10 ms·

What science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia?

118 points by signa11 5y ago

aaron695 5y ago
gdsdfe 5y ago
a species so smart that it manufactured it's own extinction ... it's a bit chilling knowing that the possibility of this happening is not zero.
- dandanua 5y ago
  > a species so smart Russia Claims Ukraine’s Refusal to Share Borscht Proves ‘Nazism’ [1] I mean, the nuclear annihilation of humanity as a result of Ukrainian denial of borscht as a common heritage with Russia would be a perfect end of the world. [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-claims-ukraines-refusal-to-share-borscht-proves-nazism https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-claims-ukraines-refusal...
juanani 5y ago
dav_Oz 5y ago
Tl;dr: most likely some of the billions of humans would survive to repopulate the world (founder effect). A possible dramatic population bottleneck throughout human history [0]. For anyone wondering about the pompous naming: Alliance for Science. >Our primary source of support is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. An interesting in-depth article [1]. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory [1]https://usrtk.org/our-investigations/cornell-alliance-for-science-is-campaign-for-agrichemical-industry/ https://usrtk.org/our-investigations/cornell-alliance-for-sc...
- verisimi 5y ago
  Great research. It sure is lucky that all these tax-exempt charitable foundations are so kindly disposed to us, and only promote genuine good causes!! The alternative would be that foundations are just a trick to extract even more funds at the tax-payers expense, to fund the billionaires' agendas! But that couldn't be! Bill, Buffett, Elon et al aren't unscrupulous self-serving billionaires - even if it makes good sense financially. They aren't using public funds to grow their businesses - or at least so they tell us in their media. No, they have our interests at heart - trust them! Phew!
nkurz 5y ago
Here's a recent well-researched post that comes to essentially the opposite conclusion: The basic conclusion of all of this is simple. Nuclear war is definitely not an existential threat to humanity, much less to all life on the planet. 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. https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness The main difference is that he concludes that nuclear winter is mostly a myth. His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions. It would be interesting to reconcile these two disparate conclusions.
- 7952 5y ago
  Looking at the devastation of wildfires it is hard to imagine that effects could be so contained. A nuclear war would be the biggest source of ignition imaginable in close proximity to forests and cropped fields. Also, I am a bit cautious about the line about densely populated areas. A city has the manpower to take control of its rural hinterland, provide workers for manual work, and outgun opposition. It may turn out to be more resilient in the long run. An isolated ranch seems secure right up until 100 guys from the local city show up.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
  > His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions. As made by some of the original nuclear winter paper authors. Mostly going from memory there's a lot that's wrong, unsupported, questionable, or nor longer relevant about the TTAPS paper. The easily unbalanced one dimensional model of the atmosphere, where there are no winds or oceans, particles can just go up and down. No support for the size range of soot produced. Very few cities in the US or USSR with enough fuel to produced real firestorms like the Tokyo one in WWII. And now many many fewer nukes in both nation's inventories.
einpoklum 5y ago
tl;dr: Most people will die, although perhaps from famine rather than directly from the blasts or from radiation disease etc. Some will survive to have a shitty life. Bottom-line quote: > The price of nuclear escalation is planetary suicide, with no winners at all. That won’t save lives in Ukraine — it will simply take the death toll of the current war from the thousands to the billions.
- jansen555 5y ago
spacemanmatt 5y ago
I think there is a part of this survival question regularly unanswered: Who will want live after surviving a nuclear war?
- gambiting 5y ago
  As someone else said - I'm not worried about nuclear war. I'm worried I won't be caught in the blast radius.
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    «When the living will envy the dead.»
- nlitened 5y ago
  If you’re really asking, I would love to survive and live in this case.
- vasco 5y ago
  I'd like to, if you're alive you can always kill yourself if things are too bad, might as well have the choice.
- throwaway743 5y ago
  Encountering deathclaws, radroaches, the brotherhood/etc, and hunt for radaway/radx isn't top on my list /s But in all honesty, yeah probably not.
dathinab 5y ago
Can you? Yes sure. Do you want to? No, 100% not. The next one or two decades after such war will be quite painful. Also it might rob humans their chance to be able to cope with actual existential threads. It also might lead to further wars, including nuclear ones.
- mauvehaus 5y ago
  On the plus side, it seems pretty likely to dramatically reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions? That seems like the most pressing existential threat we're facing at the moment.
  - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
    you're totally out of line but you're also right.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Talk about radical solutions...
  - dathinab 5y ago
    I wouldn't be sure about this. I mean if humans are desperate they are much less likely to take care about their environment, and might also not be able to do so properly even if they care. Then what about bombed gas pipelines and silos or chemical plants?
HellDunkel 5y ago
If this is what we call „sciene“ we have a problem.
- posedge 5y ago
  Care being a bit more specific?
- dylan604 5y ago
