuation would further be degraded.
Running a machine show would be a practice in slow decline to some very basic levels as you expend your specialized materials dependent on more complex supply chains. You could easily starve while trying to bootstr
I would guess some humanity would survive, but it would be a huge dice role wether you had the basic food and energy resources available in your area, as well as the sheer luck to avoid death from environmental poisoning or missing any of a thousand civilizational inputs (like basic medicines).
A lot of people like to playact like they would survive. I think it would be horrific.
I think that having 5% manufacturing capacity almost might as well be zero given the kinds of things we manufacture today. For example, a car used to have a carburetor that was relatively simple, just a few metal parts. Now we have very sophisticated high pressure fuel injection systems with exotic pumps and valves, all controlled by chips. All of these parts come from different places, and if you don't have a single part, the car doesn't work.
In fact, the chip supply chain is one of the most fragile ones given the extreme complexity and precision of making even older chips, and yet almost every device we use now uses electronics instead of mechanical parts just about everywhere it's possible to make the substitution.
A U.S. nuclear warplanner from around a decade ago (I can link you to him if you're interested) recently stated that he'd suspect that a typical full exchange between the U.S. and Russia would kill 95% of the people living in both countries within 18 months of the attack. Main causes of death would be complete collapse of infrastructure; no supply chains, no food production, no fuel, no heat, no power, no water, no medicine or health care. Most major cities would be destroyed, many cities along rivers would be under fast-flowing as water dams would be targeted to cascade fail most hydrology management, anything downwind of spent fuel storage for nuclear plants (which, in the U.S., are stored above ground near the actual reactors) would be uninhabitable for months to decades, etc. It'd be a very messy 18 months, too, as those left alive immediately after that attack and fallout, which would probably be around 2/3rds of the population of each of the countries, competed for limited resources. And his estimates assumed that nuclear winter was not a real thing. It goes downhill from there if it is.
Yeah, this is the same type of article that, from the comfort of the author's arm chair, says things like: "well humanity survived the black death, basically no matter what we're going to be fine."
You can only shrug it off looking at the abstract numbers. You absolutely do not want to live through a period of history that's anything like that.
especially in a period that kills xx% of the population _due to scarcity of resources_.
in a black plague situation the following generations are almost guaranteed an economic boom of sort as there are more natural resources per capita, in a nuclear winter scenario I believe that many would die and the survivors would still find themselves with incredible scarcity.
> I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up
This is the part you should be concerned about even if a nuclear winter doesn't or can't occur. Ask yourself how many people were alive at the end of the 19th century / early 20th and then compare that to today. Remember that it wasn't for lack of trying and that this was pre-birthcontrol. Then imagine what would happen if you saddled that technology level with 2x, 3x, or 4x the number of mouths to feed.
After a nuclear war the biggest killer would likely be famine. We never think about it since we have escaped it's clutches for so long but it is one of the biggest killers in human history. A nuclear war would destroy our current global supply chain and likely much of the national supply chain as well. Billions of people around the world would starve.
You get it. Digital computers appeared in the 1950's and have dramatically increased the carrying capacity of the planet. People thinking "oh, life wasn't so bad in the late 19th/early 20th century" aren't thinking through the technology available then would reduce the carrying capacity of the planet by 60%. 60% of humanity perishing in a relatively short period of time has never happened before and should be thought of as a civilization threatening event. The collapse of modern civilization will set us back for centuries.
> You absolutely do not want to live through a period of history that's anything like that.
Perhaps a good rule of thumb might be “you don’t want to experience a deadly event where it’s difficult to say whether you’d rather be one of the early people to die or one of the survivors.”
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.
Russia also claims that Moskva wasn't hit by Ukrainian missiles.
Evading ABM isn't easy. You need to generate delta-V to move out of the way, and then be able to get back into target, all the while not knowing if an interceptor is actually going to be coming or when.
ABM is harder than it used to be, but that's because we decided we didn't want to use nukes on interceptors. And that's because we don't want to have to get the president to release nukes to be able do the intercept. Which means we can launch when we think there's an incoming missile without much of an issue, and our reaction time is decreased.
There's nothing in the way our interceptors work that make 1000 harder than 10, aside from the fact that we don't have 1000. On the flipside, the 40 or so we do have, that are likely to kill about 10 incoming warheads. But the Russians don't know which 10. So every target they decide they have to kill needs 11 warheads, not 1. Which man's they can hit 10% of the targets they used to be able to. Or accept that some of the targets they think they should kill won't be dead.
The people who make the claims that ABM is super hard and ineffective against large strikes are generally American experts who used to work in the field.
I thought the author argued there wasn’t enough nuclear weapons to utterly destroy all the infrastructure, even in major cities. No doubt it would be really bad with tens of millions dying in the aftermath. But there would still be intact smaller cities, roads, trains, smaller airports and some industry that wasn’t targeted. Plus a shot ton of farmland and ranches.
Setting the Western world back a century is probably correct. The balance of power would shift to the global South.
The author is wrong. The people who are experts at doing this kind of thing for a living very much believe that a general nuclear war will destroy nearly all infrastructure.
Don't just believe random bloggers with no expertise in the things they're bullshitting about. Even in the open source world, there is an entire body of expert information on this topic that contradicts what this guy is saying.
Sure, here are a couple of resources, both for Russia and the U.S.
For the U.S. plan to attack Russia, the NRDC did an interesting hypothetical attack around 20 years ago to show the impact a U.S. attack would have on Russia. (It's hypothetical because the actual attack plans are classified to the point that even Senators on the big committees don't get to see them when they angrily ask for them.) The report on that hypothetical is here: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/us-nuclear-war-plan...
For the Russian plan to attack the U.S., this reddit thread is a guy who did this for a living answering questions:
The submitter, https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/, has deep knowledge of the issue, and answers a lot of questions. He's kinda a hothead, though, if asked questions the wrong way. I chalk it up to the kind of stress that might come from realizing that the plans you helped to develop to kill hundreds of millions of people might actually get put to use in the foreseeable future.
