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I'm not sure how China sinks a US carrier killing thousands of US soldiers and the situation does not escalate to a nuclear exchange. Sometimes I think a whole

I'm not sure how China sinks a US carrier killing thousands of US soldiers and the situation does not escalate to a nuclear exchange. Sometimes I think a whole generation has forgotten that we still live under the threat of global annihilation in under 15 minutes. The schools used to have duck and cover drills to prepare for nuclear attacks. This may have made people too afraid of the word nuclear and thus nuclear power is not possible in the US. Now there are "stranger on campus" drills instead. I wonder how that is warping the minds of the present generation.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Are you really sure about the global annihilation part? I'm not. The larger cities and anything near targets of strategic value will probably be gone. But otherwise? Think of all the atmospheric tests with large devices. And the "enrichment" all the coal fired power plants produce. There are people saying coal power amounts to about 50 Chernobyl EVERY FUCKING YEAR in released radioactivity into the environment! Not to speak of mercury, carbon dioxide and what not else. On average I feel rather unimpressed by that threat. It seems like a conditioning.
- njarboe 6y ago
  There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of that scenario but I could use "kill off 99.9999% of living things and cause 20-50% of species to go extinct in a few years". I have a PhD in Earth Science and have studied this issue some, but atmospheric modeling is not my specialty. If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned. P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is. [1] https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    I'm aware of the possibility that is nuclear winter. OTOH, some volcano(es) could have a big burp anytime, and produce the same. (As they did several times, in the past.)
    - njarboe 6y ago
      True, and super eruptions are a serious threat. The last big one was called the Toba eruption about 75,000 year ago. It may have dropped the human population to 3-10 thousand people based on a genetic bottleneck that appeared at around that time[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

Are you really sure about the global annihilation part? I'm not. The larger cities and anything near targets of strategic value will probably be gone. But otherwise? Think of all the atmospheric tests with large devices. And the "enrichment" all the coal fired power plants produce. There are people saying coal power amounts to about 50 Chernobyl EVERY FUCKING YEAR in released radioactivity into the environment! Not to speak of mercury, carbon dioxide and what not else. On average I feel rather unimpressed by that threat. It seems like a conditioning.

njarboe 6y ago
There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of that scenario but I could use "kill off 99.9999% of living things and cause 20-50% of species to go extinct in a few years". I have a PhD in Earth Science and have studied this issue some, but atmospheric modeling is not my specialty. If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned. P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is. [1] https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  I'm aware of the possibility that is nuclear winter. OTOH, some volcano(es) could have a big burp anytime, and produce the same. (As they did several times, in the past.)
  - njarboe 6y ago
    True, and super eruptions are a serious threat. The last big one was called the Toba eruption about 75,000 year ago. It may have dropped the human population to 3-10 thousand people based on a genetic bottleneck that appeared at around that time[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory