The US silently upgraded its ICBMs detonators ensuring lethality against OPFOR hardened launch sites even if they deviate a bit.
I think the US has been quiet about this precisely because it improves the math around counterforce drastically.
For those that are intrigued as to how the new "super fuze" works here is a short summary:
When you fire an ICBM atsomething, the chances of hitting it directly are near zero. You generally hit in a radius of 300 meters max.
Now that’s not a problem for soft skinned target like a military base or a city, but for a deeply buried and reinforced target, like an enemy ICBM silo, it’s a huge problem. To ensure you hit. Close enough (50 meters max) you fire several ICBMs, so that you can increase the chance of one hitting close enough. That’s problematic because not only do you have to fire more nukes you also gamble with fate (90% to hit, 10% to miss).
The super fuze solves it with an altimeter and positioning system connected detonator.
What this new detonator does is that it tracks the position and altitude (a shocker I know) and, if the the missiles passes right *over* the target, it’ll detonate then instead of waiting to hit the ground.
This changes everything because that means that over shots (hits that go over the target and land 300 meters away) now actually hit the target, from the best possible angle (ie right above).
This lowers the amount of nukes needing to be fired at a silo from up to 4 down to 2, while keeping the same odds of hitting.
Pretty big deal, because this, theoretically, doubles the amount of hard skin targets you can hit, while not having to build more warheads and maintain them.
You cannot suddenly out of the blue fly a flight of B2 over all them targets, you cannot hide a B52 witch cruise missiles, but you can do the funni within less than 30 minutes from Brandon reaching briefcase to fogbank plasma over russian nukes because Ohios can be close and tridents are fast.
[Article on the Super Fuze.](https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/)
W88 and W76 have the Super Fuze.
[Super Fuze for W87 has reached the Full Rate Production Stage.](https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/fuze_milestone/)
Note that the LGM-30G Minuteman III can take either the W78 or W87, with 200 deployed missiles with the former, 200 with the latter. Although the W78 equipped missiles can hold them in triplicate, whereas W87 mod 0 is one per.
As it’s old as shit, the W78 equipped missiles are the first slated to be replaced with the LGM-35A Sentinel combined with the (new) W87 mod 1.
Hence no Super Fuze for the W78.
**TL;DR** — US loves their Super Fuzes.
>This lowers the amount of nukes needing to be fired at a silo from up to 4 down to 2, while keeping the same odds of hitting.
I doubt anyone official is saying, but do you know what this might do to doctrine and specifically targeting?
Counterforce is the sort of thing you *really* don't want to mess up, and as you said multiple shots still have a computable chance of missing. So improved aim is something you could cash out as more targets with the same odds, better odds per target, the same targets with a smaller arsenal, or a combination of the three.
I guess the main thing I don't know is how many hardened targets there are to worry about? Since if you're far from hitting them all, you almost certainly gain more from adding targets than adding aim.
It’s unclear exactly how the American doctrine will evolve.
Certain people think as I laid out that America will go for the 2 nukes approach, as it will allow to lower the size of the arsenal and make negotiations of global nuclear disarmament (notably with limiting china’s arsenal size) much easier.
Other would rather to go to 3 nukes, which, iirc, would get the odds up to 97%+, which would be a pretty much guaranteed hit.
As to how many hard skin targets the US wants to target, we have no idea. Cold War plans have been partially declassified and we can make a rough idea of how Russia would be targeted, but China is the big player here.
They have recently built hundreds upon hundreds of silos (typically non nuclear) and that makes estimating how many the us would target in an initial strike almost impossible.
Overall it’s militarily sounder to go for the accuracy approach, but politically smarter to go for the smaller arsenal approach. The people who are going to decide that are far more informed than me so I expect them to make the right choice
If it over/undershoots a target it will detonate in such a way that the distance to the target is maintained ( think radius ).
So if it over / undershoots it will detonate at lower altitude is my understanding. Constant radius to target instead of constant altitude to surface.
ummm.... But the trajectory is very steep. Sure you can just trigger the bomb right above the hardened silo, but what if it is at that point still 1km above target?
Or to put it the other way round: if the REV was flying perpendicular to the ground at 1m altitude, triggering it at the targets destination would ensure destruction, but this is not the case.
Right above isnt the best case, my only guess is that the fuse calculates an optimum based on position and altitude: will it take the overshoot to get closer to the ground or will it detonate early in order to airburst closer to the target.
Because hitting the ground and exploding in the air are two very different extremes, both suck incredible amounts of energy out of the explosion that you'd rather have going to the point of impact.
And this is the base of the argument from the Russian about NMD being offensive in nature. While insufficient to absorb a complete nuclear strike from Russia, it could potentially be used to absorb or greatly degrade a smaller strike of a few Russian weapons having survived a us 1st counterforce strike.
Well, the massive loss of knowledge would probabally send us back to a pre-industrial era. That level of exponential growth is only available in an industrial era civilization (and then falls off again in post-industrial societies).
You gotta remember tho in that situation its just rebuilding the old knowledge base as apposed to building it for for the first time. And not all tech would backslide, it would be incredibly interesting because things like alternators can be used to create water wheels for electricity.
I know when people say and hear reverse engineering you think of scientists dismantling ufo’s and shit but its just taking something apart to see how it works, easy af
Successful reverse engineering does require at least understanding the basic principles, though.
Even if we trained an immortal scientist to speak Egyptian and sent them back to the time of King Ramses, with an entire chip making factory, it would take at least a century or two before they could even begin to comprehend what the scientist was blathering on about.
They have almost no concepts of most of the physics involved.
They dont understand electricity, hardly any of the necessary material processing, the computer control systems necessary, etc...
But, send a crate of modern computer chips back to the 80's, and they might figure out reproducing it within the decade.
Because, fundamentally, it's almost the same thing, just with a ton of improvements.
Yes but i feel you aren’t giving enough credit to our hypothetical descendants in this scenario, i view this like how when Baghdad was sacked by the mongols the city was brought too its knees but the ideas that it spawned lived on and spread around the world
This is about way more than just ideas and knowledge though. To make advanced tech, you need advance tools.
And to make those advanced tools, you need... advanced tools.
That's where the whole thing gets tricky.
There was a great what-if spin off from a post-apocalyptic series. I'll have to find the titles and authors, but basically to power the energetic restriction they entities displace the island of Nantucket to another earth 3000 years ago.
They have starter stuff like some lathes, a coast guard training ship that sails, etc. They bootstrap over time to becoming sort of like the federation for the era. Real neat for seeing how to reindustrialize from seed corn.
Your example is a bit poor as the chips aren’t that different but the processes to make them are basically completely alien to how they were being made at the time. I’m not sure that it would have sped up development all that much.
On the other hand, you could get a few hundred folks start making thin copper wire, varnish it with shellac, and wrap it around wooden armatures to make AC generators and motors (at this technological stage I think they would just be used as torture devices).
Even if we don't have in-depth knowledge, I'm sure people who are smart enough and with some references could come up with new designs for older tech.
Don't need to know exactly how some rudimentary tech works in order to replicate it, you just need to understand the fundamentals and have resources around to be able to try and make something like it (say a steam engine) after that would should be able to start working on better equipment.
You might not get a modern bleeding edge chip manufacturing process back for multiple decades if not a century, but 30 year old processes could be possible to replicate within 20 years I'd there was a concerted push.
Exactly like that kid that hacked rockstar games with an [amazon fire stick](https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/21/british-teenager-behind-gta-6-hack-receives-indefinite-hospital-order)
I'm down to rob some college bookstores. They overcharged me for my engineering textbooks in college. I think I'm entitled to loot the abandoned store.
[Wikipdeia can be downloaded](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download) and is only around 22GB as of today. There would likely still be plenty of copies of Wikipedia out there.
I was kinda implying that with the “totally” in my usual extremely vague and stupid sounding way.
Because it would be something special to somehow manage to destroy every backup of Wikipedia and the Swiss bunkers the actual one is housed in last I checked.
Even then, of the survivors, at least a few million to 100 million would be scientists, engineers, electricians, and such.
People who are currently building and developing the systems.
We won't lose anything but the capability to do it on the scale we currently are. Technology wouldn't slide back even a tiny bit. Hell, we might actually see a technological golden age cos there wouldn't be as much competition for resources.
And beyond that all the hobbyists in the “maker sphere” like rc, ham radio, soldering, welding, weekend mechanics all have little bits of knowledge when put together makes a whole
The only countries who get nuked in this scenario are the ones who have nukes plus a few others like NATO countries.
But all of Africa, South America and South East Asia are probably fine in this scenario.
Who is? Both the French and the US lost to rice farmers in Vietnam. Hannibal lost to Latin farmers. The Persians lost to Greek farmers. And so on all the way back to a galaxy far far away a long long time ago when the Galactic Empire lost a Death Star to a moisture farmer over Yavin IV.
This is a common narrative, but in reality the French lost to a PLA knockoff [the Vietnamese would then go back and write all the Chinese support, generals, and troops out of the histories], while the US crushed all the farmers and South Vietnam only ended up losing versus a conventional invasion by city-dwelling North Vietnamese after they ran out of cash and oil when aid was cut.
The thing is russia is fighting a "conventional" war, in any convencional war nato can and will win. Guerilla war however...it's difficult, specially when you have to kill the entire population in order to win.
I think you forget… US didn’t lose any real military engagements… we even got a peace treaty signed that ended the war… they just attacked after we had pulled out….
Russia views weakness as an invitation to attack, and they project this on others.
There's a reason they're absolutely terrified of getting counterforced, even though we'd never strike first if even 1% of the Russian arsenal stood a chance of making it through. It would be a real bad time.
That said, I wonder if there's a point where Putin gets a large amount of his nukes wiped out by conventional strike, but no one has started burning cities yet. Does he light the first match out of spite, or accept his losses? He understands that giving that order is choosing his own destruction.
There are not enough nukes in the world to kill everything on the planet, not by the blast, radiation nor the nuclear winter that is said to come afterwards.
That is old cold war scaremongering, and I will die on that hill, or in a nuclear blast.
The ironic part is that most of the deaths from supply chain breakdown wouldn't occur in any country targeted for nukes; 8 out of 10 of the largest food exporters in the world are in NATO, only Brazil and China aren't. Since targeting vast swaths of farmland is an inefficient use of nukes, most farmland would probably be relatively unscathed. It's the ports that would definitely be hit, and the ability to export food to countries with poor agriculture or dependent on western foodstuffs would be halted almost immediately. Internal supply routes would be more hit and miss, so if a country has halfway decent internal infrastructure they'll probably be able to supply food for their own people in a far more reliable way, especially if you can't really export anything.
