The Myth That Nuclear Weapons Can Kill Everyone On Earth-many times over

Once we move form suburbs, that's the plan.

 

We would very quickly see a violent and armed society take up its arms and loot each other for food, shelter, cash and anything else, in mass paranoia, rape, plundering and pillaging, as the corporate state invokes martial law and the substantial people huddle in their gated communities.

 

You let corporations gain control of the food supply.

 

Why do you constantly whine about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In case you were not aware

1) Most of the populations of those two cities survived.
2) Neither city was reduced to a permanent wasteland. Both were rebuilt in only a few years.

 

No one's whining, I just don't believe you. May one land on your locale (above ground aerial detonation will suffice), ya'll can rebuild it in a few years.

 

Think about what you just said.

It would set civilization back 1500 years...best case...

Yea...let's do that...

 

Perhaps. But because you can't erase knowledge from peoples minds, recovery won't take but a fraction of that time.

 

There are still some 400 ICBM silos in the US, so that's 400 groundbursts directly upwind of two thirds of the US.

Regardless, a nuke produces the same amount of fallout regardless of whether it is an airburst or groundburst. The fallout from an airburst might not come down directly downwind from the explosion, but it will come down somewhere.

 

It depends on the meaning of significant. It would not be enough to end all life.

But it would be enough to give all life an early death from cancer for the next 500 years or so.

Speak for yourself. I'll certainly be concerned about cancer and starvation.

More like five to ten kilotons.

 

Not to mention the heat of the fireball will combine nitrogen and oxygen in the air into nasty ozone-unfriendly compounds, and the mushroom cloud will then loft them high into the atmosphere. So if there is a large nuclear war, you can kiss the ozone layer goodbye for a century or so.

 

You don’t target the silos. You target the launch control centers. One per ten or fifteen silos.

And no, an air burst and a ground burst do not generate the same fallout.

 

This is incorrect. Each neutron that is produced by the fusion of hydrogen will go on to cause the fission of a number of uranium atoms, and half of the energy of the warhead will be due to this fission.

That is incorrect. Scientific consensus accepts nuclear winter as sound science.

Mass starvation due to the absence of a growing season anywhere on the planet over a few years would affect them. So would the absence of an ozone layer. So would everyone dying an early death from cancer.

That would be news to everyone who was killed by the firestorm at Hiroshima.

That is incorrect. Once a controlled shutdown is completed, you still need to have powered cooling of the reactor for several days.

Look what happened at Fukushima when they weren't able to provide that post-shutdown cooling.

 

No. The silos are targeted.

Yes they do. The only difference between a groundburst and an airburst is where that fallout is deposited.

 

I wouldn't bet on it. Russian nukes are only built to last about 15 years or so.

 

It's not that they didn't have rights, it's that laws were passed that override those rights.

 

Why would you target the silos individually when targeting the launch control centers turns the silos into nothing but pointless concrete tubes?

So you are telling me that a groundburst, that creates a massive crater and throws all the now-radioactive soil and rock into the upper atmosphere, generates the same amount of fallout as an air burst?

 

This is false.
They will both produce the same fallout form the materials in the weapons themselves, but a groundburst will create significantly more radioactive debris and blow it into the sky.

 

I went back and scanned this thread. So I likely missed some important points already covered.

Occasionally you hear about some poison in which one drop can kill X thousands of people. That is all based on the assumption that the drop was divided evenly and each part was introduced into an individual victim. Of course, it never happens that way. One person gets thousands of times the dosage to kill and some get no dosage at all.

The same applies to the nuclear weapons. One area will see enough damage to kill the people in that area thousands of times over and others will see little or no effect.

Given all that, a nuclear war is not something that any of us are going to see without very serious effects.

 

The only difference that makes is in where the fallout settles at. Either way the same amount of fallout will still come down somewhere.

 

This is -absurdly- false.
How does an airburst produce the same fallout as a grounburst when a grounburst produces a crater?

 

Fallout is the remnants of split atoms. The same number of atoms are split in a warhead regardless of whether it explodes in the air or on the ground.

 

Um.... no.

Nuclear fallout, or simply fallout, is the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast, so called because it "falls out" of the sky after the explosion and the shock wave have passed.[1] It commonly refers to the radioactive dust and ash created when a nuclear weapon explodes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout

 

The remnants of all those split atoms come down somewhere when there is an airburst as well.

 

Entirely immaterial.
How does an airburst produce the same fallout as a grounburst when a grounburst produces a crater?

 

That depends on how much you like dying of cancer. Personally I'm not a fan.

The fallout is the remains of split atoms. The same number of atoms are split regardless of whether a warhead explodes in the air or on the ground. The only thing that changes is where those fission fragments come down at.