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How about looking it also from another angle. How many missiles do you need to wipe out all the big Cities and capitals of the world. Probably only one missile
by yannis 17y ago
How about looking it also from another angle. How many missiles do you need to wipe out all the big Cities and capitals of the world. Probably only one missile per City. Given +- 200 countries and that is the end of civilization as we know it. From there onwards whoever survive will have to compete like cockroaches to continue living.
- three14 17y agoThat was discussed in the linked post.
- lhorie 17y agoIf you read the whole thing, you'll see he calculates that too: "99293 heavy duty nukes required to wipe out world's city dwellers, we have 10227".
- yannis 17y agoI have read the article and my point was different. I said .. and civilization as we know it will end. I used my elementary school maths. The current number of countries in the world are 192, since some of them have two capitals I rounded the number to 200. His statistics for London showed that 1 warhead was enough to wipe it out and London is spread out unlike Singapore or Hong Kong. As per my calculation 200 missiles are more than enough to destroy our current civilization.
- lhorie 17y agoI'd imagine nuking Washington wouldn't change the US as a whole (perhaps you'd get another post-9/11 terror obsession, but I'd think the economic infrastructure would still remain rather intact). I think number of capitals isn't a very good measure of economic infrastructure: Monaco has some 30k people, but a non-capital city like Sao Paulo has 11 million. One could say "ok, let's drop Monaco and nuke Sao Paulo then", and then maybe nuke Boston and Sydney too while we're at it. But you're going to run out of bombs way before you run out of large cities.
- cschep 17y agoMorbid, but true. If a nuke truly hit the ground in D.C., I can't help but shudder at the thought of the hysteria that would ensue though. Post-9/11 hysteria would look like rational behavior in comparison.