8 ms·

Nuclear war between US and Russia could kill 5B people

28 points by nithinj 2y ago

southernplaces7 2y ago
Some of the people here trying to make light of a potential US/Russia nuclear war under the logic that most of Russia's bombs probably don't work or that previously nuked cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now perfectly livable, thriving cities miss the forest for the trees in a very big way. Even if only 1 or 2% of Russia's presumed arsenal of several thousand was functional enough to get through, and even if only half of those weren't knocked out before making their targeted impacts, you'd still be talking about at least dozens of nuclear bombs exploding on the western side of the world. Most of these would strike places inhabited by millions of people and enormously important amounts of critical infrastructure. Add to that the arguably larger number of bombs working enough to be successfully launched by the U.S and its nuclear-armed allies in retaliation against Russia (and a greater percentage of them reaching their targets, because after seeing its military "perform" in Ukraine, I simply don't believe that Russia's anti-missile measures would be particularly effective). With all of this combined you'd still be seeing an absolutely catastrophic global situation of human, social, political, economic and climatological destabilization. At least tens of millions would die immediately and at least tens of millions more would die in the months of war, further mutual attacks, radiation, regional nuclear fallout effects and global economic (think food distribution in particular) effects that would follow. In no time at all, we'd be facing a whole new geopolitical and devastated economic landscape in which more people have died than in all the wars of history combined. Even if this were not the utter Armageddon of a full blown nuclear war of thousands of raining missiles, it would still devastate the peace and better human trends of the planet as we know them today. Ultimately, it would then also be a humanitarian tragedy on a scale never before seen in modern world history. That's nothing to disregard, and it's almost certainly something that would brutally damage the lives of every single person commenting here in some deeply personal, hard way, at the least.
- IAmGraydon 2y ago
  The idea of a worldwide nuclear war is just about as scary as potential futures get. The people you see everywhere online making light of it are the most frightened and they're making light as a coping mechanism. If you want to see a cope echo chamber in action, go check out subreddits like r/worldnews, where literally every comment is another unoriginal redditor trying their best to talk about it like it's nothing or even funny. It's understandable, if a bit annoying. Deep down, they all know the seriousness of the situation, even if they lack the self awareness to act like it.
mc32 2y ago
…Meanwhile in Brussels and Washington: “What red lines? Ignore red lines!” (I'm colorblind, I think those are green!) It ain’t pre winter of ‘92 no more with “the day after” looming in people’s minds. Instead it’s “l-l-l-l-let’s play chicken!” (Bob Barker voice) Curtis LeMay was 60 years too early.
- thot_experiment 2y ago
  I think your understanding of the geopolitical game state here is way off. The reality is that nuclear war is less likely in now that it was during the cold war. We aren't in isolated echo chambers fearing an ideology we don't understand, the only reason anyone wants nukes is to prevent other people from nuking them. The world is running on capitalism, there isn't the same ideological drive to conflict. We're in a metastable equilibrium. Ukraine blowing up ammo depots in Russia is far further away from catalyzing WW3 than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vasily Arkhipov etc etc.
- credit_guy 2y ago
  > Instead it’s “l-l-l-l-let’s play chicken!” (Bob Barker voice) Unfortunately, if Putin decides this is a game he wants to play, then this is a game we cannot choose not to play. We can choose not to play it now, but we will have to play it later. That's a lesson Chamberlain and the whole world learned in 1938/39.
  - protomolecule 2y ago
    [flagged]
- BigParm 2y ago
  The only action that will cause a retaliatory nuclear strike is a first nuclear strike. That's the only red line wrt Russia et al vs the West. If your primary military targets are innocent people then you should expect them to receive aid.
  - IAmGraydon 2y ago
cupcakecommons 2y ago
What's the best thing that can be done to reduce the risk of conflict?
- mc32 2y ago
  Probably having the three major powers have regular contact with each other rather than pretending they're not there and refusing to take their calls.
  - cupcakecommons 2y ago
    Seems like a great idea. What can people in the US do to facilitate this you think?
