It might not immediately destroy everything, but what is not clear from this illustration is if civilization could persist the radiotoxicity that would be around for a century or two.
How much persistent radio toxicity would result, and what would the probable distribution be?
The persistent radiotoxicity is actually pretty low. Remember, the general rule is that the more radioactive the substance, the shorter the half life, and the quicker it’s gone. The studies I’ve seen indicate that it would be safe to plant a vegetable garden at a groundburst ground zero after 3-5 years. There are certain concentration effects, though, that could cause some areas to remain dangerous for much longer.
It’s also heavily dependent on the targeting scheme used. Airbursts, like you use for destroying cities, produce very little fallout, since fallout is debris sucked up through the fireball where it is irradiated before being spewed out the top. Groundbursts, such as you would use for roads, powerplants, and military targets, produce lots of fallout and have a nasty downwind area.
The fallout area is highly dependent on meteorological conditions. For instance, if it’s raining then it will be small but intense while if it’s windy and clear it will be large but dilute.
This is just scratching the surface of a large and fascinating topic. To summarize: fusion bombs are pretty radiologically clean (especially in airburst mode), the radiation tends not to stick around (see: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both hit by smaller but much dirtier bombs than we use now), and the post-attack radiation environment will be very unevenly dangerous. In terms of long term threats, disease and breakdown in the food supply are the predominant concerns.
Depending on the targeting scheme used, there could also be regional effects on climate, at least for a few months. Not enough to create a “nuclear winter”, but possibly enough to trigger some crop failures. Not the end of the world, but not pretty, either.
Yes, “nuclear autumn.” The oddest aspect was that high-altitude temperatures would be increased enormously – to as high as the 70s F. At ground level the temperatures would be moderated – warm winter and cold summer, but only up to a year out from the exchange. Months; more likely.
Note that all this is for a massive 1980′s WWIII exchange between NATO and USSR, wherein the majority of the globe’s nuclear arsenal would be expended and in which almost every country would catch a few, if only to keep them from taking advantage of the (former) great powers’ post-attack weakness. Under these criteria, 50% of the US population was expected to perish in the initial hours, with half the remainder dead within a few years due mostly to disease and starvation. Of course, this is only one of several game-theoretically possible ways that such a war might have played out.
Nowadays the arsenals are far, far smaller and the number of weapons ready to “go” at any time smaller yet. At most a few thousand warheads could be involved in the initial exchange between two of the current big 3 (US, China, Russia). Figure that 80% of those will actually make it to the target and initiate (optimistic – likely fewer for the Russians and more for the US). Between 5 and 15% of the remainder would go off target and initiate somewhere random.
This would wreck the countries involved quite thoroughly, but the initial population loss percentages aren’t likely to climb too far into the double-digits and large areas would probably be untouched. Most countries targeting schemes since the 70s seem to be balanced primarily towards counter-force, so most of those warheads will be expended trying to kill other warheads – targeted on missile fields, bomber bases, and the like. Of course, take all that with a grain of salt. The conditions under which such a war began would have the biggest say in its conduct.
For a while now I’ve had a pet analogy I use for describing the net effects, as currently best understood: modern great-power nuclear confrontation would inflict on the belligerents in only a few hours what the Eastern Front did to Germany and Russia over 4 years.
Of course, the moron governments we’ve had lately keep finding ways to cut the arsenal further and (with the exception of the USN’s SSBNs) the strategic services are seen as a career graveyard, greatly reducing their competence and responsiveness. This erodes the multistable deterrence that has to date prevented major wars. I suppose this is a “victim of your own success” issue.
Speaking of, I recommend the very interesting glasstone blog. It’s about contradicting the widespread superstition that nuclear wars are unsurvivable and debunking hardened dogma of exaggerated nuclear effects.
It drives me crazy when people get smug about duck and cover. Apparently they think that nuclear initiations have no effects beyond the radius of total destruction when in reality most of the area subjected to blast effects are going to suffer the equivalent of anything from an F-4 tornado to a strong windstorm, dependent on the distance to ground zero. Most of the area affected by the thermal pulse will not be instantly fried, but simply suffer a similarly varying intensity of fires.
Yet those same people don’t laugh at the futility of tornado or fire drills.
That reminds me, I was just listening to an interview with Tom Givens, where he mentioned that the local trauma hospital takes in 3,100 gunshot victims per year, with roughly 100 fatalities. Handgun wounds aren’t especially lethal, when they’re not well aimed.
Jim: For the avoidance of doubt, that is a jab at “people” vibing the progress of their codebases by lines accreted.