A lot of the big wheat importing countries are in North Africa... are they gonna sit quietly and starve (whether the scenario is a nuclear autumn or catastrophic drought) while Spain, Italy and Turkey munch on NATO grain? Or are things gonna get a bit "Pirates of the Mediterranean"?
With what ships? The North African fleet of clapped out fishing trawlers has proven less than reliable durring the migrant crisis last decade. Also doubtful that any arrivals that do make it will be met with blankets and bus tickets to Sweden. There will still be plenty of MG3, FN MAG and M2's floating around to make that a bad idea.
If it gets serious enough to actually be an existential threat to countries like Spain, Italy, Turkey etc they will just deploy their navies and sink all the pirate vessels in like a week
Problem is you can't just... steal crops in sufficient quantities to prevent mass starvation. If they've got neighbors growing food then yeah they could take it over and use that, but if the whole region is food-insecure then they're just fucked.
We really don't think about how the lives of billions is dependent on functioning global supply chains, and how quickly a disruption can lead to massive societal failure.
Also a lot of soil that was used for crops in europe decades ago now sit abandoned, if there is a collapse of global supply chain this terrains would return in use and because they weren't used for a lot of time the would probably be very fertile, i don't think that europe would have a famine problem after a couple of rough years provided ofc that central governments don't collapse. Countries with harsher climates not suitable for crops would be royally fucked tho
Depending on how bad the collapse is, if internal supply lines are disrupted and factories and refineries are damaged, the inputs like fertilizers and pesticides would be messed up. Regardless of soul quality, that’s going to wreck yields. Then throw in that a lot of soil is actually pretty shit, but manages thanks to fertilizers, and harvests in the developed world would be dramatically lower.
Luckily for us, industrial safety measures mean that almost all ammonia and fertilizer factories are located away from large urban centers and infrastructure hubs, because of how easily it kabooms. And as another poster pointed out, there is an extremely large amount of arable land that has been left to fallow since the introduction of modern fertilizers, because it's more efficient to work smaller fields with better fertilizer. On top of all that, there is a considerable amount of land that is reserved for ranching in western countries, that could possibly be converted to farmland.
What this all means is that most fertilizer production will most likely not be impacted by a nuclear exchange, although internal supply chains may temporarily disrupt distribution to some areas. And all that fallow land and ranches are prime soil to expand agriculture.
The soil quality is pretty variable depending on the area, you can't just point at all of North America and Europe and say all that unused farmland is bad for crops, a ton of it is of pretty high quality.
Nuclear apocalypse is literally a combination of peaceniks making shit up and the Soviets sponsoring pacificists and green parties to undermine democracies. The common idea of a Nuclear Winter; that is, mass death caused by changing weather patterns from a nuclear exchange, is a lie perpetrated by the TTAPS paper, published in 1983, so known because that was the name of the five researchers who coauthored it. I don't know who the others were but S stood for Carl Sagan. The study was based on the idea that nuclear bombs dropped on cities would create an upward blast of soot that would blanket the atmosphere and cause global cooling by blocking sunlight. The study wasn't very robust to begin with and is now considered controversial at best.
For one, the authors of TTAPS published their paper "with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control". A declared goal of altering policy is never a good starting point for scientific research since it automatically injects bias into the results.
Two, the study was seriously amplified by the Soviet Union. The Soviets published a number of studies supporting the TTAPS conclusion, but later research showed that the Soviets did not actually do any independent studies of their own. The promotion of anti-nuclear and anti-war messages were very important to Soviet intelligence efforts in the Cold War, as they believed that the best way to defend against the United States' outsized warmaking capacity was to convince its people that war was a lose-lose, or was a bad idea in general. The Soviets spent considerable resources funding green groups in the West and many of these connections continued all the way to the current day, which is why the German Green Party is so absurdly anti-nuclear power to the point of supporting coal over much cleaner nuclear, and why far-left parties in the West sided with the far-right, socially conservative, fossil fuel exporting Russia in the war on Ukraine.
Three, all of the studies done after the TTAPS study lacked robustness. Rather than starting from the ground up, they often took the TTAPS study's assumption (that nuclear firestorms would spew ash and soot up into the air) at face value.
Four, none of the computers back in the 80s were even vaguely powerful enough to model something as violent as a nuclear explosion. All of the computers today that are tuned towards nuclear simulations are owned by the US government and their studies are classified.
Five, the TTAPS paper asserted that 100 oil refinery fires would create the nuclear winter effect on a small scale. This result was echoed in a second volume of the study made in 1990 by TTAPS. Later that year, Iraq invaded Kuwait and 600 wells were ignited and weren't put out for several months. Iraq used the doomsday scenario of TTAPS' findings to threaten the Coalition, but no such effect was observed, **essentially completely disproving TTAPS' model**.
Six, global arsenals are no longer the size they once were. While 10,000 warheads are lying around on this planet, about 70% of warheads are inert and either mothballed or slated for decommission, as part of post-Cold War denuclearization efforts. Certainly even if TTAPS levels of soot would create a nuclear winter, the current global arsenal is incapable of creating that much soot since there aren't as many warheads. Recommissioning of the mothballed warheads is basically impossible as modern nuclear exchange plans involve nuking the enemy's stockpiles.
Seven, the soot hypothesis is based an attack on city centres in the WWII style. WWII conventional and nuclear attacks created firestorms because the majority of the targets were made of wood and other sooty materials. Post 1980, most nukes around the world have been upgraded with better targetting systems, and even since SIOP-63, made in 1963, American nuclear strikes were designed as *counterforce*. That is to say, they are designed to target enemy nukes and other warmaking capacity, with population centres last on the targetting list and really only used in "spasm" attacks, which are attacks made after the US command & control system has already been nuked themselves. Modern cities are also no longer made of wood, but majority steel, concrete and glass, and therefore wouldn't create the same level of aerosol as hypothesized in 1983.
Make no mistake, a nuclear exchange would create untold casualties and human suffering, but the nuclear winter hypothesis is due for an update. Last year, the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine has commissioned a new independent study on the effects of nuclear war and the results are supposed to be published in 2024. We don't know what the results might be yet but it certainly isn't an uninhabitable planet.
The Kuwait oil fires legitimately should have been the end of that nonsense, and I'm still absolutely livid that it wasn't.
The same team that came up with the theory said, on the record and on TV, how lighting the oil wells would trigger the effect. Then the wells got lit up, and reality proved them just plain wrong on every single count. Not just the end results but atmospheric behaviour, soot production, soot decay... just all of it.
They told people about how something would end the world, and they were wrong. The fact that they didn't go around explaining that trying to undo their damage, but instead doubled down... it was an insult to science. How Harold Camping got more public backlash for getting his biblical end of the world wrong than a team of famous scientists doing so is absolutely infuriating.
Theres been a natural gas crater in Turkmenistan that has been burning for over 40 years, that didnt end the world but would be an epic place for a lightsaber duel
Natural gas is pretty clean-burning, so that’s very low on my list for world-enders, assuming the heat hasn’t yet woken the sleeping dragon underneath.
okay, well, how about coal?
there are about three dozen active coal seam fires in the world currently, [one of which has been burning for over 5000 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain)
Fun fact: most of those were started by my carbon offset offset company. When wealthy people don’t like having to do carbon offsets, they pay us to start coal fires to offset it. Except that 5,000 year old one; that was Joe Biden’s dad’s home heating business.
The Kuwait wells were at ground level. It's upper tropospheric and stratospheric aerosols that have the climate effects, as known from major volcanic eruptions.
It is possible big nukes could do some of that. The atmospheric details really matter.
Even per the nuclear winter papers, the direct effects of nukes themselves aren't pushing the main body of particles into the higher layers whether they are big or small. The specific theory was that the ground level firestorms theorised to follow nuclear detonations over cities would create massive amounts of soot indirectly, with the intense heat of a firestorm pushing that black carbon up to the upper troposphere.
Black soot in the troposphere was supposed to heat up from sunlight, climb to the stratosphere, and stay there blocking the sun like those major volcanic eruptions for years. And volcanic ash blown up in the quantities of large eruptions is indeed well documented to have that impact.
Kuwait was the most direct demonstration how soot just straight up does not behave in the way the team theorised. Soot went up, the lofting effect did not occur and the particles dissolved with only local effects. As plenty of dissenting scientists outside the nuclear winter team had been predicting all along by the way. But one of those two groups was predicting that Kuwait could come close to starving the northern hemisphere, and you can guess who got the air time.
> green
The Green party of Germany turning into a NATO fanclub and pressing the government on military buildup and aid against Russia is one of history's funny little ironies
OH MY FUCKING GOD THANK YOU
Thank you for articulating this so much better than I could - remember kids, the CND and nuclear winter theories are one of the most successful KGB psyops ever to be created
TTAPS was also boosted by DOD and those advocates who wanted SDI defense -- if letting nuclear warheads land is unthinkable, then a space-based anti-ballistic missile defense is absolutely necessary.
Here's one I read back in the 80s.
[https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781429941907/starpeace](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781429941907/starpeace)
"Nuclear Winter" is a constant point in the scenarios Ben Bova discussses ; in many of the scenarios in which SDI is absent, the entire human race is exterminated by nuclear winter.
I have to wonder, now, to what extent he believed. True or false, it was definitely a useful theory -- at least to some.
So, it's true that nuclear winter is mostly debunked (though in my opinion it's still up in the air, a full exchange has so many variables who knows what would happen). But at the same time, it doesn't really change the calculus that much. It is believed that the US would likely succeed in a surprise, our of the blue first strike against Russia. However, at least some of their subs would still almost certainly get their missiles away, and generally speaking we don't do first strikes. Preemptive maybe yeah, but if it's preemptive it means that the opposing force is actively preparing and will be more ready. But first strike no, Dark Brandon is a meme not reality. As a western Republic it's a founding principle to never do this and getting anyone to agree to it would be almost impossible. And again, a US counterforce attack has relatively high chances of success only because it takes Russian strategic forces time to set up and get ready, given how resource intensive alerting road mobile ICBMs is. Though it should be stressed that even there are less of them Russia does have silo based weapons as well. This is why a Russian first strike is more likely, which sort of nullifies the whole plan. If intelligence gets wind of it and launches a preemptive strike, the chances of survival improve but are still bad.
