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If we get to WW3, It all depends on how well the Soviet Union's massive nuclear arms stockpile has held up under 30+ years without maintenance. If more than 1%

If we get to WW3, It all depends on how well the Soviet Union's massive nuclear arms stockpile has held up under 30+ years without maintenance. If more than 1% work, there won't be a world economy. If more than 10% work, we're back down to the few handfuls of survivors who luck out with regards to fallout, etc. However, if the US isn't willing to wait long enough to find out, and launch the US stockpile first... it's game over.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Nah. There will be many survivors, even in the worst case. Realistically, nuclear war is not an extinction threat. For that, you need heavier stuff like antimatter missiles or engineered pandemics.
- mikewarot 3y ago
  I think that thousands of MRVs hitting targets around the world is bound to throw enough stuff into the stratosphere to disrupt agriculture, and push cancer rates through the roof for survivors. As for pandemics, Fauci's deadly toy was just stupidity at work(take a "safe" organism, and make it deadly, but do it in a BSL2 lab, instead of a BSL4 lab), not some grand plan. A planned release of something deliberately deadly would decimate humanity before the mutations hit.
  - teekert 3y ago
    There is a very delicate balance between how easily a virus spreads and how well it kills. The best spreading virus has you running around joyfully coughing in everyone's face (like common cold). The best killers die out, because you can't really infect anyone when you're dead (like Ebola). Maybe a virus can be truly airborne (not in aerosols, which do hit the floor or dry out), have a very delayed onset, such that if infects billions and then kills... But we haven't seen this in nature so I'm not really expecting us human to create something so advanced and complex in its behavior.
- gmuslera 3y ago
  There had been rumors about doomsday devices in the past. But even without that, second and third order effects should be counted too. At least for big or widespread enough events, because we live in a complex system.
- yossarian88 3y ago
  Read Ellsberg and be terrified.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Yeah, even the infamous concept of nuclear winter is a very uncertain hypothetical scenario. In popular imagination, an all-out nuclear war is civilization-destroying, but that's again far from certain. Contra-intuitively, these are not necessarily good news.
GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
It seems as if China's modernized and growing nuclear arsenal would be more relevant. Also, unstable states with working nuclear weapons such as India, Pakistan, and Israel.
darkclouds 3y ago
[dead]
ParanoidAltoid 3y ago
Not to nitpick your word choice, but taking you literally: WWIII isn't synonymous with nuclear armageddon, and not just contingent on Russia's stockpile. To give an example: China invades Taiwan, but all three conflicts remain frozen like Ukraine. Death tolls reach the hundreds of thousands, smaller regional conflicts emerge, more stuff is happening than the news can cover. But 95% of people are living their lives as normal, fighting online about whether this should be called WWIII instead of actually fighting in WWIII. The economy becomes weirder, but no worse than during Covid, shortages emerge and disappear as global capital continues to operate. Or a more dire example: An avalanche of wars break out, only grifters deny it's WWIII. Pakistan becomes completely overrun and drops a warning nuke, feeling as though it has nothing to lose. Fearing normalization of nukes, most world leaders shift to focusing on preventing this, planning a conventional retaliation of Pakistan alongside threats of totally annihilating it Pakistan if it launches another. That said, the tail risk absolutely exists and should be our primary concern, given that billions dead is much much worse than millions.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

Nah. There will be many survivors, even in the worst case. Realistically, nuclear war is not an extinction threat. For that, you need heavier stuff like antimatter missiles or engineered pandemics.

mikewarot 3y ago
I think that thousands of MRVs hitting targets around the world is bound to throw enough stuff into the stratosphere to disrupt agriculture, and push cancer rates through the roof for survivors. As for pandemics, Fauci's deadly toy was just stupidity at work(take a "safe" organism, and make it deadly, but do it in a BSL2 lab, instead of a BSL4 lab), not some grand plan. A planned release of something deliberately deadly would decimate humanity before the mutations hit.
- teekert 3y ago
  There is a very delicate balance between how easily a virus spreads and how well it kills. The best spreading virus has you running around joyfully coughing in everyone's face (like common cold). The best killers die out, because you can't really infect anyone when you're dead (like Ebola). Maybe a virus can be truly airborne (not in aerosols, which do hit the floor or dry out), have a very delayed onset, such that if infects billions and then kills... But we haven't seen this in nature so I'm not really expecting us human to create something so advanced and complex in its behavior.
gmuslera 3y ago
There had been rumors about doomsday devices in the past. But even without that, second and third order effects should be counted too. At least for big or widespread enough events, because we live in a complex system.
yossarian88 3y ago
Read Ellsberg and be terrified.
The_Colonel 3y ago
Yeah, even the infamous concept of nuclear winter is a very uncertain hypothetical scenario. In popular imagination, an all-out nuclear war is civilization-destroying, but that's again far from certain. Contra-intuitively, these are not necessarily good news.

GartzenDeHaes 3y ago

It seems as if China's modernized and growing nuclear arsenal would be more relevant. Also, unstable states with working nuclear weapons such as India, Pakistan, and Israel.

darkclouds 3y ago

[dead]

ParanoidAltoid 3y ago

Not to nitpick your word choice, but taking you literally: WWIII isn't synonymous with nuclear armageddon, and not just contingent on Russia's stockpile. To give an example: China invades Taiwan, but all three conflicts remain frozen like Ukraine. Death tolls reach the hundreds of thousands, smaller regional conflicts emerge, more stuff is happening than the news can cover. But 95% of people are living their lives as normal, fighting online about whether this should be called WWIII instead of actually fighting in WWIII. The economy becomes weirder, but no worse than during Covid, shortages emerge and disappear as global capital continues to operate. Or a more dire example: An avalanche of wars break out, only grifters deny it's WWIII. Pakistan becomes completely overrun and drops a warning nuke, feeling as though it has nothing to lose. Fearing normalization of nukes, most world leaders shift to focusing on preventing this, planning a conventional retaliation of Pakistan alongside threats of totally annihilating it Pakistan if it launches another. That said, the tail risk absolutely exists and should be our primary concern, given that billions dead is much much worse than millions.