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, t

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).