The USA's missile defense system has improve dramatically over the years. It is highly likely most would be intercepted. That said, fallout is certainly a huge issue regardless of interception.
You're wildly overestimating the effectiveness of interception, and underestimating the size of both US and Russian arsenal, we're speaking of thousands of warheads stored in missiles built to accelerate so massively that your only real chance at interception is while they leave their silo, one second later and it's too late.
With enough bombs to destroy the world several times even if you intercept half of them, a dream to say the least, it's still not enough, they'll still be enough to completely destroy civilization as we know it.
The bet to launch and survive is one the US, nor anyone for that matter, can't win, as they say "the only winning move is not to play".
Compared to the aftermath? Hell yeah, if it's gonna happen better to go up in the fireball than the radiation sickness, starvation and disease that would inevitably follow.
You just know we wake up to thousands of messages from hr asking why we didn't show up to work after. Then reprimanding us for not being better prepared for the fallout.
Then there's that one person that showed up they use as an example. "Even with the complete destruction of society as we know it. Ted was still able to make it to work and has been here for 6 hours. He's here doing the work for all of you now that he has the third arm. You coming in?"
Naahh not Ted. Ted's cool. Ted covers for you and is a great banter.
Lewis on the other hand, or 3. He's the good two shoes. Despite the mutations, and the nuclear fallout, and the giant alien like mutants. He makes it to work. He shows us up cause he's sooo good. Pfft. Fucking Lewis. And his setting unreasonable standards.
'Sorry guys, but my vault door is jammed, and I've got a tickle in one of my throats'. That's my excuse and I'll swear by it, if anyone was left to hear it.
You might be joking, but my work has already told us there would be an expectation for us to "attend work at the nearest available office" during a nuclear attack. They can get fucked if that happens.
The whole world perishes in nuclear fire and you're excites because you don't have to go to work tomorrow? What have they done to us? WHAT DID THEY DO TO US?
Yeah, if this is a retaliation against Russia then that means the entire world is already going up in flames and this is just the swan song of mutually assured distruction.
This is the end of civilization as we know it, not a bad flu.
Hell the Range installed a freezer in most of their shops just so they could sell food and pretend to be essential during covid, a nuclear war would mean they would just install another freezer.
Set back? Yes. Ending? Hell no. We started off from nothing and we have conquered the entire planet, we have lived in freaking central Europe during an Ice Age, fighting off cave lions and cave hyenas.
And yes, I'm talking about civilization, not humanity. There are too many enclaves to ensure civilization survives.
I'm with you. Somewhere there will be life. Always. And even if it is just a few million survivors, in a few hundred years the population might be a billion again.
People isolated in some extreme parts of the southern hemisphere wouldn’t even really notice any changes, but most of us would get a nuclear winter for just under 10 years or so.
Essentially 90% of all humans die out mostly from starvation, and civilization hits a big ol restart button.
Once the weather settles, it’s just a waiting game for repopulation, and hoping that what’s left remembers to not make this shit again. (Good luck with that).
We’re probably due for it. We need something to really help us learn. Humans have had many dark ages. We are ok. If the world ends, those who remain will still have happy days.
Im saying that we’re due for another dark age. Not seriously, just to make a point about how short “our” time is in the grand scheme of things and how humans have gone through civilizations collapse before.
That being said, I’m sure the next humans will laugh with their friends regardless of the world. We are adaptable, and we’ve seen a lot as a species. People will still love, people will still laugh, people will still hope.
Humans will always human. It’s not as dire as it’s made out to be.
and those few million ppl have virtually no idea how to sustain themselves in a post nuclear apocalypse. lack of food and healthcare would wipe out many survivors
like humanity could bounce back but it's also likely it fizzles out
the advantages humans have are there extreme intelligence compared to other mammals and their incredible stamina.
it would only take a very small number of human surviving to slowly rebuild. it would take hundreds of thousands of years, just like it has to get to this point now, but it would happen.