Jim: T. Beholder: “For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants.” The objective functions of that code were and are: (a) something that looks like it works...
VXXC: Strangely enough, when one returns to our common roots of armed raiding combined with presently energy production dominance, and we covered the insurance angle via DFC Chubb, how odd the success when one has a country not a global market… and doesn’t want the blasted ground. I refer to the present matter of the Pirates of Persia and their Boomer resistance allies.
T. Beholder: He is almost certainly wrong on LLM keeping the verbal lawns shapely. For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants. So instead it’s one more way so-called...
Jim: The legitimacy of the American regime is drawn from the Constitution accepted by the Founding Fathers in 1789. Did the Founding Fathers intend to arm Blacks, Mexicans, traffic cops, women, enforcers of divorce “court” orders, SWAT, Israelis, or the institutional progeny of slave patrol against normal white Americans? The Founding Fathers dueled. Do the American Bar Association, National Judicial College et al. have any right to prohibit normal white Americans from privately settling...
Gaikokumaniakku: “Vannevar Bush once said that the unity of decision under a totalitarian regime was a recipe for making colossal technological mistakes, whereas the prevalent confusion of decision-making in a democracy was more efficient. He could not have anticipated the tortuous system of procrastination that characterizes modern American defense procurement.” I used to quote William S. Lind, who used to compare American defense procurement to Soviet defense procurement. Any sufficiently corrupt...
Gaikokumaniakku: Note that obviously non-white wrongdoers are often documented as white in order to throw off official statistics.
Jim: I, an AI enjoyer, have been assured by my fellow AI enjoyers that quantity of lines of code has become a relevant metric at long last. I look forward to computers obeying my every whim. May the imminent godlike superintelligence have mercy on our souls.
Jim: In any case, never listen to a woman purporting to speak in authority on the raising up of boys. The sensitive young white teen was born to go to war. He should be set loose upon Africa, the Middle East, India, and elsewhere with a Toyota Hilux, some automatic weaponry, and a gas and ammunition ration, provided only that consorting with the local fauna be punishable by death.
Jim: The things you know form the threads of your thought.
Isegoria: Give me a minute, David, to Google “Bob Dylan”…
Anomaly UK: Of teenage boys who are incapable of learning by memorization because it is unnatural and they are not academically inclined, how many can name 11 members of their favourite sports team?
David Foster: Phileas Frogg..”David Starkey has been arguing for ages that memorization is a key cognitive skill that is missing from modern education. He’s not wrong”…here& #8217;s an analogy I came up with: A song by Jakob Dylan includes the following lines: Cupid, don’t draw back your bow Sam Cooke didn’t know what I know …note that in order to understand these two simple lines, you’d have to know several things: 1)You need to know that, in mythology, Cupid symbolizes love 2)And that...
T. Beholder: Miscellanea: The War in Iran In which he repeats “teh People are ekshully American sympathizers, Regime is Sauron” meme once more. The problem with acoup.blog is that Devereaux definitely can research and think for himself… right until the moment any subject touches some tripwire of MiniTru (be it $CURRENT_THING or cone-sensus of Marxism academia). Then he twitches, goes into full glass-eyed «Yes – Dnyarri – I – wish – to – know – about –...
T. Beholder: The ascendancy of armor plate over gunshot and early shells was so fleeting that some analysts are prone to make light of the ram. But writings of the 1870s and 1880s extolled the ram. As usual. If it noticeably contributed to superiority of the Eternal Brit (or later Brit 2.0), it was Predestination, otherwise a fleeting fad. Hence taunts like «But before, and before, and ever so long before…» from those in the know. through a gauntlet of effective fire that was short, only a half...
Lucklucky: Not if their jobs, power, and status depend on complexity.
Gaikokumaniakku: People who focus on receiving trust from authority have less attention available to learn engineering. People who focus on technical craft have less attention available to learn how to gain trust from authority. Thus the managers (in my experience) are always technically clueless. Hackernews recently had a discussion comparing personal coding projects to the Winchester Mystery House. https://news.ycombinator .com/item?id=47601194 This links primarily to : https://www.dbreunig....
Isegoria: Harlan Ellison’s advice to new writers: “Don’t be a whore!”
Phileas Frogg: In the words of Harlan Ellison: “Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.”
Isegoria: T. Greer discussed the book a while back, and I read it sometime after that, but recent events brought it back to my attention, too.
It might not immediately destroy everything, but what is not clear from this illustration is if civilization could persist the radiotoxicity that would be around for a century or two.
How much persistent radio toxicity would result, and what would the probable distribution be?