Now, imagine a world in which there will no longer be any agriculture, fuel, easy access to clean water, electricity, heating, medicine, health care, communications, government, supply chains, or law enforcement. The food supply that was available at stores and in homes has now run out. Fertilizer is no longer available, contemporary farm machinery that runs on petrol won't last long as the petrol dries up (and when they break down, won't be repairable due to DRM). Wildlife might supply enough calories to feed a small fraction of one percent of all people currently still alive.
This would go on indefinitely.
Preppers look at surviving a nuclear war like it's an adventure where all their Eagle Scout skills will finally be put to use. It's really just slow, heartbreaking death from starvation and disease, with horrible violence from desperate people and regional warlords mixed in. Think "The Road", without the extreme environmental destruction.
Note that this wouldn't be everywhere, just in targeted countries. US, Canada, NATO and NATO leaning Europe, Japan, both Koreas, China, Russia. Those not targeted would be looking at this whole thing kinda like insert "it's free real estate" meme here
And if nuclear winter is a real thing, which most contemporary modelling suggests it is (though this is not settled science and some modelling suggests it isn't), likely there won't be an environment conducive to growing crops anywhere in the world for at least 5 years. A lifetime Prepper Magazine subscription won't help you there.
> It's really just slow, heartbreaking death from starvation and disease, with horrible violence from desperate people and regional warlords mixed in. Think "The Road", without the extreme environmental destruction.
Yeah. People do live through those kinds of times, though. And I'd wager at least a few end up thinking it was worth it! Perhaps the Black Death was comparable in that sense, in that it killed 30-50% of Europe?
I also do have some hope that we wouldn't slide back in to warlords, disease, and famine everywhere. Everyone alive will have pretty deeply inculcated norms around fairness, cooperation, and institutions. In some of the less destroyed areas perhaps we'd be able to organize and rebuild a semblance of our current life reasonably quickly (albeit much more local).
> Everyone alive will have pretty deeply inculcated norms around fairness, cooperation, and institutions.
Sorry, but this is extremely naive. Take some time to talk to people who live in high-crime areas and learn about what life is like without those norms. Now imagine everything 10000x worse, because modern society and infrastructure means starvation just doesn't happen all that often. People kill each other over money today, when food becomes more valuable, you don't want to be there...
Easy. Buy a small plot of land in a remote area and stockpile 2 years worth of food and water. It's really not that hard. A human can live off of a small two acre garden. Even if you might be downwind of a major population center, you can build a simple fallout shelter for cheap.
That's the point. It's entirely survivable if you prepare.
I agree with this. Overstating the negative effects of nuclear war do not help us prepare to survive the reality of it. The author states many times that we should still avoid it and it would be the largest disaster ever, but people still seem to resist.
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.
While explicitly high-fallout weapons have been made, most of the more powerful bombs are less dirty, both because fusion boosting is inherently so, and because the maximum destruction radius is a different function of altitude than fallout, so destroying a city is incompatible with poisoning it.
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 electricity comes from hydropower there is a vast amount of it even if oil and coal where somehow unavailable.
It’s likely they would end up with a strange mix of technology in the short term and a different mix of infrastructure long term. Stuff like steel sailboats with small wood fired steam engines for radios.
Biofuel is not really sustainable and requires fuel to harvest. Pretty much all major infrastructure equipment runs on fuel. The difficulty of shifting off of fuel is incredibly large.
Any particular singularity scenario is (and “we’re doomed!” is in that category), but the general idea “something unpredictable will happen” seems like an unavoidable conclusion to me.
(Although that might just be a reverse Epimenides).
Sadly part of a general trend I've noticed post Ukrainian invasion to "sell" nuclear war as a viable response (or at least not a deterrent for "going in there and fixing things dammit") These people have never been in a supermarket and looked at the countries where their food comes from apparently since shipping would pretty much be a dead industry with all port cities (and their port facilities) basically blown to smithereens. Everyone who lives on the coast is going to be "food challenged" in under a month, (likely sooner as hoarding would really kick in) and then starving and fighting their neighbors for food. There would be no "third party" that would be able to ship in food aid, it would be every person for themselves. If nothing else, this one effect would kill billions of people.
It seems more likely that Russia would use them - Putin has talked of deploying them as a threat, and tactical usage has come up in recent days (though from an American source).
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 "out" for attacking NATO forces (say in Poland) where a lot of refugees and material is being shipped through to Ukraine. That would trigger Article 5 which says, briefly, "an attack on one is an attack on all." and we would be in a full hot war with Russia.
At that point, Russia can legitimately claim they "feared for their existence" and launch a nuclear strike (tactically or globally) against NATO countries (including the US) and that ends up with the US and Russian destroying a lot property using nuclear weapons.
There is an argument being made that Putin desperately wants to get attacked by NATO so that hey can threaten nuclear war, and cause NATO to back down. It certainly looks better at home if Russia is on the ropes because NATO is attacking it rather than being on the ropes because a former satellite state of the old USSR is handing it it's ass on a platter.
There is a lot riding on the outcome of the current conflict and it reached a point, quickly enough, that I believe it will reshape geopolitics for decades.
Throughout the Cold War there were people, on both sides, who felt "we could win such a war." Their definition of "winning" was somewhat twisted (as a full out war would result in knocking the world into a very very bad place civilization wise) and it was the subtext of the movie Dr. Strangelove. We have been exceptionally fortunate that we haven't tested their theories. I am, somewhat obviously, in the camp that full on nuclear hostilities would reduce the planet to a population of perhaps one or two million humans, mostly in South America and the Pacific island nations. But I am not anywhere close to being an expert on these things, just a systems analyst type.
So my observations have been:
Call: "We should go in there an kick the Russian's asses."
Response: "We won't because that would start a nuclear war, and we don't want that."
Response: "What if we would 'win' the resulting Nuclear war? Still not going to go kick there asses?"