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      Couldn't hurt to vote for the party who aren't Russian assets
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        Bayesian priors need updating
      - Krssst 2y ago
        Seems that a lot of people prefer the approach of "surrender absolutely everything to Putin preemptively". Granted America is at basically zero risk of a Russian invasion, but letting Putin roams free means that Ukraine would only be the first step. I don't really know what Putin's Europe once he gets it all would look like but I don't expect human rights to be a part of it.
        protomolecule 2y ago
        [flagged]
rasz 2y ago
And I could date Natalie Portman. Facts are russia is corrupt and bankrupt, they havent serviced/maintained nuke arsenal since forever. They cant even make new ICBMs anymore, their fifth try blew up on launch pad https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarmat-icbm-disaster/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarma... just like four previous attempts.
- mc32 2y ago
  Out of 6,000 units, even 1% of theirs working would be devastating (you know they have MIRVs), not to mention what launching ours would do. This is a stupid thought.
  - Mountain_Skies 2y ago
    >This is a stupid thought. It's a consequence of social media, where people believe if they make a statement that gets enough up arrow clicks, physical reality changes to match their desired outcome. Most of the time it's of little consequence, especially when the people posting and voting have little actual connection to the subject matter, but things are quite different when the outcome involves nuclear detonations.
- exabrial 2y ago
  > Natalie Portman Meh. > Facts are russia is corrupt and bankrupt, they havent serviced/maintained nuke arsenal since forever. They cant even make new ICBMs anymore, their fifth try blew up on launch pad https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarma https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarma... just like four previous attempts. Yep ^ it's unlilkely they have very few in a launch-able state. Although, they don't have a detonate a nuke to make parts of the world unlivable. They have plenty of radioactive material; simply detonating a salted conventional bomb would be pretty nasty.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  If anyone tried launching their ICBMs half of them would blow up in their face. So we have that going for us (the peoples of all states).
DaoVeles 2y ago
While there are many that argue against this point and I am sympathetic to them, Mutually Assured Destruction is a very powerful deterrent. One of the reasons why many treaties came a long after WW2 was because for the first time ever, we had weapons on a scale that could truly cause civilization ending events. There is talk about strategic strike capabilities and from the little bits that trickle out from within, it is considered a potential path forward. But it is a path forward that is both political and literal suicide. A scenario played out in the book 'Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America' by John Michael Greer makes a decent point. Say the US decides to strategically strike an opponent. They manage to take out 199 of 200 potential retaliatory strikes - a great success in terms of the ratio. But that one missile that gets through detonates over San Fransisco becoming the single most deadly event in US history. It just isn't seen as a viable path forward. Luckily those in power are there because of those below them, you cannot be too loose of a cannon at the top but even that doesn't put ones mind at ease as you just do not know on what could happen. Maybe the lunatics to get control of it all. Strange things can happen.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > you cannot be too loose of a cannon at the top And with Putin on one side and possibly (hopefully not) Trump on the other, that makes two loose cannons. Comforting thought.
  - samsin 2y ago
    Nuclear war between US and Russia is less likely with Trump
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Strong disagree. Trump has proven to be unreliable and unpredictable. He’s drunk on his own real or perceived power like a typical cult leader, and cannot be relied on to act rationally. Not unlike Putin.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
Well, yeah, sure, five billion people could die but at least Putin wouldn't "win", which is what's truly important.
- toofy 2y ago
  > …at least putin wouldn’t win. you might be kind of close, but it’s probably more like… “if i can’t forcibly take over any country i want for my own, ill nuke you.” …is not a rational policy for the future of world geopolitics and certainly is more nuanced than a sarcastic “at least soandso wont win”
  - protomolecule 2y ago
    [flagged]
- kcb 2y ago
  What are you getting at?
hindsightbias 2y ago
