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Study on US-Russia nuclear war: 91.5 MM casualties in first few hours (2019)
- sklargh 5y agoI have seen recently several discussions in the HN/Substack blog milleau about nuclear war “not being that bad.” Hitting the delete button on nearly every major city in Russia, the United States and and Europe is pretty bad. For the flee to New Zealand crowd; I am quite curious what will happen when everyone with access to a long range airliner or business jet heads in that direction… Related, NZ could do with some serious thinking about its inability to enforce airspace sovereignty.
- mlindner 5y agoI like this nice video from Kurzgesagt on the horrors of nuclear weapons on cities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iPH-br_eJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iPH-br_eJQ
- MrFoof 5y agoThe biggest takeaway people should have from this video is that a modern nuclear strike is effectively an overwhelming Denial of Service attack against emergency services, infrastructure, and supply chain... all at once, on an immense scale. Enough so that quickly scaling a "proper response" just isn't possible. Even if just a single large city (500K+ pop) was hit with a single, typical modern warhead (200-300kt), the results would be covered in history books for the rest of the millennium. A large scale exchange? The best you could hope for is that you're living in the Southern hemisphere to avoid the immediate horror, though the next 20 years would still be horrific.
- formerkrogemp 5y agoI'd imagine the world economy would collapse, and china would expand aggressively.
- chrisseaton 5y agoWhy does everyone think New Zealand is safe? It's a commonwealth country and has huge defence connections to the US and UK.
- Mikeb85 5y agoMainly because it's located so far from everything that it'll probably avoid being a casualty...
- DeWilde 5y agoI think the south of Argentine is probably a better spot to duke it out during a full-scale nuclear war.
- chrisseaton 5y ago'duke it out' means to go and fight someone - seems like you wanted to say the opposite?
- DeWilde 5y agoYes, I was aiming for hunker down. Thanks.
- excalibur 5y agoEveryone knows that NZ us a haven for rich westerners with luxurious bunkers, which may be enough to make it a target. For the crowd simply hoping for some variation of On the Beach, you should be aware that a nuclear war in the 2020s would almost certainly see Australia targeted by Chinese nukes.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago> rich westerners with luxurious bunkers, which may be enough to make it a target. In an apocalypse scenario, they are just extra mouths to feed - I wouldn't waste any missiles to target rich people's mansions in any country, but the locals might have plans for them...
- DeWilde 5y ago> I have seen recently several discussions in the HN/Substack blog milleau about nuclear war “not being that bad.” I think that was a fear of death cope. Downplaying such events reduces the temporary anxiety of thinking about living in a world where nukes have been unleashed. It's hard to overstate how annihilating these weapons are to the areas that are struck by them, and how decimating they are even to the population areas not directly struck but heavily dependent on the major population centers.
- tigerlily 5y agoNZ is quite far away, though eventually the radionuclides would get us. It wouldn’t surprise me if we took a direct hit. Fwiw I’d be more disappointed by a belligerent navy coming to show up our strategic shortcomings.
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- wmf 5y agoUnder the doctrine of counterforce targeting, major cities wouldn't be attacked so optimistic scenarios estimate "only" 20M dead in a US-Russia exchange. Of course that's just one possible doctrine that Russia could follow. The real issue is not any one number but the probabilities of different scenarios.
- RustyConsul 5y agoThere was a virus and i couldn't find toilet paper. You think you'd be able to find any basics after a nuke goes off? Hope ya have a farm. GL trying to get through an airport, GL trying to drive anywhere. We thought we were standing on the shoulders of giants, turns out we where standing on cards.
- robonerd 5y agoMerely live in spitting distance of some strategic targets, then you don't have to worry about suffering for long. Thanks to Naval Base Kitsap, I don't think I'll have to worry about the basics if a nuclear war breaks out.
- buildbot 5y agoYup, something like 1/3rd the entire US arsenal is there. Also, it’s kinda wild/fun to look at the vastness of the bunkers they have by the submarine pens; there are multiple rail lines going North/south that all link up to the pens.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoAnd when you're not struck...? Seems like such a goofy attitude/plan, so many failure modes.
- robonerd 5y agoGMD only has 44 interceptors. I'm pretty sure I'd be hit. >goofy attitude Just a little gallows humor. As for planning, I have enough canned food and bottled water in my closet to last about a week. But that's more a plan for lockdowns/etc than for a nuclear war. As long as I live here, I earnestly don't think there is much sense in planning for that.
