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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26709 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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We have had ample proof of nuclear weapons' destructive capacity.

Meanwhile, the actual impact of climate change can, by one so willing, be ignored entirely with little ill effect, and the catastrophe scenarios spun up about it come from people with the air of the stereotypical madman claiming that "the end is nigh".

Nah, Nuclear Armageddon was a psyop. Yes, it would suck to have nuke dropped on your head, but not much more so than an artillery shell, or a conventional bomb or missile. It was probably even more exaggerated than the impact of climate change.

not much more so than an artillery shell

This doesn't matter at all. The aggregate effect of nukes dropped on every major city (which, factually, is what would happen) would be the total collapse of the modern agricultural-industrial machine, which would mean mass death in the 80%+ range. This counts as a nuclear apocalypse by any definition.

The aggregate effect of nukes dropped on every major city (which, factually, is what would happen) would be the total collapse of the modern agricultural-industrial machine, which would mean mass death in the 80%+ range.

  1. The modern agricultural-industrial machine exists to feed the cities, if the cities are gone, there's no need for so much food
  2. Every major city worldwide or in the first world? The latter is more likely, and while the destruction of St. Louis would disrupt the supply of new GM seed stock, Brazil and India could jumpstart their own agritech rather quickly.

What you are forgetting about is the effects of 800 or so 380 kiloton ground bursts hitting the missile fields in Montana and North Dakota, and the ensuing massive fallout cloud likely blowing southward right into the breadbasket of the country (breadbasket of the world—those crops feed like 1.2 billion people)

while the destruction of St. Louis would disrupt the supply of new GM seed stock, Brazil and India could jumpstart their own agritech rather quickly.

No lawsuits from Montsanto if we irradiate the lawyers first! <taps head>

I'm going to press doubt on that one. If you're maximizing spite, rather than military advantage, you can drop nukes on major cities, and rack up the body count, you can drop them on essential infrastrructure and increase it even more, but I don't think the entire arsenal of the USSR could collapse American industry and agriculture.

The effects of the radiation etc. are perhaps somewhat exaggerated, but nuclear weapons are still incredibly destructive. A single nuke can drop on more heads than a thousand conventional artillery shells, bombs or missiles.

Sure, there were a lot of wild tales about nuclear war that remained just that or even ended up discredited, like setting the atmosphere on fire or causing nuclear winter.

But the degree of destruction that global nuclear war would have caused can be roughly extrapolated by anyone who knows what happened to those two Japanese towns plus the further development of nuclear weapons and the increased size of the stockpiles, whereas the impact of climate change is all error bars and "take my word for it".

The fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki arguably forms a part of why nuclear mythos is so exaggerated, though. Even if we don't consider the whole symbolic implication of two little bombs forcing mighty Japan to surrender, the dawn of atomic age etc., Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't all that representative of what would happen now; the Japanese tradition of paper-based construction meant the houses went up in flames even more easily than comparative European homes of the period, and the further development of nuclear weapons has been accompanied with developments in population protection (sturdier housing, still-extant shelters etc).

Also, while there's obviously bigger nukes and stockpiles than in 1945, people probably also have a wrong image of these in the other direction; once I started looking into this, I (used to nuke strength being measured in megatons) was surprised, for instance, to learn that according to most recent American estimates Russia does not have any nukes of 1 Mt or higher in power and that the Russian nuclear stockpile is a bit over 10 % of the height of Cold War (I had of course known it had gone down, but still, while it probably still packs a punch, it's not of destroy-the-world capability, even if one would expect all of them to work, not be intercepted, not fall to a first strike or a second strike etc.)

ICBMs, MIRVs and more accurate missiles basically made multi-megaton nukes obsolete. You get much better destructive power over an area if you spread a bunch of 100 kton nukes over it instead of concentrating all that power at a single point because of the three dimensional nature of the explosion.

Certainly, the point just being that people have a completely facile image of the raw power of current nukes. In "nuclear demonstration" maps like this, the nuke used to "demonstrate" a potential nuclear war is literally the 100 Mt Tsar Bomba - a device that literally only existed in the planning stages and was not even tested, and would not have remotely resembled your average Soviet nuclear warhead even in the height of the Cold War.

This is true insomuch as you will be dead in all 4 cases, but it's a rather facile observation considering the differences in magnitude of destructive power, not to mention the very serious dangers posed by radioactive fallout.

A full scale nuclear war between east and west in the mid to late cold war (assuming both sides launch their own weapons) would have resulted in the deaths of the majority of the population of all the countries involved, with any population centre worth mentioning being the target of multiple nuclear weapons, as well as sites of strategic importance such as airports, military installations, major hubs of industry, etc. The less important parts of the country that still remain would be very likely covered in radioactive fallout from the (relatively) close detonation of the aforementioned hundreds of nuclear weapons, which would kill a large proportion of the population in a matter of weeks, water, soil and food would be contaminated. Societal collapse would be unavoidable, those that managed to survive the first few months would still find themselves at a greatly increased risk for various cancers and their children would have a substantially increased risk of birth defects.

All of this is without mentioning the as of yet unforseen consequences of detonating tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at once, which I am going to assume would probably not be great.

Themotte likes to talk about "skin in the game" a lot, well if you want a good example of that then I'd point you to the fact that most nuclear planners and those informed about the nature of nuclear war stopped trying to build bomb shelters or bolt holes for themselves and their families at some point in the 60s.

Societal collapse would be unavoidable, those that managed to survive the first few months would still find themselves at a greatly increased risk for various cancers and their children would have a substantially increased risk of birth defects.

This experiment has been run, and IIRC Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s elevated cancer rates aren’t incompatible with both of them being modern industrial societies.

Don't cancer rates vary quite a bit geographically even without nuclear fallout? IIRC Australia has absurd skin cancer rates, but hasn't seen widespread panic and fleeing from this danger. "Twice as likely to die of skin cancer" is concerning and unfortunate, but still not a huge absolute risk.

Yes, although ‘White people with heavy sunshine and lots of beaches’ is the obvious reason there- cancer rates seem mostly to correlate geographically with explanatory variables.

The less important parts of the country that still remain would be very likely covered in radioactive fallout from the (relatively) close detonation of the aforementioned hundreds of nuclear weapons, which would kill a large proportion of the population in a matter of weeks, water, soil and food would be contaminated. Societal collapse would be unavoidable, those that managed to survive the first few months would still find themselves at a greatly increased risk for various cancers and their children would have a substantially increased risk of birth defects.

That's the part that's hugely overblown, and instilling the fear of this scenario was an absolute psyop. Yes, with a large enough arsenal you could inflict millions of deaths, and targeting industrial centers would indirectly result in millions more. Fallout poisoning water and soil in the hinterlands would scarcely be a factor.

I'm also not sure that massive strikes against population centers would be nearly as common as predicted, at least once targeting was good enough to hit something smaller than "that city over there" (although I imagine it would depend on the exact scenario) but even at the height of the Cold War, there were just so many military targets to hit that maximizing for casualties instead of enemy military capability was arguably not the smartest play. Unfortunately a lot of military targets are colocated with large population centers.

But people read the "number of nuclear weapons" and forget that during the Cold War we were planning, at various points, of using those weapons on military targets, and not just bases, but ships, submarines, troop formations, and enemy aircraft – hence the development of nuclear-tipped torpedoes, air-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and anti-ship missiles.

Fallout and radiation poisoning could be bad if someone deliberately tried to maximize it, but conventional nuclear weapons just aren't as dirty as people seem to think. People survived Hiroshima within a thousand feet of ground zero. The guy who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered from radiation poisoning...and lived to be 93.

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