People are missing the tree for the forest. If the “concerned” folks are to be believed, after more than a decade of corruption fighting Xi has missiles filled with water rather than rocket fuel. How do you think the Soviet hand-me-downs are going? The problem isn’t Putin or Xi committing global suicide, it’s they’re not paying attention to the details: Sgt. Boris or Liu driving off with thermonuclear warheads and selling them. https://blog.ucsusa.org/gregory-kulacki/xi-jinpings-thoughts-on-chinas-nuclear-weapons/ https://blog.ucsusa.org/gregory-kulacki/xi-jinpings-thoughts...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > problem isn’t Putin or Xi committing global suicide, it’s they’re not paying attention to the details The problem with Putin or Xi is that they're dictators. Dictatorships trade the immortality of the state for the mortality of a man. The de-stabilising moments will come in the moments (a) before they are removed from power, by death or another's gunpoint, and are no longer weighing the interests of the world or even their country but their personal surival and (b) immediately after, when both succession and the chain of command are ambiguous. (In the latter respect, the CCP is at least an institution.)
  - protomolecule 2y ago
    [flagged]
h2odragon 2y ago
Assuming the nukes work. We've been discovering our stockpiles of arms to be less functional than hoped. And that's with stuff that was tested and could be used as part of storage. The nukes were never meant to be used, the chances of them malfunctioning are somewhat higher. That's before you subtract the hype of "nukes are the ultimate weapon" from any calculations. Hiroshima is still an active, populated city. People assume nukes are "finger of God" erasers, but they're really rather inefficient explosives with simple physics.
- mc32 2y ago
  You can’t compare kiloton with megaton weapons. This is insincere. Moreover what strikes me is we have so many people handwringing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wondering if it was morally right… but the same kind of people are cavalier about having thousands of weapons tens of times more energetic getting launched. It’s mindboggling.
- foxyv 2y ago
  A 5 megaton bomb will collapse buildings in a 6-7km radius and then set the entire city on fire. China could level Albuquerque with a single Dong-Feng 5. Especially if they use their 12 1MT warhead MIRV configuration. Fusion weapons are in a whole new ballgame compared to 15kt Hiroshima weapon. While nuclear weapons tend to scale logarithmically with regards to damage, it hardly matters when the weapons are 300x more energetic. That doesn't even take into account the much higher levels of fallout from U-238 tampered high yield weapons.
  - baybal2 2y ago
    [dead]
Perceval 2y ago
> bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet This makes some assumptions about how nuclear weapons would be targeted and detonated, assumptions which may not be correct. Countervalue vs counterthreat targeting has been a back-and-forth for a long time in nuclear strategy discussions. The Nature paper relies on an assumption that there would be significant countervalue targeting—i.e. targeting cities and population centers rather than strictly military targets. This may not be a correct assumption about how U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are targeted. Second, the way that nuclear weapons are detonated has implications for the amount of burning and ash. Detonating weapons at ground level would limit the radius of destruction and increase the longer lasting fires burning the cities and projecting ash upwards into the atmosphere. But this isn't how nuclear weapons detonation has been modeled, pretty much since the Manhattan Project, because scientists realized that the shock of the detonation would destroy a greater radius if the nuclear weapon has detonated in the air above the target. This increases the radius of destruction, but decreases the long-lasting fires and ash projection upwards. Obviously it's not eliminated, but there is a significant difference depending on the manner in which the nuclear weapons are detonated. Both the U.S. and USSR have understood this. While an all-out nuclear exchange that employs countervalue targeting against cities and detonates nuclear weapons at the ground level could result in what the Nature article models, that is an unlikely scenario given what we know about U.S. and Russian thinking/targeting/strategy. More likely is 1) not a full exchange, 2) counterthreat targeting, 3) detonation above targets. This will still result in ash, and fires, and destruction, but will be substantially different in overall outcomes.
- more_corn 2y ago
  Even a limited exchange will release sufficient ash to kill billions of people through starvation. There was a previous model of a limited exchange between Pakistan and India I think the estimate was two billion dead.

