13 ms·

How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

117 points by mikestew 5y ago

lurquer 5y ago
I would expect a large number will be duds. There has been no testing for years, the nature of the device requires constant maintenance, the delivery systems (rockets) require even more maintenance… And, then you have the issue of fraud… that is, suppliers, contractors, and quality-control guys fudging the numbers.
oxff 5y ago
cglan 5y ago
I think it might be for the better that we think nuclear weapons are world ending in that it stops them from being used
- hollerith 5y ago
  That only works as long as Putin and Xi also believe they are world-ending.
  - vkou 5y ago
    China has an order of magnitude fewer nuclear weapons than either Russia or the US. I'm not concerned about it deciding to end civilization. It can't. All those weapons can do for it is to provide a guarantee that anyone starting a war with them will lose a lot more than they gain. If you're concerned about Chinese nuclear weapons, my best advice for you is to not go to war with China.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  It might be worse if we were to allow another holocaust because we base our risk assessment on faulty analysis whereas our enemies feel free to threaten because they are working from an accurate risk assessment.
- theptip 5y ago
  I think it’s almost always better to have a more accurate mode of the world than a less accurate one. For example if Russia were to commit further atrocities worse than actual nuclear war, and the civilized world refused to call their bluff because the cost of imaginary nuclear war is worse still. Of course there are also scenarios where bluffs getting made and called are net-negative utility, and maybe you wouldn’t make those bluffs if you thought them being called would end the world? However Putin is already making threats of nuclear retaliation, so this point is probably moot.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    > if Russia were to commit further atrocities worse than actual nuclear war Is this even physically possible? I mean imagine Hitler was winning WW2 and the only way to stop him was to cause global nuclear war with today's arcenal - are you confident which is the better option?
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    While this is certainly a different model of the world - it would be incredibly irresponsible to operate if this were accurate, or that almost any model of the outcome would be in any way accurately predicable or controllable in the end.
- playpause 5y ago
  Most of my non-tech friends believe that nuclear apocalypse would entail at least the end of all human life. I think this only makes them more complacent in a strange way. They can shrug it off with gallows humour - if it happens, well, that was that, I only hope it’s quick. They don’t have to think about the reality of how life would change in the years following a nuclear war. The myth of nuclear apocalypse is a kind of licence to stop mentally engaging with the issue, which I don’t think is good. Not to mention the nihilistic side effects of believing one is going through life on borrowed time. Pushing falsehoods for the greater good always has unintended consequences.
hammock 5y ago
The conclusion: >Nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be. Some of this is because the threat has routinely been exaggerated by anti-nuclear groups, and some of it is the result of arms control efforts over the past half-century, which have significantly reduced the potential human toll of a nuclear war It’s odd to me that he blames exaggeration of nuclear weapons on anti-nuclear and anti-proliferation. It would seem likely to me that the exaggeration is more due to pro-nuclear forces and nuclear state powers, with the aim of promoting peace through power and deterrence.
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  Internal US government documents estimate something like a 90% population loss after a war that only targets our ICBM silos. (Ie not one missile hits a populated area.) The fallout destroys our food supplies and wipes out livestock, making farming impossible: most of the US population starves within a year. There is a reason the US government doesn’t spend a lot of effort preparing the population for a nuclear war, and it isn’t because of “anti-nuclear activism.”
  - lumost 5y ago
    Studies done in the 60s and 70s were aimed at much larger scale conflicts than would occur in 2022. However the general sentiment is accurate. Food production post-nuclear war is a wildcard, dependent on both fallout pattern, global capacity to increase food production, global interest in helping countries devastated by nuclear war, and targeting. The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles. The assumption that both sides haven't done some planning for both scorched earth targetting approaches, and "survivable" exchanges also seems suspect. Who's to say that Russia wouldn't target conventional military infrastructure, and civilian population centers, having assumed that all deployable warheads would already have been fired? They could reasonably assess that the value of targeting silos which have already fired their missiles is low, and the need for post-war food production will be high. Alternately, they could adopt a scorched earth targeting policy to maximize fallout and leave the US in a permanently weakened state. I'm sure all nuclear powers have tried to maximize their choices in how to deploy weapons in any conflict.
CapitalistCartr 5y ago
It depends: Real-world nukes, or Hollywood nukes. If real-world nukes, play with Nukemap to get an idea. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
- andai 5y ago
  The article mentions nukemap and says it targets the center of each city, whereas in real life infrastructure (of military significance) would be targeted. As far as I can tell that's the assumption on which the entire article rests.
  - CapitalistCartr 5y ago
    Nukemap targets wherever you put the center. It's completely customizable.
demosito666 5y ago
As a wannabe libertarian, I believe in freedom of speech and information. But if I had to choose a single topic of all that has to banned, it would be this. Due to several cognitive biases human perception tends to lean towards black & white depiction of the world. In nuclear war topic black is "we all are gonna die so there is no point to use the nukes" and white is "well, it's not that bad after all, maybe we could nuke those evil Russians/Americans". Black depiction must be maintained in public space even if the preconditions are false. The Overton window must stay where it is now.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  If you want to force people to lie or remain silent about what you consider a dangerous truth despite it being discernibly false in order to maintain a convenient fiction soviet style you probably aren't actually a libertarian.
  - demosito666 5y ago
    Well, yeah, this is an imaginable scenario, because it's impossible to "ban" such things because of Streisand effect. I would oppose anything like this in the real world.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Interesting that your comment exemplifies the black & white depiction of the world that you describe. A grey depiction is exactly as the article describes - nuclear war would be bad but here are its realistic effects, and here are ways that you can protect yourself from the worst of these effects. There's a communalist vs. individualist divide here. It may be better for everyone if everyone believes that nuclear war is unspeakably bad and so is off the table as an option. However, it's better for an individual, given that they can't influence world events, if they're armed with a realistic portrayal of nuclear war and steps they can take to protect themselves.
deanc 5y ago
How can we be sure of even a conservative estimate of current warheads. Why wouldn’t US/Russia have significantly more nuclear war heads than they are a) allowed and b) saying they have? Surely it’s in their interest to have more than the other.
- hollerith 5y ago
  The US frequently inspects Russian nuclear facilities and vice versa per the New START Treaty.
  - deanc 5y ago
    Playing dumb here but there’re not going to invite each other to the secret nuclear warhead stash are they?
    - hollerith 5y ago
      The most expensive part of a warhead by far is the fissile material. I imagine the Russians show the US inspectors their stockpiles of fissile material that would need to be melted, cast, then machined before it could be incorporated into a functional warhead. There were over a dozen inspections last year IIRC. Nothing known to science produces gamma rays at the rate per unit of mass that fissile material does, so that is how the US would detect sham fissile material. In fact I suspect that the inspectors measure the entire gamma-ray spectrum and would be able to distinguish Russian fissile material from, e.g., Chinese or French fissile material using that spectrum. I imagine so because after a nuclear explosion there is a US agency that can determine from which country's stockpile the bomb's fissile material came from (by measuring isotope ratios in the fallout). My guess is that the inspection regime is not airtight but if the Russians are cheating then it has cost them 10s of billions of dollars (to produce new fissile material).
    - pixl97 5y ago
      Russia has about the same economic output as Texas. Trying to keep a massive number of weapons is a stupendous expense already. That many more weapons is throwing money in a pit that you cant use for things like building an economy, or a palace for a dictator.
happytoexplain 5y ago
>not an existential threat to humanity ... [but] 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. So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. I get it - some people focus on the worst case scenario of a human-species-ending nuclear winter. I'm not actually particularly interested in how likely or unlikely that specific outcome is, as the "lesser" outcomes are plenty horrifying enough, and don't call for a general downplaying of nuclear attacks like this.
- jocker12 5y ago
  You should try this https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php. Move the map on your location and see the impact radius.