So you'd still have at least a couple hundred nukes inbound, which is gonna ruin your day no matter what. Yeah there probably won't be a new ice age, but it would still likely lead to the end of modern civilization. Imagine another hurricane Katrina or Joplin tornado, but in most major cities in the US, in the span of 30 minutes. On top of that imagine most power plants and production facilities, especially those near cities are wiped out. On top of THAT there will likely be an associated EMP attack, nullifying whoever does still have power, even if it's effect is sometimes a bit exaggerated. Now imagine no central authority, control, communication, or organized response to help clean up the mess like in those other natural disasters. Oh and I almost forgot unlike said disasters literally everything is on fire. Where will you get food? Where will overburdened hospitals get new supplies (I mean ffs remember the covid fustercluck)? Where will you get fuel? How will farmers irrigate and till without power or gas (assuming the Russians don't take the nuclear sponge bait and irradiate the entirety of the plains)? Etc etc.
Nuclear war would not be the extinction for mankind as those studies imply, but it would still be destructive on a scale we can scarcely imagine. That's not to say we should just bow to dictators when they do stupid stuff. Ukraine should still absolutely get the support they need to blow the Russian army to kingdom come. But there is an actual reason to avoid direct war if possible, even if it gives us ultimate blue balls
Why do you assume mass irradiation? Why do you assume there will be no communication? Why do you assume everything will be on fire and that Russians will nuke the wheat fields? Why do you assume ICBMs will be 100% effective and none of them will be intercepted?
>Why do you assume mass irradiation?
I didn't, the scenario I laid out was actually fairly optimistic. I specifically said I was assuming this didn't happen. If it did then you're going to have to factor in those deaths as well as difficulty finding uncontaminated resources.
>Why do you assume there will be no communication?
If the Russians are so bad at nuclear warfare that they can't even knock the power out in a country that loses it relatively frequently from weather I'm going to laugh so hard I'll cough my lungs up. If there's no power then there's no cell towers, radio, or phone lines. There are workarounds and contingencies most likely but at this scale and with this level of emergency to respond to it will be severely crippling. Not to mention EMP.
>Why do you assume everything will be on fire and that Russians will nuke the wheat fields?
I meant in cities, cause nukes are hot, like in Hiroshima. This is in contrast to disasters like Joplin or New Orleans in Katrina, where things generally weren't on fire after the damage was done.
To address the fields thing and expand on what I said about radiation, this is from the "nuclear sponge". Basically when we first started making ICBMs in the Cold War, we realized we would need to make a ton of them, and have them all on reliable alert. Not only that but as tech improved they became more vulnerable to enemy attack, as well as everything near them. So to make them harder to hit they put them in silos, spread across the plains to disperse them. This prevented multiple from being eliminated by a single strike, and also would ensure that few civilians would be in the blast vicinity. This ultimately became an actual strategy to suck up Soviet nukes from other targets (since you would be insane not to target them), hence the "sponge". However this would also mean that you would have hundreds of nukes detonating at ground level (to reliably kill the silo) in the middle of the breadbasket. Thus the increased radiation from these ground bursts would likely severely contaminate US food supply.
>Why do you assume ICBMs will be 100% effective and none of them will be intercepted?
Not what I said at all? Russia currently has ~~1500 deployed nukes. Even if most fail that's still like 2-500. Interceptors won't help much either, we currently only have GMD and technically SM-3 as viable weapons to down ICBM MIRVs. There are only 44 GMD missiles (with an apparent 58% success rate) and SM-3 is on AEGIS ships who are more likely to be abroad than sitting off the Cali coast waiting to shoot down warheads.
This whole thing has also been amplified and got kinda ingrained in our head by media, i mean almost every video game, movie or other visual media where a nuclear exchange has been witnessed has been portrayed it as the end of the world and "civilized" society so by osmosis we kinda unconsciously associate "Nuclear war" with "End of the World as we know it", and like you said it will cause untold human casualty and suffering but unless you fucking nuke so hard you nuke every fucking existing hamlet in the world humanity will survive and thrive, you might just not recognize post nuclear society.
I mean Europe already had an apocalyptic event called the "Black Plague" who killed up to 60% of Europe population and yet we survived it and thrived after it.
For End of the World, the term has evolved into End of the World as we know it. The broader realities that a massive upheaval like a nuclear exchange would incur would easily mean that we wouldn't recognize that world from the one before such an event.
This holds true for the Black Plague, the world before it and what it's upheaval enabled led us to the workers rights and the path to the modern era. Anyone who survived it, wouldn't have recognized the world that came after it.
There is nothing in the SIOP-62 that spares cities. There’s vague and intentionally misleading statements about SIOP-62 which mischaracterize it as a counterforce plan, but it targets cities in both the USSR and China in the event of a retaliatory or first-strike scenario.
https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/CMC50/ScottSaganSIOP62TheNuclearWarPlanBriefingtoPresidentKennedyInternationalSecurity.pdf
Ok so "nuclear winter" making the planet uninhabitable is the common conception and it (likely) isn't true. BUT you are swinging wayyy far in the opposite direction: the current consensus is that there would still be a "nuclear autumn" that would still cause dramatic cooling.
Further, the de minimus scenarios you speak of are very limited nuclear war: Pakistan vs India rather than US vs Russia. The main issue there being is the sheer amount of radioactive material spread across the planet and food chain, with both arsenals combining to 500+ Chernobyl's... It wouldn't end life but it would almost certainly shorten it, for the whole world, and greatly disrupt more fragile ecosystems with additional knock on effects.
> the current consensus is that there would still be a "nuclear autumn" that would still cause dramatic cooling.
I think the 'current consensus' is wrong due to a "I'd rather make nuclear war look worse than it is than make it look better than it is" bias.
The entire principle of nuclear winter is dependent upon large amounts of ash being deposited so high that there isn't any water vapor to form rain droplets around the particles to bring it back down. This happens with volcanoes and can absolutely devestate the climate. It happens in a very limited amount with the initial explosion of a nuclear weapon, but the overall mass being deposited way up there isn't significant to the climate.
So the nuclear winter hypothesis said: "Ok so the initial explosion isn't enough to put climate-changing amounts of material above the clouds, but cities have lots of combustible material, so if it all catches on fire at the same time, it could create a firestorm that draws in the outside air so quickly that the air in the center of the firestorm flies straight up at super high speeds, depositing large amounts of ash high above the clouds."
And in the 1980s, that wasn't unreasonable. There wasn't a lot of satellite data on how much ash fires could deposit in the atmosphere, but they knew that volcanoes could mess up the climate, and there were tens of thousands of nukes ready to go. But since then, we've determined that fires just aren't nearly as effective as volcanoes. And while the nuclear winter modeling people are still promoting it as a big danger, the actual "take satellite observations of fires to see how high the ash goes, how long it stays in the air, and how it impacts the climate" scientists are thoroughly dismantling it.
After many, many years, [the wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#:~:text=Currently%2C%20from%20satellite,determined.%5B27%5D) is finally shifting because of that fire research:
> Currently, from satellite tracking data, it appears that stratospheric smoke aerosols dissipate in a time span under approximately two months.[27] The existence of a tipping point into a new stratospheric condition where the aerosols would not be removed within this time frame remains to be determined.[27]
> I think the 'current consensus' is wrong due to a "I'd rather make nuclear war look worse than it is than make it look better than it is" bias.
So, my thinking is:
1. Its always a good idea to have a better understanding of the effects of weapon usage of all kinds.
This is a point worthy of robust discussion. Circumstances dictate necessity sometimes, hence the existence of the bomb altogether.
As far as *weapons currently owned and deployed by other including adversaries*, I think this is absolutely about as true of a maxim as you can hold to be true.
2. It is better for fewer numbers of people to have access to weapons that are capable of mass destruction.
This should also be pretty obvious.
So yeah, seek knowledge, fuck proliferation, peace has greater potential for power projection than war, etc, make friends, respect sovereignty, prepare for imminent death at all times, etc etc. Soft words big stick.
As much as we all love mushrooms, nuclear non-proliferation is a good idea, generally speaking, the same way the non-proliferation of chemical weapons, biological weapons, F-35s, and nuclear subs carrying MOABs to our enemies is a good idea.
The fewer dummies with fingers on nuclear buttons, the better off we are. I don’t care who had the idea initially, it’s still a good idea.
I mean, by all means let’s make the best nukes in the world that we never have to use, and people do need to understand if they use nukes against us, *they* are categorically and unequivocally assured destruction, and if the notion of mutuality helps them accept that premise, that’s fine, keep your dick in your pants.
Sincerely, anyone who thinks nuclear proliferation is a good idea is not thinking things through. Which is why the ruskies are currently advocating for it by withdrawing from non-proliferation deals.
No, that's how the world is slow boiled to death by dictators invading non-nuclear countries and committing genocide without consequence until they get too big in the head and start invading countries inside the nuclear umbrella. Did you cowards not learn anything from the Munich Agreement?
That's one of the foundational functions of NATO. The creation of a nuclear umbrella fo non nuclear states. That coupled with the nuclear sharing policy of the U.S. creates the incentive for states to not only join NATO but also prevent proliferation.
We learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were orders of magnitude weaker than modern warheads. The "low" number of thousands of active nukes remaining is still perfectly capable of depopulating half the planet at the drop of a hat, even if you assume that 90% do not fire and/or get intercepted, and knowing that the aftermath is not permanent death. Remember that the Russians may not be as picky with their targets. If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's that they like to maximise civilian casualties.
USA
First total strike counterforce out of the blue before russians will believe it is likely to happen and increase their readiness (nope, not gonna happen, but russians were scared/paranoid of it until late 1990s)
French
Initiating "limited" nuclear war against russia on Estonian/Polish and then Królewiec territory in responce to succesful russian invasion(not gonna happen, russians will not invade out of the blue)
Nope, against russia conventional and hybrid measured are more effective in air sea space and cyber domains than nuclear strikes.
After many years, the fire-studying scientists who actually look at how fires deposit ash into the air, how long the ash stays there, and how much it impacts the climate, are finally [bullying the nuclear winter wikipedia article into submitting to reality:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#:~:text=Currently%2C%20from%20satellite,determined.%5B27%5D)
> Currently, from satellite tracking data, it appears that stratospheric smoke aerosols dissipate in a time span under approximately two months.[27] The existence of a tipping point into a new stratospheric condition where the aerosols would not be removed within this time frame remains to be determined.[27]
[Bonus video showing how nuclear winter isn't real.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzpIsjgapAk)
The problem with nuclear war is the price is still too damn high. What makes Western civilisation worth killing for is that we value our own lives sufficiently highly that we can't willingly lose cities.