If you watch any sort of "large conversation" like this, where part of a group wants some action and another part of the group doesn't want that action, you will see this sort of interplay. It happens in companies, it happens in counties, states, countries, and the world at large. Various voices attempting to achieve a sufficiently high level of consensus from the group in order to take an action. Failing to achieve a high enough level consensus results in "group antibodies" which are basically people who become so offended at the action proposed the switch to becoming active members of resistance and start trying to generate counter action consensus.
I have exploited this effect to create change in large organizations that were stagnant. You start by pushing just enough on the change to 'surface' the people who had been acting through intermediaries to act directly. Then you can identify them and have a one on one conversation to get them signed up for the change. Do that enough times to surface all the resistance, and then at some point the change just "goes through" because "everyone seems to think it is the right thing to do."
> Of course NFZs have to be enforced to actually be NFZs and that means NATO shooting down Russian jets/helicopters/missiles that violate it
No, that's not actually the issue.
The issue is that the usual method of NFZ enforcement means preemptively destroying Russian air defenses first, to make it safe for aircraft patrolling the skies to find and intercept aircraft that might violate it.
Of course, at least one NATO member (e.g., Poland) has gone beyond calling for an NFZ to call for NATO peacekeepers on the ground for various purposes.
NATO’s Eastern flank is not super happy with waiting for Russia to attack them, given their demonstrated aggressiveness and rhetoric tied to historical imperial Russian territory.
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.
Yes, obviously this. I support stronger military action. I don’t want nuclear war. Again, obviously.
All that blob of text is pointless. NATO need merely declare it has no offensive ambitions. Which it doesn’t. Then there’s no existential threat.
Whether Russia chooses to use nukes, likely against kyiv, is really independent of that distinction. Whether the west responds with nukes is all but assuredly “no”.
That's a terrible analogy, nuclear weapons are more akin to everyone being armed with grenades and trapped in the same room. You're going to get hit no matter what so as soon as one person pulls a pin their target is going to do the same and everyone is getting hit by shrapnel.
> NATO need merely declare it has no offensive ambitions. Which it doesn’t. Then there’s no existential threat.
Let's examine that from a counterfactual standpoint. Let's say that during the invasion of Iraq Russia had decided to impose a no fly zone and then proceeded to shoot down American aircraft when they violated it. They of course declared that they have no offensive ambitions, they're simply helping to defend a sovereign nation against a larger aggressor. Would that have caused the United States to attack Russian forces?
You comment is precisely correct. It is the trolley problem writ large.
That is part of the reason why there are college courses dedicated to the topic, pages and pages of historical analysis of the choices made in situations in the past their their outcomes, analyses of the issues leading up to the "fulcrum point" of the crisis, and daily assessments (guesses) of the mental state of, and the response of, the key players in the situation.
That these situations are not popping up every day is a testament to the work of a functional state department and diplomatic corps. And it is why the people in that corps who heard a President extorting a foreign leader by withholding military support in exchange political favors, were so horrified.
No, there's a number of fools that think getting into a conventional war with a Russia that threatens a nuclear response is smart.
Either because they think that a nuclear escalation won't happen, or, more concerningly, because they think that a nuclear escalation is something that they can win.
This essay is leaning very hard on the fact that there are 5% the number of warheads today as there were at the peak of the cold war. Nuclear weapons are exactly as destructive as we think; the sum total of the nuclear arsenal is far smaller than when many of us formed our impressions.
3rd paragraph, although parent may have a typo - rather than 300 - 800 it says 300 - 500
In practice, most strategic nuclear warheads today are in the 300-500 kT range, with tactical weapons being smaller. If we take the American W88 (455 kT) as representative of this range
The analysis is interesting and makes sense that populations wouldn’t largely be targeted, but it seems that’s assuming some kind of logical strategy to the war where the objective is to disable the forces of your opponent. That’s nice and tidy to then say populated areas won’t largely be targeted, but what if the objective in using them just becomes to create as much human suffering as possible?
Nukes don't need to wipe out every square inch as the author implies. They only need to cause covid-like, ukraine-like interference to our infrastructure to reduce our planet to the iron age and only capable of supporting a fraction of its current population.
"Known" nuclear weapons. Good part of the motivation of that arms race was to discourage the enemy to start a war, even if they had everything to win it. In that line, there had been rumours of doomsday devices (like Dead Hand from URSS in the Cold War) that could put in danger most life on Earth, that could be triggered if some side loses or other defined conditions. It is a level up from mutual assured destruction.
And that example is from 50+ years ago. I don't know if something more advanced was developed more recently by either side. Technology and science had advanced a lot and both sides had a pretty big budget all this time. I prefer to not discard the possibility.
> rumours of doomsday devices (like Dead Hand from URSS in the Cold War) that could put in danger most life on Earth, that could be triggered if some side loses or other defined conditions.
The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret!
A message is not a message if doesn't reach your intended audience. In the other hand, it could reach just your intended audience and not the whole world, your own citizens could take that message as something negative.
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 assumptions:
- Hardened, remote military targets will soak up a lot of warheads that could otherwise be targeted to wreck cities or general-purpose infrastructure.
- Civilization will only regress to an early-20th-century level after every oil refinery has been destroyed and the surrounding populations decimated.
That last pair of assumptions in particular raises my eyebrows:
"To put this into perspective, there are currently about 1,200 international airports and 732 oil refineries worldwide. Allocating a single warhead to each of these would leave only a thousand or so for every single other target on the planet."
and
"Most people even in major urban areas would survive the initial attack, along with a surprising amount of infrastructure. This isn’t to minimize the effects, as 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 up."
It hardly matters if most people survived the initial attack if all the oil refineries are gone, along with all the infrastructure within a couple miles of each oil refinery. Early 20th century technology supported fewer than 2 billion people, most of those being people who already knew how to farm without artificial fertilizers. Today we are nearly 8 billion and a much smaller fraction have any experience farming. A nuclear war that globally knocks technology back to the early 20th century, even for "only" a decade or so, would lead to the death of most people now alive. At that point I'm skeptical that there would be enough survivors to sustain even as much specialization of labor as found in the early 20th century industrialized economies. Technology level and population could fall much further.