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    I've played with the nuke map occasionally for years, though I've never taken it too seriously in terms of estimating realistic damage. I'm not sure what targets would be hit, and by which bombs, and even then, the circles don't provide a holistic, long-term description of damage. But it is a lot of fun.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    This tells you nothing about number of people that would die as a result. Remember what happened to global trade when 1 ship was stuck in Suesz? It takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy all large-scale deepwater ports in the world. Global Trade is crippled. UK and Japan depend on food imports, so people there starve. It only takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy most oil refining capacity in the world. Czech republic has enough gas to last 6 days
- leto_ii 5y ago
  > So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. My thoughts exactly. Setting the world back 100+ years is a disaster of gigantic proportions. I also find it odd that the author didn't even attempt to provide an estimate of the possible victim count. I'm basically sure it would at least be in the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions. This is to say nothing about a possible future arms race that would increase the numbers of warheads substantially.
mikece 5y ago
You can definitely survive a nuclear war -- but you might up envying the dead.
- tsol 5y ago
  Someone will, probably won't be you or I though.
empthought 5y ago
This essay is leaning very hard on the fact that there are 5% the number of warheads today as there were at the peak of the cold war. Nuclear weapons are exactly as destructive as we think; the sum total of the nuclear arsenal is far smaller than when many of us formed our impressions.
- snemvalts 5y ago
  And the average yield is just 300-800 kt. A lot less than the megaton size bombs of the cold war.
  - samarama 5y ago
    Where did you get that number from?
    - earleybird 5y ago
      3rd paragraph, although parent may have a typo - rather than 300 - 800 it says 300 - 500 In practice, most strategic nuclear warheads today are in the 300-500 kT range, with tactical weapons being smaller. If we take the American W88 (455 kT) as representative of this range
gcheong 5y ago
The analysis is interesting and makes sense that populations wouldn’t largely be targeted, but it seems that’s assuming some kind of logical strategy to the war where the objective is to disable the forces of your opponent. That’s nice and tidy to then say populated areas won’t largely be targeted, but what if the objective in using them just becomes to create as much human suffering as possible?
- chakalakasp 5y ago
  The author has no idea what he is talking about and his thoughts have no relation to actual nuclear targeting plans.
- soared 5y ago
  Or similarly our logic is not the same logic that our opponent operates on.
- empthought 5y ago
  Population for recruiting irregular military personnel is a strategic target, too.
chillingeffect 5y ago
Nukes don't need to wipe out every square inch as the author implies. They only need to cause covid-like, ukraine-like interference to our infrastructure to reduce our planet to the iron age and only capable of supporting a fraction of its current population.
gmuslera 5y ago
"Known" nuclear weapons. Good part of the motivation of that arms race was to discourage the enemy to start a war, even if they had everything to win it. In that line, there had been rumours of doomsday devices (like Dead Hand from URSS in the Cold War) that could put in danger most life on Earth, that could be triggered if some side loses or other defined conditions. It is a level up from mutual assured destruction. And that example is from 50+ years ago. I don't know if something more advanced was developed more recently by either side. Technology and science had advanced a lot and both sides had a pretty big budget all this time. I prefer to not discard the possibility.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  > rumours of doomsday devices (like Dead Hand from URSS in the Cold War) that could put in danger most life on Earth, that could be triggered if some side loses or other defined conditions. The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozg7gEchjuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozg7gEchjuM
  - gmuslera 5y ago
    A message is not a message if doesn't reach your intended audience. In the other hand, it could reach just your intended audience and not the whole world, your own citizens could take that message as something negative.
philipkglass 5y ago
There are some good points here mixed with some large assumptions. The good points: - Weapons fuzed for high-altitude air burst, which maximizes the damage area at the expense of not being able to kill hardened targets, are not going to produce dangerous fallout. - The typical warhead now is significantly smaller than the multi-megaton ones that were typical during the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The large assumptions: - Hardened, remote military targets will soak up a lot of warheads that could otherwise be targeted to wreck cities or general-purpose infrastructure. - Civilization will only regress to an early-20th-century level after every oil refinery has been destroyed and the surrounding populations decimated. That last pair of assumptions in particular raises my eyebrows: "To put this into perspective, there are currently about 1,200 international airports and 732 oil refineries worldwide. Allocating a single warhead to each of these would leave only a thousand or so for every single other target on the planet." and "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." It hardly matters if most people survived the initial attack if all the oil refineries are gone, along with all the infrastructure within a couple miles of each oil refinery. Early 20th century technology supported fewer than 2 billion people, most of those being people who already knew how to farm without artificial fertilizers. Today we are nearly 8 billion and a much smaller fraction have any experience farming. A nuclear war that globally knocks technology back to the early 20th century, even for "only" a decade or so, would lead to the death of most people now alive. At that point I'm skeptical that there would be enough survivors to sustain even as much specialization of labor as found in the early 20th century industrialized economies. Technology level and population could fall much further.
- baybal2 5y ago
- pixl97 5y ago
  This right here. When the green revolution dies so does 90% of humanity. This also ignores our continuing need for modern medicine as our use of antibiotics has grown some rather nasty things that would greatly reduce our densities if left without things like chlorine for water purification.
bontaq 5y ago
Destroying the entirety of Manhattan beneath 80th st or so, along with a significant part of Manhattan-facing Brooklyn and Hoboken shorelines, with a single reasonably placed bomb is actually about as destructive as I imagined (following their 3 miles out rule). But sure, let's lighten up about nukes!
phendrenad2 5y ago
If all of the nukes in the world went off at once, strategically spaced out to cause the most land coverage (I.E. some kind of Dr Strangelove situation), the world would look mostly the same. Green grass, blue oceans. It wouldn't be scorched earth. But, of course, those unlucky enough to live downwind, within 100 or so miles of a nuke, would get a healthy dose of radiation to their internal organs, as radioactive dust would be unavoidable. For decades, that fallout region would be uninhabitable, because radioactive isotopes would be incorporated into plants and animals. So yeah, not the end of the world, or even civilization, but I wouldn't want to live in that world.
mupuff1234 5y ago
> For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live. This person is delusional. The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario.
- lumost 5y ago
  Following a nuclear exchange, it is unlikely that a country without ports, airports, transit networks, or a military, would remain the financial hub of the world.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Why? Finance wouldn't be worth much after an armageddon anyway.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  > The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario. What? So civilisation is collapsing around you, and instead of a port and ships that can move grain and life-saving goods, you would rather have an army of bankers so that they can trade triple-A rated collateralized debt obligations for newly radiactive real estate?
  - steve_adams_86 5y ago
    But actually, why not target both? There are thousands of warheads from what I understand. It doesn’t seem like they need to be choosey.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      The article covers that. It boils down to “there’s a lot of bombs but the world is really, really big.”
lil_dispaches 5y ago
If this isn't misinformation, I don't know what is.
jzellis 5y ago
"For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live." I'm not sure what universe this cat lives in, but I'm pretty sure Moscow would far more concerned with vaporizing Wall Street than in whatever naval stuff happens in Red Hook or Port Elizabeth (rather than Annapolis or Chesapeake). Or does he think wars are still won by navies instead of bankers? :-D
genericone 5y ago
Just one of many pro-nuke propaganda pieces prepping our minds for the next stage of war, actual nuclear war. The more we discuss the merits, the more "acceptable" the outcomes seem to become in the popular zeitgeist.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  You think this is a government backed article?
  - genericone 5y ago
    This appears like a navy-glorification website. If not government backed, then it could at least be think-tank backed, with a military industrial bent.
    - psyc 5y ago
      https://www.navalgazing.net/About https://www.navalgazing.net/About Surely part of the ruse!
patall 5y ago
That really depends on what people 'think' is a lot. About 7 million Germans died in WWII (civilian + military), clearly a lot, but still 'only' 10% of the population. The Ukraine military has reporter their own casualties as 3'000 men so far, which is huge, yet 10+ times that many people go into sport arenas every week. If nuclear war now would kill 50% of the global population, it would certainly define our history for centuries, yet half of us (i.e more than 4 billion humans) would still be there afterwards.
- pixl97 5y ago
  The problem we have today is that of specialization. I dont believe there is a viable scenario where only 40% of the population dies. We either lose something like less than 10% of the population or we loose over 80%. Food is the reason. In 1900 before the green revolution there were less than 2 billion people on the planet and huge portions of them grew their own food. After that point industrialisation and mass fossil fuel production of fertiliser allowed our population to explode. Now were completely dependant on those factories that have massive supply lines fed by specialists.