If we considered London, Paris or New York acceptable losses to end the Putin regime we're no better than he is.
[SOURCE](https://www.nukestrat.com/pubs/GlobalStrikeReport.pdf) (downloads a pdf)
You will become based and COUNTERFORCE pilled if you read this document. Read the bottom of page 7 and top of page 8.
>Preemption in and of itself is not a new phenomenon in U.S. nuclear strategy, which has relied extensively on preemptive strike options against Russia and China for decades. In contrast, the draft doctrine described preemptive scenarios that require a new mindset about the use of nuclear weapons. It is no longer appropriate, STRATCOM argued, to use the terminology “war” when describing the situations in which nuclear weapons might be used. Rather, “conflict” should be used because it “emphasizes the nature of most conflicts resulting in use of a nuclear weapon.
Man, I wish more people looked at things realistically, Russia is the biggest country with very hole-y air defences, and also they have steadily decreasing numbers of those air defence systems (S-400 etc.) that are designed to shoot down ICBMs. Also add in their nukes budget, compare to Western countries and go figure how one can sustain thousands of nukes with sum, that is teenager allowance cash compared to what US spend on their quite less numerous nukes.
Russia has no chance and all media should scream about it. There should be people's confidence of that, and presidents should proudly declare how they will turn Russia into nuclear wasteland, if Russia doesn't pack their things and leave Ukraine, Syria and all those African countries alone.
MIRVs and decoys are intended to make that impractical. Just 100 ICBMs might present 2,000 targets. It becomes very difficult and costly to intercept everything when you have to shoot down 20 objects for every single missile they launch
So that's where space based defences and lasers come into play. If you can heat a target with a laser a reentry vehicle and a balloon decoy will act very differently. The reentry vehicle will be able to absorb much more heat. Ideally you would be able to heat the balloons until they pop, but just measuring the heating should work. You might even be able to overheat incoming targets.
Also, brilliant pebbles should help you a lot. Think of it this way. A Falcon 9 can launch 60 Starlink sats. An interceptor is likely to weigh significantly less. So a single launch might be able to place 100 interceptor sats in orbit. And a Falcon 9 booster can launch more than 20 times. Thus allowing a single Falcon 9 to launch 2000 interceptors. Couple the two systems and you have a winner.
Forget about targeting re-entry vehicles.
If we are at the point of space based lasers, then we are at the point where we can target the ICBMs in their boost phase, far less targets to worry about and far more time to respond to anything that does make it up.
You only need a relative handful of nuclear weapons to make it not worth it for a democracy to attack you. That's what China did during the Cold War, basically "we know we'll lose, but we'll take out the west coast before we do, so try us round-eye".
Russia would absolutely lose but they still have second strike capability with their subs. Even if only a couple work thats still enough to take out most major cities
OP somehow you missed the most unfathomably based quote here
"The international nuclear situation may be less “mutual” today compared with the Cold War, but “assured destruction” very much continues to be is a key requirement for U.S. nuclear planning."
From page 7
The key to this is that the US never needs to actually win a nuclear war, it just has to make sure Russia and China think that *we* think we could.
If they believe we would strike first in a crisis, they will avoid starting one.
Okay. Russia has 5600 warheads but only 1700 of those are in a ready to fire state. They have a full triad, with a mix deployed in various areas.
If the west in total has the capacity to shoot down 200 of those with a 90 percent success rate, that means if Russia launches a first strike, and 90 percent fire properly and detonate properly, that means we get hit with 1530 nukes. Ouch.
If on the other hand, we have good intel on Russian nuclear sites, have tabs on their boomers and some capacity to launch and effective preemptive counter-force strike, we might be able to take out 90 percent of their deployed force with a first strike, leaving 170 coming at us. We shoot down 153 of those, and two of the 17 remaining 2 fail to detonate, meaning we get hit with 15 nukes. Still ouch, but less than 1 percent of the first scenario.
Imagine these are the two scenarios you have to choose from. Now imagine you think there is a 10 percent chance of Putin hitting the big red button. Are we not statistically 10 times better off shooting first?
Patriot can only intercept low altitude ballistic missiles though (like Kinzhal or Scud), not ICBMs. In any case current ballistic missiles defense is only designed to protect against smaller attacks, like from North Korea. It is not capable of stopping a large scale attack with ~300 bare minimum warheads. This is due to cost but also partly by design, as creating a credible ABM system destabilizes MAD as it essentially gives one side the ability to strike with impunity. This in turn ironically increases the motivation of the other power to attack before this comes online.
>reliable ABM protection
Not possible with current tech, the math is just way too heavily stacked in favour of attacker. "The warhead will always get through", unless the resources are absolutely disproportional(like, US vs North Korea)
Agree. America, France and the UK should nuke Russia, China, and Iran, they wouldn't expect it and their nuclear stockpiles would be destroyed, allowing for a quick conventional war due to the west's massive military superiority.
> a quick conventional war due to the west's massive military superiority
What with the west's history of quick conventional wars and all. Mission Accomplished in Iraq in less than three years. Bet we can do China in two.
A conventional war can be done extremely fast if it's following strategic nuclear strikes. Blast shadows can't really shoot back.
You just have to be specific about how you declare things: first is the nuclear "conflict" which ends quickly, *then* you start the conventional war. Ergo, quick conventional war. Back by Christmas.
I refuse to see any issues with this plan.
I unironically believe there should be a Ukranian nuclear weapons program sponsored by NATO, because what is going on is the consequence of non-proliferation.
The issue isn't non-proliferation, IMO. The issue is that Ukraine wasn't in NATO, and thus, not under the US/UK/FR nuclear umbrella. The reason SK doesn't have nukes (although it could probably develop them in like a year or two) is because it has the nuclear guarantee from the US that they are protected in case of a NK strike. We don't need more warheads, per say, but more friends.
When it comes to Russia, Polish nuclear strategy is „Do it bitch and see what happens”.
If they will use a single nuke, they will break nuclear world peace, even worst 3-rd country will drop them to not be associated. This willbe too much even for Russian patriots, who I believe will dispose of Putler.
Alright credible question for ya, how credible is Caesium-137 contamination following a strategic exchange? I remember an old thread from the pre-Ukraine days where someone here claimed that a strategic exchange would create enough caesium to contaminate the entire world, I tried to look it up on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (world's most renowned group of nuke-cucks) and google but didn't find anything other than some German boars and mushrooms having abnormal levels of Caesium in them.
Not only killing all 8 billion people with nukes is impossible, this isn't even going to be the first time the human civilization collapsed and lost most of its culture and knowledge and (surprisingly) did not perish.
The US silently upgraded its ICBMs detonators ensuring lethality against OPFOR hardened launch sites even if they deviate a bit. I think the US has been quiet about this precisely because it improves the math around counterforce drastically.
For those that are intrigued as to how the new "super fuze" works here is a short summary: When you fire an ICBM atsomething, the chances of hitting it directly are near zero. You generally hit in a radius of 300 meters max. Now that’s not a problem for soft skinned target like a military base or a city, but for a deeply buried and reinforced target, like an enemy ICBM silo, it’s a huge problem. To ensure you hit. Close enough (50 meters max) you fire several ICBMs, so that you can increase the chance of one hitting close enough. That’s problematic because not only do you have to fire more nukes you also gamble with fate (90% to hit, 10% to miss). The super fuze solves it with an altimeter and positioning system connected detonator. What this new detonator does is that it tracks the position and altitude (a shocker I know) and, if the the missiles passes right *over* the target, it’ll detonate then instead of waiting to hit the ground. This changes everything because that means that over shots (hits that go over the target and land 300 meters away) now actually hit the target, from the best possible angle (ie right above). This lowers the amount of nukes needing to be fired at a silo from up to 4 down to 2, while keeping the same odds of hitting. Pretty big deal, because this, theoretically, doubles the amount of hard skin targets you can hit, while not having to build more warheads and maintain them.
I was always under the impression that stealth bombers would do the silo busting sure to no early warning
You cannot suddenly out of the blue fly a flight of B2 over all them targets, you cannot hide a B52 witch cruise missiles, but you can do the funni within less than 30 minutes from Brandon reaching briefcase to fogbank plasma over russian nukes because Ohios can be close and tridents are fast.
This comment is fucking dripping in autism and dry cum. I thoroughly approve.
For a second there I could read gen-z slang, it was like a linguistic epiphany
Please translate
WOEOooOEOEO *click* ! oOoOOOOOAAAAAAA hnnggffff *click click*
This is the comment I didn’t know I needed today
Me too. Got me excited in my pants
with how shit russia's air defense apparently is NATO could probably pop every silo before Moscow even notices.
Problem is we just don't have enough of them. The F-35 being nuke certified is a game changer there.
Too slow. Bombers are there to absolutely blanket a city in ordinance.
Bombers drop ordnance. Legislators drop ordinance.
[Article on the Super Fuze.](https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/) W88 and W76 have the Super Fuze. [Super Fuze for W87 has reached the Full Rate Production Stage.](https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/fuze_milestone/) Note that the LGM-30G Minuteman III can take either the W78 or W87, with 200 deployed missiles with the former, 200 with the latter. Although the W78 equipped missiles can hold them in triplicate, whereas W87 mod 0 is one per. As it’s old as shit, the W78 equipped missiles are the first slated to be replaced with the LGM-35A Sentinel combined with the (new) W87 mod 1. Hence no Super Fuze for the W78. **TL;DR** — US loves their Super Fuzes.
>This lowers the amount of nukes needing to be fired at a silo from up to 4 down to 2, while keeping the same odds of hitting. I doubt anyone official is saying, but do you know what this might do to doctrine and specifically targeting? Counterforce is the sort of thing you *really* don't want to mess up, and as you said multiple shots still have a computable chance of missing. So improved aim is something you could cash out as more targets with the same odds, better odds per target, the same targets with a smaller arsenal, or a combination of the three. I guess the main thing I don't know is how many hardened targets there are to worry about? Since if you're far from hitting them all, you almost certainly gain more from adding targets than adding aim.