  This is just the first part of the scientific method to create an hypothesis/theory. Unfortunately, the next part--testing the theory--is rather difficult. Making it worse, the final part is to reliably be able to recreate the results in subsequent testing. With this particular set of tests, the only winning move is not to play.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jansen555 5y ago
If there is nukes war, it will basically wipe out USA and likely UK as well. Russia probably has significant losses as well but due to its size and terrain plus population density, Russia will eke out a winning population to continue Russia as a nationhood after the war. US will be just left as a oral tradition. I don't think other countries will be affected much other than loss in trading opportunities in dollar. Russia has significantly more nukes than all western countries combined. And that is official numbers. They have their own uranium mines and even US has to import from them. So the number of nukes will be significantly more in the unofficial numbers. Plus, they have access to China as production centres for all the widget they needed. While US by their own suspicion paranoid manner wouldnt engage China for such production needs. With US and UK gone, whatever left as NATO will ceased to exist as they have very little nukes left to counter the remaining nuke countries.
- skeeks 5y ago
  And what about all the climate consequences?
- nukemaster 5y ago
  Lol no. I don't know what it is with the fear porn over nukes. If you're more than 8 miles from the city that gets nuked you just have to stay inside for a week and you'll survive with a slightly higher chance of getting cancer. Your windows will probably get blown out and you'll have to tape trash bags over them but keep in mind that's a sonic effect; the wavefront from the blast is what causes it, not actual material from the site which takes much longer to propagate. Fallout particles are large and only suspend, not dissolved, in the air. So all you have to do to avoid it is stay inside and wait for the low half life radioisotopes to decay. Given the awful state of most US cities a nuclear war could arguably improve the US.
  - messe 5y ago
    > If you're more than 8 miles from the city that gets nuked Even if you're less than that distance, you've a fairly decent chance depending on local geography and the building you're in. The inverse square law helps a lot.
lumost 5y ago
In any realistic exchange, there will be entire countries spared from the effects. Particulate matter rarely crosses hemispheric boundaries. Most of Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand would be spared. Given the roughly 1k standby weapons each side has, neither Russia or the US would waste missiles on anything other than military targets and capitol cities of nuclear powers involved in the exchange. This isn’t the Cold War where weapons numbered in the 10s of thousands. Every continent is not split between East and west. There is limited reason China/NK would involve themselves in a nuclear escalation between Russia and NATO. The part we should be concerned with is that the above makes a nuclear exchange over a proxy war far more likely. Alternately, if both sides decide on a second use policy similar to chemical weapons in ww2 - a conventional war becomes possible.
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  Half the planet would be dead and uninhabitable for a long time. USA has 88 nuclear power plants. No question they will all be targeted. So it's Chernobyl time 88, but there will be noone left to cover each of them with a sarcophagus. The projections for a 500 warhead attack estimate 100-150 million dying immediately from the fireballs, shockwaves and fires. Then most survivors will die from the radioactive fallout, radiation sickness, starvation. Most animal life will end too.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Actually that is forbidden, at least according to some convention which exact point of origin I'm too lazy to search now. Anyway, targeting NPP's with nukes is a big NO, NO! Same for things like dams, btw. OTOH, before these the Brits had no problems targeting Germanies dams whith some ingenious things, which hopped over the water several times like described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise But that was before this convention was born. Anyway, remains to be seen who gives a shit about such things in all out confrontation.
    - jules-jules 5y ago
bryanlarsen 5y ago
Pre-industrial man survived in both the Sahara and the Arctic. We have a wider biome than rats. Humans would survive. Whether civilization would is a different question.
- pizza234 5y ago
  The article doesn't question that the human species will survive: > This implies that some humans would survive, eventually to repopulate the planet, and that a species-level extinction of Homo sapiens is unlikely even after a full-scale nuclear war. But the vast majority of the human population would suffer extremely unpleasant deaths from burns, radiation and starvation, and human civilization would likely collapse entirely. Survivors would eke out a living on a devastated, barren planet.
rainworld 5y ago
https://youtu.be/WF0mEOCK2KE https://youtu.be/WF0mEOCK2KE Note that 104 million is not the final death toll.
- amelius 5y ago
  What would it look like if the US didn't fire back?
  - rainworld 5y ago
    This simulation does not involve an American strike at all. Some context: https://twitter.com/DavidTeter/status/1507813126288207872 https://twitter.com/DavidTeter/status/1507813126288207872
doingtheiroming 5y ago
One more reason that we need nuclear power. It keeps going when the sun doesn’t shine for whatever reason. If the Netherlands’ greenhouses switched to electric heating, they can produce food year round. Indoor farming is an unsung hero of modern agriculture that we can use much more of when we get the cost of energy down. And it’s also a way for us to survive all sorts of catastrophes, not only a nuclear war.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  I would guess that nuclear power plants are one of the first pieces of infrastructure to be targeted in the event of a NATO-Russia nuclear war. The reasons why nuclear power plants are less likely to be attacked in a conventional war don't really apply in that case. And you wouldn't even need to waste a nuke on it; a conventional warhead would do the job just as well. Solar, yeah, I suppose losing ~50% of your output capacity is not awesome. But better to be operating at 50% than to be destroyed completely.