  - empthought 5y ago
    2 billion people today rely on subsistence farming, it's silly to think 90% of people on earth would die on account of that alone.
    - pixl97 5y ago
      They survive on subsistence farming because their near large urban cities don't. The moment those cities are not fed the terrible order they already exist in gets worse. A supersaturation even can only exist as long as energy is being applied. When that is lost (fossils fuels) then a corrective event occurs.
      - empthought 5y ago
        No, they survive on subsistence farming regardless of what any cities do. That's the definition of subsistence farming. I agree that the situation in cities would be dire, but over 40% of people live in rural areas and half of them are already growing their own food.
anonymousiam 5y ago
So... I guess it's okay if Russia nukes Ukraine? Does that explain the March 27th publication date?
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  I have no idea how you reached that conclusion.
  - anonymousiam 5y ago
    This is an article downplaying the severity and seriousness of the use of nuclear weapons. It was published shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine (again). Perhaps the timing is just a coincidence, but I've come to learn over the years that it's unlikely.
    - matkoniecz 5y ago
      This article is written in response to articles/claims proclaiming that nuclear war will cause people to become extinct (or similarly overblown claims). If they are downplaying nuclear war - can you recommend articles of a similar quality presenting claim that nuclear war is worse than presented here? And this article still presents it as an horrific disaster - and maybe it assumes that people are aware that millions would die in just opening of the nuclear war, it would be worst disaster in history. And that such thing happening would be bad. And unwanted. And focused on countering "we will all die" perspective. For example they are taking as given that USA shooting down Russian planes over Ukraine is nonstarter because it increases risk of nuclear war,
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
Yeah, but you know - if they start flying, we're dead. I'm in the middle of Poland, it really won't be any comfort for me that USA will survive when I'll be dead.
poulpy123 5y ago
I'm not very comfortable with all the talks I hear or read about how nuclear war isn't so bad since russia invaded ukraine
- hwers 5y ago
  It's just a form of stress coping. It's entirely delusional and I think it's very important we not allow this type of thinking to be a normal form of thought (as uncomfortable as it is).
- JacksCracked 5y ago
- helij 5y ago
  Psychosis and wishful thinking is pretty disturbing.
kalessin 5y ago
"Thought experiment" from Kurzgesagt: What if We Nuke a City? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iPH-br_eJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iPH-br_eJQ
timcavel 5y ago
rhn_mk1 5y ago
Posted earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051354
baron816 5y ago
What happens to nuclear power plants if they’re destroyed by a nuclear blast? Or a nuclear waste facility? Wouldn’t that result in a Chernobyl like event, without the ability to contain it as quickly? How would the world handle a few dozen Chernobyls all at once?
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  > How would the world handle a few dozen Chernobyls all at once? It would be basically irrelevant compared to other consequences of full scale-nuclear war.
zzzeek 5y ago
"Again, nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be." What kind of person gets up in the morning and decides this is the thing they need to write about and tell the world today? How are we served by this?
- psyc 5y ago
  Some of us are just naturally curious, and cats be damned.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  1) Some like to believe in things consistent with reality 2) Typical people would prefer to avoid nuclear war Which part you consider objectionable in what you quoted?
the__alchemist 5y ago
One thing of note left out, re destruction of population centers: The article focuses on a most-likely scenario, and doesn't discuss a most-dangerous (to civilians) one. I'm curious how much devastation could be unleashed if weapons were targeted at population centers. Depending on how effective defense systems are (THAAD, PATRIOT etc), I'd bet huge amounts of people could be killed.
javajosh 5y ago
I imagine we'll be seeing a lot of content like this in the run up to nuking Kyiv. Despicable.
- throwaway_75369 5y ago
darkhorn 5y ago
> In practice, most strategic nuclear warheads today are in the 300-500 kT range Capable to wipe out all capital cities in Eastern Europe, or most of capital cities of Western Europe, I mean if only one is used, and not two, out of few thousands. Few weeks ago something fell out of blue in Zagreb and later they identified it as a Russian spy plane. That's it.
georgia_peach 5y ago
Whenever the experts volunteer their precious time--making words and pictures for total strangers--to convince us that we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads over something, it's probably time to take precautions & make preparations.
andrewflnr 5y ago
The biggest problem I see with this rather sunny perspective is that it assumes all those "reserve" warheads are permanently out of action. In fact, we have to expect that they'll start getting pulled into service as soon as the first nukes fly. That is, after all, the point of a reserve is it not? So no, it's not going to stop at 3000 warheads.
pmoriarty 5y ago
I strongly encourage anyone who wants a taste of what nuclear war would look like to watch Threads[1]. Despite being the most terrifying depiction of nuclear war that I've ever seen, and it is probably overoptimistic. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a general in charge of UK's nuclear strategic defense met with his Soviet counterpart and asked the latter what he thought of Threads and the latter laughed and said the entire UK was an overkill zone. In the US you are either by major population areas (as most people are) and will probably be targeted by many weapons in the megaton range, and if you're in remote areas you're probably near some missile bases and will be wiped out too. Nuclear winter and fallout will get the rest. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE
- slaymaker1907 5y ago
  In most of the analysis I've seen, those who die immediately will be the fortunate ones. Starvation is a horrible way to go, and even if nuclear winter doesn't happen, we probably won't have the necessary technology in place to produce food for the remaining population.
- echoradio 5y ago
  Came by to mention Threads. [1] The collapse of society spurred by nuclear war is a pretty horrific thing. If Threads taught me anything about being prepared for “surviving” a nuclear war in a metropolitan area, it’s to stock up on alcohol and drugs so your impending death is not as painful. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  Your link opens as "video is not available".
enaaem 5y ago
I don’t really see why people think this article promotes nuclear war. It does help to explain a lot of geopolitical events like why Russia feels insecure even with thousands of nukes. The fact is that things aren’t over after throwing your nukes. Your still need a strong conventional army to capture or defend territory. For Russia to be a great power (and they want to be) they have to control the Central European plane to be fully secure. No, buffer states are not enough. They have to control the countries there either as puppet states or full annexation.
upofadown 5y ago
>I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up. That's not how technology works. You can't rewind things arbitrarily backwards any more than than you can wind them arbitrarily forwards. The technology required to recreate my grandfathers feed and fuel business simply doesn't not exist anymore. The horses that pulled the wagons no longer exist and would have to be bred up again. All the manufactured fittings no longer have factories and there is no one that knows how to design the machines. If there is a slip it would be to the level of small manually run farms. Those that could not manage that particular technology would die. Which would be almost everyone. It would make a lot more sense to recover as many machine tools as possible and then try to recreate the existing technology from the wreckage
kmeisthax 5y ago
>Broadly speaking, we can expect nuclear weapons to be aimed at one of three types of targets: strategic (nuclear) targets, conventional military forces, and industrial/infrastructure targets. This is assuming the person wielding the nukes is attempting to use them for normal military activity. However, nuclear weapons are generally wasteful for this purpose; regular missiles work just as well, cost less money, and do not poison the land you want to invade for weeks out. If you could use nukes in an ordinary military campaign, then all the nuclear disarmament over the last 30 years would not have happened. The only thing nuclear weapons are really good at is killing lots of people really quickly. Thus, my current bet is that if Russia attempts to use their nukes, it will specifically be a last-ditch effort to kill as many pro-EU Ukranians as possible on their way out of the country. Their current actions are consistent with this; when their initial blitzkrieg failed, they proceeded to slaughtering as many civilians as they could. I otherwise generally agree with the article's contention that nuclear war will not be a species-destroying event. It is, however, still something worth avoiding; because in an all-out war Russia will absolutely be going after population centers first and not militarily-valuable targets. Russia's goal is not to win the war. Their goal is to make Putin look tough and powerful while goading the west into making the mistake of counterattacking so we can bleed faster than they are.
empressplay 5y ago