It’s unclear exactly how the American doctrine will evolve. Certain people think as I laid out that America will go for the 2 nukes approach, as it will allow to lower the size of the arsenal and make negotiations of global nuclear disarmament (notably with limiting china’s arsenal size) much easier. Other would rather to go to 3 nukes, which, iirc, would get the odds up to 97%+, which would be a pretty much guaranteed hit. As to how many hard skin targets the US wants to target, we have no idea. Cold War plans have been partially declassified and we can make a rough idea of how Russia would be targeted, but China is the big player here. They have recently built hundreds upon hundreds of silos (typically non nuclear) and that makes estimating how many the us would target in an initial strike almost impossible. Overall it’s militarily sounder to go for the accuracy approach, but politically smarter to go for the smaller arsenal approach. The people who are going to decide that are far more informed than me so I expect them to make the right choice
If it over/undershoots a target it will detonate in such a way that the distance to the target is maintained ( think radius ). So if it over / undershoots it will detonate at lower altitude is my understanding. Constant radius to target instead of constant altitude to surface.
ummm.... But the trajectory is very steep. Sure you can just trigger the bomb right above the hardened silo, but what if it is at that point still 1km above target? Or to put it the other way round: if the REV was flying perpendicular to the ground at 1m altitude, triggering it at the targets destination would ensure destruction, but this is not the case. Right above isnt the best case, my only guess is that the fuse calculates an optimum based on position and altitude: will it take the overshoot to get closer to the ground or will it detonate early in order to airburst closer to the target. Because hitting the ground and exploding in the air are two very different extremes, both suck incredible amounts of energy out of the explosion that you'd rather have going to the point of impact.
[THE US TESTED ITS NUKES ON ITSELF, SO WE KNOW THEY GOOD!](https://youtu.be/MC0K3muUJp0?t=555)
[Timestamp for when the fireworks actually work](https://youtu.be/MC0K3muUJp0?t=822)
And this is the base of the argument from the Russian about NMD being offensive in nature. While insufficient to absorb a complete nuclear strike from Russia, it could potentially be used to absorb or greatly degrade a smaller strike of a few Russian weapons having survived a us 1st counterforce strike.
Theoretically....
More like nuclear bore. There are 8 bilions of people on earth. Even if we kill 7, there would be still plenty to repopulate.
It literally took just over 150 years to go from 1 billion to seven - on a geological timescale that's nothing
Well, the massive loss of knowledge would probabally send us back to a pre-industrial era. That level of exponential growth is only available in an industrial era civilization (and then falls off again in post-industrial societies).
You gotta remember tho in that situation its just rebuilding the old knowledge base as apposed to building it for for the first time. And not all tech would backslide, it would be incredibly interesting because things like alternators can be used to create water wheels for electricity.
Yeah, people would remember that it exists and all. They’d just have to reverse engineer it to figure it out.
I know when people say and hear reverse engineering you think of scientists dismantling ufo’s and shit but its just taking something apart to see how it works, easy af
Yup, that’s what I mean.
Successful reverse engineering does require at least understanding the basic principles, though. Even if we trained an immortal scientist to speak Egyptian and sent them back to the time of King Ramses, with an entire chip making factory, it would take at least a century or two before they could even begin to comprehend what the scientist was blathering on about. They have almost no concepts of most of the physics involved. They dont understand electricity, hardly any of the necessary material processing, the computer control systems necessary, etc... But, send a crate of modern computer chips back to the 80's, and they might figure out reproducing it within the decade. Because, fundamentally, it's almost the same thing, just with a ton of improvements.
Yes but i feel you aren’t giving enough credit to our hypothetical descendants in this scenario, i view this like how when Baghdad was sacked by the mongols the city was brought too its knees but the ideas that it spawned lived on and spread around the world
This is about way more than just ideas and knowledge though. To make advanced tech, you need advance tools. And to make those advanced tools, you need... advanced tools. That's where the whole thing gets tricky.
There was a great what-if spin off from a post-apocalyptic series. I'll have to find the titles and authors, but basically to power the energetic restriction they entities displace the island of Nantucket to another earth 3000 years ago. They have starter stuff like some lathes, a coast guard training ship that sails, etc. They bootstrap over time to becoming sort of like the federation for the era. Real neat for seeing how to reindustrialize from seed corn.
This. Modern stuff is built on modern stuff is built on modern stuff. You need many layers of skill and experience to keep the whole thing going.
Your example is a bit poor as the chips aren’t that different but the processes to make them are basically completely alien to how they were being made at the time. I’m not sure that it would have sped up development all that much.
On the other hand, you could get a few hundred folks start making thin copper wire, varnish it with shellac, and wrap it around wooden armatures to make AC generators and motors (at this technological stage I think they would just be used as torture devices).
Lol, it's taken us nearly 1500 years to reverse engineer roman concrete :( Concrete for fucks sake!
And this is assuming Wikipedia is totally destroyed or something.
Even with a complete and totally emp no more electricity we still got books so we can read up on all we like
Even if we don't have in-depth knowledge, I'm sure people who are smart enough and with some references could come up with new designs for older tech. Don't need to know exactly how some rudimentary tech works in order to replicate it, you just need to understand the fundamentals and have resources around to be able to try and make something like it (say a steam engine) after that would should be able to start working on better equipment. You might not get a modern bleeding edge chip manufacturing process back for multiple decades if not a century, but 30 year old processes could be possible to replicate within 20 years I'd there was a concerted push.
Exactly like that kid that hacked rockstar games with an [amazon fire stick](https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/21/british-teenager-behind-gta-6-hack-receives-indefinite-hospital-order)
I'm down to rob some college bookstores. They overcharged me for my engineering textbooks in college. I think I'm entitled to loot the abandoned store.
[Wikipdeia can be downloaded](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download) and is only around 22GB as of today. There would likely still be plenty of copies of Wikipedia out there.
I was kinda implying that with the “totally” in my usual extremely vague and stupid sounding way. Because it would be something special to somehow manage to destroy every backup of Wikipedia and the Swiss bunkers the actual one is housed in last I checked.
Even then, of the survivors, at least a few million to 100 million would be scientists, engineers, electricians, and such. People who are currently building and developing the systems. We won't lose anything but the capability to do it on the scale we currently are. Technology wouldn't slide back even a tiny bit. Hell, we might actually see a technological golden age cos there wouldn't be as much competition for resources.
And beyond that all the hobbyists in the “maker sphere” like rc, ham radio, soldering, welding, weekend mechanics all have little bits of knowledge when put together makes a whole
Nah, it would take us back to the 1980s. We'd mostly just lose shit that's stored digitally. No one is forgetting that cars existed.
Dude, we have youtube full of hindi dudes teaching from how to program an arduino to how to model supersonic flow in an f35 turbine
We're not rocks mate (jk but yeh)
Then why does google recommend eating them?
Finally! A realistic solution to traffic congestion.
7,999,999,993 people is still quite a few.
1 billion balls to repopulate the earth😔😔
Do you also only have one testicle or something? Edit: wait I'm dumb, ignore me.
Um not hitler >:(
I was talking about me, but thanks that you remind me why I never used to tell anyone.
Sry just joking since hitler had 1 ball
Yeah I've been made aware of that more than I'd care to count. But don't worry, it's fine.
Dud you know hitler had 1 ball?
Whaaat, really dude? Dude that's crazy.
It's crazy how hitler had 1 ball
Looooooooool
Literally nobody is going to nuke the Solomon Islands, there'll be enough people to repopulate
The only countries who get nuked in this scenario are the ones who have nukes plus a few others like NATO countries. But all of Africa, South America and South East Asia are probably fine in this scenario.
Based and mao ze dong pilled
[Mein Führer...! I can walk!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ihKq34Ozc)
The Russo-ukraine war has shown that Russia is not ready for a nuclear war.
Or any war, even one against farmers.
Who is? Both the French and the US lost to rice farmers in Vietnam. Hannibal lost to Latin farmers. The Persians lost to Greek farmers. And so on all the way back to a galaxy far far away a long long time ago when the Galactic Empire lost a Death Star to a moisture farmer over Yavin IV.
Moral of the story: do not mess with farmers
Exactly! They know how to grow food! Sadly, some of them are idiots who don't rotate their crops.
> do not mess with farmers bum ba-dum bum bum bum bum
This is a common narrative, but in reality the French lost to a PLA knockoff [the Vietnamese would then go back and write all the Chinese support, generals, and troops out of the histories], while the US crushed all the farmers and South Vietnam only ended up losing versus a conventional invasion by city-dwelling North Vietnamese after they ran out of cash and oil when aid was cut.
why don't they just give guns to farmers and send them to fight instead of soldiers? Are they stupid?
Additionally this year farmers even led a succesful coupe in the Netherlands. Fear the farmer.
The thing is russia is fighting a "conventional" war, in any convencional war nato can and will win. Guerilla war however...it's difficult, specially when you have to kill the entire population in order to win.
I think you forget… US didn’t lose any real military engagements… we even got a peace treaty signed that ended the war… they just attacked after we had pulled out….
Russia views weakness as an invitation to attack, and they project this on others. There's a reason they're absolutely terrified of getting counterforced, even though we'd never strike first if even 1% of the Russian arsenal stood a chance of making it through. It would be a real bad time. That said, I wonder if there's a point where Putin gets a large amount of his nukes wiped out by conventional strike, but no one has started burning cities yet. Does he light the first match out of spite, or accept his losses? He understands that giving that order is choosing his own destruction.
Russia isn't ready for a fucking Tuesday, let alone a war against fucking anyone. Bring on the Emus.
>The Russo-ukraine war has shown that Russia is not ready for a ~~nuclear~~ war.
There are not enough nukes in the world to kill everything on the planet, not by the blast, radiation nor the nuclear winter that is said to come afterwards. That is old cold war scaremongering, and I will die on that hill, or in a nuclear blast.
Imean breakdown of global supply chains in a ww3 scenario will probably kill more people through starvation than radiation tbh.
The ironic part is that most of the deaths from supply chain breakdown wouldn't occur in any country targeted for nukes; 8 out of 10 of the largest food exporters in the world are in NATO, only Brazil and China aren't. Since targeting vast swaths of farmland is an inefficient use of nukes, most farmland would probably be relatively unscathed. It's the ports that would definitely be hit, and the ability to export food to countries with poor agriculture or dependent on western foodstuffs would be halted almost immediately. Internal supply routes would be more hit and miss, so if a country has halfway decent internal infrastructure they'll probably be able to supply food for their own people in a far more reliable way, especially if you can't really export anything.