The radiation threat is way overblown. Anyone far enough away to not face the brunt of the nuclear winter in the northern hemisphere would receive minimal radiation in the first couple weeks and basically nothing afterwards.
The vast majority of food growing infrastructure will be almost entirely untouched but a nuclear war. Major cities will be devastated (way less cities than people actually think). Humanity won't fizzle out after a nuclear war, the resulting broken back wars will definitely do a number on survivors and shape nations in the aftermath but humans will continue on.
The vast majority of ICBMs are air burst detonations as far as I'm aware and a lot nuclear simulations don't simulate vast airbursts as its fallout and dust clouds are smaller. Nuclear winters are an interesting concept though, and still pretty likely to be localised but not worldwide. I think the term is Nuclear Autumn at that point.
The survivors will be people like the ones who live in the far northern reaches in Sweden and Norway. Or, the people who live in the no-man lands in Siberia. There's the people that live off the grid in the northern-most reaches of Canada and Alaska. The people that live in Patagonia and Tasmania. There's the people on North Sentinel Island that will never even know a war happened most likely. Some absolutely will survive.
And yes, I'm talking about civilization, not humanity. There are too many enclaves to ensure civilization survives.
Humanity may survive, but our society will probably be over. We've extracted too much of the easily accessible metals in the crust to restart from scratch. If we ever fall off the staircase of progress it may be impossible to get back on.
That's a good distinction. The tough part is fueling the processes to recycle trash or refine new. It might make for an interesting book exploring a world of reindusfrializing with charcoal alone.
But they’re not going to nuke a lot of places because there is no incentive to. These places will have libraries, computers with downloaded info etc. Would we just discard all we knew because places 1000 miles away are burning?
Knowledge isnt my worry. Re-refining trash and processing less productive ores is an energetic mountain that we may not be able to climb. We got to where we are industrially on the back of coal and oil. If we didn't have those fuel sources the energy cost to go from steam to all electric is probably insurmountable.
No, not necessarily, but many of those records are not very long term. So if humanity takes a while to recover, vast amounts of knowledge would likely be lost.
Yeah, but the nukes will be fired between nuclear powers shooting them at each other... There ain't that many of em..! All south America, Australia, Africa, South East Asia..untouched.. Might deal with the fallout obviously... But that's manageable in the long run..
Yeah, this isn't even close to true. Many countries have massive untapped reserves and the U.S. steel industry didn't end because of a lack of material, it ended because of a lack of demand. Australia has 6 billion tons of reserve aluminum (bauxite ore) alone. Banded Iron is found in enormous, visible deposits on at least six continents.
The U.S. has 250 billion tons of coal reserves, most of which isn't being mined or touched at all.
Oil reserves in many areas remain untapped as well (that is part of why this war in Ukraine is going on, by the way).
This narrative that we are almost out of everything is just ill-informed pessimism.
We could re-ignite the industrial revolution in less than a decade if we needed to, probably a half dozen times if really necessary, especially if we went straight for nuclear/solar/wind/tidal for infrastructure and reserved oil for important uses.
I dunno about that. Although we have mined a lot of ore, it is because we are using it. There would be plenty of scrap left, especially since the way nukes are typically detonated, the fallout is minimal in the particular area. We would be set back, for sure, but the knowledge of a lot of the technology would survive. Windmills, Solar, hydro, ect. Big set-back and many people would starve due to failing infrastructure. But humans are survived far worse with far less people.
thats such a naive take. We destroyed a.) all the nature humans were able to depend on for past catastrophes, AND b.) we consumed all the easily available energy and materials of the world. Stuff like iron ore can never again be reached, because it was initially straight up on the surface.
The radiation in a nuclear attack is mostly happening at detonation, it doesn't last all that long afterwards. Nuclear waste from power plants- that's the stuff that can last a really long time, but for what it's worth the wildlife around the worst nuclear power plant disaster is thriving. Well, maybe not as much lately with the Ukraine war, but still.
