3 ms·
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 ar
by 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 agoThis 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.
- empthought 5y ago"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." As if it were an expensive and impractical proposition for more people to grow a little food. The reason fewer people engage in farming is that fewer people need to engage in it, and it is neither well-rewarded nor an intrinsically desirable activity for most people. It's nothing to do with not knowing how or being unable to learn.
- discreteevent 5y ago1/3 acre of potatoes to feed a family of 4. You might also need a stock of whatever one uses to treat blight. A few chickens for eggs. Maybe let the farmers keep cows as they are good at it.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoJohn deer tractors digitally brick themselves if you replace a part without authorisation. Most modern Ag machinery will be gone. Modern farms don't plant seed from their last harvest, specialised farms cultivate seeds, and 'normal' farms buy them and plants them - that system will be gone. Most agrochemicals will be gone. Is your plan to give a random joe a field and a hoe? They will get maybe 30% of the yield a proffeshional farmer would. That means a famine. And they will be unavaliable for any other much-nessesary construction and repair work, because without specialised equipment it's weeks of back-breaking work just to harvest 1 field of potato. Average person does not even know the difference between a potato seed and a potato tuber, let alone the optimal varieties, time for planting, etc. Which will be impossible anyway, because the infrastructure is gone. And because you will have random idiots planting potato without any knowledge of disease and pest control, they will run rampant and cause famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
- kortex 5y agoHackers will suddenly become some of the most valuable people in society. Those tractors will be jailbroken inside of a month. The average human wants to survive. If that survival is predicating on knowing about sustainable potato agriculture, you better believe that folks will learn.
- chakalakasp 5y agoThis is what a typical attack on the U.S. would likely look like. Attack 1 is an attack that attempts to hit the U.S. silos in addition to other U.S. military and civilian targets. It's what would perhaps be used in a first-strike scenario. Attack 2 assumes that the land based U.S. missiles have already launched, and only targets military and civilian targets, but doesn't worry about targeting U.S. land based missile silos. Attack laydown 1: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/main/TARGET%20GRAPHICS/OPEN-RISOP%200.93%20COUNTERFORCE%2BCOUNTERVALUE%20ATTACK/RISOP%200.93%20CF%2BCV%20ATTACK_CONUS.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/main... Attack laydown 2: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/main/TARGET%20GRAPHICS/OPEN-RISOP%200.92%20COUNTERVALUE-ONLY%20ATTACK/RISOP%200.92%20CV%20ONLY%20ATTACK_CONUS.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/main... The casualties figure is immediate, and doesn't include things like the breakdown of society -- this is just the casualties estimated from the actual war itself.