  - doingtheiroming 5y ago
    A regional conflict like India / Pakistan is far more likely than a superpower apocalypse and nuclear power would be hugely helpful in that situation. The same goes for a major volcanic eruption or any number of other disasters we might face which affect the amount of solar energy available.
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      I would guess that India and Pakistan know as well as anyone else the importance of destroying an opponent's most critical infrastructure in the execution of a total war.
  - bufferoverflow 5y ago
    That's why we need underground nuclear power plants. War in Ukraine showed how fragile surface infrastructure is.
Digit-Al 5y ago
When the Wind Blows by Quentin Blake was a bleak look at what it might be like to live through a nuclear winter. It doesn't end happily.
- comrh 5y ago
  Small nit, it was by Raymond Briggs
  - Digit-Al 5y ago
    Don't know why I put Quentin Blake. Think I had a brain fart or something.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  On the Beach by Nevil Shute was similar, not about nuclear winter but about radiation killing everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)
dylan604 5y ago
What would happen if NATO just didn't respond to a Russian first strike?
- baybal2 5y ago
  NATO would still have a multiple of conventional firepower to defeat Russia few times over. That's based on a scenarios if Russia somehow manages to fire all of its 1000 warheads into NATO force in Europe, without being fired back at.
  - messe 5y ago
    Can all of Russia's deployed warheads actually reach Europe without either burning up in the atmosphere or overshooting? Not many of them are intermediate range missiles, so for most of them their range is several thousand kilometers. Sure most Europe falls well under that, but warheads tend to be deployed on solid rocket motors as they're comparatively low maintenance. Solid rocket motors can't be shut off once they're started, so you have very little control over its burn time once its started (this is one of many reasons why the Space Shuttle had so many black zones where an abort would result in the death of the crew). All you can control is its trajectory, but targeting europe, would mean either a very shallow trajectory, relying on air resistance to sufficiently slow the missile at the target, potentially resulting in the missile and warhead burning up or tearing up from g-forces in the lower atmosphere; or an extremely steep trajectory, resulting in, again, either strong g-forces or incredibly high temperatures meaning the missile burns up or tears up in the lower atmosphere. Given the reluctance toward a first strike, I'm not convinced that russia can strike most counter-value targets in Europe with its fixed deployments. I think of the few missiles it has that can reach europe, they're likely aimed at counter-force locations, with the rest aimed at the significantly larger nuclear force in the US. Its subs are a different question though.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      >Its subs are a different question though. My assumption would be that any Russian missile boat is being trailed with an opposition attack sub just waiting for it to become a sitting duck while prepping for launch operations.
water8 5y ago
I get that global warming is an issue but I don’t think nuclear winter is our best option at this point
FpUser 5y ago
>"but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up" "Stabilize" and "back up"? What an idiot. How about constant state of war for resources that are no longer available for one or another reason and further degradation because of it.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  obliterating our technical means would also mean reducing our ability to do damage.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    People have successfully proven to exterminate each other on large scale by very low tech.
kkfx 5y ago
I suggest to rediscover an infamous and undone USA secret ops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot witch was essentially the natural prosecution of an UKs one, similarly undone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable The USA are the sole who hope, want to dream, a feasible nuclear war because they need war to save their economy, not from today but always, their economical model is not sustainable: produce much for a short period, than a deep crisis, than a war and back at the start of the cycle. So no we humans can't survive a nuclear war and to survive we need to annihilate neoliberal school of thought, witch is essentially the British school of thought extended to the USA and Germany and then to China and SK before being globalized. Only erasing those think tanks from the root we can survive. Unfortunately many born under their school fails to understand whose their own enemy and fight for them...
credit_guy 5y ago
The main article cited here [1] just runs a climate model assuming that a nuclear war would put 150 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Where did this assumption come from? From here: "Turco et al. [1990] give a range of 20– 290 Tg of smoke injection over the Northern Hemisphere, and our 150 Tg case is just in the middle of this range." In case terra-grams is not your favorite unit of mass, you can mentally exchange it for MT = mega tons. The Pinatubo eruption for comparison put 20 Mt of soot in the stratosphere. As far as weather or climate are concerned, it went basically unnoticed. What else put a lot of soot in the atmosphere? Saddam after Gulf War 1. Not much happened then either. So much of a non-event it was, that Carl Sagan (one of the co-authors of the aforementioned 1990 Turco paper) conceded that their nuclear winter prediction was wrong [2] "It was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6° C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared." [1] http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockNW2006JD008235.pdf http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockNW2006JD008235.p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in_the_first_Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...
