At least Pyrrhus survived to return to Epirus. It's hard to declare even a tragic victory if you're dead yourself.Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed
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At least Pyrrhus survived to return to Epirus. It's hard to declare even a tragic victory if you're dead yourself.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
You know the "Nuclear War will kill everything everywhere" meme is bullshit, right? At the end of the day, they're bombs, not magical flying boogie monsters.
Last edited by JordanGoodspeed; 03-14-2014 at 05:00 PM.
Principles of winning total war given availability of N, B and C WMD:
- Use high megaton war heads for counterforce operations against highly specific hardened targets
- Use enhanced radiation low megaton war heads for mass anti personnel purposes
- Similar commentary for B and C warheads and weapons
- Punch large holes in first tier defenses
- Engage in a substantial overture of spec ops and "terrorist" attacks in order to sow chaos and confusion
- Never forget the value of tactical warfare especially sniper ops
Maybe it's time to up the meds? What do sniper ops have to do with counterforce exchanges of nukes? Again, it started out alright, and then you just dumped a bunch of words and concepts in there at random. Stop that.
Let us not forget that high tech (and big tech) strategic stand off weapons cannot win a war. The huge bombing raids on Dresden and The Ruhr, while crippling factories and logistics, did not secure any territory. It took boots on the ground to do that. More recently our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have also served as reminders of how important it is to back up massive strategic capabilities with people who know how to find excellent platforms which mask ready detection from which to aim and shoot.
A little better. If you'd like to argue that a conventional war would be the probable follow-on to a nuclear exchange, I happen to agree with you. Would snipers be a part of that? Probably. The capacity is endogenous to infantry units, company level and above. Whether conventional warfare would be a good idea... I guess it depends on what it is you're trying to accomplish. Invading China or Russia? Probably not a good idea.
Jumping straight from counterforce to snipers? A bridge too far, dude.
Besides what I said in the post referred to....
The wars we've had since Vietnam have been smaller, and much resisted, in the USA. There has been no world war for 69 years; that's a longer stretch than usual since 1648. Before then too, religious and dynastic wars were happening almost continuously.
Western Europe has been free from war since WW2, and in Eastern Europe too until the breakup of Yugoslavia, and that area is now also peaceful. There is some terrorism and revolt in Muslim former Soviet Republics or Russian federation members near or in the Caucasus, but no full scale war yet.
There have been periodic civil wars in China throughout history, but there is none today. Most of East Asia is free from war, which was not true up until 20 years ago.
The trouble spots now are the Middle East and Africa, which are undergoing difficult transitions. The Middle East has always been full of war. Africa may have been more peaceful before colonial conquest; I'm not sure. But it was also very sparsely populated then.
The Ukraine crisis reminds us that the danger is not over, but also that invasions of one country by another are now very much frowned on, whereas it was routine in past times. But of course, the USA is being rather hypocritical about this.
Last edited by Eric the Green; 03-16-2014 at 03:45 AM.
No, they won't kill everyone, but they will kill civilization anywhere they are targetted. We rely on too many systems that will be disrupted and unrecoverable.
We will return as a species, but most of us alive when a nuclear war occurs will never see a return to normalcy. A lot of us will starve or freeze to death. Others will perish from <insert the catastrophic disease of choice>. No one will be unaffected.
ETA: Detail.
Last edited by Marx & Lennon; 03-17-2014 at 09:36 PM.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
Define "civilization".No, they won't kill everyone, but they will kill civilization anywhere they are targetted. We rely on too many systems that will be disrupted and unrecoverable.
Mostly agree, but for the sake of clarity, define "normalcy".We will return as a species, but most of us alive when a nuclear war occurs will never see a return to normalcy. A lot of us will starve or freeze to death. Others from <insert the catastrophic disease of choice>.
There are several definitions, but this one fits: "The condition that exists when people have developed effective ways of organizing a society and care about art, science, etc."
My worry is the dissolution of society into tribal enclaves. Some of that already exists in more socially remote areas. In the US, Appalachia is a good example. It's not so physically remote that it's outside the reach of society, rather that it's insular and self-segregating.
You can argue in favor of Appalachian culture, but it is not the bellwether of civilization. It's a backwater that can exist because civilization is just down the road.
