3 ms·
OT, but it's a pet peeve: > but it wasn't long before they could The total amount of nuclear weapons ever built is laughably inadequate for the task of ending
by Tuna-Fish 4y ago
OT, but it's a pet peeve:
> but it wasn't long before they could
The total amount of nuclear weapons ever built is laughably inadequate for the task of ending life on earth. They would not end human life either, and even ending human civilization (as in, agriculture and organized society) is off by many orders of magnitude.
Nuclear war would be horrible, but the actual impact got massively overinflated, largely because of good reasons.
- brucethemoose2 4y agoThe initial fission stage is the "hard" part of a nuke, but the subsequent fusion stages are much easier to scale up. Arbitrarily large nuclear bombs are theoretically "easy" to make by chaining increasingly large fusion stages one after the other, as they aren't limited by expensive fissile material. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bigger-boom/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bi... Hence scientists extrapolated nukes really could end life on Earth, and in a slightly different reality than ours, they may have.
- roywiggins 4y agoIt would be really, really hard to kill the bacteria and Archaeans that we've since found hiding deep underground. They're long way down and would barely notice.
- namaria 4y agoA whole country the size of the US can crap its collective pants with a freak cold snap and you think 10^4 nuclear detonations destroying all major cities is quite survivable?
- codeulike 4y agoWhat about Nuclear Winter?
- edgyquant 4y agoThere’s been a ton of studies stating this was likely overblown in the early Cold War for propaganda purposes. It wouldn’t last long enough to wipe out humanity let alone all life.
- Darmani 4y agoCorrect. https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness > To put this another way, each bomb can destroy an area of 34.2 square miles, and the maximum total area destroyed by our nuclear apocalypse is about 137,000 square miles, approximately the size of Montana, Bangladesh or Greece. (I think that should be Bangladesh and Greece; Montana is larger than the two of them combined.)