11 ms·

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 definitel

• 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.
• roenxi 5y ago
  This may be a mystery best left unsolved. If we insist on figuring it out experimentally, I recommend waiting until I'm dead of some non-nuclear-fireball cause. There is no reason to escalate tensions in Ukraine to the point where this is an option, anyway. NATO should back off, call it Iraq 2.0 and agree that there are to be no NATO-supported military on Russia's doorstep. The current policies are recklessly provocative.
  • iso1210 5y ago
    No, Russia should stop bombing people
    • Razengan 5y ago
      And the US, having bombed more people all over the world than literally all other nations combined.
      • IgorPartola 5y ago
        Two wrongs make a right?
        • kdkddk 5y ago
        • esailija 5y ago
          It's proof by contradiction. Either you are against bombing innocents or you are not. By holding a stance that only Russia bombing innocents is wrong you are not only for bombing innocents you are also a russophobe at the same time.
          • bradleyjg 5y ago
            By holding a stance that only Russia bombing innocents Who is holding that stance? Must every conversation start with a comprehensive list of all unjust things currently occurring anywhere in the world?
• pizza234 5y ago
  > https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness I'm a bit skeptical of this article, which seems excessively optimistic, since the estimation it does at the very beginning: > Arms-control treaties limit both nations to 1,550 deployed warheads, although FAS estimates 1,588 for Russia and 1,644 for the US seems to interpret numbers differently (deployed strategically/readily deployable). Edit: the two articles complement each other in a very interesting way, for example: navalgazing.net assumes that nuclear weapons would target strategic targets, cornell.edu instead densely populated areas (I think reality would tend towards the first case). The navalgazing.net article states that the soot research is from 80s/90s, while the reserch referenced by cornell.edu is from 2020 (I think in this specific case, the navalgazing.net is at fault).
  • jdlee0 5y ago
    Deployed is not inventory. 1500 warheads ready to go. The rest cannot be flushed in an initial nuclear exchange. It's also a little complex in terms of the count. Bombers count as one independent of how many warheads they carry (the US has non-trivial nuclear bomber forces)
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Freestyler_3 5y ago
    I would assume most nukes are small tactical nukes. Initial nukes will focus on nuclear launch facility's, command and control. So I think a significant amount of nukes will not be used at all.
    • gentleman11 5y ago
      You are gravely mistaken. The nuking of launch facilities means that each side will have to launch almost its entire arsenals within 15 minutes, guaranteeing a very large exchange to avoid having your own weapons become crippled. The dynamic leads to dramatically more detonations, not less
• gentleman11 5y ago
  We’re comparing oil wells burning to ash from nuclear bombs. Oil doesn’t burn hot enough to compete and doesn’t consume enough secondary matter. Nuclear weapons vaporize things that oil would merely burn
  • Qem 5y ago
    Burning oil wells lack the ability to inject dust and soot directly into the stratosphere, as opposed to a big mushroom cloud.
• justin66 5y ago
  > I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up. Except it would need to restart without all the easily accessible fossil fuels and lumber of that time…
  • Loic 5y ago
    But way more knowledge of what kann be done.
  • rhino369 5y ago
    Most areas of the world have more forest now than they did at the early 20th century. And fossil fuel extraction would be mostly spared from the nuclear attacks.
  • Teever 5y ago
    I hear this often repeated assumption all the time and I would love to know where it originated from? Like what pop-sci article first misquoted a paper where someone stated that this was a possibility in a narrow set of circumstances? I'm not saying it's wrong per se, It just seems like one of those factoids that sounds great, that fits in a nice little spot in our brains ready to be regurgitated when we hear something tangentially related. It's a little too convenient of an idea.
    • dotancohen 5y ago
      We now pull oil out from under kilometers of sea and seabed. We do that not for the challenge, but rather because the days of sticking a pipe in the ground and having the black gold geyser up out of it are long over. Basically, we consume the oil that is cheapest to get to. And right now some of the cheapest oil to get to is under kilometers of sea and seabed.
      • Teever 5y ago
        What does this have to do with my question about where this claim was first made?