xyzzy21 5y ago
The central error in this question which is ill-formed: what do you mean by "Humans". Can humans as a species survive? Absolutely no question: yes. Can humans as any individuals survive? Absolutely no question: no. Not statistically. Can humans as some cultural or nation-state survive? Can humans in some particular geography/demography survive? Honestly that's where the gray area starts.
irrational 5y ago
Well, that was a cheerful Sunday morning reading. It was shocking how devastating even <1 percent of the world’s stockpile being used, much less most of it.
practice9 5y ago
The linked article is fear mongering. All sides understand the consequences, so nobody is going to use ALL or even part of their nuclear arsenal. There can be a tactical nuclear bomb exchange as a show of force, but this is unlikely to cause any kind of climate change. Moreover in the last paragraph author tries to justify that it's ok for a genocide to happen if the perpetrator has nuclear weapons
- realcertify 5y ago
  It may very quickly get out of control into a full scale nuclear war, and that may literally happen in minutes. Recently I often see articles suggesting that limited use of nukes might be ok, I hope the people who make the actual decisions don't agree with those.
  - practice9 5y ago
    War is always multi-step. The enemies try to beat each other into submission, and then use it to their advantage in negotiations. Where does this myth of world destruction in a few minutes come from? Movies? There is no scenario where Russia would benefit from bombing Europe or USA indiscriminately. USA economy depends on China economy, China economy depends on USA economy, Russia economy depends on China / Europe / US economy. And even with sanctions, most countries are trading with Russia, but the Russian economy is starting to show signs of failure. Prolonged land war would be a disaster for them. A tactical nuclear attack or chemical attack towards Ukraine would mean an absolute nightmare for Russian economy, like signing off on the destruction of Russia economically
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > fear mongering. If there's one thing you should be afraid of it is probably nuclear war. > All sides understand the consequences, so nobody is going to use ALL or even part of their nuclear arsenal. Putin and the Kremlin now probably understand that they can't really trust their military readiness, which makes it that much more likely that if their nuclear launch sites are threatened that they will launch everything they have under the assumption that if they don't they will lose it, and that they need to fire everything they have assuming a lot won't reach their targets.
incomingpain 5y ago
Lets say you live in Timmins Ontario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timmins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timmins population of 40,000. Nuclear holocaust happens. Toronto(7 hours away) has literally 0 survivors, only mutants and threedog radio is left. Same with all other large cities. How long would it take for Timmins to notice it happened? Internet likely would be down... but such is life in northern rural parts of Canada. Nobody there associates with people in Toronto. They would see the outage and decide to go fishing. Headed to the river to catch me some sturgeon! It would probably be days before anyone noticed there was a problem. It would then take weeks for anyone to care enough to find out what happened to Toronto. By the time they show up in toronto the radioactive fallout would be greatly reduced. The world is a big place and 'nuclear winter' is just a hypothesis. In fact, with civilization being destroyed... timmins doesnt have to worry about climate change anymore. Though that might be a problem because damn that place is cold. They need some warming.
- alephxyz 5y ago
  I doubt people would take days to notice that their steady supply of power, petroleums, natural gas, medication, fresh food, etc. disappeared
  - incomingpain 5y ago
    >I doubt people would take days to notice that their steady supply of power, petroleums, natural gas, medication, fresh food, etc. disappeared Power wouldn't be cut. The grid would probably be over powered. Most power generation is not near the cities. NIMBY problems with building nukes in backyards. Petroleum products? They are pretty remote, they tend to run higher reserves. Medication and food? Kind of the same thing. You know one thing I didn't consider. Tourism. Maybe someone from toronto would be there and notice and bring it to people's attention. Point I am making isn't to argue over how fast people might notice the destruction of civilization. More, even in nuclear apocalypse, life goes on. Something interesting as well. Right before an apocalypse your internet algorithm will start providing you with how to build survival shelters in the forest. Not camping, not doomsday prepping. Just survivalist type stuff.
realcertify 5y ago
To me the most worrying is the number of articles with opposite point of view popping up recently stating that the nuclear exchange wouldn't result in anything catastrophic. Like someone said here in the comments "just sit in a basement for a week and all would be well". Heck there's even no basements here in Bay Area, but I doubt that would help. I'm concerned that such point of view if getting more popular could result in much higher chance of a nuclear war eventually.
- uwagar 5y ago
  they probably meant Baysment Area.
hulitu 5y ago
There is only one way to find out.
nayuki 5y ago
> with this scenario generating about 5 Tg (teragrams) of soot as smoke from wildfires and burning buildings entered the atmosphere It's cool to see them as one of the very few sources that properly use the prefixed metric unit "teragram". The more common equivalent is "million tonne", which is more verbose and uses the non-base unit "tonne" (megagram).
des1nderlase 5y ago
Faster we escalate this conflict, faster China would become next #1 power. Playbook from the history,...