Other things to consider: Weapon reliability -- particularly on the Russian side. Will many / most of their ICBMs even get off the ground? Will the warheads actually work properly? I'm not saying they're all duds but if I was Russia I'd maybe keep 100 maintained for the sake of demonstration. Willingness to launch -- this is probably a bigger problem on the Russian side (the Americans brainwash their soldiers better!) Even if they use tricks like obfuscating targets or claiming the target is an uninhabited 'demonstration' someone still has to push the button. European Theatre -- Russia needs its subs to try to stop UK / American subs from nuking them so they're not likely deployed around NA (instead hunting for enemies closer to home) and thus can't destroy the silos. As such they can't attack the US using ICBMs because they will face massive retaliation. The only way Russia can survive such a war would be to have an exchange with Europe and assume the US will not launch ICBMs (a fair assessment). The rest of the West will be far too distracted dealing with the humanitarian crisis generated by the blasts in Europe to care about Russia. So, if the West were to imply an invasion of Russia directly, Russia's best course of action would be to nuke a few cities in non-nuclear countries in Western Europe. At that point an invasion of Russia would be untenable (due to the need to deal with the figurative and literal fallout), and although nuclear retaliation might ensue (but not more than tit for tat), it would not be existential to Russia. And nobody would risk poking the bear again. This is Putin's thinking and why we're not invading Russia (or even Ukraine). However, I'd like to point out that even the destruction of a single largish city will completely ruin any appetite on the part of the West to either inflict such damage themselves or encourage any encores. You will see anti-war protests in the West on an unprecedented scale. There will be uncontrolled rioting in the streets. Any democratic government that engages in further nuclear activity will likely not survive politically and neither will their parties. This is Putin's 'escalate to de-escalate' scenario. While what is happening in Ukraine is horrific and terrible I'm afraid we're stuck unless we develop an appetite for this sort of shit. Which is itself horrible and terrible.
- chakalakasp 5y ago
  >Weapon reliability -- particularly on the Russian side. Will many / most of their ICBMs even get off the ground? Will the warheads actually work properly? I'm not saying they're all duds but if I was Russia I'd maybe keep 100 maintained for the sake of demonstration. From the little I've communicated with people who would know (because they used to be in the IC), the vague answer is "Yes, they would work." >European Theatre -- Russia needs its subs to try to stop UK / American subs from nuking them so they're not likely deployed around NA (instead hunting for enemies closer to home) and thus can't destroy the silos. The submarines that launch ballistic nuclear missiles are not the same submarines that hunt the submarines that launch ballistic nuclear missiles. You might want to read up on the wiki on this stuff or something.
somenameforme 5y ago
> "Broadly speaking, we can expect nuclear weapons to be aimed at one of three types of targets: strategic (nuclear) targets, conventional military forces, and industrial/infrastructure targets. Notably absent is a direct interest in killing the opposing population, although people tend to live near infrastructure, so it is going to happen." This is unsubstantiated and seemingly just poorly informed. Our initial nuclear targets from the 50s have been declassified [1] and it's no doubt other countries have similar targets. We planned to specifically target population centers as well as things like medical production facilities. The reason propaganda is so heavily interweaved into war is because a war is won by breaking the will of the enemy to resist. See: Afghanistan, a country which has the GDP of a moderate sized city in a developed country and relatively primitive weapons, has now won wars against both the Soviet Union and the USA. Both had dramatic superiorities in every measurable category, except willpower. The will of the invaders broke before the will of the Afghans. And so the Afghans won. In nuclear war, where all rules and ethics have long since been tossed aside, the only goal will be to break the will of the enemy by any means possible. And I can think of no possibly better way to completely break the will of a people to fight than finding their most economically developed and heavily populated locations, and sending the nukes square center. Even "better" is that these will be some of the softest targets. Nuclear facilities are built with the anticipation of being nuclear targets, Manhattan isn't. [1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear-Target-List-Declassified-First-Ever/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear...
lamontcg 5y ago
"The world can have a little nuclear war... as a treat." Honestly the normalization of nuclear war on this forum is so disgusting that this article doesn't deserve a better response than that. Stop crawling up your own contrarian asshole that far. The "best" outcome of nuclear war will be so bad that you'll probably wish you were just incinerated in the blast. (And Russia will never in a million years show any kind of restraint once it comes to launching nuclear missiles at the United States. If their nukes are like their tanks many of them may not work, and they should now know that. And once they start shooting the United States will quickly treat the remaining arsenal as an existential threat so seek to destroy them all. That means that Russia must launch all of them. Its a game theoretical problem with an optimum that exhibits bang-bang control).
- empressplay 5y ago
  This is why NA is not really under threat. Europe, on the other hand really should be preparing for the possibility of an attack. Which is where we get into trouble -- European NATO members _believe_ they are under the 'MAD' umbrella, but Putin doesn't believe it. And so they really should prepare their infrastructures for that possibility, rather than just waving it away as an impossibility.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Yeah if Putin drops a single tactical nuke on an airfield in Poland would we actually commit to nuclear war over that? Probably not? That is a thing to be worried about since he is the batshit crazy one in the room who likes to assassinate people publicly using methods that only he would have access to, causing random deaths specifically for the purpose of showing that he doesn't care and you can't hide from him. Plus the callous ability to order his army to grind cities into to rubble and randomly rape and murder the population into creating a refugee crisis. That's the problem with playing this kind of a game with someone who will always escalate back -- and who certainly has the ability to destroy the world as we know it.
alpple 5y ago
People aren't good at predicting the results of things that haven't happened before.
miav 5y ago
I’m surprised by the bad response this article received. All media I’m aware of speak of nuclear war in very vague terms and suggest an outcome similar to that which we see in entertainment science fiction. Long before the war in Ukraine I have been occasionally trying to dig a little deeper into the actual possible outcome of a nuclear war, but found only vague or outdated information and I’m very grateful to the author of the article for doing good research. Yes, it is based on major assumptions, but those truly are the best thing we have since the discussed situation is genuinely unprecedented. I’m also surprised by the disgust people here express towards the supposed “normalisation of nuclear war”. Much like the general public was taught by films such as Terminator that AI is something that will end the world, the perception of nuclear warfare was similarly shaped by media. When AI started seeing widespread use in daily life it became important to address the ingrained misconceptions. In the same way, now that there’s a war in Europe and Russia is threatening the use of nukes it is important for people to have a reasonably accurate idea of what such use would entail. The idea of “nuclear war is simply unacceptable and we must avoid it at all costs” is good very getting upvotes on social media, but truth is that taking all available steps to prevent such a war is equivalent to appeasing Russia in all cases.
- empressplay 5y ago
  You can bet that the #1 aim of Western governments currently is trying to figure out a way to neutralize the threat posed by Russian nukes, but until we figure that out, appeasing (or at least not antagonizing) Russia is all we have.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  The AI shown in terminator does not exist. That’s a gross false equivalence.
me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
Honestly if I ever find a terminal into the universe I’m rolling back humans.
kortex 5y ago
I think it's important to have accurate models of the world, in order to make sound decisions. I don't think playing a macabre Pascal's Wager with nuclear armageddon benefits no one. It would be an unmitigated disaster. There would be incalculable suffering. But all this talk of ending humanity as a species is not at all scientifically founded. If anything, I think this raises the stake of responsible earth stewardship (same thing with climate change). If you believe you are well and truly fucked, fatalism kicks in and you mentally check out. But if you believe that you will most likely survive, and the amount of suffering you experience will be affected by your decisions, all of a sudden you have ethical skin in the game. Why reduce nukes 90% if that 10% still glasses the planet? There is no qualitative change. But if a 90% reduction is the difference between 8B and 1B deaths, de-armament is now approachable, has real stakes, and makes a real impact.
smiley1437 5y ago
"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say... no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops." - Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
nikolay 5y ago
So, what's the actual conclusion? It's okay to keep pushing Russian until they fire off the nukes?!
r3dneck 5y ago
Sadly, we have two study cases about "how destructive are nuclear weapons" and yes, really, they are Hiroshima and Nagasaki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... I've read this article quickly but there is no mention to those events, the author only compare the power of a modern nuke with Hiroshima bomb. So, how can this article be a reliable source ? About the author, I don't see his name and after a quick google search, I can't find any endorsement to that website as reliable source. This is the second article I see on HN of the series "nukes are bad but no so bad" that are no more that blogger opinions, INMO. As usual, being liked transform anything on Internet in authoritative information by induction and this is bad.