- drooogs 5y agoI think it's more dark humor / coping with death than a plan. if that were someone's serious plan, they would probably consider killing themselves if the bomb didn't do it for them.
- the_only_law 5y ago> I have seen recently several discussions in the HN/Substack blog milleau about nuclear war “not being that bad.” I started noticing this sentiment on Reddit sometime last year. Usually with some jingoistic fantasy about whatever country the news media told them to hate.
- Barrin92 5y agoIt's a psychological coping thing. A lot of people, in particular younger ones born after the cold war have never actually been in a situation where their own physical safety is threatened by brute violence or seen the world around them fall apart. See also "covid is just the flu, right guys?" phenomenon. Substack bloggers in particular with their Pollyanna-ish tendencies take these things badly.
- drooogs 5y agoI dunno what discussions you are referring to specifically, but the mainstream belief is that all-out nuclear war would end in nuclear winter. I have seen some posts/articles recently contesting that, which are (quietly) supported by the scientific community. we don't know for sure that nuclear winter wouldn't happen, but the foundations of the original theory have come into question under the last few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d... I don't really see a meaningful distinction between "end of the human race" and merely "end of civilization as we know it", but it's interesting to learn about the current debate among experts.
- lamontcg 5y agoThat isn't an interesting debate to have or to watch. Particularly not when as big of a chunk of our population believes the rapture is coming in their lifetimes.
- baybal2 5y ago
- causality0 5y agoThis reminds me of how little sense the US national defense budget makes. You would think that if something represents half the threat, addressing it should be half the budget. Yet nuclear missiles represent nearly all the threat to the United States, so why doesn't 75% of the defense budget go toward anti-missile systems development and deployment? At the moment, the US still has zero chance of defending against a single MIRV'd ICBM, let alone the hundreds that Russia would use. What fraction of the US defense budget is spent on anti-ICBMs? 9.2 billion dollars, or 1.3%. https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/no-us-missile-defense-system-proven-capable-against-realistic-icbm-threats-study/ https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/no-us-missile-defense-sy...
- 737min 5y agoIn part that’s because large scale ballistic weapon defense has generally been viewed by experts as destabilizing and accelerating the arms race. It’s a little technical why that is so, but interesting to read — regardless of one’s ultimate views.
- mort96 5y agoThis. The mutually assured destruction doctrine works because both parties knows that the party which does the first strike will be obliterated by the other party's second strike, so neither party wants to be the one to strike first. However, if party A should get too good of an ICBM defence system, mutually assured destruction would stop functioning; party A could conceivably fire a first strike with the knowledge that party B wouldn't be able to retaliate with a second strike. This would make it in party B's interest to do a first strike before party A's anti-ballistic missile systems are functional (EDIT: or something like that; essentially, it breaks the entire MAD mechanism, I shouldn't make it sound like any particular outcome is likely.) There was a whole anti-ballistic missile treaty which banned the US and the USSR (and then its successor states) from developing anti-ballistic missile systems. George W. Bush withdrew the US from the treaty in 2002. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty
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- 737min 5y agoNuclear weapons are widely seen as a stabilizing force by aerious security experts, and while their ultimate elimination is a worthy ethical ideal, it is obviously impossible in the present global environment. This link is from one of the abolishment campaign back in 2019. The world has become more not less dangerous since for France, UK, and US - and their many allies whose territorial integrity is assured by US nuclear weapons.
- someweirdperson 5y agoWhat's that weird unit MM? What I could find is an incorrect (multiplied not added) use of the roman 1000 used for money-millions. That would be pretty cheap in this context. Maybe its something like Mega-huMans?
- AlotOfReading 5y agoIt's a semi-common generic Millions indicator, not specific to finance. I prefer to just use "m" instead.
- robonerd 5y agoM is the Roman numeral for a thousand. MM should be two-thousand, but has come to mean 'a thousand thousands' e.g. a million.
- john_courtland 5y agoThink Millipede, where Milli is 1,000. Milli Milli = MM = 1,000 * 1,000. > MM ("thousand thousands", from Latin "Mille" ...) from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2C000%2C000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2C000%2C000
- mjw1007 5y agoRepeating a letter indicating an abbreviated word is an oldfashioned way of pluralising it. For example, 'pp' to represent 'pages'.