Normalcy is a lot tougher to define. How about: "The status that exists where drudgery is not required for survival, so life can have periods set aside for leisure and intellectual pursuits."
Not truly definitive, but not bad as a descriptive.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
Life would be miserable for survivors. The carrying capacity of the planet would go far below that of the world's dog population. There are about 400 million dogs. They too would be decimated. But they would have trouble finding food. There is enough food on Earth for us to cooperate with a predator almost as effective as a Big Cat. Don't like the comparison? Four years ago I did some Census work. I came up to a door in broad daylight, only to find four large and aggressive dogs. They must have figured me for a burglar. I forget the breed -- Dobermans, German Shepherds, or Rottweilers -- I wasn't sure of how sturdy the latch on the door was. Four eighty-pound Molosser dogs is basically one 320-pound tiger in power and strength. Four such dogs together could eat you if it had to. I walked off resolutely and slowly. Running away from a dog is consummately futile.
Surviving the blast, flames, and radiation won't be enough. Many of the food stocks will themselves be destroyed. Much of the potable water will be fouled or reservoirs holding it will be destroyed. Dealing with thirst will not be so simple as turning a facet -- and even if you were able to get water out of the fountain it could be badly contaminated. It might slake your thirst only to give you a fatal dose of radiation, toxic waste, or microbial infection. Know well -- the water supply will be compromised if not demolished.
Finding foodstuffs in what used to be a Safeway, Kroger, or Wal-Mart might not help. What was in a cooler or a freezer will spoil fast -- faster than you might be able to walk to the store. You will walk -- because your car won't be very useful because you may never be able to get gasoline for it again. The electricity will be gone, and the police force will probably be decimated, so you might have cause to fear highwaymen. Law and order is one essential to a working society.
Shelter will be hard to find. Most will be smashed or burned into uselessness. Nuclear winter is likely to start as soot from burning buildings and formerly-living biomass (from fossil fuels to trees as wood and paper, plants recently growing, and creatures from songbirds to horses) fills the atmosphere as soot. It will be cold. If you are in an outlying suburb you will be cold, hungry, thirsty, and confused. If you had the wisdom to have a portable radio with plenty of batteries or a crank-operated one, then you might not be able to get information because most of the radio stations will be out of operation forever. A highway sign that says "Jackson 45 / Springfield 82" will be of no help if you have no cause to believe that either location exists anymore.
Almost all the information that you had a few days earlier is no longer valid. The letters "ORD" no longer have any relevance to air travel because Chicago O'Hare International Airport no longer exists. The baseball game between the Milwaukee Brewers and St. Louis Cardinals has been postponed forever. Any memory of the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge will be all that you have. It's going to get cold and dark, and crops are going to fail.
If you are lucky, you live way out in the sticks. You are fortunate to know how to use a horse and plow. If you aren't there yet, then you face some vicious highwaymen and some very hungry dogs who haven't been getting any canned or dry dog food. Man's Best Friend is a man-eater except for good behavior. You have to plant crops, arrange for irrigation in a dry area, harvest the crops, feed the livestock, milk the cows if you have them and butcher livestock if you raise them for food. You will need to mill the grain and turn it into something palatable. You can't rely upon food-processing companies like Kraft, Kellogg's, or Iowa Beef Processing; they no longer exist.
Your world has been set back at least two hundred years in economics and maybe three hundred years in politics. It's a strange and dangerous world in which most of what you ever learned has suddenly become useless or irrelevant.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
PBrower,
Goodness, that's a very active imagination you've got there. Lotta detail. Do you have citations for those estimates, or are you just going plagiarize Cormac McCarthy's The Road?
Less than 400 million, huh? That's in excess of 95% of the world's population. How many megatons do you think that would require? Do you envision people nuking Africa? South America? New Zealand? Your house? Can you give me an example of a country that had its cities bombed and suffered an equivalent morality rate? No, let's make it a city. What percentage of Hiroshima or Nagasaki's population died during the bombing? What percentage of Tokyo died when the (wooden) city was firebombed? How about a famine of that scale? Did the Bengal Famine do that? The Irish Potato Famine? The Holodomyr? Did the Year without a Summer do that to the world's population? The Spanish Flu? Did the firestorms of cities in WWII (produced largely from cities made of wood) or the burning oil fields of the Gulf War or the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo do anything like that to the climate? (PS the answer is no.)