117 points by mikestew 5y ago

I would expect a large number will be duds. There has been no testing for years, the nature of the device requires constant maintenance, the delivery systems (rockets) require even more maintenance… And, then you have the issue of fraud… that is, suppliers, contractors, and quality-control guys fudging the numbers.

oxff 5y ago

cglan 5y ago

I think it might be for the better that we think nuclear weapons are world ending in that it stops them from being used

hollerith 5y ago
That only works as long as Putin and Xi also believe they are world-ending.
- vkou 5y ago
  China has an order of magnitude fewer nuclear weapons than either Russia or the US. I'm not concerned about it deciding to end civilization. It can't. All those weapons can do for it is to provide a guarantee that anyone starting a war with them will lose a lot more than they gain. If you're concerned about Chinese nuclear weapons, my best advice for you is to not go to war with China.
michaelmrose 5y ago
It might be worse if we were to allow another holocaust because we base our risk assessment on faulty analysis whereas our enemies feel free to threaten because they are working from an accurate risk assessment.
theptip 5y ago
I think it’s almost always better to have a more accurate mode of the world than a less accurate one. For example if Russia were to commit further atrocities worse than actual nuclear war, and the civilized world refused to call their bluff because the cost of imaginary nuclear war is worse still. Of course there are also scenarios where bluffs getting made and called are net-negative utility, and maybe you wouldn’t make those bluffs if you thought them being called would end the world? However Putin is already making threats of nuclear retaliation, so this point is probably moot.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  > if Russia were to commit further atrocities worse than actual nuclear war Is this even physically possible? I mean imagine Hitler was winning WW2 and the only way to stop him was to cause global nuclear war with today's arcenal - are you confident which is the better option?
- dv_dt 5y ago
  While this is certainly a different model of the world - it would be incredibly irresponsible to operate if this were accurate, or that almost any model of the outcome would be in any way accurately predicable or controllable in the end.
playpause 5y ago
Most of my non-tech friends believe that nuclear apocalypse would entail at least the end of all human life. I think this only makes them more complacent in a strange way. They can shrug it off with gallows humour - if it happens, well, that was that, I only hope it’s quick. They don’t have to think about the reality of how life would change in the years following a nuclear war. The myth of nuclear apocalypse is a kind of licence to stop mentally engaging with the issue, which I don’t think is good. Not to mention the nihilistic side effects of believing one is going through life on borrowed time. Pushing falsehoods for the greater good always has unintended consequences.

hammock 5y ago

The conclusion: >Nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be. Some of this is because the threat has routinely been exaggerated by anti-nuclear groups, and some of it is the result of arms control efforts over the past half-century, which have significantly reduced the potential human toll of a nuclear war It’s odd to me that he blames exaggeration of nuclear weapons on anti-nuclear and anti-proliferation. It would seem likely to me that the exaggeration is more due to pro-nuclear forces and nuclear state powers, with the aim of promoting peace through power and deterrence.

matthewdgreen 5y ago
Internal US government documents estimate something like a 90% population loss after a war that only targets our ICBM silos. (Ie not one missile hits a populated area.) The fallout destroys our food supplies and wipes out livestock, making farming impossible: most of the US population starves within a year. There is a reason the US government doesn’t spend a lot of effort preparing the population for a nuclear war, and it isn’t because of “anti-nuclear activism.”
- lumost 5y ago
  Studies done in the 60s and 70s were aimed at much larger scale conflicts than would occur in 2022. However the general sentiment is accurate. Food production post-nuclear war is a wildcard, dependent on both fallout pattern, global capacity to increase food production, global interest in helping countries devastated by nuclear war, and targeting. The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles. The assumption that both sides haven't done some planning for both scorched earth targetting approaches, and "survivable" exchanges also seems suspect. Who's to say that Russia wouldn't target conventional military infrastructure, and civilian population centers, having assumed that all deployable warheads would already have been fired? They could reasonably assess that the value of targeting silos which have already fired their missiles is low, and the need for post-war food production will be high. Alternately, they could adopt a scorched earth targeting policy to maximize fallout and leave the US in a permanently weakened state. I'm sure all nuclear powers have tried to maximize their choices in how to deploy weapons in any conflict.

CapitalistCartr 5y ago

It depends: Real-world nukes, or Hollywood nukes. If real-world nukes, play with Nukemap to get an idea. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

andai 5y ago
The article mentions nukemap and says it targets the center of each city, whereas in real life infrastructure (of military significance) would be targeted. As far as I can tell that's the assumption on which the entire article rests.
- CapitalistCartr 5y ago
  Nukemap targets wherever you put the center. It's completely customizable.

demosito666 5y ago

As a wannabe libertarian, I believe in freedom of speech and information. But if I had to choose a single topic of all that has to banned, it would be this. Due to several cognitive biases human perception tends to lean towards black & white depiction of the world. In nuclear war topic black is "we all are gonna die so there is no point to use the nukes" and white is "well, it's not that bad after all, maybe we could nuke those evil Russians/Americans". Black depiction must be maintained in public space even if the preconditions are false. The Overton window must stay where it is now.

michaelmrose 5y ago
If you want to force people to lie or remain silent about what you consider a dangerous truth despite it being discernibly false in order to maintain a convenient fiction soviet style you probably aren't actually a libertarian.
- demosito666 5y ago
  Well, yeah, this is an imaginable scenario, because it's impossible to "ban" such things because of Streisand effect. I would oppose anything like this in the real world.
nostrademons 5y ago
Interesting that your comment exemplifies the black & white depiction of the world that you describe. A grey depiction is exactly as the article describes - nuclear war would be bad but here are its realistic effects, and here are ways that you can protect yourself from the worst of these effects. There's a communalist vs. individualist divide here. It may be better for everyone if everyone believes that nuclear war is unspeakably bad and so is off the table as an option. However, it's better for an individual, given that they can't influence world events, if they're armed with a realistic portrayal of nuclear war and steps they can take to protect themselves.

deanc 5y ago

How can we be sure of even a conservative estimate of current warheads. Why wouldn’t US/Russia have significantly more nuclear war heads than they are a) allowed and b) saying they have? Surely it’s in their interest to have more than the other.

hollerith 5y ago
The US frequently inspects Russian nuclear facilities and vice versa per the New START Treaty.
- deanc 5y ago
  Playing dumb here but there’re not going to invite each other to the secret nuclear warhead stash are they?
  - hollerith 5y ago
    The most expensive part of a warhead by far is the fissile material. I imagine the Russians show the US inspectors their stockpiles of fissile material that would need to be melted, cast, then machined before it could be incorporated into a functional warhead. There were over a dozen inspections last year IIRC. Nothing known to science produces gamma rays at the rate per unit of mass that fissile material does, so that is how the US would detect sham fissile material. In fact I suspect that the inspectors measure the entire gamma-ray spectrum and would be able to distinguish Russian fissile material from, e.g., Chinese or French fissile material using that spectrum. I imagine so because after a nuclear explosion there is a US agency that can determine from which country's stockpile the bomb's fissile material came from (by measuring isotope ratios in the fallout). My guess is that the inspection regime is not airtight but if the Russians are cheating then it has cost them 10s of billions of dollars (to produce new fissile material).
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Russia has about the same economic output as Texas. Trying to keep a massive number of weapons is a stupendous expense already. That many more weapons is throwing money in a pit that you cant use for things like building an economy, or a palace for a dictator.

happytoexplain 5y ago

>not an existential threat to humanity ... [but] 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. So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. I get it - some people focus on the worst case scenario of a human-species-ending nuclear winter. I'm not actually particularly interested in how likely or unlikely that specific outcome is, as the "lesser" outcomes are plenty horrifying enough, and don't call for a general downplaying of nuclear attacks like this.