- yesenadam 5y agoI believe it's from latin, and is not so old-fashioned in the many countries it's (still) used! e.g. in spanish, USA is EEUU (Estados Unidos)
- RustyConsul 5y agoleast-Fun simulation ever, but i'm sure the creators did alot of research into troop movements to paint this picture so great job. The only thing that it doesn't take into account the weapons we've developed since then. Like Cyber, Anti-Air "Iron Dome", satelite responses, etc. It's crazy how many zero-days are hoarded instead of fixed. It's crazy how interconnected and reliant on technology we are. Take out a city with a nuke, that's really bad. But disable wifi, electricity, water, oil or any other nessecity and instead of destroying that city you watch that city destroy itself.
- choeger 5y agoThe invasion of Ukraine had a curious effect on me. Before, when I read about the 50s and some (US) generals advocating for a nuclear first strike against Soviet Russia, I was dumbfounded. How could military leaders be so fucking stupid? How could someone remotely intelligent even contemplate a nuclear exchange, let alone a first strike? Nowadays, the apparent incompetence of the Russian army, compared with the apparent utter irrationality of the Russian leadership got me thinking. Assuming that Russia loses the next big battle and ends up in the defensive, it's totally possible that the Russian leadership decides to deploy tactical nukes in an attempt to "escalate to deescalate". Such a scenario can very easily lead to a NATO-Russia war and consequently to a large-scale nuclear exchange. Hence, a nuclear first strike doesn't look so outlandish anymore. After all, the incompetence of the Russian army has been proven, so maybe their second strike would be somehow survivable. It's an odd train of thoughts, but presented with the facts of Russia's irrational invasion of Ukraine and its utter incompetence in military strategy, it's hard to argue that it's not at least reasonable.
- truckerbill 5y agoUsing nukes at all is an escalation. Not something you want to roll the dice on given the scale of destruction and the window of time in which things would go very downhill.
- mindslight 5y agoTactical nukes are indeed the big worry. By the way people talk, I don't think most people appreciate the difference between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons aren't "end of the world" (but we certainly benefit from collectively pretending that they are!). The use of tactical nuclear weapons would fall right in line with Russia's apparent goal in Ukraine - turn it into a destroyed shithole incapable of economic development ("neutrality"). Use of tactical nukes would trigger NATO Article 4, but it seems that Russia actually wants to go to war with EU/US ("NATO") to justify their struggle (analogous to NK's "Juche"), and so I'd think we'd still be left with the same calculus regarding escalation to strategic nukes. Unfortunately the only workable strategy seems to be containment and hoping the wheels come off domestically ("SU 2.0"). This doesn't mean we should heed Putler's boasting about his phallic red button in response to any aid to Ukraine, but it does mean a long period of watching genocide and other organized crimes against humanity while waiting for those wheels to work themselves off.
- christkv 5y agoAm I the only one who would expect the us to launch on China as well in this case of scenario. I mean every enemy country with nukes would be attacked in all out nuclear war.
- supernt 5y agoBiden’S nuclear posture review; Every four years, the US government revises it’s nuclear policies in a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) ... Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reports: The Pentagon will eliminate the sole nuclear gravity bomb in the U.S. strategic weapons arsenal capable of blasting deeply buried underground structures as part of the Biden administration‘s review of strategic weapons policy, according to U.S. officials. The retirement of the B83 bomb, a megatonclass weapon delivered by B-2 stealth bombers, was disclosed to Congress last month as part of the Biden administration’s classified nuclear posture review, a major reassessment of strategic forces and their employment. The bomb is “costly to maintain and of increasingly limited value,” a senior defense official told The Washington Times. “Limited value?” Not so. Both Russia and China have deep underground nuclear missile bunkers and manufacturing and storage facilities that only this weapon can attack. Even our land based and sub-launched warheads can’t penetrate these hardened facilities... Source Joel Skousen Latest WAB
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoPrinceton Simulation? Looks almost exactly like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/DEFCON/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520/DEFCON/ to me.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoWeine nicht wenn die Bombe fällt, Dam Dam. Dam. Dam. Bunker, Stein, und Eisen dicht, aber deine Maske nicht! Dam Dam. Dam Dam.
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