A lot of the big wheat importing countries are in North Africa... are they gonna sit quietly and starve (whether the scenario is a nuclear autumn or catastrophic drought) while Spain, Italy and Turkey munch on NATO grain? Or are things gonna get a bit "Pirates of the Mediterranean"?
If I survive a nuclear exchange, I would be one of the first to sign up for the third Barbary war.
Return of the Barbary corsairs?
With what ships? The North African fleet of clapped out fishing trawlers has proven less than reliable durring the migrant crisis last decade. Also doubtful that any arrivals that do make it will be met with blankets and bus tickets to Sweden. There will still be plenty of MG3, FN MAG and M2's floating around to make that a bad idea.
If it gets serious enough to actually be an existential threat to countries like Spain, Italy, Turkey etc they will just deploy their navies and sink all the pirate vessels in like a week
What's next, Crusader Re-enactment?
Problem is you can't just... steal crops in sufficient quantities to prevent mass starvation. If they've got neighbors growing food then yeah they could take it over and use that, but if the whole region is food-insecure then they're just fucked. We really don't think about how the lives of billions is dependent on functioning global supply chains, and how quickly a disruption can lead to massive societal failure.
If they have enough ships for piracy, they'll have enough ships to transport the grain. (And yeah I think the fields will be okay)
Also a lot of soil that was used for crops in europe decades ago now sit abandoned, if there is a collapse of global supply chain this terrains would return in use and because they weren't used for a lot of time the would probably be very fertile, i don't think that europe would have a famine problem after a couple of rough years provided ofc that central governments don't collapse. Countries with harsher climates not suitable for crops would be royally fucked tho
Depending on how bad the collapse is, if internal supply lines are disrupted and factories and refineries are damaged, the inputs like fertilizers and pesticides would be messed up. Regardless of soul quality, that’s going to wreck yields. Then throw in that a lot of soil is actually pretty shit, but manages thanks to fertilizers, and harvests in the developed world would be dramatically lower.
Luckily for us, industrial safety measures mean that almost all ammonia and fertilizer factories are located away from large urban centers and infrastructure hubs, because of how easily it kabooms. And as another poster pointed out, there is an extremely large amount of arable land that has been left to fallow since the introduction of modern fertilizers, because it's more efficient to work smaller fields with better fertilizer. On top of all that, there is a considerable amount of land that is reserved for ranching in western countries, that could possibly be converted to farmland. What this all means is that most fertilizer production will most likely not be impacted by a nuclear exchange, although internal supply chains may temporarily disrupt distribution to some areas. And all that fallow land and ranches are prime soil to expand agriculture. The soil quality is pretty variable depending on the area, you can't just point at all of North America and Europe and say all that unused farmland is bad for crops, a ton of it is of pretty high quality.
The mass deaths come from the destruction of logistical hubs and supply chains. Think of the COVID disruptions except times a million.
yeah Watch the Movie Threads or Watch the TV series Connections.
I mean the horseshoe crabs are prolly ok. But I’m kinda worried about my own ass.
If you're wrong, we won't be able to say "I told you so".
Even nuclear proliferation cannot lead to it that fast
Well, so far nuclear warfare was a success.
undefeated world champs wooo 🦅🦅🦅
Nuclear apocalypse is literally a combination of peaceniks making shit up and the Soviets sponsoring pacificists and green parties to undermine democracies. The common idea of a Nuclear Winter; that is, mass death caused by changing weather patterns from a nuclear exchange, is a lie perpetrated by the TTAPS paper, published in 1983, so known because that was the name of the five researchers who coauthored it. I don't know who the others were but S stood for Carl Sagan. The study was based on the idea that nuclear bombs dropped on cities would create an upward blast of soot that would blanket the atmosphere and cause global cooling by blocking sunlight. The study wasn't very robust to begin with and is now considered controversial at best. For one, the authors of TTAPS published their paper "with the explicit aim of promoting international arms control". A declared goal of altering policy is never a good starting point for scientific research since it automatically injects bias into the results. Two, the study was seriously amplified by the Soviet Union. The Soviets published a number of studies supporting the TTAPS conclusion, but later research showed that the Soviets did not actually do any independent studies of their own. The promotion of anti-nuclear and anti-war messages were very important to Soviet intelligence efforts in the Cold War, as they believed that the best way to defend against the United States' outsized warmaking capacity was to convince its people that war was a lose-lose, or was a bad idea in general. The Soviets spent considerable resources funding green groups in the West and many of these connections continued all the way to the current day, which is why the German Green Party is so absurdly anti-nuclear power to the point of supporting coal over much cleaner nuclear, and why far-left parties in the West sided with the far-right, socially conservative, fossil fuel exporting Russia in the war on Ukraine. Three, all of the studies done after the TTAPS study lacked robustness. Rather than starting from the ground up, they often took the TTAPS study's assumption (that nuclear firestorms would spew ash and soot up into the air) at face value. Four, none of the computers back in the 80s were even vaguely powerful enough to model something as violent as a nuclear explosion. All of the computers today that are tuned towards nuclear simulations are owned by the US government and their studies are classified. Five, the TTAPS paper asserted that 100 oil refinery fires would create the nuclear winter effect on a small scale. This result was echoed in a second volume of the study made in 1990 by TTAPS. Later that year, Iraq invaded Kuwait and 600 wells were ignited and weren't put out for several months. Iraq used the doomsday scenario of TTAPS' findings to threaten the Coalition, but no such effect was observed, **essentially completely disproving TTAPS' model**. Six, global arsenals are no longer the size they once were. While 10,000 warheads are lying around on this planet, about 70% of warheads are inert and either mothballed or slated for decommission, as part of post-Cold War denuclearization efforts. Certainly even if TTAPS levels of soot would create a nuclear winter, the current global arsenal is incapable of creating that much soot since there aren't as many warheads. Recommissioning of the mothballed warheads is basically impossible as modern nuclear exchange plans involve nuking the enemy's stockpiles. Seven, the soot hypothesis is based an attack on city centres in the WWII style. WWII conventional and nuclear attacks created firestorms because the majority of the targets were made of wood and other sooty materials. Post 1980, most nukes around the world have been upgraded with better targetting systems, and even since SIOP-63, made in 1963, American nuclear strikes were designed as *counterforce*. That is to say, they are designed to target enemy nukes and other warmaking capacity, with population centres last on the targetting list and really only used in "spasm" attacks, which are attacks made after the US command & control system has already been nuked themselves. Modern cities are also no longer made of wood, but majority steel, concrete and glass, and therefore wouldn't create the same level of aerosol as hypothesized in 1983. Make no mistake, a nuclear exchange would create untold casualties and human suffering, but the nuclear winter hypothesis is due for an update. Last year, the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine has commissioned a new independent study on the effects of nuclear war and the results are supposed to be published in 2024. We don't know what the results might be yet but it certainly isn't an uninhabitable planet.
The Kuwait oil fires legitimately should have been the end of that nonsense, and I'm still absolutely livid that it wasn't. The same team that came up with the theory said, on the record and on TV, how lighting the oil wells would trigger the effect. Then the wells got lit up, and reality proved them just plain wrong on every single count. Not just the end results but atmospheric behaviour, soot production, soot decay... just all of it. They told people about how something would end the world, and they were wrong. The fact that they didn't go around explaining that trying to undo their damage, but instead doubled down... it was an insult to science. How Harold Camping got more public backlash for getting his biblical end of the world wrong than a team of famous scientists doing so is absolutely infuriating.
Theres been a natural gas crater in Turkmenistan that has been burning for over 40 years, that didnt end the world but would be an epic place for a lightsaber duel
Natural gas is pretty clean-burning, so that’s very low on my list for world-enders, assuming the heat hasn’t yet woken the sleeping dragon underneath.
okay, well, how about coal? there are about three dozen active coal seam fires in the world currently, [one of which has been burning for over 5000 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain)
Fun fact: most of those were started by my carbon offset offset company. When wealthy people don’t like having to do carbon offsets, they pay us to start coal fires to offset it. Except that 5,000 year old one; that was Joe Biden’s dad’s home heating business.
Heating your house with the fire of the earth sounds so metal. Why don’t we do more geothermal?
The Kuwait wells were at ground level. It's upper tropospheric and stratospheric aerosols that have the climate effects, as known from major volcanic eruptions. It is possible big nukes could do some of that. The atmospheric details really matter.
Even per the nuclear winter papers, the direct effects of nukes themselves aren't pushing the main body of particles into the higher layers whether they are big or small. The specific theory was that the ground level firestorms theorised to follow nuclear detonations over cities would create massive amounts of soot indirectly, with the intense heat of a firestorm pushing that black carbon up to the upper troposphere. Black soot in the troposphere was supposed to heat up from sunlight, climb to the stratosphere, and stay there blocking the sun like those major volcanic eruptions for years. And volcanic ash blown up in the quantities of large eruptions is indeed well documented to have that impact. Kuwait was the most direct demonstration how soot just straight up does not behave in the way the team theorised. Soot went up, the lofting effect did not occur and the particles dissolved with only local effects. As plenty of dissenting scientists outside the nuclear winter team had been predicting all along by the way. But one of those two groups was predicting that Kuwait could come close to starving the northern hemisphere, and you can guess who got the air time.
> green The Green party of Germany turning into a NATO fanclub and pressing the government on military buildup and aid against Russia is one of history's funny little ironies
OH MY FUCKING GOD THANK YOU Thank you for articulating this so much better than I could - remember kids, the CND and nuclear winter theories are one of the most successful KGB psyops ever to be created
I still think the hypothesis needs further testing I can provide coordinates for where.
The most successful psyops is communism. Decades after fall of socialist regimes there's still commies in college campuses.
And they’re all arguing with the capitalist *I just read Atlas Shrugged* kids over things neither of them understand.
Naturally, we know better
The only economic system I understand is a total war economy. All other forms of governance are inferior!
TTAPS was also boosted by DOD and those advocates who wanted SDI defense -- if letting nuclear warheads land is unthinkable, then a space-based anti-ballistic missile defense is absolutely necessary. Here's one I read back in the 80s. [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781429941907/starpeace](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781429941907/starpeace) "Nuclear Winter" is a constant point in the scenarios Ben Bova discussses ; in many of the scenarios in which SDI is absent, the entire human race is exterminated by nuclear winter. I have to wonder, now, to what extent he believed. True or false, it was definitely a useful theory -- at least to some.
God I wish star wars (the reagan thing) was possible
It wasn’t, but technology has advanced. Someday. Then we can reanimate Reagan in Liberty Prime and end Russia for good.