jocker12 5y ago
You should try this https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php. Move the map on your location and see the impact radius.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  I've played with the nuke map occasionally for years, though I've never taken it too seriously in terms of estimating realistic damage. I'm not sure what targets would be hit, and by which bombs, and even then, the circles don't provide a holistic, long-term description of damage. But it is a lot of fun.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  This tells you nothing about number of people that would die as a result. Remember what happened to global trade when 1 ship was stuck in Suesz? It takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy all large-scale deepwater ports in the world. Global Trade is crippled. UK and Japan depend on food imports, so people there starve. It only takes a couple dozen nukes to destroy most oil refining capacity in the world. Czech republic has enough gas to last 6 days
leto_ii 5y ago
> So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. My thoughts exactly. Setting the world back 100+ years is a disaster of gigantic proportions. I also find it odd that the author didn't even attempt to provide an estimate of the possible victim count. I'm basically sure it would at least be in the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions. This is to say nothing about a possible future arms race that would increase the numbers of warheads substantially.

mikece 5y ago

You can definitely survive a nuclear war -- but you might up envying the dead.

tsol 5y ago
Someone will, probably won't be you or I though.

empthought 5y ago

This essay is leaning very hard on the fact that there are 5% the number of warheads today as there were at the peak of the cold war. Nuclear weapons are exactly as destructive as we think; the sum total of the nuclear arsenal is far smaller than when many of us formed our impressions.

snemvalts 5y ago
And the average yield is just 300-800 kt. A lot less than the megaton size bombs of the cold war.
- samarama 5y ago
  Where did you get that number from?
  - earleybird 5y ago
    3rd paragraph, although parent may have a typo - rather than 300 - 800 it says 300 - 500 In practice, most strategic nuclear warheads today are in the 300-500 kT range, with tactical weapons being smaller. If we take the American W88 (455 kT) as representative of this range

gcheong 5y ago

The analysis is interesting and makes sense that populations wouldn’t largely be targeted, but it seems that’s assuming some kind of logical strategy to the war where the objective is to disable the forces of your opponent. That’s nice and tidy to then say populated areas won’t largely be targeted, but what if the objective in using them just becomes to create as much human suffering as possible?

chakalakasp 5y ago
The author has no idea what he is talking about and his thoughts have no relation to actual nuclear targeting plans.
soared 5y ago
Or similarly our logic is not the same logic that our opponent operates on.
empthought 5y ago
Population for recruiting irregular military personnel is a strategic target, too.

chillingeffect 5y ago

Nukes don't need to wipe out every square inch as the author implies. They only need to cause covid-like, ukraine-like interference to our infrastructure to reduce our planet to the iron age and only capable of supporting a fraction of its current population.

gmuslera 5y ago

"Known" nuclear weapons. Good part of the motivation of that arms race was to discourage the enemy to start a war, even if they had everything to win it. In that line, there had been rumours of doomsday devices (like Dead Hand from URSS in the Cold War) that could put in danger most life on Earth, that could be triggered if some side loses or other defined conditions. It is a level up from mutual assured destruction. And that example is from 50+ years ago. I don't know if something more advanced was developed more recently by either side. Technology and science had advanced a lot and both sides had a pretty big budget all this time. I prefer to not discard the possibility.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> rumours of doomsday devices (like Dead Hand from URSS in the Cold War) that could put in danger most life on Earth, that could be triggered if some side loses or other defined conditions. The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozg7gEchjuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozg7gEchjuM
- gmuslera 5y ago
  A message is not a message if doesn't reach your intended audience. In the other hand, it could reach just your intended audience and not the whole world, your own citizens could take that message as something negative.

philipkglass 5y ago

There are some good points here mixed with some large assumptions. The good points: - Weapons fuzed for high-altitude air burst, which maximizes the damage area at the expense of not being able to kill hardened targets, are not going to produce dangerous fallout. - The typical warhead now is significantly smaller than the multi-megaton ones that were typical during the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The large assumptions: - Hardened, remote military targets will soak up a lot of warheads that could otherwise be targeted to wreck cities or general-purpose infrastructure. - Civilization will only regress to an early-20th-century level after every oil refinery has been destroyed and the surrounding populations decimated. That last pair of assumptions in particular raises my eyebrows: "To put this into perspective, there are currently about 1,200 international airports and 732 oil refineries worldwide. Allocating a single warhead to each of these would leave only a thousand or so for every single other target on the planet." and "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." It hardly matters if most people survived the initial attack if all the oil refineries are gone, along with all the infrastructure within a couple miles of each oil refinery. Early 20th century technology supported fewer than 2 billion people, most of those being people who already knew how to farm without artificial fertilizers. Today we are nearly 8 billion and a much smaller fraction have any experience farming. A nuclear war that globally knocks technology back to the early 20th century, even for "only" a decade or so, would lead to the death of most people now alive. At that point I'm skeptical that there would be enough survivors to sustain even as much specialization of labor as found in the early 20th century industrialized economies. Technology level and population could fall much further.

baybal2 5y ago
pixl97 5y ago
This right here. When the green revolution dies so does 90% of humanity. This also ignores our continuing need for modern medicine as our use of antibiotics has grown some rather nasty things that would greatly reduce our densities if left without things like chlorine for water purification.

bontaq 5y ago

Destroying the entirety of Manhattan beneath 80th st or so, along with a significant part of Manhattan-facing Brooklyn and Hoboken shorelines, with a single reasonably placed bomb is actually about as destructive as I imagined (following their 3 miles out rule). But sure, let's lighten up about nukes!

phendrenad2 5y ago

If all of the nukes in the world went off at once, strategically spaced out to cause the most land coverage (I.E. some kind of Dr Strangelove situation), the world would look mostly the same. Green grass, blue oceans. It wouldn't be scorched earth. But, of course, those unlucky enough to live downwind, within 100 or so miles of a nuke, would get a healthy dose of radiation to their internal organs, as radioactive dust would be unavoidable. For decades, that fallout region would be uninhabitable, because radioactive isotopes would be incorporated into plants and animals. So yeah, not the end of the world, or even civilization, but I wouldn't want to live in that world.

mupuff1234 5y ago

> For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live. This person is delusional. The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario.

lumost 5y ago
Following a nuclear exchange, it is unlikely that a country without ports, airports, transit networks, or a military, would remain the financial hub of the world.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
Why? Finance wouldn't be worth much after an armageddon anyway.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario. What? So civilisation is collapsing around you, and instead of a port and ships that can move grain and life-saving goods, you would rather have an army of bankers so that they can trade triple-A rated collateralized debt obligations for newly radiactive real estate?
- steve_adams_86 5y ago
  But actually, why not target both? There are thousands of warheads from what I understand. It doesn’t seem like they need to be choosey.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    The article covers that. It boils down to “there’s a lot of bombs but the world is really, really big.”

lil_dispaches 5y ago

If this isn't misinformation, I don't know what is.

jzellis 5y ago

"For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live." I'm not sure what universe this cat lives in, but I'm pretty sure Moscow would far more concerned with vaporizing Wall Street than in whatever naval stuff happens in Red Hook or Port Elizabeth (rather than Annapolis or Chesapeake). Or does he think wars are still won by navies instead of bankers? :-D

genericone 5y ago

Just one of many pro-nuke propaganda pieces prepping our minds for the next stage of war, actual nuclear war. The more we discuss the merits, the more "acceptable" the outcomes seem to become in the popular zeitgeist.

oneoff786 5y ago
You think this is a government backed article?
- genericone 5y ago
  This appears like a navy-glorification website. If not government backed, then it could at least be think-tank backed, with a military industrial bent.
  - psyc 5y ago
    https://www.navalgazing.net/About https://www.navalgazing.net/About Surely part of the ruse!

patall 5y ago

That really depends on what people 'think' is a lot. About 7 million Germans died in WWII (civilian + military), clearly a lot, but still 'only' 10% of the population. The Ukraine military has reporter their own casualties as 3'000 men so far, which is huge, yet 10+ times that many people go into sport arenas every week. If nuclear war now would kill 50% of the global population, it would certainly define our history for centuries, yet half of us (i.e more than 4 billion humans) would still be there afterwards.