28 points by nithinj 2y ago

Some of the people here trying to make light of a potential US/Russia nuclear war under the logic that most of Russia's bombs probably don't work or that previously nuked cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now perfectly livable, thriving cities miss the forest for the trees in a very big way. Even if only 1 or 2% of Russia's presumed arsenal of several thousand was functional enough to get through, and even if only half of those weren't knocked out before making their targeted impacts, you'd still be talking about at least dozens of nuclear bombs exploding on the western side of the world. Most of these would strike places inhabited by millions of people and enormously important amounts of critical infrastructure. Add to that the arguably larger number of bombs working enough to be successfully launched by the U.S and its nuclear-armed allies in retaliation against Russia (and a greater percentage of them reaching their targets, because after seeing its military "perform" in Ukraine, I simply don't believe that Russia's anti-missile measures would be particularly effective). With all of this combined you'd still be seeing an absolutely catastrophic global situation of human, social, political, economic and climatological destabilization. At least tens of millions would die immediately and at least tens of millions more would die in the months of war, further mutual attacks, radiation, regional nuclear fallout effects and global economic (think food distribution in particular) effects that would follow. In no time at all, we'd be facing a whole new geopolitical and devastated economic landscape in which more people have died than in all the wars of history combined. Even if this were not the utter Armageddon of a full blown nuclear war of thousands of raining missiles, it would still devastate the peace and better human trends of the planet as we know them today. Ultimately, it would then also be a humanitarian tragedy on a scale never before seen in modern world history. That's nothing to disregard, and it's almost certainly something that would brutally damage the lives of every single person commenting here in some deeply personal, hard way, at the least.

IAmGraydon 2y ago
The idea of a worldwide nuclear war is just about as scary as potential futures get. The people you see everywhere online making light of it are the most frightened and they're making light as a coping mechanism. If you want to see a cope echo chamber in action, go check out subreddits like r/worldnews, where literally every comment is another unoriginal redditor trying their best to talk about it like it's nothing or even funny. It's understandable, if a bit annoying. Deep down, they all know the seriousness of the situation, even if they lack the self awareness to act like it.

mc32 2y ago

…Meanwhile in Brussels and Washington: “What red lines? Ignore red lines!” (I'm colorblind, I think those are green!) It ain’t pre winter of ‘92 no more with “the day after” looming in people’s minds. Instead it’s “l-l-l-l-let’s play chicken!” (Bob Barker voice) Curtis LeMay was 60 years too early.

thot_experiment 2y ago
I think your understanding of the geopolitical game state here is way off. The reality is that nuclear war is less likely in now that it was during the cold war. We aren't in isolated echo chambers fearing an ideology we don't understand, the only reason anyone wants nukes is to prevent other people from nuking them. The world is running on capitalism, there isn't the same ideological drive to conflict. We're in a metastable equilibrium. Ukraine blowing up ammo depots in Russia is far further away from catalyzing WW3 than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vasily Arkhipov etc etc.
credit_guy 2y ago
> Instead it’s “l-l-l-l-let’s play chicken!” (Bob Barker voice) Unfortunately, if Putin decides this is a game he wants to play, then this is a game we cannot choose not to play. We can choose not to play it now, but we will have to play it later. That's a lesson Chamberlain and the whole world learned in 1938/39.
- protomolecule 2y ago
  [flagged]
BigParm 2y ago
The only action that will cause a retaliatory nuclear strike is a first nuclear strike. That's the only red line wrt Russia et al vs the West. If your primary military targets are innocent people then you should expect them to receive aid.
- IAmGraydon 2y ago

cupcakecommons 2y ago

What's the best thing that can be done to reduce the risk of conflict?