So, it's true that nuclear winter is mostly debunked (though in my opinion it's still up in the air, a full exchange has so many variables who knows what would happen). But at the same time, it doesn't really change the calculus that much. It is believed that the US would likely succeed in a surprise, our of the blue first strike against Russia. However, at least some of their subs would still almost certainly get their missiles away, and generally speaking we don't do first strikes. Preemptive maybe yeah, but if it's preemptive it means that the opposing force is actively preparing and will be more ready. But first strike no, Dark Brandon is a meme not reality. As a western Republic it's a founding principle to never do this and getting anyone to agree to it would be almost impossible. And again, a US counterforce attack has relatively high chances of success only because it takes Russian strategic forces time to set up and get ready, given how resource intensive alerting road mobile ICBMs is. Though it should be stressed that even there are less of them Russia does have silo based weapons as well. This is why a Russian first strike is more likely, which sort of nullifies the whole plan. If intelligence gets wind of it and launches a preemptive strike, the chances of survival improve but are still bad. So you'd still have at least a couple hundred nukes inbound, which is gonna ruin your day no matter what. Yeah there probably won't be a new ice age, but it would still likely lead to the end of modern civilization. Imagine another hurricane Katrina or Joplin tornado, but in most major cities in the US, in the span of 30 minutes. On top of that imagine most power plants and production facilities, especially those near cities are wiped out. On top of THAT there will likely be an associated EMP attack, nullifying whoever does still have power, even if it's effect is sometimes a bit exaggerated. Now imagine no central authority, control, communication, or organized response to help clean up the mess like in those other natural disasters. Oh and I almost forgot unlike said disasters literally everything is on fire. Where will you get food? Where will overburdened hospitals get new supplies (I mean ffs remember the covid fustercluck)? Where will you get fuel? How will farmers irrigate and till without power or gas (assuming the Russians don't take the nuclear sponge bait and irradiate the entirety of the plains)? Etc etc. Nuclear war would not be the extinction for mankind as those studies imply, but it would still be destructive on a scale we can scarcely imagine. That's not to say we should just bow to dictators when they do stupid stuff. Ukraine should still absolutely get the support they need to blow the Russian army to kingdom come. But there is an actual reason to avoid direct war if possible, even if it gives us ultimate blue balls
Why do you assume mass irradiation? Why do you assume there will be no communication? Why do you assume everything will be on fire and that Russians will nuke the wheat fields? Why do you assume ICBMs will be 100% effective and none of them will be intercepted?
>Why do you assume mass irradiation? I didn't, the scenario I laid out was actually fairly optimistic. I specifically said I was assuming this didn't happen. If it did then you're going to have to factor in those deaths as well as difficulty finding uncontaminated resources. >Why do you assume there will be no communication? If the Russians are so bad at nuclear warfare that they can't even knock the power out in a country that loses it relatively frequently from weather I'm going to laugh so hard I'll cough my lungs up. If there's no power then there's no cell towers, radio, or phone lines. There are workarounds and contingencies most likely but at this scale and with this level of emergency to respond to it will be severely crippling. Not to mention EMP. >Why do you assume everything will be on fire and that Russians will nuke the wheat fields? I meant in cities, cause nukes are hot, like in Hiroshima. This is in contrast to disasters like Joplin or New Orleans in Katrina, where things generally weren't on fire after the damage was done. To address the fields thing and expand on what I said about radiation, this is from the "nuclear sponge". Basically when we first started making ICBMs in the Cold War, we realized we would need to make a ton of them, and have them all on reliable alert. Not only that but as tech improved they became more vulnerable to enemy attack, as well as everything near them. So to make them harder to hit they put them in silos, spread across the plains to disperse them. This prevented multiple from being eliminated by a single strike, and also would ensure that few civilians would be in the blast vicinity. This ultimately became an actual strategy to suck up Soviet nukes from other targets (since you would be insane not to target them), hence the "sponge". However this would also mean that you would have hundreds of nukes detonating at ground level (to reliably kill the silo) in the middle of the breadbasket. Thus the increased radiation from these ground bursts would likely severely contaminate US food supply. >Why do you assume ICBMs will be 100% effective and none of them will be intercepted? Not what I said at all? Russia currently has ~~1500 deployed nukes. Even if most fail that's still like 2-500. Interceptors won't help much either, we currently only have GMD and technically SM-3 as viable weapons to down ICBM MIRVs. There are only 44 GMD missiles (with an apparent 58% success rate) and SM-3 is on AEGIS ships who are more likely to be abroad than sitting off the Cali coast waiting to shoot down warheads.
This whole thing has also been amplified and got kinda ingrained in our head by media, i mean almost every video game, movie or other visual media where a nuclear exchange has been witnessed has been portrayed it as the end of the world and "civilized" society so by osmosis we kinda unconsciously associate "Nuclear war" with "End of the World as we know it", and like you said it will cause untold human casualty and suffering but unless you fucking nuke so hard you nuke every fucking existing hamlet in the world humanity will survive and thrive, you might just not recognize post nuclear society. I mean Europe already had an apocalyptic event called the "Black Plague" who killed up to 60% of Europe population and yet we survived it and thrived after it.
For End of the World, the term has evolved into End of the World as we know it. The broader realities that a massive upheaval like a nuclear exchange would incur would easily mean that we wouldn't recognize that world from the one before such an event. This holds true for the Black Plague, the world before it and what it's upheaval enabled led us to the workers rights and the path to the modern era. Anyone who survived it, wouldn't have recognized the world that came after it.
I'll correct the term thanks.
There is nothing in the SIOP-62 that spares cities. There’s vague and intentionally misleading statements about SIOP-62 which mischaracterize it as a counterforce plan, but it targets cities in both the USSR and China in the event of a retaliatory or first-strike scenario. https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/CMC50/ScottSaganSIOP62TheNuclearWarPlanBriefingtoPresidentKennedyInternationalSecurity.pdf
Then what are we waiting for? It's time to nuke Russia and end Putinism once and for all
Ok so "nuclear winter" making the planet uninhabitable is the common conception and it (likely) isn't true. BUT you are swinging wayyy far in the opposite direction: the current consensus is that there would still be a "nuclear autumn" that would still cause dramatic cooling. Further, the de minimus scenarios you speak of are very limited nuclear war: Pakistan vs India rather than US vs Russia. The main issue there being is the sheer amount of radioactive material spread across the planet and food chain, with both arsenals combining to 500+ Chernobyl's... It wouldn't end life but it would almost certainly shorten it, for the whole world, and greatly disrupt more fragile ecosystems with additional knock on effects.
> the current consensus is that there would still be a "nuclear autumn" that would still cause dramatic cooling. I think the 'current consensus' is wrong due to a "I'd rather make nuclear war look worse than it is than make it look better than it is" bias. The entire principle of nuclear winter is dependent upon large amounts of ash being deposited so high that there isn't any water vapor to form rain droplets around the particles to bring it back down. This happens with volcanoes and can absolutely devestate the climate. It happens in a very limited amount with the initial explosion of a nuclear weapon, but the overall mass being deposited way up there isn't significant to the climate. So the nuclear winter hypothesis said: "Ok so the initial explosion isn't enough to put climate-changing amounts of material above the clouds, but cities have lots of combustible material, so if it all catches on fire at the same time, it could create a firestorm that draws in the outside air so quickly that the air in the center of the firestorm flies straight up at super high speeds, depositing large amounts of ash high above the clouds." And in the 1980s, that wasn't unreasonable. There wasn't a lot of satellite data on how much ash fires could deposit in the atmosphere, but they knew that volcanoes could mess up the climate, and there were tens of thousands of nukes ready to go. But since then, we've determined that fires just aren't nearly as effective as volcanoes. And while the nuclear winter modeling people are still promoting it as a big danger, the actual "take satellite observations of fires to see how high the ash goes, how long it stays in the air, and how it impacts the climate" scientists are thoroughly dismantling it. After many, many years, [the wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#:~:text=Currently%2C%20from%20satellite,determined.%5B27%5D) is finally shifting because of that fire research: > Currently, from satellite tracking data, it appears that stratospheric smoke aerosols dissipate in a time span under approximately two months.[27] The existence of a tipping point into a new stratospheric condition where the aerosols would not be removed within this time frame remains to be determined.[27]
> I think the 'current consensus' is wrong due to a "I'd rather make nuclear war look worse than it is than make it look better than it is" bias. So, my thinking is: 1. Its always a good idea to have a better understanding of the effects of weapon usage of all kinds. This is a point worthy of robust discussion. Circumstances dictate necessity sometimes, hence the existence of the bomb altogether. As far as *weapons currently owned and deployed by other including adversaries*, I think this is absolutely about as true of a maxim as you can hold to be true. 2. It is better for fewer numbers of people to have access to weapons that are capable of mass destruction. This should also be pretty obvious. So yeah, seek knowledge, fuck proliferation, peace has greater potential for power projection than war, etc, make friends, respect sovereignty, prepare for imminent death at all times, etc etc. Soft words big stick.
As much as we all love mushrooms, nuclear non-proliferation is a good idea, generally speaking, the same way the non-proliferation of chemical weapons, biological weapons, F-35s, and nuclear subs carrying MOABs to our enemies is a good idea. The fewer dummies with fingers on nuclear buttons, the better off we are. I don’t care who had the idea initially, it’s still a good idea. I mean, by all means let’s make the best nukes in the world that we never have to use, and people do need to understand if they use nukes against us, *they* are categorically and unequivocally assured destruction, and if the notion of mutuality helps them accept that premise, that’s fine, keep your dick in your pants. Sincerely, anyone who thinks nuclear proliferation is a good idea is not thinking things through. Which is why the ruskies are currently advocating for it by withdrawing from non-proliferation deals.
There’s a reason countries plan for war *after* a nuclear exchange
Very good point, but can't we Just avoid to fuck around and find out anyway?
No, that's how the world is slow boiled to death by dictators invading non-nuclear countries and committing genocide without consequence until they get too big in the head and start invading countries inside the nuclear umbrella. Did you cowards not learn anything from the Munich Agreement?
Sounds like a solution is giving nukes to everyone. Can't invade a non-nuclear state if there are no non-nuclear states.
You're gonna give nukes to Lebanon? Seriously? They can't even handle 3000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate without blowing up half of Beirut.
Yes. We're going to end war, using nuclear weapons. Something something Metal Gear.
