Just curious from a creative standpoint: is there any way to have nuclear war in the latter cold war lead to/allow for the situation we see in films like Robocop, Bladerunner and Escape from New York, where large areas of society crumble and are pushed to the limit but this still hold together albeit under a totalitarian regime where everything has just fallen to hell? Or is that unrealistic compared to the return to horse and all that?
Cold War WI: Everyday Life After an Atomic War
- Thread starter Emperor Norton I
- Start date
I have seen a lot of people mention Nuclear Winter. The scientific evidence that I have seen is iffy. My question to you and anyone who agrees with the idea of Nuclear Winter is "If it is a fact why don't we use it to slow down or stop Global warming?"
I have seen a lot of people mention Nuclear Winter. The scientific evidence that I have seen is iffy. My question to you and anyone who agrees with the idea of Nuclear Winter is "If it is a fact why don't we use it to slow down or stop Global warming?"
It's not exactly the same thing, but there have been extensive discussion of the use of sulfur dioxide or other aerosols injected into the upper atmosphere as a heat shield - basically the same thing except better controlled and using chemicals optimized for the task instead of just soot. In fact - and I'm just going on popsci articles so this may not be accurate - there seems to be an emerging consensus that it would work and be remarkably cheap to do. But nobody is sure what the side effects would be, except that they would likely be non-trivial.
So, basically, we may in fact end up using it to slow down or stop global warming.
I urge the OP to read DrakonFin's underrated P&S spinoff, The Land of Sad Songs. There are lots of little notes on what life in Finland is after a 1984 nuke war - both in the first months and years after the war, and then a quarter century into the future (i.e. roughly our OTL present). Even stuff like what people drink instead of coffee (since international trade is still rather weak and expensive even years after the catastrophe, particularly in cozy European backwaters the likes of Finland).
I've always wondered, what would become of the media. This isn't even asking things like if movies and albums will still get made, though that can be discussed. I mean like the original master tapes of an album or the original reel of a movie, the things that get mastered and remastered, will those survive or would they be destroyed as well, and us just left with VHS copies of films and vinyl copies of music as the only copies left.