mc32 2y ago
Probably having the three major powers have regular contact with each other rather than pretending they're not there and refusing to take their calls.
- cupcakecommons 2y ago
  Seems like a great idea. What can people in the US do to facilitate this you think?
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Couldn't hurt to vote for the party who aren't Russian assets
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Bayesian priors need updating
    - Krssst 2y ago
      Seems that a lot of people prefer the approach of "surrender absolutely everything to Putin preemptively". Granted America is at basically zero risk of a Russian invasion, but letting Putin roams free means that Ukraine would only be the first step. I don't really know what Putin's Europe once he gets it all would look like but I don't expect human rights to be a part of it.
      - protomolecule 2y ago
        [flagged]

rasz 2y ago

And I could date Natalie Portman. Facts are russia is corrupt and bankrupt, they havent serviced/maintained nuke arsenal since forever. They cant even make new ICBMs anymore, their fifth try blew up on launch pad https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarmat-icbm-disaster/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarma... just like four previous attempts.

mc32 2y ago
Out of 6,000 units, even 1% of theirs working would be devastating (you know they have MIRVs), not to mention what launching ours would do. This is a stupid thought.
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  >This is a stupid thought. It's a consequence of social media, where people believe if they make a statement that gets enough up arrow clicks, physical reality changes to match their desired outcome. Most of the time it's of little consequence, especially when the people posting and voting have little actual connection to the subject matter, but things are quite different when the outcome involves nuclear detonations.
exabrial 2y ago
> Natalie Portman Meh. > Facts are russia is corrupt and bankrupt, they havent serviced/maintained nuke arsenal since forever. They cant even make new ICBMs anymore, their fifth try blew up on launch pad https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarma https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarma... just like four previous attempts. Yep ^ it's unlilkely they have very few in a launch-able state. Although, they don't have a detonate a nuke to make parts of the world unlivable. They have plenty of radioactive material; simply detonating a salted conventional bomb would be pretty nasty.
datavirtue 2y ago
If anyone tried launching their ICBMs half of them would blow up in their face. So we have that going for us (the peoples of all states).

DaoVeles 2y ago

While there are many that argue against this point and I am sympathetic to them, Mutually Assured Destruction is a very powerful deterrent. One of the reasons why many treaties came a long after WW2 was because for the first time ever, we had weapons on a scale that could truly cause civilization ending events. There is talk about strategic strike capabilities and from the little bits that trickle out from within, it is considered a potential path forward. But it is a path forward that is both political and literal suicide. A scenario played out in the book 'Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America' by John Michael Greer makes a decent point. Say the US decides to strategically strike an opponent. They manage to take out 199 of 200 potential retaliatory strikes - a great success in terms of the ratio. But that one missile that gets through detonates over San Fransisco becoming the single most deadly event in US history. It just isn't seen as a viable path forward. Luckily those in power are there because of those below them, you cannot be too loose of a cannon at the top but even that doesn't put ones mind at ease as you just do not know on what could happen. Maybe the lunatics to get control of it all. Strange things can happen.

insane_dreamer 2y ago
> you cannot be too loose of a cannon at the top And with Putin on one side and possibly (hopefully not) Trump on the other, that makes two loose cannons. Comforting thought.
- samsin 2y ago
  Nuclear war between US and Russia is less likely with Trump
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Strong disagree. Trump has proven to be unreliable and unpredictable. He’s drunk on his own real or perceived power like a typical cult leader, and cannot be relied on to act rationally. Not unlike Putin.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Mountain_Skies 2y ago

Well, yeah, sure, five billion people could die but at least Putin wouldn't "win", which is what's truly important.

toofy 2y ago
> …at least putin wouldn’t win. you might be kind of close, but it’s probably more like… “if i can’t forcibly take over any country i want for my own, ill nuke you.” …is not a rational policy for the future of world geopolitics and certainly is more nuanced than a sarcastic “at least soandso wont win”
- protomolecule 2y ago
  [flagged]
kcb 2y ago
What are you getting at?

