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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Is that really true?

I've only ever heard this but I just find it hard to believe.

Like, whose nuking Italy and is the nuclear fallout really going to destroy Italy? Or the Pacific islands? Florida?

Will all the missiles actually hit? Won't most be intercepted?

I just don't buy it but I have zero reference point for this aside from the 1000 & 1 times over heard it said.

Literally destroyed, every square mile burning and uninhabitable? No. Not 99% human extinction, maybe not 90%.

Irreparable damage to any way of life more sophisticated than the 1700s, probably. Quite a large fraction of the world is next to either a military base or an industrial target.

There's also the problem that most of the cheap if dirty sources of energy and other resources are much scarcer than they were in the industrial period. Even with modern knowledge to bootstrap it would be harder to build back to the same level of technology.

And that the best places to live and build are...currently occupied and built upon, and thus high on the target list.

Airbursts (for maximum effect on surface targets) have very little residual radiation at the target site at least. A few days to a few weeks (how long before survivor populations in this sort of scenario would even venture towards bombed out target locations) should be fine. Ground bursting trades radius for the ability to hit hardened, buried targets (plus fallout) and wouldn't likely be used in most of those desirable locations. Not great for current occupants but survivors ought to be able to recolonize many of those nice places to live without that much trouble.

Unfortunately there's a lot of ground burst targets near some cities, like major railyards, ports, or the giant buried warehouse of ~2300 Trident missile warheads sitting right next to Seattle. Some of those places are going to glow for a long time.

Edit: maybe only a thousand or so now, unless the ones they're planning to scrap are still in storage?

The key thing here to understand is half life and radioactivity.

The worse, more harmful some radiation product is, the faster it decays into something harmless.

Another key thing that dangers of radiation are massively overhyped. It's deadly, but not nearly as much as people believe due to popular media. (you can google 'radiation hormesis' and read about it)

Will all the missiles actually hit? Won't most be intercepted?

Intercepting ballistic missiles is very unusual; it can be done but at the moment you can only hope to see a missile intercepted if you e.g. are on a US carrier, and there are not too many incoming warheads. Of course, in any real war on any protected target, they'd fire multiples.

Wouldn’t Brazil and Australia come through a global nuclear war fairly intact, while being major food powers? Obviously USA, Russia, Canada, Ukraine, China don’t do too well in the event of a nuclear war, and Argentine and New Zealand agriculture is probably very reliant on imported inputs, but those two seem reasonably well suited to autarky and are major food exporters.

It does make me wonder about the minor nuclear calculus. Sure, France and the UK are probably bound to deploy as the US says. Does Pakistan decide to take a few shots? Does North Korea level Seoul while no one’s looking?

I think it depends on your definition of annihilate the world multiple times over.

A widespread nuclear exchange would likely be incompatible with anything resembling modern civilization, especially due to how inter-networked the global economy is etc.

Would it be a case where every person perished individually as a result of a direct nuclear bombing, no.

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