People always talk about nuclear war like it would be some kind of extinction level event but is that realistic? Can two countries swap nukes without destroying the entire planet?
People always talk about nuclear war like it would be some kind of extinction level event but is that realistic?
We've done it before, but we arent supposed to talk abou
>Can two countries swap nukes without destroying the entire planet?
The US swapped two nukes for 0 nukes once.
we've tested thousands of nukes already and it didn't end the world nor cause nuclear winter
The effects of global thermonuclear would be limited to the northern hemisphere
>The effects of global thermonuclear would be limited to the northern hemisphere
Which would suck because that's where I am.
The northern hemisphere is the world so to speak so yeah it's end of the world
That's only if they unload like a hundred fricking nukes at once. A single city can be nuked and will change frick all.
Didn't a nuke go off in Ukraine once?
It is not an extinction event with the nukes alone.
It would be hundreds of millions dead, long lasting environmental disaster, economic collapse, and so on.
Also the initiator would be wiped out from the history along with their people.
Nuclear war can be funny, even comedy. Just imagine a India-Pakistan nuclear war.
Humanity has survived at least one nuclear war in the past which melted the ice sheets and caused noahs flood when the interdimensional / intergalactical powers thought over the domain of earth and their gene spliced servant/thrall races on it. One faction wanted to free us from servitude while the other wanted to continue to enslave us. There have been further skirmishes but the battle that lead to the flood was the biggest one and most likely a nuclear considering the scorched landmasses in the former lush lands of babylon and messopotemia.
It's like global warming. It's very very bad, very undesirable, but it's far from a doomsday.
I've read some on the subject and concluded "probably not", here's fairly detailed summary:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mxKwP2PFtg8ABwzug/nuclear-war-is-unlikely-to-cause-human-extinction
No, probably not. The perception is mainly based on media like On The Beach where it shows just a giant invisible death cloud of radiation reaching every single point on the planet. That and nuclear weapon designs were continually tweaked to spread less radiation after detonation. So outside of the general zones of the blasts, we'd be gucci as a human race ~~*maybe*~~
No, the nukes were the starting gun for WWIII, the opening bombardment before the tanks got rolling. If the head planners in NATO and the USSR didn't know that war was going to follow detonations instead of just plain wiping us all out, why would they bother drawing up war plans
Russians would get annihilated as a nation, the West, not so much. US would take the brunt of that exchange, a billion people would die and whoever is left alive would do their best to survive the chaos of the first few years.
And then they would scramble to murder anyone remaining in Russia.
If Ukraine had 10 nukes aimed at Moscow this war would not have started in the first place.
Instead they invested in their conventional garbage and look where we are. Putin would have never risked Moscow getting deleted to get Dombabwe
The U.S./EU denuclearized Ukraine in the 1990s as a concession to Russia. Ukraine wasn't given a choice. Their nukes were shipped back to Moscow without Ukraine having a voice at the negotiation table. Ukraine's development of conventional weapons since then has relied heavily on old Soviet infrastructure, but Ukraine has also been highly adaptive and innovative on a shoestring budget. They've created some advanced weapons for a fraction of what the West spends on similar development. Their crushing poverty has been what held them back, and the insane levels of Russian corruption that crippled their government and society up to 2014 when they finally got a chance to start cleaning that up.
so you're saying a smaller, shittier russia, intentionally crippled, still managed to outperform them since the collapse of the ussr?
Give Ukraine their nukes back