• baybal2 5y ago
  This only possible if command, and control infrastructure is intact. If C&C is destroyed, Russia cannot do a coordinated launch of its full arsenal. If C&C in Moscow is taken out, it will be up to people in command bunkers in Russia to decide on taking own action, fully knowing that random fire at will launch is futile against a seriously NBC prepared adversary. Only silo based ICBMs are kept in state of high readiness, and can be fired "with a press of a button." That limits targets by range, number of delivery vehicles, and whether the warheads have their own individual last stages. Russian has 3 major silo based ICBM field, each built with 1 major target in mind: 1 for Europe, 1 for the US, and 1 for China. We don't know how many of missiles will be retargeted, or how many can, but we are certain that a lot of ICBMs employed, say, in the Russian Far East, cannot reach most of the US even with a single warhead. The highly improbable scenario of Russia being allowed to launch all of its ~1000 at short notice, and launch them only at densely populated cities is predicted to cause 50M deaths in USA without BMD, people taking to nuclear shelters, and no civil defence defence response. In reality, it's practically impossible to successfully fire their whole arsenal without prior notice, and fire it on designated target only in Europe or North America. The realistic estimate is that the US will face 300 to 500 warheads.
  • TMWNN 5y ago
    >The realistic estimate is that the US will face 300 to 500 warheads. Does this include boomers? I suspect that, given the a) greatly reduced number of Russian SSBNs at sea since the USSR's dissoluton,[1] and b) improvements in Western technology since that event, the US and allies a) have every Russian SSBN under 100% surveillance by a SSN, and b) can take every Russian SSBN out with a good approximation of success. Am I off base in my thinking? [1] Yes, I know about the Russian ability to launch in port. Events of the past month have made me less confident about this ability's functionality.
    • baybal2 5y ago
      > Does this include boomers? No, only silo based. No submarines at sea, or any mobile land based ones, as they will delay the first strike, and out the preparations for it. Warheads on them are tiny as well.
• adventured 5y ago
  The anti nuclear weapon propagandists have worked overtime for half a century to scare into people the notion that nuclear war would mean the end of humanity, the end of civilization. They're lying, largely for good intent I imagine (granted some of them actually believe it). One of the dumbest quotes by a famous smart person I've run across is the Einstein quote about WW4 (it would be fought with sticks and stones), which most people here are likely familiar with. For a scientist it was comically irrational, emotional and false; a scare statement, nothing more. Obviously we don't want a nuclear war to ever happen. If it does, neither humanity nor civilization will end. Russia could aim all of their nukes at the US and would struggle to kill more than a third of the US population at worst, and that's if their weapons all work and are all accurate. Russia couldn't kill everyone in Texas with their nukes if they wanted to. The vast majority of the rest of the world and its civilizations would continue on just fine. And in a wider sense, the planet would shrug off the nuclear event. Even if it caused an extra million cases per year of cancer (an extreme outcome), the human population would shrug that off too (80 million net population is being added still). When it comes to material thrown up, that would be trivial, as someone else noted about prior wars and how that came to not much consequence. So is it rational to keep lying to the population about the end-of-the-world risk that nukes (don't) pose, in an effort to prevent their use? Maybe, probably? They certainly pose a risk in terms of vast destruction, vast death, and the end of cities that get targeted. You could kill 300 million in a mass nuclear attack and that population would be replaced numerically in four years (which isn't to ignore all the other obvious effects, including that the new population isn't an instant stand-in for the people now missing).
  • nkurz 5y ago
    > Obviously we don't want a nuclear war to ever happen. If it does, neither humanity nor civilization will end. Russia could aim all of their nukes at the US and would struggle to kill more than a third of the US population at worst, and that's if their weapons all work and are all accurate. Russia couldn't kill everyone in Texas with their nukes if they wanted to. The vast majority of the rest of the world and its civilizations would continue on just fine. The linked article is definitely alarmist, but seems to be accurately reflecting the current beliefs of atmospheric scientists. The most recent paper they cite is this one: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD030509 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD03... I've only skimmed it, but it would seem to disagree with your position of no risk to civilization. They are predicting full on nuclear winter: "Despite this, the models agree that a nuclear winter would follow a large-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, a result previously found by a large number of diverse but much less sophisticated models in the 1980s." Can you convince us that we should believe you rather than the atmospheric scientists? I actually do believe you might be right, but you are in the difficult position of having us discard what appears to be the current scientific consensus in favor of what appears to be amateur speculation.
• poof131 5y ago
  My biggest concern with that article is some of the assumptions, such as most the warheads will go after random army bases in unpopulated areas. I feel like that is a very “conventional” war attitude from an armchair tactician. My guess would be a strategy of annihilating all key US & EU population centers. Utterly destroy DC, NY, SF, LA, etc. After spending a decade in the military, I saw a consistent theme of underestimating opponents and making plans on how we want them to act. War isn’t rational and never plays out how you want it to. The people trying to make nuclear war seem like a reasonable outcome terrify me, especially when they make assumptions about how the opponent would act that best aligns with what they want to happen.
  • LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    I've read it different: But I’m going to be conservative and estimate that a quarter of the global stockpile is going towards such targets.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  Who wrote that article? What is their expertise?