Food processing facilities gone, eh? Let me cite a table from On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn. (Whom you might know better as the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove.)
Industrial Base 1954 Output Capacity (1956 billion $) % Surviving Capacity % Surviving Capital Stock Instruments 4 20 20 Transportation eqp. 73 23 23 Electrical eqp. 32 23 23 Primary Metal ind. 36 23 28 Fabricated metal prods. 35 28 28 Rubber prods. 6 29 29 Machinery (except electrical) 50 34 34 Petroleum & coal prods. 18 36 36 Chemicals prods. 25 42 42 Pulp & paper prods. 14 54 54 Food prods. 68 57 57 Construction 91 60 60 Textile prods. 20 69 69 Lumber 9 86 86 Mining 20 89 89 Agriculture 92 95 95 Electric public utilities ~ 54
Now, do you think industry has become more concentrated in central cities, or less, since that was compiled?
Here is an estimate from the Federation of American Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council on what a nuclear exchange between the US and China would actually look like. It's a bit lengthy, nor is it the only scenario, but it has the advantage of being professionally written and researched, and concerns itself with actual real world considerations like counterforce / countervalue, delivery mechanisms, number of available weapons, possible targets, etc.
To make a long story short (though I highly encourage you to read the sources, since these sorts of speculations are clearly of interest to you), the numbers for your scenario just don't line up. Oh, tens of millions of people would die (with diminishing marginal returns to the number of weapons. You can only nuke Manhattan or Chicago's Loop so many times, while nuking an equivalent area of Peoria or San Bernardino is going to net much fewer casualties), the economy would be shattered, and most people's standard of living would drop to Third World standards for an extended period of time. And I don't doubt for the first few months there would be many individuals living through circumstances that would sound very similar to what you described. It would be the worst catastrophe ever suffered by the United States. But within a year or two we would still have a population and industrial capacity larger than that prior to WWII, more than sufficient to prosecute a bloody conventional war of retribution, and to forge an unsteady peace afterward. Life would go on, and within a couple of decades most of the rubble cleared and the old world largely forgotten by the postwar generations, much as happened in Europe after WWII. Perhaps it wouldn't pop back as vibrantly, without rapidly expanding populations or energy consumption, but the fantasies of biker gangs in fur bikinis and carrot monsters would remain just that.
I never read The Road, so I can't be accused of plagiarism. The estimate of 400 million dogs (and they are about are some of the most adept eating machines since T. Rex) comes from Wikipedia.
I may have based my fears upon estimates of a global thermonuclear war between the Soviet Union and the USA based upon weapons stocks of the 1980s. The burning oil wells of Kuwait was the model for local effects. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo gave the world a weak summer. The summer of 1992 was unusually cool. Maybe that is now an obsolete concern. Give the world a tyrant who sees the world crashing around him a nuclear arsenal and he might seek to destroy the humanity that intends to put a rope around his neck. It is a good thing that Hitler had no nukes.Less than 400 million, huh? That's in excess of 95% of the world's population. How many megatons do you think that would require? Do you envision people nuking Africa? South America? New Zealand? Your house? Can you give me an example of a country that had its cities bombed and suffered an equivalent morality rate? No, let's make it a city. What percentage of Hiroshima or Nagasaki's population died during the bombing? What percentage of Tokyo died when the (wooden) city was firebombed? How about a famine of that scale? Did the Bengal Famine do that? The Irish Potato Famine? The Holodomyr? Did the Year without a Summer do that to the world's population? The Spanish Flu? Did the firestorms of cities in WWII (produced largely from cities made of wood) or the burning oil fields of the Gulf War or the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo do anything like that to the climate? (PS the answer is no.)
The nukes that ravaged Hiroshima and Nagasaki are wimps in contrast to the far-more-powerful hydrogen bombs that the US, Russia, Britain, China, Pakistan, India, and France are known to have. Herman Kahn is discredited on his rosy picture of economic recovery after a nuclear exchange. Much of the business is now in the suburbs which will not be safe.
Food processing facilities gone, eh? Let me cite a table from On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn. (Whom you might know better as the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove.)