The persistent radiotoxicity is actually pretty low. Remember, the general rule is that the more radioactive the substance, the shorter the half life, and the quicker it’s gone. The studies I’ve seen indicate that it would be safe to plant a vegetable garden at a groundburst ground zero after 3-5 years. There are certain concentration effects, though, that could cause some areas to remain dangerous for much longer.
It’s also heavily dependent on the targeting scheme used. Airbursts, like you use for destroying cities, produce very little fallout, since fallout is debris sucked up through the fireball where it is irradiated before being spewed out the top. Groundbursts, such as you would use for roads, powerplants, and military targets, produce lots of fallout and have a nasty downwind area.
The fallout area is highly dependent on meteorological conditions. For instance, if it’s raining then it will be small but intense while if it’s windy and clear it will be large but dilute.
This is just scratching the surface of a large and fascinating topic. To summarize: fusion bombs are pretty radiologically clean (especially in airburst mode), the radiation tends not to stick around (see: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both hit by smaller but much dirtier bombs than we use now), and the post-attack radiation environment will be very unevenly dangerous. In terms of long term threats, disease and breakdown in the food supply are the predominant concerns.
Depending on the targeting scheme used, there could also be regional effects on climate, at least for a few months. Not enough to create a “nuclear winter”, but possibly enough to trigger some crop failures. Not the end of the world, but not pretty, either.
Yes, “nuclear autumn.” The oddest aspect was that high-altitude temperatures would be increased enormously – to as high as the 70s F. At ground level the temperatures would be moderated – warm winter and cold summer, but only up to a year out from the exchange. Months; more likely.
Note that all this is for a massive 1980′s WWIII exchange between NATO and USSR, wherein the majority of the globe’s nuclear arsenal would be expended and in which almost every country would catch a few, if only to keep them from taking advantage of the (former) great powers’ post-attack weakness. Under these criteria, 50% of the US population was expected to perish in the initial hours, with half the remainder dead within a few years due mostly to disease and starvation. Of course, this is only one of several game-theoretically possible ways that such a war might have played out.
Nowadays the arsenals are far, far smaller and the number of weapons ready to “go” at any time smaller yet. At most a few thousand warheads could be involved in the initial exchange between two of the current big 3 (US, China, Russia). Figure that 80% of those will actually make it to the target and initiate (optimistic – likely fewer for the Russians and more for the US). Between 5 and 15% of the remainder would go off target and initiate somewhere random.
This would wreck the countries involved quite thoroughly, but the initial population loss percentages aren’t likely to climb too far into the double-digits and large areas would probably be untouched. Most countries targeting schemes since the 70s seem to be balanced primarily towards counter-force, so most of those warheads will be expended trying to kill other warheads – targeted on missile fields, bomber bases, and the like. Of course, take all that with a grain of salt. The conditions under which such a war began would have the biggest say in its conduct.
For a while now I’ve had a pet analogy I use for describing the net effects, as currently best understood: modern great-power nuclear confrontation would inflict on the belligerents in only a few hours what the Eastern Front did to Germany and Russia over 4 years.
Of course, the moron governments we’ve had lately keep finding ways to cut the arsenal further and (with the exception of the USN’s SSBNs) the strategic services are seen as a career graveyard, greatly reducing their competence and responsiveness. This erodes the multistable deterrence that has to date prevented major wars. I suppose this is a “victim of your own success” issue.
Speaking of, I recommend the very interesting glasstone blog. It’s about contradicting the widespread superstition that nuclear wars are unsurvivable and debunking hardened dogma of exaggerated nuclear effects.
Duck & cover makes sense after all!
It drives me crazy when people get smug about duck and cover. Apparently they think that nuclear initiations have no effects beyond the radius of total destruction when in reality most of the area subjected to blast effects are going to suffer the equivalent of anything from an F-4 tornado to a strong windstorm, dependent on the distance to ground zero. Most of the area affected by the thermal pulse will not be instantly fried, but simply suffer a similarly varying intensity of fires.
Yet those same people don’t laugh at the futility of tornado or fire drills.
It’s almost as if this smug attitude toward duck and cover had some ideological component…
I’m still amazed by the fact that the casualty rate at ground zero was not 100 percent.
If there’s one thing my readings have instilled in me, it is the understanding that people can be surprisingly hard to kill. We’re stretchy.
That reminds me, I was just listening to an interview with Tom Givens, where he mentioned that the local trauma hospital takes in 3,100 gunshot victims per year, with roughly 100 fatalities. Handgun wounds aren’t especially lethal, when they’re not well aimed.
Thank god that black people hold their guns sideways!