118 points by signa11 5y ago

a species so smart that it manufactured it's own extinction ... it's a bit chilling knowing that the possibility of this happening is not zero.

dandanua 5y ago
> a species so smart Russia Claims Ukraine’s Refusal to Share Borscht Proves ‘Nazism’ [1] I mean, the nuclear annihilation of humanity as a result of Ukrainian denial of borscht as a common heritage with Russia would be a perfect end of the world. [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-claims-ukraines-refusal-to-share-borscht-proves-nazism https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-claims-ukraines-refusal...

juanani 5y ago

dav_Oz 5y ago

Tl;dr: most likely some of the billions of humans would survive to repopulate the world (founder effect). A possible dramatic population bottleneck throughout human history [0]. For anyone wondering about the pompous naming: Alliance for Science. >Our primary source of support is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. An interesting in-depth article [1]. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory [1]https://usrtk.org/our-investigations/cornell-alliance-for-science-is-campaign-for-agrichemical-industry/ https://usrtk.org/our-investigations/cornell-alliance-for-sc...

verisimi 5y ago
Great research. It sure is lucky that all these tax-exempt charitable foundations are so kindly disposed to us, and only promote genuine good causes!! The alternative would be that foundations are just a trick to extract even more funds at the tax-payers expense, to fund the billionaires' agendas! But that couldn't be! Bill, Buffett, Elon et al aren't unscrupulous self-serving billionaires - even if it makes good sense financially. They aren't using public funds to grow their businesses - or at least so they tell us in their media. No, they have our interests at heart - trust them! Phew!

nkurz 5y ago

Here's a recent well-researched post that comes to essentially the opposite conclusion: The basic conclusion of all of this is simple. Nuclear war is definitely not an existential threat to humanity, much less to all life on the planet. 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. https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness The main difference is that he concludes that nuclear winter is mostly a myth. His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions. It would be interesting to reconcile these two disparate conclusions.

7952 5y ago
Looking at the devastation of wildfires it is hard to imagine that effects could be so contained. A nuclear war would be the biggest source of ignition imaginable in close proximity to forests and cropped fields. Also, I am a bit cautious about the line about densely populated areas. A city has the manpower to take control of its rural hinterland, provide workers for manual work, and outgun opposition. It may turn out to be more resilient in the long run. An isolated ranch seems secure right up until 100 guys from the local city show up.
Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
> His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions. As made by some of the original nuclear winter paper authors. Mostly going from memory there's a lot that's wrong, unsupported, questionable, or nor longer relevant about the TTAPS paper. The easily unbalanced one dimensional model of the atmosphere, where there are no winds or oceans, particles can just go up and down. No support for the size range of soot produced. Very few cities in the US or USSR with enough fuel to produced real firestorms like the Tokyo one in WWII. And now many many fewer nukes in both nation's inventories.

einpoklum 5y ago

tl;dr: Most people will die, although perhaps from famine rather than directly from the blasts or from radiation disease etc. Some will survive to have a shitty life. Bottom-line quote: > The price of nuclear escalation is planetary suicide, with no winners at all. That won’t save lives in Ukraine — it will simply take the death toll of the current war from the thousands to the billions.

jansen555 5y ago

spacemanmatt 5y ago

I think there is a part of this survival question regularly unanswered: Who will want live after surviving a nuclear war?

gambiting 5y ago
As someone else said - I'm not worried about nuclear war. I'm worried I won't be caught in the blast radius.
- _0w8t 5y ago
  «When the living will envy the dead.»
nlitened 5y ago
If you’re really asking, I would love to survive and live in this case.
vasco 5y ago
I'd like to, if you're alive you can always kill yourself if things are too bad, might as well have the choice.
throwaway743 5y ago
Encountering deathclaws, radroaches, the brotherhood/etc, and hunt for radaway/radx isn't top on my list /s But in all honesty, yeah probably not.

dathinab 5y ago

Can you? Yes sure. Do you want to? No, 100% not. The next one or two decades after such war will be quite painful. Also it might rob humans their chance to be able to cope with actual existential threads. It also might lead to further wars, including nuclear ones.

mauvehaus 5y ago
On the plus side, it seems pretty likely to dramatically reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions? That seems like the most pressing existential threat we're facing at the moment.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  you're totally out of line but you're also right.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Talk about radical solutions...
- dathinab 5y ago
  I wouldn't be sure about this. I mean if humans are desperate they are much less likely to take care about their environment, and might also not be able to do so properly even if they care. Then what about bombed gas pipelines and silos or chemical plants?