Industrial Base 1954 Output Capacity (1956 billion $) % Surviving Capacity % Surviving Capital Stock Instruments 4 20 20 Transportation eqp. 73 23 23 Electrical eqp. 32 23 23 Primary Metal ind. 36 23 28 Fabricated metal prods. 35 28 28 Rubber prods. 6 29 29 Machinery (except electrical) 50 34 34 Petroleum & coal prods. 18 36 36 Chemicals prods. 25 42 42 Pulp & paper prods. 14 54 54 Food prods. 68 57 57 Construction 91 60 60 Textile prods. 20 69 69 Lumber 9 86 86 Mining 20 89 89 Agriculture 92 95 95 Electric public utilities ~ 54
Now, do you think industry has become more concentrated in central cities, or less, since that was compiled?
A-bombs destroyed core cities. H-bombs take the suburbs, too. Government, transport, and industry would be ravaged. Power structures would be gone. Water supplies would be either gone or inoperable. Economic markets would be no more. Law enforcement would be about as effective as it was in France around AD 500.
If some gangster leader is going to bomb Chicago, he will also bomb Peoria... and Milwaukee, Rockford, Madison, Champaign, South Bend, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek (cereal processing!), Grand Rapids, Green Bay, Springfield, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, the Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, and Des Moines as well. You get the idea. We would be bombed back 200 years (Agrarian age), at the least, in economics and back 400 years (the age of the Divine right of Kings) in politics.To make a long story short (though I highly encourage you to read the sources, since these sorts of speculations are clearly of interest to you), the numbers for your scenario just don't line up. Oh, tens of millions of people would die (with diminishing marginal returns to the number of weapons. You can only nuke Manhattan or Chicago's Loop so many times, while nuking an equivalent area of Peoria or San Bernardino is going to net much fewer casualties), the economy would be shattered, and most people's standard of living would drop to Third World standards for an extended period of time. And I don't doubt for the first few months there would be many individuals living through circumstances that would sound very similar to what you described. It would be the worst catastrophe ever suffered by the United States. But within a year or two we would still have a population and industrial capacity larger than that prior to WWII, more than sufficient to prosecute a bloody conventional war of retribution, and to forge an unsteady peace afterward. Life would go on, and within a couple of decades most of the rubble cleared and the old world largely forgotten by the postwar generations, much as happened in Europe after WWII. Perhaps it wouldn't pop back as vibrantly, without rapidly expanding populations or energy consumption, but the fantasies of biker gangs in fur bikinis and carrot monsters would remain just that.
After the deaths from the blast, fire, and radiation would come deaths from famine, plague, and lawlessness -- or tyranny, its own form of lawlessness. You must have gotten the wrong idea of what I meant by hordes of hungry dogs. Dogs are documented man-eaters, and they are potentially as lethal as the Big Cats. I don't need to mention giant ants, "carrot people", or "biker gangs in fur bikinis".
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
You should, it's actually very good. The movie followed much of it quite closely, as well. But I meant the estimate of less than 400 million people, dude.I never read The Road, so I can't be accused of plagiarism. The estimate of 400 million dogs (and they are about are some of the most adept eating machines since T. Rex) comes from Wikipedia.
Stocks have shrunk greatly, since then. And the trend was in the direction of smaller, more precisely targeted MIRV warheads, anyways.I may have based my fears upon estimates of a global thermonuclear war between the Soviet Union and the USA based upon weapons stocks of the 1980s.
Tyrants, Hitler, some figures on those events cited.The burning oil wells of Kuwait was the model for local effects. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo gave the world a weak summer. The summer of 1992 was unusually cool. Maybe that is now an obsolete concern. Give the world a tyrant who sees the world crashing around him a nuclear arsenal and he might seek to destroy the humanity that intends to put a rope around his neck. It is a good thing that Hitler had no nukes.
Sigh, source for the below:The nukes that ravaged Hiroshima and Nagasaki are wimps in contrast to the far-more-powerful hydrogen bombs that the US, Russia, Britain, China, Pakistan, India, and France are known to have.
Myth: Because some modern H-bombs are over 1000 times as powerful as the A-bomb that destroyed most of Hiroshima, these H-bombs are 1000 times as deadly and destructive. ° Facts: A nuclear weapon 1000 times as powerful as the one that blasted Hiroshima, if exploded under comparable conditions, produces equally serious blast damage to wood-frame houses over an area up to about 130 times as large, not 1000 times as large.