pixl97 5y ago
The problem we have today is that of specialization. I dont believe there is a viable scenario where only 40% of the population dies. We either lose something like less than 10% of the population or we loose over 80%. Food is the reason. In 1900 before the green revolution there were less than 2 billion people on the planet and huge portions of them grew their own food. After that point industrialisation and mass fossil fuel production of fertiliser allowed our population to explode. Now were completely dependant on those factories that have massive supply lines fed by specialists.
- empthought 5y ago
  2 billion people today rely on subsistence farming, it's silly to think 90% of people on earth would die on account of that alone.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    They survive on subsistence farming because their near large urban cities don't. The moment those cities are not fed the terrible order they already exist in gets worse. A supersaturation even can only exist as long as energy is being applied. When that is lost (fossils fuels) then a corrective event occurs.
    - empthought 5y ago
      No, they survive on subsistence farming regardless of what any cities do. That's the definition of subsistence farming. I agree that the situation in cities would be dire, but over 40% of people live in rural areas and half of them are already growing their own food.

anonymousiam 5y ago

So... I guess it's okay if Russia nukes Ukraine? Does that explain the March 27th publication date?

matkoniecz 5y ago
I have no idea how you reached that conclusion.
- anonymousiam 5y ago
  This is an article downplaying the severity and seriousness of the use of nuclear weapons. It was published shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine (again). Perhaps the timing is just a coincidence, but I've come to learn over the years that it's unlikely.
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    This article is written in response to articles/claims proclaiming that nuclear war will cause people to become extinct (or similarly overblown claims). If they are downplaying nuclear war - can you recommend articles of a similar quality presenting claim that nuclear war is worse than presented here? And this article still presents it as an horrific disaster - and maybe it assumes that people are aware that millions would die in just opening of the nuclear war, it would be worst disaster in history. And that such thing happening would be bad. And unwanted. And focused on countering "we will all die" perspective. For example they are taking as given that USA shooting down Russian planes over Ukraine is nonstarter because it increases risk of nuclear war,

Claude_Shannon 5y ago

Yeah, but you know - if they start flying, we're dead. I'm in the middle of Poland, it really won't be any comfort for me that USA will survive when I'll be dead.

poulpy123 5y ago

I'm not very comfortable with all the talks I hear or read about how nuclear war isn't so bad since russia invaded ukraine

hwers 5y ago
It's just a form of stress coping. It's entirely delusional and I think it's very important we not allow this type of thinking to be a normal form of thought (as uncomfortable as it is).
JacksCracked 5y ago
helij 5y ago
Psychosis and wishful thinking is pretty disturbing.

kalessin 5y ago

"Thought experiment" from Kurzgesagt: What if We Nuke a City? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iPH-br_eJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iPH-br_eJQ

timcavel 5y ago

rhn_mk1 5y ago

Posted earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051354

baron816 5y ago

What happens to nuclear power plants if they’re destroyed by a nuclear blast? Or a nuclear waste facility? Wouldn’t that result in a Chernobyl like event, without the ability to contain it as quickly? How would the world handle a few dozen Chernobyls all at once?

matkoniecz 5y ago
> How would the world handle a few dozen Chernobyls all at once? It would be basically irrelevant compared to other consequences of full scale-nuclear war.

zzzeek 5y ago

"Again, nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be." What kind of person gets up in the morning and decides this is the thing they need to write about and tell the world today? How are we served by this?

psyc 5y ago
Some of us are just naturally curious, and cats be damned.
matkoniecz 5y ago
1) Some like to believe in things consistent with reality 2) Typical people would prefer to avoid nuclear war Which part you consider objectionable in what you quoted?

the__alchemist 5y ago

One thing of note left out, re destruction of population centers: The article focuses on a most-likely scenario, and doesn't discuss a most-dangerous (to civilians) one. I'm curious how much devastation could be unleashed if weapons were targeted at population centers. Depending on how effective defense systems are (THAAD, PATRIOT etc), I'd bet huge amounts of people could be killed.

javajosh 5y ago

I imagine we'll be seeing a lot of content like this in the run up to nuking Kyiv. Despicable.

throwaway_75369 5y ago

darkhorn 5y ago

> In practice, most strategic nuclear warheads today are in the 300-500 kT range Capable to wipe out all capital cities in Eastern Europe, or most of capital cities of Western Europe, I mean if only one is used, and not two, out of few thousands. Few weeks ago something fell out of blue in Zagreb and later they identified it as a Russian spy plane. That's it.

georgia_peach 5y ago

Whenever the experts volunteer their precious time--making words and pictures for total strangers--to convince us that we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads over something, it's probably time to take precautions & make preparations.

andrewflnr 5y ago

The biggest problem I see with this rather sunny perspective is that it assumes all those "reserve" warheads are permanently out of action. In fact, we have to expect that they'll start getting pulled into service as soon as the first nukes fly. That is, after all, the point of a reserve is it not? So no, it's not going to stop at 3000 warheads.

pmoriarty 5y ago

I strongly encourage anyone who wants a taste of what nuclear war would look like to watch Threads[1]. Despite being the most terrifying depiction of nuclear war that I've ever seen, and it is probably overoptimistic. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a general in charge of UK's nuclear strategic defense met with his Soviet counterpart and asked the latter what he thought of Threads and the latter laughed and said the entire UK was an overkill zone. In the US you are either by major population areas (as most people are) and will probably be targeted by many weapons in the megaton range, and if you're in remote areas you're probably near some missile bases and will be wiped out too. Nuclear winter and fallout will get the rest. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE

slaymaker1907 5y ago
In most of the analysis I've seen, those who die immediately will be the fortunate ones. Starvation is a horrible way to go, and even if nuclear winter doesn't happen, we probably won't have the necessary technology in place to produce food for the remaining population.
echoradio 5y ago
Came by to mention Threads. [1] The collapse of society spurred by nuclear war is a pretty horrific thing. If Threads taught me anything about being prepared for “surviving” a nuclear war in a metropolitan area, it’s to stock up on alcohol and drugs so your impending death is not as painful. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)
baobabKoodaa 5y ago
Your link opens as "video is not available".

enaaem 5y ago

I don’t really see why people think this article promotes nuclear war. It does help to explain a lot of geopolitical events like why Russia feels insecure even with thousands of nukes. The fact is that things aren’t over after throwing your nukes. Your still need a strong conventional army to capture or defend territory. For Russia to be a great power (and they want to be) they have to control the Central European plane to be fully secure. No, buffer states are not enough. They have to control the countries there either as puppet states or full annexation.

upofadown 5y ago

>I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up. That's not how technology works. You can't rewind things arbitrarily backwards any more than than you can wind them arbitrarily forwards. The technology required to recreate my grandfathers feed and fuel business simply doesn't not exist anymore. The horses that pulled the wagons no longer exist and would have to be bred up again. All the manufactured fittings no longer have factories and there is no one that knows how to design the machines. If there is a slip it would be to the level of small manually run farms. Those that could not manage that particular technology would die. Which would be almost everyone. It would make a lot more sense to recover as many machine tools as possible and then try to recreate the existing technology from the wreckage

kmeisthax 5y ago

>Broadly speaking, we can expect nuclear weapons to be aimed at one of three types of targets: strategic (nuclear) targets, conventional military forces, and industrial/infrastructure targets. This is assuming the person wielding the nukes is attempting to use them for normal military activity. However, nuclear weapons are generally wasteful for this purpose; regular missiles work just as well, cost less money, and do not poison the land you want to invade for weeks out. If you could use nukes in an ordinary military campaign, then all the nuclear disarmament over the last 30 years would not have happened. The only thing nuclear weapons are really good at is killing lots of people really quickly. Thus, my current bet is that if Russia attempts to use their nukes, it will specifically be a last-ditch effort to kill as many pro-EU Ukranians as possible on their way out of the country. Their current actions are consistent with this; when their initial blitzkrieg failed, they proceeded to slaughtering as many civilians as they could. I otherwise generally agree with the article's contention that nuclear war will not be a species-destroying event. It is, however, still something worth avoiding; because in an all-out war Russia will absolutely be going after population centers first and not militarily-valuable targets. Russia's goal is not to win the war. Their goal is to make Putin look tough and powerful while goading the west into making the mistake of counterattacking so we can bleed faster than they are.