This right here. When the green revolution dies so does 90% of humanity.
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.
"people who already knew how to farm without artificial fertilizers. Today we are nearly 8 billion and a much smaller fraction have any experience farming."
As if it were an expensive and impractical proposition for more people to grow a little food.
The reason fewer people engage in farming is that fewer people need to engage in it, and it is neither well-rewarded nor an intrinsically desirable activity for most people. It's nothing to do with not knowing how or being unable to learn.
1/3 acre of potatoes to feed a family of 4. You might also need a stock of whatever one uses to treat blight. A few chickens for eggs. Maybe let the farmers keep cows as they are good at it.
John deer tractors digitally brick themselves if you replace a part without authorisation. Most modern Ag machinery will be gone. Modern farms don't plant seed from their last harvest, specialised farms cultivate seeds, and 'normal' farms buy them and plants them - that system will be gone. Most agrochemicals will be gone.
Is your plan to give a random joe a field and a hoe? They will get maybe 30% of the yield a proffeshional farmer would. That means a famine. And they will be unavaliable for any other much-nessesary construction and repair work, because without specialised equipment it's weeks of back-breaking work just to harvest 1 field of potato.
Average person does not even know the difference between a potato seed and a potato tuber, let alone the optimal varieties, time for planting, etc. Which will be impossible anyway, because the infrastructure is gone.
And because you will have random idiots planting potato without any knowledge of disease and pest control, they will run rampant and cause famine:
Hackers will suddenly become some of the most valuable people in society. Those tractors will be jailbroken inside of a month.
The average human wants to survive. If that survival is predicating on knowing about sustainable potato agriculture, you better believe that folks will learn.
> They will get maybe 30% of the yield a proffeshional farmer would.
So we only need three times as many random joes as "proffeshional" farmers to produce the same amount of food? That's much better than I thought.
I agree that without industrialized farming, the food supply is questionable. But the idea that the trouble is in people not having the necessary skills, rather than petrochemical availability, is simply laughable.
Agricultural society has existed for tens of thousands of years and people engage in agricultural activity to the extent that it is needed.
This is what a typical attack on the U.S. would likely look like. Attack 1 is an attack that attempts to hit the U.S. silos in addition to other U.S. military and civilian targets. It's what would perhaps be used in a first-strike scenario. Attack 2 assumes that the land based U.S. missiles have already launched, and only targets military and civilian targets, but doesn't worry about targeting U.S. land based missile silos.
The casualties figure is immediate, and doesn't include things like the breakdown of society -- this is just the casualties estimated from the actual war itself.
Destroying the entirety of Manhattan beneath 80th st or so, along with a significant part of Manhattan-facing Brooklyn and Hoboken shorelines, with a single reasonably placed bomb is actually about as destructive as I imagined (following their 3 miles out rule).
If all of the nukes in the world went off at once, strategically spaced out to cause the most land coverage (I.E. some kind of Dr Strangelove situation), the world would look mostly the same. Green grass, blue oceans. It wouldn't be scorched earth. But, of course, those unlucky enough to live downwind, within 100 or so miles of a nuke, would get a healthy dose of radiation to their internal organs, as radioactive dust would be unavoidable. For decades, that fallout region would be uninhabitable, because radioactive isotopes would be incorporated into plants and animals.
So yeah, not the end of the world, or even civilization, but I wouldn't want to live in that world.
> 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.
Following a nuclear exchange, it is unlikely that a country without ports, airports, transit networks, or a military, would remain the financial hub of the world.
> 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?
I did see that. I suppose my thinking is that both seem like prime targets, so they could easily both be high on the list.
I’m probably failing to recognize the number of “prime” targets in the really, really big world though. It’s in the territory of scales so huge that brains are bad at drawing useful conclusions. I also have no idea about war strategy, let alone of this variety.
It seems like you have the order of things mixed up. The point is that destroying a financial hub of the world is a more effective way of collapsing civilization than destroying a port.
I don’t have an opinion regarding order of port vs. financial hub. New York is a target for its communications infrastructure. That is in large part a component which facilitates its staus as a financial/economic hub. If you have a city of ~9M and a metro area of 20M without orderly communication, things can unravel from within very quickly. And everything not destroyed at that point becomes easy pickings.
1. Moscow is definitely getting targeted, as it’s a big administrative centre. But it’s also a big population centre, so a revenge attack on a big population centre is to be expected.
2. Food and manufacturing nowadays depends on things like futures contracts, foreign currency exchange, lines of credit and so on. Not to mention the ownership of the companies doing it! The right type of damage to the financial system could be very impactful.
Transporting grain makes a bit more sense than sending ground troops to Europe in a post nuclear war situation, but it’s still mostly nonsense. New York isn’t a hub of bankers. It’s the hub of commerce. Yes, it’s critically important.
Also, according to the Nukemap website the author links to: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ you can hit everything from Philadelphia to New York with a single single Tsar bomba. With a bomb like that it hardly matters if you aim it at Port Elizabeth or Manhattan.
Tsar bomba is not in service in anyone's arsenal. It was a one-off test device built to see how big an explosion you could generate with a multi-stage thermonuclear reaction.
Not to mention it's not very effective since ICBMs rely on having many projectiles per missile to try and confuse any defensive technology. Tsar Bomba would very much be a Death Star like threat. Scary on paper, but concentrating too much force in a single place.
Counterforce vs. countervalue strategy. A limited nuclear exchange would almost certainly be counterforce, and focused on things like military targets and ports. A larger exchange would become a countervalue exercise focused on economic targets.
"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."