For example, air bursting a 20-kiloton weapon at the optimum height to destroy most buildings will destroy or severely damage houses out to about 1.42 miles from ground zero.6 The circular area of at least severe blast damage will be about 6.33 square miles. (The explosion of a 20 kiloton weapon releases the same amount of energy as 20 thousand tons of TNT.) One thousand 20-kiloton weapons thus air burst, well separated to avoid overlap of their blast areas, would destroy or severely damage houses over areas totalling approximately 6,330 square miles. In contrast, similar air bursting of one 20- megaton weapon (equivalent in explosive power to 20 million tons of TNT) would destroy or severely damage the great majority of houses out to a distance of 16 miles from ground zero.6 The area of destruction would be about 800 square miles – not 6,330 square miles.
Myth: Overkill would result if all the U.S. and U.S.S.R, nuclear weapons were used meaning not only that the two superpowers have more than enough weapons to kill all of each other’s people, but also that they have enough weapons to exterminate the human race.
° Facts: Statements that the U.S. and the Soviet Union have the power to kill the world’s population several times over are based on misleading calculations. One such calculation is to multiply the deaths produced per kiloton exploded over Hiroshima or Nagasaki by an estimate of the number of kilotons in either side’s arsenal. (A kiloton explosion is one that produces the same amount of energy as does 1000 tons of TNT.) The unstated assumption is that somehow the world’s population could be gathered into circular crowds, each a few miles in diameter with a population density equal to downtown Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and then a small (Hiroshima-sized) weapon would be exploded over the center of each crowd. Other misleading calculations are based on exaggerations of the dangers from long-lasting radiation and other harmful effects of a nuclear war.
Myth: Fallout radiation from a nuclear war would poison the air and all parts of the environment. It would kill everyone. (This is the demoralizing message of On the Beach and many similar pseudoscientific books and articles.)
° Facts: When a nuclear weapon explodes near enough to the ground for its fireball to touch the ground, it forms a crater. (See Fig. 1.1.)
Fig. 1.1. A surface burst. In a surface or near-surface burst, the fireball touches the ground and blasts a crater. ORNL-DWG 786264
EDIT To improve a link.
Last edited by JordanGoodspeed; 03-18-2014 at 03:35 PM.
Many thousands of tons of earth from the crater of a large explosion are pulverized into trillions of particles. These particles are contaminated by radioactive atoms produced by the nuclear explosion. Thousands of tons of the particles are carried up into a mushroom-shaped cloud, miles above the earth. These radioactive particles then fall out of the mushroom cloud, or out of the dispersing cloud of particles blown by the winds thus becoming fallout. Each contaminated particle continuously gives off invisible radiation, much like a tiny X-ray machine while in the mushroom cloud, while descending, and after having fallen to earth. The descending radioactive particles are carried by the winds like the sand and dust particles of a miles-thick sandstorm cloud except that they usually are blown at lower speeds and in many areas the particles are so far apart that no cloud is seen. The largest, heaviest fallout particles reach the ground first, in locations close to the explosion. Many smaller particles are carried by the winds for tens to thousands of miles before falling to earth. At any one place where fallout from a single explosion is being deposited on the ground in concentrations high enough to require the use of shelters, deposition will be completed within a few hours.
The smallest fallout particles those tiny enough to be inhaled into a person’s lungs are invisible to the naked eye. These tiny particles would fall so slowly from the four-mile or greater heights to which they would be injected by currently deployed Soviet warheads that most would remain airborne for weeks to years before reaching the ground. By that time their extremely wide dispersal and radioactive decay would make them much less dangerous. Only where such tiny particles are promptly brought to earth by rain- outs or snow-outs in scattered “hot spots,” and later dried and blown about by the winds, would these invisible particles constitute a long-term and relatively minor post-attack danger.
The air in properly designed fallout shelters, even those without air filters, is free of radioactive particles and safe to breathe except in a few’ rare environments as will be explained later.
