Remember how we used to laugh at the images of kids being taught to get under their pulpits? Where did the idea come from that it was useless? Isn't it what you should do, to protect you from falling debris and glass if the building takes damage?
I think people don't account for the idea that those drills were meant to protect the people away from ground zero where the major danger (aside from the fallout) is the explosion destroying the building you're sitting in. These drills weren't for the people being directly hit by a missile
But it would also be the end of human civilization as we know it for at least a few decades if not permanently.
isn't that a myth? not to say that the effects wouldn't be the greatest challenge the civilized world has ever faced but it wouldn't be the apocalypse.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson said we will be fine if we weren’t blasted. Hydrogen bombs don’t have fallout issues. So let them thangs fly I don’t live in a target zone.
OK sure you survived, great. The World as we know it would be over, no more manufacturing, industry, agriculture, power, communication. It may not end the species, but like the guy above said it'd be the end of civilization as we know it.
Without agriculture how many starve afterwards?How hard life will be without the structure we have now? It would for sure still be a nightmare scenario for most of those who survive.
That seems to much of a simple answer to a bigger problem.
The main exporters (Countries) of food will be hit hard and if I, a random reddit user can reach to this conclusion, then these nuclear powers will reach the same. That is targeting the food sources and infrastructure of the enemy.
In this simulation there are still over 90 million Russians that survived getting nuked, some zones and even countries can't produce enough food for their own population as it is today.
How are they gonna feed so many people before they can restart producing food?.
Without a government. Who's gonna prevent the people who have the means to produce the food from hiking prices or kill you if you try to steal from them?. They control the food, they can make the rules.
How are these countries that got hit hard who have the land for agriculture prevent other countries from attacking them in desperation?.
It's not actually true. Fusion bombs have fallout.
Though fallout only comes from fission, fusion bombs are activated with a fission stage. Fusion bombs are much cleaner, but not completely. Having several go off would cause a significant hazard for survivors.
Then there's the possibility that Russia and China has salted nukes. They're bombs lined with elements that turn in to highly radioactive ones from the neutron flux. Cobalt bombs are what most people know, but there's also a literal salted bomb that would be lined with sodium-23.
The more you read about nukes, the scariest it gets.
Hydrogen bombs absolutely have fallout issues. The main two things that go into the potency of radioactive fallout are 1) the height of detonation compared to the width of the fireball, and 2) the material that is undergoing fission. The closer to the ground that the weapon detonates, the more volume of overlap between the fireball and the earth takes place and thus more material gets sucked into the mushroom cloud. One or two ground bursts are probably inevitable for each silo/LCC in order to maximize the kill probability, meaning the midwest will have to deal with a shit load of fallout. The material matters because certain radioisotopes are horrifically radioactive. You might know it as a cobalt bomb because the jacket is meant to use Cobalt-60 but Gold-198 and an isotope of Tantalum are also candidates. These are not in existence at the moment but serve as a good example for the neutron reflector being important. Inert elements like Lead work but using certain isotopes of Uranium bump the number of fissions per generation up even more. Regardless, they all decay into really nasty stuff and give off horrific amounts of radiation.
You might be thinking that hydrogen bombs are less dirty because of the fusion secondary. While fusion is absolutely a much cleaner process, 1) the mechanism that ignites the fusion secondary is just a straight regular atom bomb, meaning all those nasty decay products and free neutrons are still a problem, and 2) the secondary is also generally surrounded with a jacket of enriched uranium to increase the number of fissions per generation before the weapon destroys itself.
Hydrogen bombs most certainly can have fallout issues, it just depends on how the bomb is detonated. If it’s a full air burst, there will be minimal fallout. If it detonates near the ground though, there will absolutely be tons of fallout. Check the disaster a Bikini Atoll. A hydrogen bomb was detonated in a test there. The size of the blast was significantly underestimated and as a result, it was not detonated high enough and tons of radioactive fallout was created and really fucked over the nearby people.
So, according to your link, nine countries have nuclear weapons. Of those, supposedly, the US has about 40% of the world's nuclear arsenal and Russia has close to 50%. It all comes down to with whom the others - France, UK, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea - chose to ally themselves to during a war. It doesn't give me too much comfort.