HellDunkel 5y ago

If this is what we call „sciene“ we have a problem.

posedge 5y ago
Care being a bit more specific?
dylan604 5y ago
This is just the first part of the scientific method to create an hypothesis/theory. Unfortunately, the next part--testing the theory--is rather difficult. Making it worse, the final part is to reliably be able to recreate the results in subsequent testing. With this particular set of tests, the only winning move is not to play.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jansen555 5y ago

If there is nukes war, it will basically wipe out USA and likely UK as well. Russia probably has significant losses as well but due to its size and terrain plus population density, Russia will eke out a winning population to continue Russia as a nationhood after the war. US will be just left as a oral tradition. I don't think other countries will be affected much other than loss in trading opportunities in dollar. Russia has significantly more nukes than all western countries combined. And that is official numbers. They have their own uranium mines and even US has to import from them. So the number of nukes will be significantly more in the unofficial numbers. Plus, they have access to China as production centres for all the widget they needed. While US by their own suspicion paranoid manner wouldnt engage China for such production needs. With US and UK gone, whatever left as NATO will ceased to exist as they have very little nukes left to counter the remaining nuke countries.

skeeks 5y ago
And what about all the climate consequences?
nukemaster 5y ago
Lol no. I don't know what it is with the fear porn over nukes. If you're more than 8 miles from the city that gets nuked you just have to stay inside for a week and you'll survive with a slightly higher chance of getting cancer. Your windows will probably get blown out and you'll have to tape trash bags over them but keep in mind that's a sonic effect; the wavefront from the blast is what causes it, not actual material from the site which takes much longer to propagate. Fallout particles are large and only suspend, not dissolved, in the air. So all you have to do to avoid it is stay inside and wait for the low half life radioisotopes to decay. Given the awful state of most US cities a nuclear war could arguably improve the US.
- messe 5y ago
  > If you're more than 8 miles from the city that gets nuked Even if you're less than that distance, you've a fairly decent chance depending on local geography and the building you're in. The inverse square law helps a lot.

lumost 5y ago

In any realistic exchange, there will be entire countries spared from the effects. Particulate matter rarely crosses hemispheric boundaries. Most of Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand would be spared. Given the roughly 1k standby weapons each side has, neither Russia or the US would waste missiles on anything other than military targets and capitol cities of nuclear powers involved in the exchange. This isn’t the Cold War where weapons numbered in the 10s of thousands. Every continent is not split between East and west. There is limited reason China/NK would involve themselves in a nuclear escalation between Russia and NATO. The part we should be concerned with is that the above makes a nuclear exchange over a proxy war far more likely. Alternately, if both sides decide on a second use policy similar to chemical weapons in ww2 - a conventional war becomes possible.

bufferoverflow 5y ago
Half the planet would be dead and uninhabitable for a long time. USA has 88 nuclear power plants. No question they will all be targeted. So it's Chernobyl time 88, but there will be noone left to cover each of them with a sarcophagus. The projections for a 500 warhead attack estimate 100-150 million dying immediately from the fireballs, shockwaves and fires. Then most survivors will die from the radioactive fallout, radiation sickness, starvation. Most animal life will end too.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Actually that is forbidden, at least according to some convention which exact point of origin I'm too lazy to search now. Anyway, targeting NPP's with nukes is a big NO, NO! Same for things like dams, btw. OTOH, before these the Brits had no problems targeting Germanies dams whith some ingenious things, which hopped over the water several times like described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise But that was before this convention was born. Anyway, remains to be seen who gives a shit about such things in all out confrontation.
  - jules-jules 5y ago

bryanlarsen 5y ago

Pre-industrial man survived in both the Sahara and the Arctic. We have a wider biome than rats. Humans would survive. Whether civilization would is a different question.

pizza234 5y ago
The article doesn't question that the human species will survive: > This implies that some humans would survive, eventually to repopulate the planet, and that a species-level extinction of Homo sapiens is unlikely even after a full-scale nuclear war. But the vast majority of the human population would suffer extremely unpleasant deaths from burns, radiation and starvation, and human civilization would likely collapse entirely. Survivors would eke out a living on a devastated, barren planet.

rainworld 5y ago

https://youtu.be/WF0mEOCK2KE https://youtu.be/WF0mEOCK2KE Note that 104 million is not the final death toll.

amelius 5y ago
What would it look like if the US didn't fire back?
- rainworld 5y ago
  This simulation does not involve an American strike at all. Some context: https://twitter.com/DavidTeter/status/1507813126288207872 https://twitter.com/DavidTeter/status/1507813126288207872

doingtheiroming 5y ago

One more reason that we need nuclear power. It keeps going when the sun doesn’t shine for whatever reason. If the Netherlands’ greenhouses switched to electric heating, they can produce food year round. Indoor farming is an unsung hero of modern agriculture that we can use much more of when we get the cost of energy down. And it’s also a way for us to survive all sorts of catastrophes, not only a nuclear war.