Fortunately for all living things, the danger from fallout radiation lessens with time. The radioactive decay, as this lessening is called, is rapid at first, then gets slower and slower. The dose rate (the amount of radiation received per hour) decreases accordingly. Figure 1.2 illustrates the rapidity of the decay of radiation from fallout during the first two days after the nuclear explosion that produced it. R stands for roentgen, a measurement unit often used to measure exposure to gamma rays and X rays. Fallout meters called dosimeters measure the dose received by recording the number of R. Fallout meters called survey meters, or dose-rate meters, measure the dose rate by recording the number of R being received per hour at the time of measurement. Notice that it takes about seven times as long for the dose rate to decay from 1000 roentgens per hour (1000 R/hr) to 10 R/hr (48 hours) as to decay from 1000 R/hr to 100 R/hr (7 hours). (Only in high-fallout areas would the dose rate 1 hour after the explosion be as high as 1000 roentgens per hour.)
Fig. 1.2. Decay of the dose rate of radiation from fallout, from the time of the explosion, not from the time of fallout deposition. ORNL.DWG 78-265
If the dose rate 1 hour after an explosion is 1000 R/hr, it would take about 2 weeks for the dose rate to be reduced to 1 R/hr solely as a result of radioactive decay. Weathering effects will reduce the dose rate further,’ for example, rain can wash fallout particles from plants and houses to lower positions on or closer to the ground. Surrounding objects would reduce the radiation dose from these low-lying particles.
Figure 1.2 also illustrates the fact that at a typical location where a given amount of fallout from an explosion is deposited later than 1 hour after the explosion, the highest dose rate and the total dose received at that location are less than at a location where the same amount of fallout is deposited 1 hour after the explosion. The longer fallout particles have been airborne before reaching the ground, the less dangerous is their radiation.
Within two weeks after an attack the occupants of most shelters could safely stop using them, or could work outside the shelters for an increasing number of hours each day. Exceptions would be in areas of extremely heavy fallout such as might occur downwind from important targets attacked with many weapons, especially missile sites and very large cities. To know when to come out safely, occupants either would need a reliable fallout meter to measure the changing radiation dangers, or must receive information based on measurements made nearby with a reliable instrument.
The radiation dose that will kill a person varies considerably with different people. A dose of 450 R resulting from exposure of the whole body to fallout radiation is often said to be the dose that will kill about half the persons receiving it, although most studies indicate that it would take somewhat less.1 (Note: A number written after a statement refers the reader to a source listed in the Selected References that follow Appendix D.) Almost all persons confined to expedient shelters after a nuclear attack would be under stress and without clean surroundings or antibiotics to fight infections. Many also would lack adequate water and food. Under these unprecedented conditions, perhaps half the persons who received a whole-body dose of 350 R within a few days would die.2
Fortunately, the human body can repair most radiation damage if the daily radiation doses are not too large. As will be explained in Appendix B, a person who is healthy and has not been exposed in the past two weeks to a total radiation dose of more than 100 R can receive a dose of 6 R each day for at least two months without being incapacitated.
Only a very small fraction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki citizens who survived radiation doses some of which were nearly fatal have suffered serious delayed effects. The reader should realize that to do essential work after a massive nuclear attack, many survivors must be willing to receive much larger radiation doses than are normally permissible. Otherwise, too many workers would stay inside shelter too much of the time, and work that would be vital to national recovery could not be done. For example, if the great majority of truckers were so fearful of receiving even non-incapacitating radiation doses that they would refuse to transport food, additional millions would die from starvation alone.
Myth: Fallout radiation penetrates everything; there is no escaping its deadly effects.
° Facts: Some gamma radiation from fallout will penetrate the shielding materials of even an excellent shelter and reach its occupants. However, the radiation dose that the occupants of an excellent shelter would receive while inside this shelter can be reduced to a dose smaller than the average American receives during his lifetime from X rays and other radiation exposures normal in America today. The design features of such a shelter include the use of a sufficient thickness of earth or other heavy shielding material. Gamma rays are like X rays, but more penetrating. Figure 1.3 shows how rapidly gamma rays are reduced in number (but not in their ability to penetrate) by layers of packed earth. Each of the layers shown is one halving-thickness of packed earth- about 3.6 inches (9 centimeters).3 A halving- thickness is the thickness of a material which reduces by half the dose of radiation that passes through it.
The actual paths of gamma rays passing through shielding materials are much more complicated, due to scattering, etc., than are the straight-line paths shown in Fig. 1.3. But when averaged out, the effectiveness of a halving-thickness of any material is approximately as shown. The denser a substance, the better it serves for shielding material. Thus, a halving-thickness of concrete is only about 2.4 inches (6.1 cm).