I'm not sure what universe this cat lives in, but I'm pretty sure Moscow would far more concerned with vaporizing Wall Street than in whatever naval stuff happens in Red Hook or Port Elizabeth (rather than Annapolis or Chesapeake). Or does he think wars are still won by navies instead of bankers? :-D
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 for centuries, yet half of us (i.e more than 4 billion humans) would still be there afterwards.
The problem we have today is that of specialization. I dont believe there is a viable scenario where only 40% of the population dies. We either lose something like less than 10% of the population or we loose over 80%.
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.
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.
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
> So even if you have your own farms, property rights are basically over under a catastrophe of that scale
1. And for the same reason, just any kind of government will be forced to seize land from vapid hipsters, and grow something edible on it, along with enforcing at least minimal rationing.
2. 1/3 of food in the world is wasted
> consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food, 222 million tonnes, as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa
A healthy young adult can live a heck a lot of time on one bag of staple foods.
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.
Just one of many pro-nuke propaganda pieces prepping our minds for the next stage of war, actual nuclear war. The more we discuss the merits, the more "acceptable" the outcomes seem to become in the popular zeitgeist.
This appears like a navy-glorification website. If not government backed, then it could at least be think-tank backed, with a military industrial bent.
This is an article downplaying the severity and seriousness of the use of nuclear weapons. It was published shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine (again). Perhaps the timing is just a coincidence, but I've come to learn over the years that it's unlikely.
This article is written in response to articles/claims proclaiming that nuclear war will cause people to become extinct (or similarly overblown claims).
If they are downplaying nuclear war - can you recommend articles of a similar quality presenting claim that nuclear war is worse than presented here?
And this article still presents it as an horrific disaster - and maybe it assumes that people are aware that millions would die in just opening of the nuclear war, it would be worst disaster in history. And that such thing happening would be bad. And unwanted.
And focused on countering "we will all die" perspective.
For example they are taking as given that USA shooting down Russian planes over Ukraine is nonstarter because it increases risk of nuclear war,
Yeah, but you know - if they start flying, we're dead.
I'm in the middle of Poland, it really won't be any comfort for me that USA will survive when I'll be dead.
It's just a form of stress coping. It's entirely delusional and I think it's very important we not allow this type of thinking to be a normal form of thought (as uncomfortable as it is).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadI'm not concerned about it deciding to end civilization. It can't. All those weapons can do for it is to provide a guarantee that anyone starting a war with them will lose a lot more than they gain.
If you're concerned about Chinese nuclear weapons, my best advice for you is to not go to war with China.
For example if Russia were to commit further atrocities worse than actual nuclear war, and the civilized world refused to call their bluff because the cost of imaginary nuclear war is worse still.
Of course there are also scenarios where bluffs getting made and called are net-negative utility, and maybe you wouldn’t make those bluffs if you thought them being called would end the world? However Putin is already making threats of nuclear retaliation, so this point is probably moot.
Is this even physically possible? I mean imagine Hitler was winning WW2 and the only way to stop him was to cause global nuclear war with today's arcenal - are you confident which is the better option?
>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 exaggeration of nuclear weapons on anti-nuclear and anti-proliferation.
It would seem likely to me that the exaggeration is more due to pro-nuclear forces and nuclear state powers, with the aim of promoting peace through power and deterrence.
The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles. The assumption that both sides haven't done some planning for both scorched earth targetting approaches, and "survivable" exchanges also seems suspect. Who's to say that Russia wouldn't target conventional military infrastructure, and civilian population centers, having assumed that all deployable warheads would already have been fired? They could reasonably assess that the value of targeting silos which have already fired their missiles is low, and the need for post-war food production will be high.
Alternately, they could adopt a scorched earth targeting policy to maximize fallout and leave the US in a permanently weakened state. I'm sure all nuclear powers have tried to maximize their choices in how to deploy weapons in any conflict.
That's what SLBMs are for. An SLBM launched off the Oregon coast could hit missile silos in Montana in under 5 minutes. Launch in the middle of the night and there's not enough time to get the President out of bed and brief him before the missiles impact. (For that matter, if you park an SSBN 500 miles off Washington DC, it can get nuked in 3 minutes, probably killing the president as there's not enough time to get him down into the bunker. That's why the U.S. developed the SOSUS network, so you can't park an SSBN 500 miles off Washington without us knowing about it.)
Modern SLBMs (1980s and onwards) are explicitly designed for this role, with depressed flight trajectories, low CEP, MIRVs, hardened silo penetrators, and warhead yields calibrated to destroy typical silos, given an accurate ground burst.
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.
[1] https://ia800501.us.archive.org/35/items/NuclearWarSurvivalS...
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.
The quality of OPEN-RISOP is generally pretty good, and the author worked at Sandia National Labs about 10-20 years ago. Targeting at least is pretty consistent with what I'd expect as high value targets. OPEN-RISOP's counterforce + countervalue scenario only tallies about 60M fatalities (~20% of US population) from the original attack. chakalakaps must be assuming cascading failures of infrastructure & food production after the initial attack (a la Threads [2]). While this is a distinct possibility, it's far from a given - and this is also one of those areas where being prepared (eg. having a year of dried foodstuffs stored, or a small personal garden) can give you a distinct survival advantage.
[1] https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/tree/main/TARGET%20...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE
If real-world nukes, play with Nukemap to get an idea.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Due to several cognitive biases human perception tends to lean towards black & white depiction of the world. In nuclear war topic black is "we all are gonna die so there is no point to use the nukes" and white is "well, it's not that bad after all, maybe we could nuke those evil Russians/Americans". Black depiction must be maintained in public space even if the preconditions are false. The Overton window must stay where it is now.
There's a communalist vs. individualist divide here. It may be better for everyone if everyone believes that nuclear war is unspeakably bad and so is off the table as an option. However, it's better for an individual, given that they can't influence world events, if they're armed with a realistic portrayal of nuclear war and steps they can take to protect themselves.
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).
So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. I get it - some people focus on the worst case scenario of a human-species-ending nuclear winter. I'm not actually particularly interested in how likely or unlikely that specific outcome is, as the "lesser" outcomes are plenty horrifying enough, and don't call for a general downplaying of nuclear attacks like this.
It takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy all large-scale deepwater ports in the world. Global Trade is crippled. UK and Japan depend on food imports, so people there starve.
It only takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy most oil refining capacity in the world. Czech republic has enough gas to last 6 days
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 of warheads substantially.
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 the remaining infrastructure to safe places on the planet, wherever that may be. But I think it does underscore the need to diversify off of the Earth.
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 anyone, person or government force or leverage to protect it. If cities are destroyed expertise is probably not 95% destroyed, but closer to 99%.
I think the current geopolitics is wiped out. At least the belligerents. Not only are their governments physically destroyed, but they have no legitimacy. They just allowed the worst failure in human history to occur.
There's no assurances what happens next.
Agreed. They however will be spending their time doing subsidence agriculture, basic medicine, hunting, building etc. just like anybody living in premodern conditions.
With 95% population loss you can be damn sure there will be no internet, electricity, water/sewage, refined fuel for transportation etc.
People will quickly revert to the middle ages because they'll have to. There will be no time to tinker with reinventing microelectronics.
> There will be technologically advanced places that will persist—no matter what
You can be basically sure that there won't. The 5% left will be in small remote communities, not in a few big cities.
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.
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 most simple objects and devices is, you may lose some sleep. And this is only about infrastructure - not engineers/specialists who know how to build and operate it. On top there are no easily available hydrocarbons left to bootstrap an industrial civilization a second time.
If we fuck up this time, or are fucked up by a major extinction event, we’ll be stuck in early middle ages until we die out.
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.
Running a machine show would be a practice in slow decline to some very basic levels as you expend your specialized materials dependent on more complex supply chains. You could easily starve while trying to bootstr
I would guess some humanity would survive, but it would be a huge dice role wether you had the basic food and energy resources available in your area, as well as the sheer luck to avoid death from environmental poisoning or missing any of a thousand civilizational inputs (like basic medicines).
A lot of people like to playact like they would survive. I think it would be horrific.
In fact, the chip supply chain is one of the most fragile ones given the extreme complexity and precision of making even older chips, and yet almost every device we use now uses electronics instead of mechanical parts just about everywhere it's possible to make the substitution.
Note that diesel engines were made with rather low-tech.
He's an engineer who's job was, in the past, to be one of the people who developed the U.S. nuclear warplans against Russia.
His open source attempt at using his understanding to build hypothetical target laydowns for Russian attacks against the U.S. is here:
https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP
You can only shrug it off looking at the abstract numbers. You absolutely do not want to live through a period of history that's anything like that.
in a black plague situation the following generations are almost guaranteed an economic boom of sort as there are more natural resources per capita, in a nuclear winter scenario I believe that many would die and the survivors would still find themselves with incredible scarcity.
Did you read the article? I think you are making its point, which is that it is bad but not as bad as most people think.
This is the part you should be concerned about even if a nuclear winter doesn't or can't occur. Ask yourself how many people were alive at the end of the 19th century / early 20th and then compare that to today. Remember that it wasn't for lack of trying and that this was pre-birthcontrol. Then imagine what would happen if you saddled that technology level with 2x, 3x, or 4x the number of mouths to feed.
After a nuclear war the biggest killer would likely be famine. We never think about it since we have escaped it's clutches for so long but it is one of the biggest killers in human history. A nuclear war would destroy our current global supply chain and likely much of the national supply chain as well. Billions of people around the world would starve.
Perhaps a good rule of thumb might be “you don’t want to experience a deadly event where it’s difficult to say whether you’d rather be one of the early people to die or one of the survivors.”
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).
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.
ABM stuff works okayish against very small numbers of incoming warheads. ABM is completely ineffective against large numbers of inbound warheads.
Evading ABM isn't easy. You need to generate delta-V to move out of the way, and then be able to get back into target, all the while not knowing if an interceptor is actually going to be coming or when.
ABM is harder than it used to be, but that's because we decided we didn't want to use nukes on interceptors. And that's because we don't want to have to get the president to release nukes to be able do the intercept. Which means we can launch when we think there's an incoming missile without much of an issue, and our reaction time is decreased.
There's nothing in the way our interceptors work that make 1000 harder than 10, aside from the fact that we don't have 1000. On the flipside, the 40 or so we do have, that are likely to kill about 10 incoming warheads. But the Russians don't know which 10. So every target they decide they have to kill needs 11 warheads, not 1. Which man's they can hit 10% of the targets they used to be able to. Or accept that some of the targets they think they should kill won't be dead.
Setting the Western world back a century is probably correct. The balance of power would shift to the global South.
Don't just believe random bloggers with no expertise in the things they're bullshitting about. Even in the open source world, there is an entire body of expert information on this topic that contradicts what this guy is saying.
For the U.S. plan to attack Russia, the NRDC did an interesting hypothetical attack around 20 years ago to show the impact a U.S. attack would have on Russia. (It's hypothetical because the actual attack plans are classified to the point that even Senators on the big committees don't get to see them when they angrily ask for them.) The report on that hypothetical is here: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/us-nuclear-war-plan...
For the Russian plan to attack the U.S., this reddit thread is a guy who did this for a living answering questions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/trkfe7/three_hypotheti...
The submitter, https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/, has deep knowledge of the issue, and answers a lot of questions. He's kinda a hothead, though, if asked questions the wrong way. I chalk it up to the kind of stress that might come from realizing that the plans you helped to develop to kill hundreds of millions of people might actually get put to use in the foreseeable future.
He also answers some questions in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/tpa3ao/openriso...
The nuclear winter stuff is more interesting. Most recent papers are very much thinking it's a very big deal:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3155983 http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ChinaNWrice8inpress.pd... https://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/OzdoganNuclearWinterM... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF00... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5478 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1919049117 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JD02... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD03...
One paper that feels the nuclear winter risk is overstated is ...
1) Don't die in the initial strike. Take a working vacation to the countryside when things look tense if you live near obvious targets.
2) Have a few months' worth of food and water on hand
3) Skill with guns, ammo, and guns, in that order
4) Friends. Have friends who also have a modicum of preparedness and useful skills, or be good at making them
5) Healthcare and sanitation. Know the basics, have the basics.
That's a start from some rando on the internet
Now, imagine a world in which there will no longer be any agriculture, fuel, easy access to clean water, electricity, heating, medicine, health care, communications, government, supply chains, or law enforcement. The food supply that was available at stores and in homes has now run out. Fertilizer is no longer available, contemporary farm machinery that runs on petrol won't last long as the petrol dries up (and when they break down, won't be repairable due to DRM). Wildlife might supply enough calories to feed a small fraction of one percent of all people currently still alive.
This would go on indefinitely.
Preppers look at surviving a nuclear war like it's an adventure where all their Eagle Scout skills will finally be put to use. It's really just slow, heartbreaking death from starvation and disease, with horrible violence from desperate people and regional warlords mixed in. Think "The Road", without the extreme environmental destruction.
Note that this wouldn't be everywhere, just in targeted countries. US, Canada, NATO and NATO leaning Europe, Japan, both Koreas, China, Russia. Those not targeted would be looking at this whole thing kinda like insert "it's free real estate" meme here
And if nuclear winter is a real thing, which most contemporary modelling suggests it is (though this is not settled science and some modelling suggests it isn't), likely there won't be an environment conducive to growing crops anywhere in the world for at least 5 years. A lifetime Prepper Magazine subscription won't help you there.
Yeah. People do live through those kinds of times, though. And I'd wager at least a few end up thinking it was worth it! Perhaps the Black Death was comparable in that sense, in that it killed 30-50% of Europe?
I also do have some hope that we wouldn't slide back in to warlords, disease, and famine everywhere. Everyone alive will have pretty deeply inculcated norms around fairness, cooperation, and institutions. In some of the less destroyed areas perhaps we'd be able to organize and rebuild a semblance of our current life reasonably quickly (albeit much more local).
P.S. fuck DRM :-)
Sorry, but this is extremely naive. Take some time to talk to people who live in high-crime areas and learn about what life is like without those norms. Now imagine everything 10000x worse, because modern society and infrastructure means starvation just doesn't happen all that often. People kill each other over money today, when food becomes more valuable, you don't want to be there...
That's the point. It's entirely survivable if you prepare.
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.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were both rebuilt, cancer levels in those cities in people conceived after the bombs is indistinguishable from places that weren’t nuked: https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki
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 electricity comes from hydropower there is a vast amount of it even if oil and coal where somehow unavailable.
It’s likely they would end up with a strange mix of technology in the short term and a different mix of infrastructure long term. Stuff like steel sailboats with small wood fired steam engines for radios.
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.
(Although that might just be a reverse Epimenides).
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-cannot-take-lightly-threat-...
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 "out" for attacking NATO forces (say in Poland) where a lot of refugees and material is being shipped through to Ukraine. That would trigger Article 5 which says, briefly, "an attack on one is an attack on all." and we would be in a full hot war with Russia.
At that point, Russia can legitimately claim they "feared for their existence" and launch a nuclear strike (tactically or globally) against NATO countries (including the US) and that ends up with the US and Russian destroying a lot property using nuclear weapons.
There is an argument being made that Putin desperately wants to get attacked by NATO so that hey can threaten nuclear war, and cause NATO to back down. It certainly looks better at home if Russia is on the ropes because NATO is attacking it rather than being on the ropes because a former satellite state of the old USSR is handing it it's ass on a platter.
There is a lot riding on the outcome of the current conflict and it reached a point, quickly enough, that I believe it will reshape geopolitics for decades.
Throughout the Cold War there were people, on both sides, who felt "we could win such a war." Their definition of "winning" was somewhat twisted (as a full out war would result in knocking the world into a very very bad place civilization wise) and it was the subtext of the movie Dr. Strangelove. We have been exceptionally fortunate that we haven't tested their theories. I am, somewhat obviously, in the camp that full on nuclear hostilities would reduce the planet to a population of perhaps one or two million humans, mostly in South America and the Pacific island nations. But I am not anywhere close to being an expert on these things, just a systems analyst type.
So my observations have been:
Call: "We should go in there an kick the Russian's asses."
Response: "We won't because that would start a nuclear war, and we don't want that."
Response: "What if we would 'win' the resulting Nuclear war? Still not going to go kick there asses?"
If you watch any sort of "large conversation" like this, where part of a group wants some action and another part of the group doesn't want that action, you will see this sort of interplay. It happens in companies, it happens in counties, states, countries, and the world at large. Various voices attempting to achieve a sufficiently high level of consensus from the group in order to take an action. Failing to achieve a high enough level consensus results in "group antibodies" which are basically people who become so offended at the action proposed the switch to becoming active members of resistance and start trying to generate counter action consensus.
I have exploited this effect to create change in large organizations that were stagnant. You start by pushing just enough on the change to 'surface' the people who had been acting through intermediaries to act directly. Then you can identify them and have a one on one conversation to get them signed up for the change. Do that enough times to surface all the resistance, and then at some point the change just "goes through" because "everyone seems to think it is the right thing to do."
No, that's not actually the issue.
The issue is that the usual method of NFZ enforcement means preemptively destroying Russian air defenses first, to make it safe for aircraft patrolling the skies to find and intercept aircraft that might violate it.
Of course, at least one NATO member (e.g., Poland) has gone beyond calling for an NFZ to call for NATO peacekeepers on the ground for various purposes.
NATO’s Eastern flank is not super happy with waiting for Russia to attack them, given their demonstrated aggressiveness and rhetoric tied to historical imperial Russian territory.
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.
All that blob of text is pointless. NATO need merely declare it has no offensive ambitions. Which it doesn’t. Then there’s no existential threat.