mumblemumble 5y ago
I would guess that nuclear power plants are one of the first pieces of infrastructure to be targeted in the event of a NATO-Russia nuclear war. The reasons why nuclear power plants are less likely to be attacked in a conventional war don't really apply in that case. And you wouldn't even need to waste a nuke on it; a conventional warhead would do the job just as well. Solar, yeah, I suppose losing ~50% of your output capacity is not awesome. But better to be operating at 50% than to be destroyed completely.
- doingtheiroming 5y ago
  A regional conflict like India / Pakistan is far more likely than a superpower apocalypse and nuclear power would be hugely helpful in that situation. The same goes for a major volcanic eruption or any number of other disasters we might face which affect the amount of solar energy available.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    I would guess that India and Pakistan know as well as anyone else the importance of destroying an opponent's most critical infrastructure in the execution of a total war.
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  That's why we need underground nuclear power plants. War in Ukraine showed how fragile surface infrastructure is.

Digit-Al 5y ago

When the Wind Blows by Quentin Blake was a bleak look at what it might be like to live through a nuclear winter. It doesn't end happily.

comrh 5y ago
Small nit, it was by Raymond Briggs
- Digit-Al 5y ago
  Don't know why I put Quentin Blake. Think I had a brain fart or something.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
On the Beach by Nevil Shute was similar, not about nuclear winter but about radiation killing everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)

dylan604 5y ago

What would happen if NATO just didn't respond to a Russian first strike?

baybal2 5y ago
NATO would still have a multiple of conventional firepower to defeat Russia few times over. That's based on a scenarios if Russia somehow manages to fire all of its 1000 warheads into NATO force in Europe, without being fired back at.
- messe 5y ago
  Can all of Russia's deployed warheads actually reach Europe without either burning up in the atmosphere or overshooting? Not many of them are intermediate range missiles, so for most of them their range is several thousand kilometers. Sure most Europe falls well under that, but warheads tend to be deployed on solid rocket motors as they're comparatively low maintenance. Solid rocket motors can't be shut off once they're started, so you have very little control over its burn time once its started (this is one of many reasons why the Space Shuttle had so many black zones where an abort would result in the death of the crew). All you can control is its trajectory, but targeting europe, would mean either a very shallow trajectory, relying on air resistance to sufficiently slow the missile at the target, potentially resulting in the missile and warhead burning up or tearing up from g-forces in the lower atmosphere; or an extremely steep trajectory, resulting in, again, either strong g-forces or incredibly high temperatures meaning the missile burns up or tears up in the lower atmosphere. Given the reluctance toward a first strike, I'm not convinced that russia can strike most counter-value targets in Europe with its fixed deployments. I think of the few missiles it has that can reach europe, they're likely aimed at counter-force locations, with the rest aimed at the significantly larger nuclear force in the US. Its subs are a different question though.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >Its subs are a different question though. My assumption would be that any Russian missile boat is being trailed with an opposition attack sub just waiting for it to become a sitting duck while prepping for launch operations.

water8 5y ago

I get that global warming is an issue but I don’t think nuclear winter is our best option at this point

FpUser 5y ago

>"but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up" "Stabilize" and "back up"? What an idiot. How about constant state of war for resources that are no longer available for one or another reason and further degradation because of it.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
obliterating our technical means would also mean reducing our ability to do damage.
- FpUser 5y ago
  People have successfully proven to exterminate each other on large scale by very low tech.

kkfx 5y ago

I suggest to rediscover an infamous and undone USA secret ops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot witch was essentially the natural prosecution of an UKs one, similarly undone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable The USA are the sole who hope, want to dream, a feasible nuclear war because they need war to save their economy, not from today but always, their economical model is not sustainable: produce much for a short period, than a deep crisis, than a war and back at the start of the cycle. So no we humans can't survive a nuclear war and to survive we need to annihilate neoliberal school of thought, witch is essentially the British school of thought extended to the USA and Germany and then to China and SK before being globalized. Only erasing those think tanks from the root we can survive. Unfortunately many born under their school fails to understand whose their own enemy and fight for them...

credit_guy 5y ago

The main article cited here [1] just runs a climate model assuming that a nuclear war would put 150 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Where did this assumption come from? From here: "Turco et al. [1990] give a range of 20– 290 Tg of smoke injection over the Northern Hemisphere, and our 150 Tg case is just in the middle of this range." In case terra-grams is not your favorite unit of mass, you can mentally exchange it for MT = mega tons. The Pinatubo eruption for comparison put 20 Mt of soot in the stratosphere. As far as weather or climate are concerned, it went basically unnoticed. What else put a lot of soot in the atmosphere? Saddam after Gulf War 1. Not much happened then either. So much of a non-event it was, that Carl Sagan (one of the co-authors of the aforementioned 1990 Turco paper) conceded that their nuclear winter prediction was wrong [2] "It was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6° C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared." [1] http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockNW2006JD008235.pdf http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockNW2006JD008235.p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in_the_first_Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...