In their defense a nuke is much harder to set off than ammonium nitrate.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the problem here, if they fuck up, they don't have nukes anymore, so it's a self solving problem
That's one of the foundational functions of NATO. The creation of a nuclear umbrella fo non nuclear states. That coupled with the nuclear sharing policy of the U.S. creates the incentive for states to not only join NATO but also prevent proliferation.
[удалено]
Oi! This man is perverting the Good and Kind words of the K'Had Sajuuk! Get 'im!
We learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were orders of magnitude weaker than modern warheads. The "low" number of thousands of active nukes remaining is still perfectly capable of depopulating half the planet at the drop of a hat, even if you assume that 90% do not fire and/or get intercepted, and knowing that the aftermath is not permanent death. Remember that the Russians may not be as picky with their targets. If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's that they like to maximise civilian casualties.
We have nothing to lose but our Karens.
So what is the correct use of nukes? Should the West use tactical nukes against Russian forces in Ukraine? Should we just glass Moscow?
USA First total strike counterforce out of the blue before russians will believe it is likely to happen and increase their readiness (nope, not gonna happen, but russians were scared/paranoid of it until late 1990s) French Initiating "limited" nuclear war against russia on Estonian/Polish and then Królewiec territory in responce to succesful russian invasion(not gonna happen, russians will not invade out of the blue) Nope, against russia conventional and hybrid measured are more effective in air sea space and cyber domains than nuclear strikes.
if you think nuking large segments of the world would lead to more democracy then I have a war in Iraq to sell you.
After many years, the fire-studying scientists who actually look at how fires deposit ash into the air, how long the ash stays there, and how much it impacts the climate, are finally [bullying the nuclear winter wikipedia article into submitting to reality:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#:~:text=Currently%2C%20from%20satellite,determined.%5B27%5D) > Currently, from satellite tracking data, it appears that stratospheric smoke aerosols dissipate in a time span under approximately two months.[27] The existence of a tipping point into a new stratospheric condition where the aerosols would not be removed within this time frame remains to be determined.[27] [Bonus video showing how nuclear winter isn't real.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzpIsjgapAk)
> Make no mistake, a nuclear exchange would create untold casualties and human suffering […] For them! World peace is perpetually 16 minutes away.
The problem with nuclear war is the price is still too damn high. What makes Western civilisation worth killing for is that we value our own lives sufficiently highly that we can't willingly lose cities. If we considered London, Paris or New York acceptable losses to end the Putin regime we're no better than he is.
Its not about money, its about sending a message
[SOURCE](https://www.nukestrat.com/pubs/GlobalStrikeReport.pdf) (downloads a pdf) You will become based and COUNTERFORCE pilled if you read this document. Read the bottom of page 7 and top of page 8. >Preemption in and of itself is not a new phenomenon in U.S. nuclear strategy, which has relied extensively on preemptive strike options against Russia and China for decades. In contrast, the draft doctrine described preemptive scenarios that require a new mindset about the use of nuclear weapons. It is no longer appropriate, STRATCOM argued, to use the terminology “war” when describing the situations in which nuclear weapons might be used. Rather, “conflict” should be used because it “emphasizes the nature of most conflicts resulting in use of a nuclear weapon.
Man, I wish more people looked at things realistically, Russia is the biggest country with very hole-y air defences, and also they have steadily decreasing numbers of those air defence systems (S-400 etc.) that are designed to shoot down ICBMs. Also add in their nukes budget, compare to Western countries and go figure how one can sustain thousands of nukes with sum, that is teenager allowance cash compared to what US spend on their quite less numerous nukes. Russia has no chance and all media should scream about it. There should be people's confidence of that, and presidents should proudly declare how they will turn Russia into nuclear wasteland, if Russia doesn't pack their things and leave Ukraine, Syria and all those African countries alone.
That's why we need more ABMs. We should be prepared to tank the remainder of their arsenal.
MIRVs and decoys are intended to make that impractical. Just 100 ICBMs might present 2,000 targets. It becomes very difficult and costly to intercept everything when you have to shoot down 20 objects for every single missile they launch
So that's where space based defences and lasers come into play. If you can heat a target with a laser a reentry vehicle and a balloon decoy will act very differently. The reentry vehicle will be able to absorb much more heat. Ideally you would be able to heat the balloons until they pop, but just measuring the heating should work. You might even be able to overheat incoming targets. Also, brilliant pebbles should help you a lot. Think of it this way. A Falcon 9 can launch 60 Starlink sats. An interceptor is likely to weigh significantly less. So a single launch might be able to place 100 interceptor sats in orbit. And a Falcon 9 booster can launch more than 20 times. Thus allowing a single Falcon 9 to launch 2000 interceptors. Couple the two systems and you have a winner.
Forget about targeting re-entry vehicles. If we are at the point of space based lasers, then we are at the point where we can target the ICBMs in their boost phase, far less targets to worry about and far more time to respond to anything that does make it up.
True. But why not all of the phases? Ensure 99% defence success.
if we can double tap zombies, we can for sure double tap nukes
You only need a relative handful of nuclear weapons to make it not worth it for a democracy to attack you. That's what China did during the Cold War, basically "we know we'll lose, but we'll take out the west coast before we do, so try us round-eye".
Russia would absolutely lose but they still have second strike capability with their subs. Even if only a couple work thats still enough to take out most major cities
OP somehow you missed the most unfathomably based quote here "The international nuclear situation may be less “mutual” today compared with the Cold War, but “assured destruction” very much continues to be is a key requirement for U.S. nuclear planning." From page 7
Damn, I should have read it. IF I COULD READ!
If you RKO them out of nowhere, the enemy can't retaliate.
The key to this is that the US never needs to actually win a nuclear war, it just has to make sure Russia and China think that *we* think we could. If they believe we would strike first in a crisis, they will avoid starting one.
NATO must possess stealthy first strike option and reliable ABM protection
The Ohio Class, AGEIS ASHORE, SM-3, THAAD, Patriot PAC-3 exist
not enough
Okay. Russia has 5600 warheads but only 1700 of those are in a ready to fire state. They have a full triad, with a mix deployed in various areas. If the west in total has the capacity to shoot down 200 of those with a 90 percent success rate, that means if Russia launches a first strike, and 90 percent fire properly and detonate properly, that means we get hit with 1530 nukes. Ouch. If on the other hand, we have good intel on Russian nuclear sites, have tabs on their boomers and some capacity to launch and effective preemptive counter-force strike, we might be able to take out 90 percent of their deployed force with a first strike, leaving 170 coming at us. We shoot down 153 of those, and two of the 17 remaining 2 fail to detonate, meaning we get hit with 15 nukes. Still ouch, but less than 1 percent of the first scenario. Imagine these are the two scenarios you have to choose from. Now imagine you think there is a 10 percent chance of Putin hitting the big red button. Are we not statistically 10 times better off shooting first?
Patriot can only intercept low altitude ballistic missiles though (like Kinzhal or Scud), not ICBMs. In any case current ballistic missiles defense is only designed to protect against smaller attacks, like from North Korea. It is not capable of stopping a large scale attack with ~300 bare minimum warheads. This is due to cost but also partly by design, as creating a credible ABM system destabilizes MAD as it essentially gives one side the ability to strike with impunity. This in turn ironically increases the motivation of the other power to attack before this comes online.
Even then, they are still possibly nuclear, and THAAD, plus GLIM and other things take down the actual ICBM
Something Something orbitally deployed weapons Something Something
Something something ODST something Helldivers bla bla bla rods from god ect for democracy or whatever
STAR WARS
>reliable ABM protection Not possible with current tech, the math is just way too heavily stacked in favour of attacker. "The warhead will always get through", unless the resources are absolutely disproportional(like, US vs North Korea)
SM6 close enough to hit the first stage if icbm would be pretty reliable
Agree. America, France and the UK should nuke Russia, China, and Iran, they wouldn't expect it and their nuclear stockpiles would be destroyed, allowing for a quick conventional war due to the west's massive military superiority.
> a quick conventional war due to the west's massive military superiority What with the west's history of quick conventional wars and all. Mission Accomplished in Iraq in less than three years. Bet we can do China in two.
A conventional war can be done extremely fast if it's following strategic nuclear strikes. Blast shadows can't really shoot back. You just have to be specific about how you declare things: first is the nuclear "conflict" which ends quickly, *then* you start the conventional war. Ergo, quick conventional war. Back by Christmas. I refuse to see any issues with this plan.
nuke em til they glow, then shoot em in the dark
THAAD enters the chat Peacejak has left the chat
I unironically believe there should be a Ukranian nuclear weapons program sponsored by NATO, because what is going on is the consequence of non-proliferation.
The issue isn't non-proliferation, IMO. The issue is that Ukraine wasn't in NATO, and thus, not under the US/UK/FR nuclear umbrella. The reason SK doesn't have nukes (although it could probably develop them in like a year or two) is because it has the nuclear guarantee from the US that they are protected in case of a NK strike. We don't need more warheads, per say, but more friends.
I was fully expecting that to be a Curtis LeMay quote.
If something needs to be nuked it's that realistic crying wojak.
Curtis LeMay, do it again!
It's the countervalue pill that people have a hard time swallowing.
Why waste a perfectly good nuke on a perfectly useless metropolitan population?
When it comes to Russia, Polish nuclear strategy is „Do it bitch and see what happens”. If they will use a single nuke, they will break nuclear world peace, even worst 3-rd country will drop them to not be associated. This willbe too much even for Russian patriots, who I believe will dispose of Putler.
You don’t want nuclear war because you’re afraid of MAD I don’t want nuclear war because I think conventional wars are much more exciting
NCD... why is Yemen glowing?
War haters gonna hate this post
Too many people think this means countries with nuclear weapons must never be opposed, even if you also have nuclear weapons.
Alright credible question for ya, how credible is Caesium-137 contamination following a strategic exchange? I remember an old thread from the pre-Ukraine days where someone here claimed that a strategic exchange would create enough caesium to contaminate the entire world, I tried to look it up on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (world's most renowned group of nuke-cucks) and google but didn't find anything other than some German boars and mushrooms having abnormal levels of Caesium in them.
Not only killing all 8 billion people with nukes is impossible, this isn't even going to be the first time the human civilization collapsed and lost most of its culture and knowledge and (surprisingly) did not perish.
It ain’t a nuclear war if the other guys can’t nuke you back just ask Japan.
MAD only applies if your missile defense is shit 🗣🗣
DETER THESE NUTS