Whether Russia chooses to use nukes, likely against kyiv, is really independent of that distinction. Whether the west responds with nukes is all but assuredly “no”.
Yet the bully also knows if they actually use the gun they'll be put down like a feral dog before they have time to reload.
Let's examine that from a counterfactual standpoint. Let's say that during the invasion of Iraq Russia had decided to impose a no fly zone and then proceeded to shoot down American aircraft when they violated it. They of course declared that they have no offensive ambitions, they're simply helping to defend a sovereign nation against a larger aggressor. Would that have caused the United States to attack Russian forces?
That is part of the reason why there are college courses dedicated to the topic, pages and pages of historical analysis of the choices made in situations in the past their their outcomes, analyses of the issues leading up to the "fulcrum point" of the crisis, and daily assessments (guesses) of the mental state of, and the response of, the key players in the situation.
That these situations are not popping up every day is a testament to the work of a functional state department and diplomatic corps. And it is why the people in that corps who heard a President extorting a foreign leader by withholding military support in exchange political favors, were so horrified.
Either because they think that a nuclear escalation won't happen, or, more concerningly, because they think that a nuclear escalation is something that they can win.
In practice, most strategic nuclear warheads today are in the 300-500 kT range, with tactical weapons being smaller. If we take the American W88 (455 kT) as representative of this range
And that example is from 50+ years ago. I don't know if something more advanced was developed more recently by either side. Technology and science had advanced a lot and both sides had a pretty big budget all this time. I prefer to not discard the possibility.
The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozg7gEchjuM
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 assumptions:
- Hardened, remote military targets will soak up a lot of warheads that could otherwise be targeted to wreck cities or general-purpose infrastructure.
- Civilization will only regress to an early-20th-century level after every oil refinery has been destroyed and the surrounding populations decimated.
That last pair of assumptions in particular raises my eyebrows:
"To put this into perspective, there are currently about 1,200 international airports and 732 oil refineries worldwide. Allocating a single warhead to each of these would leave only a thousand or so for every single other target on the planet."
and
"Most people even in major urban areas would survive the initial attack, along with a surprising amount of infrastructure. This isn’t to minimize the effects, as 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 up."
It hardly matters if most people survived the initial attack if all the oil refineries are gone, along with all the infrastructure within a couple miles of each oil refinery. Early 20th century technology supported fewer than 2 billion people, most of those being people who already knew how to farm without artificial fertilizers. Today we are nearly 8 billion and a much smaller fraction have any experience farming. A nuclear war that globally knocks technology back to the early 20th century, even for "only" a decade or so, would lead to the death of most people now alive. At that point I'm skeptical that there would be enough survivors to sustain even as much specialization of labor as found in the early 20th century industrialized economies. Technology level and population could fall much further.
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.
As if it were an expensive and impractical proposition for more people to grow a little food.
The reason fewer people engage in farming is that fewer people need to engage in it, and it is neither well-rewarded nor an intrinsically desirable activity for most people. It's nothing to do with not knowing how or being unable to learn.
Is your plan to give a random joe a field and a hoe? They will get maybe 30% of the yield a proffeshional farmer would. That means a famine. And they will be unavaliable for any other much-nessesary construction and repair work, because without specialised equipment it's weeks of back-breaking work just to harvest 1 field of potato.
Average person does not even know the difference between a potato seed and a potato tuber, let alone the optimal varieties, time for planting, etc. Which will be impossible anyway, because the infrastructure is gone.
And because you will have random idiots planting potato without any knowledge of disease and pest control, they will run rampant and cause famine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
The average human wants to survive. If that survival is predicating on knowing about sustainable potato agriculture, you better believe that folks will learn.
So we only need three times as many random joes as "proffeshional" farmers to produce the same amount of food? That's much better than I thought.
I agree that without industrialized farming, the food supply is questionable. But the idea that the trouble is in people not having the necessary skills, rather than petrochemical availability, is simply laughable. Agricultural society has existed for tens of thousands of years and people engage in agricultural activity to the extent that it is needed.
Attack laydown 1: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/main...
Attack laydown 2:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/main...
The casualties figure is immediate, and doesn't include things like the breakdown of society -- this is just the casualties estimated from the actual war itself.
But sure, let's lighten up about nukes!
So yeah, not the end of the world, or even civilization, but I wouldn't want to live in that world.
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?
I’m probably failing to recognize the number of “prime” targets in the really, really big world though. It’s in the territory of scales so huge that brains are bad at drawing useful conclusions. I also have no idea about war strategy, let alone of this variety.
2. Food and manufacturing nowadays depends on things like futures contracts, foreign currency exchange, lines of credit and so on. Not to mention the ownership of the companies doing it! The right type of damage to the financial system could be very impactful.
3. There’s plenty of bombs to go around.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/main...
I'm not sure what universe this cat lives in, but I'm pretty sure Moscow would far more concerned with vaporizing Wall Street than in whatever naval stuff happens in Red Hook or Port Elizabeth (rather than Annapolis or Chesapeake). Or does he think wars are still won by navies instead of bankers? :-D
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 for centuries, yet half of us (i.e more than 4 billion humans) would still be there afterwards.
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.
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.
1. And for the same reason, just any kind of government will be forced to seize land from vapid hipsters, and grow something edible on it, along with enforcing at least minimal rationing.
2. 1/3 of food in the world is wasted
> consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food, 222 million tonnes, as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa
A healthy young adult can live a heck a lot of time on one bag of staple foods.
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.
Surely part of the ruse!
If they are downplaying nuclear war - can you recommend articles of a similar quality presenting claim that nuclear war is worse than presented here?
And this article still presents it as an horrific disaster - and maybe it assumes that people are aware that millions would die in just opening of the nuclear war, it would be worst disaster in history. And that such thing happening would be bad. And unwanted.
And focused on countering "we will all die" perspective.
For example they are taking as given that USA shooting down Russian planes over Ukraine is nonstarter because it increases risk of nuclear war,