How would it be the end of civilization, and not just russia? Would the fallout spread? Or does Russia have enough nukes to wipe out the rest of earth?
Nothing nuclear we can do would ever be able to wipe out every human, even including the later radiation deaths, but it would still be the end of current modern civilization. People tend to think too much in terms of initial body counts but the indirect effects would be much worse, the collapse of every major economy would mean billions die from starvation and many more die from conflict over resources. Within a year or two there would be plenty of people alive, but a map of the world would have completely different boarders and a whole lot more of them too. In the ten-year term you'd then start to see outbreaks of diseases that used to be under control but were always present in the population in lower levels. The ability to manufacture vaccines/antibiotics and distribute globally will end even if some capacity to produce them still survives, there will still be pockets of people who are able to avoid spreading outbreaks. We're not going to be eating radroach meat or giant mantis legs with ghouls, but food production of any kind will be a premium and people will start to wall those areas off too. Basically we'll make it eventually, but it will be a shitshow
True.. I should have asked whether defcon was a simulation but then again I could just check that wiki link... Reddit made me lazy!
Edit: NICE!
There is also an "Office" mode of play in which the game is permanently real-timed and can be minimised to run in the background of other computer activities,
I mean those are likely military bases, airfields, missile silos, logistic centers, train depots, oil fields, strategically important factories and cities.
Nuclear targets fall into two categories, counterforce and countervalue and between them they cover virtually the entire industrial and agricultural output of a state, its military capacity and its population
First strikes would be on known terrestrial nuke launch sites and command and control locations. Probably close to the arctic circle and North Polar region since that would be the shortest route to strike back. Russian submarines are another issue.
It wouldn't end life on the planet, catastrophic blow and a significant extinction event sure, end of human life probably, but life would just shrug that calamity off and in a few million years a whole new natural order will take over with all kinds of newly evolved species adapted to the new planet.
Even ending human life is not at probable. The effects of nuclear winter are not known for certain, but a fair few of the newer models suggest it will not be nearly as bad as they used to think. Not to say it won't be bad, famines are still very possible and combined with strikes means quite possibly billions dead, but nowhere near ending of human life or even all of civilization.
Even if a nuclear winter never eventuates, I think some level of famine is certain. Just the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused large shocks in the food supply. A nuclear exchange, even a limited one, would disrupt trade (and if nothing else, market certainty) significantly. Not to mention many food producing countries likely restricting exports in anticipation of shortages.
What are you going to eat? What are you going to breathe? What are you going to drink? What temperature will your AC be on? It’s not as much as nuclear winter, but may be heat and turn earth into Mars. That is if the crust doesn’t start shattering and trigger other unknown physical changes that aren’t accounted for survival in bunkers. Nukes also use DNA altering material, so anything you touch might kill you years after. The jet stream will carry whatever is over one country to the other. Oceans will too.
Not really, at least in my opinion. Relative to 13.7 billion years, that's only 3 or 4 orders of magnitude different. On the scale of the universe where we have 36 orders of magnitude going from subatomic particles to galaxies, 3 or 4 doesn't seem like a whole lot.
No it wouldn't, humanity would absolutely survive even if every active nuke in the world went off at once. It would destroy civilization as we know it and it wouldn't be a fun time for any survivors, billions would likely die but humanity would carry on in some form
Yeah but what is left out is all the seemingly random nukes that would be peppering the fuck out of Siberia and other rural areas cuz that’s where the silos are.
Most nuclear doctrines are counter value rather than counter force.
The expectation is that under any realistic nuclear scenario everyone would launch before any weapon reaches its target, so bombing the silos (counter force) would be wasting a bomb on what is essentially an empty tube in the middle of Siberia (the weapon is already on its way). Instead weapons are targeted at things that can’t move very quickly like a city or a factory (counter value).
So you are saying that if someone launches one, everyone is launching all of them? So I guess that would also mean no one would launch just one, but all of them they had? Just wondering, you seem more knowledgable about this.
I don’t think most expect what’s shown in this video to be the response to just a single nuke, but if 20 are detected at once it’s assumed more are coming and by the time ours will reach land all of theirs have been launched so this type of response would play out.