hindsightbias 2y ago

People are missing the tree for the forest. If the “concerned” folks are to be believed, after more than a decade of corruption fighting Xi has missiles filled with water rather than rocket fuel. How do you think the Soviet hand-me-downs are going? The problem isn’t Putin or Xi committing global suicide, it’s they’re not paying attention to the details: Sgt. Boris or Liu driving off with thermonuclear warheads and selling them. https://blog.ucsusa.org/gregory-kulacki/xi-jinpings-thoughts-on-chinas-nuclear-weapons/ https://blog.ucsusa.org/gregory-kulacki/xi-jinpings-thoughts...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> problem isn’t Putin or Xi committing global suicide, it’s they’re not paying attention to the details The problem with Putin or Xi is that they're dictators. Dictatorships trade the immortality of the state for the mortality of a man. The de-stabilising moments will come in the moments (a) before they are removed from power, by death or another's gunpoint, and are no longer weighing the interests of the world or even their country but their personal surival and (b) immediately after, when both succession and the chain of command are ambiguous. (In the latter respect, the CCP is at least an institution.)
- protomolecule 2y ago
  [flagged]

h2odragon 2y ago

Assuming the nukes work. We've been discovering our stockpiles of arms to be less functional than hoped. And that's with stuff that was tested and could be used as part of storage. The nukes were never meant to be used, the chances of them malfunctioning are somewhat higher. That's before you subtract the hype of "nukes are the ultimate weapon" from any calculations. Hiroshima is still an active, populated city. People assume nukes are "finger of God" erasers, but they're really rather inefficient explosives with simple physics.

mc32 2y ago
You can’t compare kiloton with megaton weapons. This is insincere. Moreover what strikes me is we have so many people handwringing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wondering if it was morally right… but the same kind of people are cavalier about having thousands of weapons tens of times more energetic getting launched. It’s mindboggling.
foxyv 2y ago
A 5 megaton bomb will collapse buildings in a 6-7km radius and then set the entire city on fire. China could level Albuquerque with a single Dong-Feng 5. Especially if they use their 12 1MT warhead MIRV configuration. Fusion weapons are in a whole new ballgame compared to 15kt Hiroshima weapon. While nuclear weapons tend to scale logarithmically with regards to damage, it hardly matters when the weapons are 300x more energetic. That doesn't even take into account the much higher levels of fallout from U-238 tampered high yield weapons.
- baybal2 2y ago
  [dead]

Perceval 2y ago

> bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet This makes some assumptions about how nuclear weapons would be targeted and detonated, assumptions which may not be correct. Countervalue vs counterthreat targeting has been a back-and-forth for a long time in nuclear strategy discussions. The Nature paper relies on an assumption that there would be significant countervalue targeting—i.e. targeting cities and population centers rather than strictly military targets. This may not be a correct assumption about how U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are targeted. Second, the way that nuclear weapons are detonated has implications for the amount of burning and ash. Detonating weapons at ground level would limit the radius of destruction and increase the longer lasting fires burning the cities and projecting ash upwards into the atmosphere. But this isn't how nuclear weapons detonation has been modeled, pretty much since the Manhattan Project, because scientists realized that the shock of the detonation would destroy a greater radius if the nuclear weapon has detonated in the air above the target. This increases the radius of destruction, but decreases the long-lasting fires and ash projection upwards. Obviously it's not eliminated, but there is a significant difference depending on the manner in which the nuclear weapons are detonated. Both the U.S. and USSR have understood this. While an all-out nuclear exchange that employs countervalue targeting against cities and detonates nuclear weapons at the ground level could result in what the Nature article models, that is an unlikely scenario given what we know about U.S. and Russian thinking/targeting/strategy. More likely is 1) not a full exchange, 2) counterthreat targeting, 3) detonation above targets. This will still result in ash, and fires, and destruction, but will be substantially different in overall outcomes.

more_corn 2y ago
Even a limited exchange will release sufficient ash to kill billions of people through starvation. There was a previous model of a limited exchange between Pakistan and India I think the estimate was two billion dead.