xyzzy21 5y ago

The central error in this question which is ill-formed: what do you mean by "Humans". Can humans as a species survive? Absolutely no question: yes. Can humans as any individuals survive? Absolutely no question: no. Not statistically. Can humans as some cultural or nation-state survive? Can humans in some particular geography/demography survive? Honestly that's where the gray area starts.

irrational 5y ago

Well, that was a cheerful Sunday morning reading. It was shocking how devastating even <1 percent of the world’s stockpile being used, much less most of it.

practice9 5y ago

The linked article is fear mongering. All sides understand the consequences, so nobody is going to use ALL or even part of their nuclear arsenal. There can be a tactical nuclear bomb exchange as a show of force, but this is unlikely to cause any kind of climate change. Moreover in the last paragraph author tries to justify that it's ok for a genocide to happen if the perpetrator has nuclear weapons

realcertify 5y ago
It may very quickly get out of control into a full scale nuclear war, and that may literally happen in minutes. Recently I often see articles suggesting that limited use of nukes might be ok, I hope the people who make the actual decisions don't agree with those.
- practice9 5y ago
  War is always multi-step. The enemies try to beat each other into submission, and then use it to their advantage in negotiations. Where does this myth of world destruction in a few minutes come from? Movies? There is no scenario where Russia would benefit from bombing Europe or USA indiscriminately. USA economy depends on China economy, China economy depends on USA economy, Russia economy depends on China / Europe / US economy. And even with sanctions, most countries are trading with Russia, but the Russian economy is starting to show signs of failure. Prolonged land war would be a disaster for them. A tactical nuclear attack or chemical attack towards Ukraine would mean an absolute nightmare for Russian economy, like signing off on the destruction of Russia economically
lamontcg 5y ago
> fear mongering. If there's one thing you should be afraid of it is probably nuclear war. > All sides understand the consequences, so nobody is going to use ALL or even part of their nuclear arsenal. Putin and the Kremlin now probably understand that they can't really trust their military readiness, which makes it that much more likely that if their nuclear launch sites are threatened that they will launch everything they have under the assumption that if they don't they will lose it, and that they need to fire everything they have assuming a lot won't reach their targets.

incomingpain 5y ago

Lets say you live in Timmins Ontario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timmins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timmins population of 40,000. Nuclear holocaust happens. Toronto(7 hours away) has literally 0 survivors, only mutants and threedog radio is left. Same with all other large cities. How long would it take for Timmins to notice it happened? Internet likely would be down... but such is life in northern rural parts of Canada. Nobody there associates with people in Toronto. They would see the outage and decide to go fishing. Headed to the river to catch me some sturgeon! It would probably be days before anyone noticed there was a problem. It would then take weeks for anyone to care enough to find out what happened to Toronto. By the time they show up in toronto the radioactive fallout would be greatly reduced. The world is a big place and 'nuclear winter' is just a hypothesis. In fact, with civilization being destroyed... timmins doesnt have to worry about climate change anymore. Though that might be a problem because damn that place is cold. They need some warming.

alephxyz 5y ago
I doubt people would take days to notice that their steady supply of power, petroleums, natural gas, medication, fresh food, etc. disappeared
- incomingpain 5y ago
  >I doubt people would take days to notice that their steady supply of power, petroleums, natural gas, medication, fresh food, etc. disappeared Power wouldn't be cut. The grid would probably be over powered. Most power generation is not near the cities. NIMBY problems with building nukes in backyards. Petroleum products? They are pretty remote, they tend to run higher reserves. Medication and food? Kind of the same thing. You know one thing I didn't consider. Tourism. Maybe someone from toronto would be there and notice and bring it to people's attention. Point I am making isn't to argue over how fast people might notice the destruction of civilization. More, even in nuclear apocalypse, life goes on. Something interesting as well. Right before an apocalypse your internet algorithm will start providing you with how to build survival shelters in the forest. Not camping, not doomsday prepping. Just survivalist type stuff.

realcertify 5y ago

To me the most worrying is the number of articles with opposite point of view popping up recently stating that the nuclear exchange wouldn't result in anything catastrophic. Like someone said here in the comments "just sit in a basement for a week and all would be well". Heck there's even no basements here in Bay Area, but I doubt that would help. I'm concerned that such point of view if getting more popular could result in much higher chance of a nuclear war eventually.

uwagar 5y ago
they probably meant Baysment Area.

hulitu 5y ago

There is only one way to find out.

nayuki 5y ago

> with this scenario generating about 5 Tg (teragrams) of soot as smoke from wildfires and burning buildings entered the atmosphere It's cool to see them as one of the very few sources that properly use the prefixed metric unit "teragram". The more common equivalent is "million tonne", which is more verbose and uses the non-base unit "tonne" (megagram).

des1nderlase 5y ago

Faster we escalate this conflict, faster China would become next #1 power. Playbook from the history,...