empressplay 5y ago

Other things to consider: Weapon reliability -- particularly on the Russian side. Will many / most of their ICBMs even get off the ground? Will the warheads actually work properly? I'm not saying they're all duds but if I was Russia I'd maybe keep 100 maintained for the sake of demonstration. Willingness to launch -- this is probably a bigger problem on the Russian side (the Americans brainwash their soldiers better!) Even if they use tricks like obfuscating targets or claiming the target is an uninhabited 'demonstration' someone still has to push the button. European Theatre -- Russia needs its subs to try to stop UK / American subs from nuking them so they're not likely deployed around NA (instead hunting for enemies closer to home) and thus can't destroy the silos. As such they can't attack the US using ICBMs because they will face massive retaliation. The only way Russia can survive such a war would be to have an exchange with Europe and assume the US will not launch ICBMs (a fair assessment). The rest of the West will be far too distracted dealing with the humanitarian crisis generated by the blasts in Europe to care about Russia. So, if the West were to imply an invasion of Russia directly, Russia's best course of action would be to nuke a few cities in non-nuclear countries in Western Europe. At that point an invasion of Russia would be untenable (due to the need to deal with the figurative and literal fallout), and although nuclear retaliation might ensue (but not more than tit for tat), it would not be existential to Russia. And nobody would risk poking the bear again. This is Putin's thinking and why we're not invading Russia (or even Ukraine). However, I'd like to point out that even the destruction of a single largish city will completely ruin any appetite on the part of the West to either inflict such damage themselves or encourage any encores. You will see anti-war protests in the West on an unprecedented scale. There will be uncontrolled rioting in the streets. Any democratic government that engages in further nuclear activity will likely not survive politically and neither will their parties. This is Putin's 'escalate to de-escalate' scenario. While what is happening in Ukraine is horrific and terrible I'm afraid we're stuck unless we develop an appetite for this sort of shit. Which is itself horrible and terrible.

chakalakasp 5y ago
>Weapon reliability -- particularly on the Russian side. Will many / most of their ICBMs even get off the ground? Will the warheads actually work properly? I'm not saying they're all duds but if I was Russia I'd maybe keep 100 maintained for the sake of demonstration. From the little I've communicated with people who would know (because they used to be in the IC), the vague answer is "Yes, they would work." >European Theatre -- Russia needs its subs to try to stop UK / American subs from nuking them so they're not likely deployed around NA (instead hunting for enemies closer to home) and thus can't destroy the silos. The submarines that launch ballistic nuclear missiles are not the same submarines that hunt the submarines that launch ballistic nuclear missiles. You might want to read up on the wiki on this stuff or something.

somenameforme 5y ago

> "Broadly speaking, we can expect nuclear weapons to be aimed at one of three types of targets: strategic (nuclear) targets, conventional military forces, and industrial/infrastructure targets. Notably absent is a direct interest in killing the opposing population, although people tend to live near infrastructure, so it is going to happen." This is unsubstantiated and seemingly just poorly informed. Our initial nuclear targets from the 50s have been declassified [1] and it's no doubt other countries have similar targets. We planned to specifically target population centers as well as things like medical production facilities. The reason propaganda is so heavily interweaved into war is because a war is won by breaking the will of the enemy to resist. See: Afghanistan, a country which has the GDP of a moderate sized city in a developed country and relatively primitive weapons, has now won wars against both the Soviet Union and the USA. Both had dramatic superiorities in every measurable category, except willpower. The will of the invaders broke before the will of the Afghans. And so the Afghans won. In nuclear war, where all rules and ethics have long since been tossed aside, the only goal will be to break the will of the enemy by any means possible. And I can think of no possibly better way to completely break the will of a people to fight than finding their most economically developed and heavily populated locations, and sending the nukes square center. Even "better" is that these will be some of the softest targets. Nuclear facilities are built with the anticipation of being nuclear targets, Manhattan isn't. [1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear-Target-List-Declassified-First-Ever/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear...

lamontcg 5y ago

"The world can have a little nuclear war... as a treat." Honestly the normalization of nuclear war on this forum is so disgusting that this article doesn't deserve a better response than that. Stop crawling up your own contrarian asshole that far. The "best" outcome of nuclear war will be so bad that you'll probably wish you were just incinerated in the blast. (And Russia will never in a million years show any kind of restraint once it comes to launching nuclear missiles at the United States. If their nukes are like their tanks many of them may not work, and they should now know that. And once they start shooting the United States will quickly treat the remaining arsenal as an existential threat so seek to destroy them all. That means that Russia must launch all of them. Its a game theoretical problem with an optimum that exhibits bang-bang control).

empressplay 5y ago
This is why NA is not really under threat. Europe, on the other hand really should be preparing for the possibility of an attack. Which is where we get into trouble -- European NATO members _believe_ they are under the 'MAD' umbrella, but Putin doesn't believe it. And so they really should prepare their infrastructures for that possibility, rather than just waving it away as an impossibility.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Yeah if Putin drops a single tactical nuke on an airfield in Poland would we actually commit to nuclear war over that? Probably not? That is a thing to be worried about since he is the batshit crazy one in the room who likes to assassinate people publicly using methods that only he would have access to, causing random deaths specifically for the purpose of showing that he doesn't care and you can't hide from him. Plus the callous ability to order his army to grind cities into to rubble and randomly rape and murder the population into creating a refugee crisis. That's the problem with playing this kind of a game with someone who will always escalate back -- and who certainly has the ability to destroy the world as we know it.

alpple 5y ago

People aren't good at predicting the results of things that haven't happened before.

miav 5y ago

I’m surprised by the bad response this article received. All media I’m aware of speak of nuclear war in very vague terms and suggest an outcome similar to that which we see in entertainment science fiction. Long before the war in Ukraine I have been occasionally trying to dig a little deeper into the actual possible outcome of a nuclear war, but found only vague or outdated information and I’m very grateful to the author of the article for doing good research. Yes, it is based on major assumptions, but those truly are the best thing we have since the discussed situation is genuinely unprecedented. I’m also surprised by the disgust people here express towards the supposed “normalisation of nuclear war”. Much like the general public was taught by films such as Terminator that AI is something that will end the world, the perception of nuclear warfare was similarly shaped by media. When AI started seeing widespread use in daily life it became important to address the ingrained misconceptions. In the same way, now that there’s a war in Europe and Russia is threatening the use of nukes it is important for people to have a reasonably accurate idea of what such use would entail. The idea of “nuclear war is simply unacceptable and we must avoid it at all costs” is good very getting upvotes on social media, but truth is that taking all available steps to prevent such a war is equivalent to appeasing Russia in all cases.

empressplay 5y ago
You can bet that the #1 aim of Western governments currently is trying to figure out a way to neutralize the threat posed by Russian nukes, but until we figure that out, appeasing (or at least not antagonizing) Russia is all we have.
oneoff786 5y ago
The AI shown in terminator does not exist. That’s a gross false equivalence.

me_me_mu_mu 5y ago

Honestly if I ever find a terminal into the universe I’m rolling back humans.

kortex 5y ago

I think it's important to have accurate models of the world, in order to make sound decisions. I don't think playing a macabre Pascal's Wager with nuclear armageddon benefits no one. It would be an unmitigated disaster. There would be incalculable suffering. But all this talk of ending humanity as a species is not at all scientifically founded. If anything, I think this raises the stake of responsible earth stewardship (same thing with climate change). If you believe you are well and truly fucked, fatalism kicks in and you mentally check out. But if you believe that you will most likely survive, and the amount of suffering you experience will be affected by your decisions, all of a sudden you have ethical skin in the game. Why reduce nukes 90% if that 10% still glasses the planet? There is no qualitative change. But if a 90% reduction is the difference between 8B and 1B deaths, de-armament is now approachable, has real stakes, and makes a real impact.

smiley1437 5y ago

"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say... no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops." - Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

nikolay 5y ago

So, what's the actual conclusion? It's okay to keep pushing Russian until they fire off the nukes?!

r3dneck 5y ago

Sadly, we have two study cases about "how destructive are nuclear weapons" and yes, really, they are Hiroshima and Nagasaki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... I've read this article quickly but there is no mention to those events, the author only compare the power of a modern nuke with Hiroshima bomb. So, how can this article be a reliable source ? About the author, I don't see his name and after a quick google search, I can't find any endorsement to that website as reliable source. This is the second article I see on HN of the series "nukes are bad but no so bad" that are no more that blogger opinions, INMO. As usual, being liked transform anything on Internet in authoritative information by induction and this is bad.