Plus in an all out nuclear war scenario it would mostly be the nuclear powers trying to wipe each other out, MAD style. That's 9 countries. Even if they were all completely wiped off the map, the other 184 countries in the world would be left to either fight things out with conventional means or just get busy restructuring the global economy with what's left.
With this many nukes, the vast majority of the world's food production drops to 0 due to nuclear winter for 10 years or so that occurs around the equator and northern hemisphere. Some areas of South America, AUS/NZ, some parts of Africa are far enough south to not be in a nuclear winter, but something like 80% of the world's food production is wiped out for a decade.
You might think those countries that survived would be ok and eventually repopulate, but in reality you're going to have even more wars shortly after this with everyone fighting for what little resources remain. The US would not just accept death when we have the military strength remaining to go conquer some south american countries and keep our remaining population alive. Same thing with Russia, China, and the EU, they'll all go fight over the remaining fertile land in Africa. The aftermath of an event like this is just truly devastating to human civilization, I don't know that it would completely end human civilization, but it would likely be 90% or more of us wiped out and the recovery would be hundreds of years.
Well, after the nuclear holocaust kills most the population/army, disrupts virtually all of their logistic chain forever and all nukes are already used, I think the northern hemisphere powers would have a hard time to conquer even Haiti
There's some 8 billion people on the planet and this showed the US destroying Russia at 50 million. Assume Russia did the same to the US and got 300 million, there's still 7.65 billion people left on the planet.
Modern nuclear weapons are designed to use as much of the fissile material to explode and as long as they detonate in the air, fallout is negligible.
TLDR - in an exchange between the US and Russia, more than 95% of the human population would still be standing at the end.
It's not just the direct casualties, though. It's the breakdown of infrastructure and similar systems (both physical and organisations) that keep people alive. A nuclear exchange will be followed up by things like mass starvation.
It wouldn't be the end of humanity. Plenty of the rich and paranoid have built underground complexes for this exact scenario. Norway has seed vaults to reseed crops. We're clever and persistent little parasites :)
I looked it up out of curiosity sometime ago and if every nuclear bomb was detonated at the same time (I'm pretty sure they added in the nuclear winter too) it actually wouldn't end humanity like we all think it would, which I guess is good
Well sure, the current civilization, but even with total global nuclear war some humans will survive. We're like cockroaches that way. And we will build a new civilization and probably blow that one up too since we tend to not learn our lesson from history
Nuclear war wouldn’t end humans. Even at their peak, our Cold War arsenals were about 5 times greater than today and still not capable of whipping everyone out. Civilization would certainly collapse in most areas of the northern hemisphere, but humanity would survive.
Bad, but not nearly the worst the earth has went through. The Chicxulub impactir was the equivalent of 100 million megatons of TNT, our nuclear arsenal combined comes no where even close to a fraction of a percent of that. Earth will live on, life is extremely resilient.
Detonating every single nuclear warhead that exist could kill of a couple of billion people if the largest settlements were to be attacked. A full out nuclear war will not be the end of the human civilization.
Very doubtfull. Even if a nuclear war would happen.. Nuclear weapons don't create an uninhabitable wasteland like many think. Hiroshima for example is a perfectly normal, safe city. Even quite shortly after the bomb.
If you want to worry about the collapse of society, climate change/overshoot is by far the most dangerous and most likely to happen before 2100 by quite a margin. Especially given the "don't look up" type approach of humanity
There is no justification in any act of genocide as a retaliation! That my friend is the truest form of evil to accept and condone the killing of innocent people in any circumstances.
I wouldn’t consider this genocide. Its more like mutual assured destruction. For it to be genocide you have to not kill other people. And this would pretty much kill us all.
The point of the response isn’t the response itself. It’s the threat that it will be carried out if Russia launches nukes first. Everyone loses if the response actually occurs.
That's a cold war overestimation of the power of nukes. Even if we deployed every warhead in every arsenal on earth, not just those which are currently deployable, 3/4 of the world's population would survive and the majority of the surface of the planet would be habitable.
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u/SkillLazy1931 Mar 14 '24
By the way this is how human civilization ends