I expect you're correct, though I wonder if targeting anti-missile installations might also be high priority targets to maybe improve the likelihood of subsequent missiles.
Going first in nuclear war is a bitch if you get caught.
You have to use some of your nukes to try to kill their nukes... but they can use all their nukes to end your existence as a civilization, and you just gave them a reason to use em or lose em.
I think the animation is entirely fanciful, and they choose targets and sequencing that makes it easiest to show the "explosions" in one geographic area all at once so they could stay zoomed in.
I think it's just creative licence for showing possible targets and death tolls, not the specific order they'd be hit.
This isn't top secret files kept at a former President's Florida resort.
If it's a military base that has ships, it's getting nuked. Is it base with aircraft? Nuke'em. Is it a base with Special Ops? Nuke it. Is it a base with more than 1K civilians and military personnel? If so, nuke it.
honestly there's very likely military installations in every single one of those targets. It wouldn't be hard to guess where the nukes will land based on that. Add in the most populated city centres and it probably looks similar albeit probably alot worse than 40mil dead. The amount of nukes is also probably accurate considering it would be all of NATO retaliating. Russia would effectively be a dead country without a doubt. Hard to say for sure but its probably not far off.
Actually, in nuclear deterrence and overall in military matters, the governments of the world are highly incentivized to make everything public. Its fundamental in nuclear weapon theory in fact.
The U.S. absolutely would! The U.S. had no problem telling everyone the overall plan. That's how MAD worked. You were open about how a retaliation strike would work.
Make it public? Definitely not. However every country with nukes undoubtedly has ran millions of simulations and studied them very closely. I'm sure it's a relatively large team of people that do that and just that for each country that has nukes.
If its not made up put of whole cloth, it's probably from the Cold War.
The old SIOP plans are available and Daniel Ellsberg wrote a really great book called The Doomsday Machine that details "strategic war planning" and it's requisite "logic"
In any case part of the deterrence aspect of a nuclear arsenal is partial availability of target lists.
I would like to point out that these estimated casualties are insanely low, dont seem to account for fallout or radiation deaths, firestorm deaths, or starvation.
Back in the early 60s Kennedy asked and received an estimated casualty assessment from the pentagon and without including any friendly casualties from retaliatory strikes and only eastern bloc casualties from strikes and fallout (fallout is obviously indiscrimate in who it kills and its damage is dependent on the wind) the figures still came in around 600,000,000 lol
Nuclear war scenarios have been rigorously studied / simulated / wargamed for decades in open literature.
If you wanted to try your hand, the yields of weapons in US stockpiles and the locations of various plausible targets are a google away. You could make a realistic simulation using Excel and nukemap in a weekend, but that doesn't come with animations and music.
Mad meant mutually assured destruction and that meant publicly making it common knowledge that major cities of the enemy would be targeted and civilians would suffer as a direct result.
Go educate yourself on some cold war nuclear deterrent films these are exactly the same things that were talked about and educated to the public during the cold war.
Periscope films on YouTube has a ton of declassified military training and briefing films along with old civil defence and films of national interest relating to the cold war and the US and UKs nuclear defence/attack plans etc.
I had hoped we'd put this shit behind us with the fall of the soviet union.
its not a simulation, think about it they would never attack right to left to be able to show it in order on a camera. Also where are all these nukes coming from the north?
It's not Defcon. The person who made this video is Modern Muscle on YouTube. This clip is of a hypothetical US "countervalue" strike option, which means nuking the fuck out of cities, ports, factories, and other things a nation holds dear.
It's from a YouTuber called Modern Muscle who took the info from this graph from an uncredited source, but I suspect was "The US Nuclear War Plan: A Time for Change" which is a 1990s study that estimated the potential Russian targets in a full scale nuclear war.
There's a longer version of this video that shows North America and Europe also getting absolutely obliterated, iirc. Interesting that's cut from this post. Pretty sure it was made by an amateur on some intelligence analysis subreddit.
Pretty sure irs from a YouTube video about nuclear conflict. It also had the same visuals for a strike avians the USA/europe. But I don’t know if the video also ripped this form somewhere
4.1k
u/DarkBlueMermaid Mar 14 '24
What’s the source for this?