Fig. 1.3. Illustration of shielding against fallout radiation. Note the increasingly large improvements in the attenuation (reduction) factors that are attained as each additional halving-thickness of packed earth is added. ORNL-DWG 78-18834
If additional halving-thicknesses of packed earth shielding are successively added to the five thicknesses shown in Fig. 1.3, the protection factor (PF) is successively increased from 32 to 64, to 128, to 256, to 512, to 1024, and so on.
Myth: Blindness and a disastrous increase of cancers would be the fate of survivors of a nuclear war, because the nuclear explosions would destroy so much of the protective ozone in the stratosphere that far too much ultraviolet light would reach the earth’s surface. Even birds and insects would be blinded. People could not work outdoors in daytime for years without dark glasses, and would have to wear protective clothing to prevent incapacitating sunburn. Plants would be badly injured and food production greatly reduced.
° Facts: Large nuclear explosions do inject huge amounts of nitrogen oxides (gasses that destroy ozone) into the stratosphere. However, the percent of the stratospheric ozone destroyed by a given amount of nitrogen oxides has been greatly overestimated in almost all theoretical calculations and models. For example, the Soviet and U.S. atmospheric nuclear test explosions of large weapons in 1952-1962 were calculated by Foley and Ruderman to result in a reduction of more than 10 percent in total ozone. (See M. H. Foley and M. A. Ruderman, ‘Stratospheric NO from Past Nuclear Explosions”, Journal of Geophysics, Res. 78, 4441-4450.) Yet observations that they cited showed no reductions in ozone. Nor did ultraviolet increase. Other theoreticians calculated sizeable reductions in total ozone, but interpreted the observational data to indicate either no reduction, or much smaller reductions than their calculated ones.
A realistic simplified estimate of the increased ultraviolet light dangers to American survivors of a large nuclear war equates these hazards to moving from San Francisco to sea level at the equator, where the sea level incidence of skin cancers (seldom fatal) is highest- about 10 times higher than the incidence at San Francisco. Many additional thousands of American survivors might get skin cancer, but little or no increase in skin cancers might result if in the post-attack world deliberate sun tanning and going around hatless went out of fashion. Furthermore, almost all of today’s warheads are smaller than those exploded in the large- weapons tests mentioned above; most would inject much smaller amounts of ozone-destroying gasses, or no gasses, into the stratosphere, where ozone deficiencies may persist for years. And nuclear weapons smaller than 500 kilotons result in increases (due to smog reactions) in upper tropospheric ozone. In a nuclear war, these increases would partially compensate for the upper-level tropospheric decreases-as explained by Julius S. Chang and Donald J. Wuebbles of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
° Myth: Unsurvivable “nuclear winter” surely will follow a nuclear war. The world will be frozen if only 100 megatons (less than one percent of all nuclear weapons) are used to ignite cities. World-enveloping smoke from fires and the dust from surface bursts will prevent almost all sunlight and solar heat from reaching the earth’s surface. Universal darkness for weeks! Sub-zero temperatures, even in summertime! Frozen crops, even in the jungles of South America! Worldwide famine! Whole species of animals and plants exterminated! The survival of mankind in doubt!
° Facts: Unsurvivable “nuclear winter” is a discredited theory that, since its conception in 1982, has been used to frighten additional millions into believing that trying to survive a nuclear war is a waste of effort and resources, and that only by ridding the world of almost all nuclear weapons do we have a chance of surviving.
Non-propagandizing scientists recently have calculated that the climatic and other environmental effects of even an all-out nuclear war would be much less severe than the catastrophic effects repeatedly publicized by popular astronomer Carl Sagan and his fellow activist scientists, and by all the involved Soviet scientists. Conclusions reached from these recent, realistic calculations are summarized in an article, “Nuclear Winter Reappraised”, featured in the 1986 summer issue of Foreign Affairs, the prestigious quarterly of the Council on Foreign Relations. The authors, Starley L. Thompson and Stephen H. Schneider, are atmospheric scientists with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They showed ” that on scientific grounds the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishing low level of probability.”
Their models indicate that in July (when the greatest temperature reductions would result) the average temperature in the United States would be reduced for a few days from about 70 degrees Fahrenheit to approximately 50 degrees. (In contrast, under the same conditions Carl Sagan, his associates, and the Russian scientists predicted a resulting average temperature of about 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, lasting for many weeks!)
Persons who want to learn more about possible post-attack climatic effects also should read the Fall 1986 issue of Foreign Affairs. This issue contains a long letter from Thompson and Schneider which further demolishes the theory of catastrophic “nuclear winter.” Continuing studies indicate there will be even smaller reductions in temperature than those calculated by Thompson and Schneider.
Soviet propagandists promptly exploited belief in unsurvivable “nuclear winter” to increase fear of nuclear weapons and war, and to demoralize their enemies. Because raging city firestorms are needed to inject huge amounts of smoke into the stratosphere and thus, according to one discredited theory, prevent almost all solar heat from reaching the ground, the Soviets changed their descriptions of how a modern city will burn if blasted by a nuclear explosion.
Figure 1.6 pictures how Russian scientists and civil defense officials realistically described – before the invention of “nuclear winter” – the burning of a city hit by a nuclear weapon. Buildings in the blasted area for miles around ground zero will be reduced to scattered rubble – mostly of concrete, steel, and other nonflammable materials – that will not burn in blazing fires. Thus in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory translation (ORNL-TR-2793) of Civil Defense. Second Edition (500,000 copies), Moscow, 1970, by Egorov, Shlyakhov, and Alabin, we read: “Fires do not occur in zones of complete destruction . . . that are characterized by an overpressure exceeding 0.5 kg/cm2 [- 7 psi]., because rubble is scattered and covers the burning structures. As a result the rubble only smolders, and fires as such do not occur.”
Fig. 1.6. Drawing with Caption in a Russian Civil Defense Training Film Strip. The blazing fires ignited by a surface burst are shown in standing buildings outside the miles-wide “zone of complete destruction,” where the blast-hurled “rubble only smolders.”
Translation: [Radioactive] contamination occurs in the area of the explosion and also along the trajectory of the cloud which forms a radioactive track.
So, no. That is not true, and nothing you have shown to date has "discredited" Herman Kahn's analysis.Herman Kahn is discredited on his rosy picture of economic recovery after a nuclear exchange. Much of the business is now in the suburbs which will not be safe.
A-bombs destroyed core cities. H-bombs take the suburbs, too. Government, transport, and industry would be ravaged. Power structures would be gone. Water supplies would be either gone or inoperable. Economic markets would be no more. Law enforcement would be about as effective as it was in France around AD 500.
Any power with capability to conduct full scale thermonuclear war (Russia, the US, China if it tried) would target primarily counterforce, and thus much of the combatant's respective nuclear arsenals would be eaten up in strikes directed at each other's arsenals. In America, most of these strikes would land in the upper Great Plains. EDITED for clarity.If some gangster leader is going to bomb Chicago, he will also bomb Peoria... and Milwaukee, Rockford, Madison, Champaign, South Bend, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek (cereal processing!), Grand Rapids, Green Bay, Springfield, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, the Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, and Des Moines as well. You get the idea
Countervalue strikes against major population centers are the province of weaker powers, and a limited countervalue scenario was already detailed in a prior post here. If you do not have the patience to read the entire thing, fatalities topped out at about 15 million, and casualties at about 40.
Given the above, your claims of a sudden reversion to "The Divine Right of Kings" and early 6th century French legal standards (which I think are far too dismissive of the actual accomplishments of the leadership at the time) strike me as more of the sorts of florid but baseless historical allusions of which you are so fond.You get the idea. We would be bombed back 200 years (Agrarian age), at the least, in economics and back 400 years (the age of the Divine right of Kings) in politics.
After the deaths from the blast, fire, and radiation would come deaths from famine, plague, and lawlessness -- or tyranny, its own form of lawlessness. You must have gotten the wrong idea of what I meant by hordes of hungry dogs. Dogs are documented man-eaters, and they are potentially as lethal as the Big Cats. I don't need to mention giant ants, "carrot people", or "biker gangs in fur bikinis".
Now, near North Korean levels of military mobilization to punish those held responsible? Entirely possible, and it would be interesting (in the abstract) to see where that led. Probably not in the direction you are thinking of, though it might make for a particularly bleak 1T.
Last edited by JordanGoodspeed; 03-18-2014 at 03:36 PM.
