Most likely aftermath of an early 80s nuclear war?

I'm planning a story that involves a nuclear war that occurs in 1983. The main events of the story will occur a few decades afterwards, so the war itself will serve as a backdrop more than anything. What I need help with is information that would help me with the setting; such as casualties, environmental effects, and likely targets. The environmental effects and casualties would really help. Just pointing out good sources would also be appreciated.

The POD would likely involve either Able Archer '83 or the 1983 Soviet false alarm. Full, global nuclear exchange is also assumed.
 
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Europe is toast. Maybe an enclave in Berlin where WARPAC and NATO forces don't want to nuke themselves? (Useful maybe for story purposes).
France and Germany are going to be radioactive. Warsaw Pact nations would have been flattened, expect high casualties both during and after war due to famine. Expect warlordism, mass starvation, the return of many old diseases and birth defects.

Britain is also likely to be in a state as most (if not all) of her major cities are hit. Maybe small provisional governments exist.

USSR is going to be glowing in the dark. It gets hit by thousands of weapons courtesy of the US, Europe (maybe China?). Expect very little surviving infrastructure or centralized government. Likely to be a land of ash, famine, death and warlordism.

The US is likely to be pretty fucked in a 1980's exchange. Many major cities will have been flattened as the Soviets target population centres, major military bases, missile installations, air force bases. Mass famine, mass death and its likely the central US government (assuming it survives) will struggle to assert its authority over the whole country. Maybe lots of smaller provisional authorities pop up.

China I believe would be hit by the USSR. Japan and Korea are likely to also be fucked. (Citation needed) Unsure about India. Likely to be hit maybe by USSR and or Pakistan?

South America I am unsure. Likely a few major cities hit, despite not really being aligned, the Soviets are likely to target nations who they think might help the US recover. Unsure, possibly the most unscathed continent.

Africa I am unsure about. Maybe South Africa cops a few hits. Continent is likely to be somewhat unscathed but the collapse of all the major powers is going to upset eveyrthing.

Australia and NZ likely to suffer a few hits, possibly the only Western nations who are going to be in some sort of shape assuming they can keep their central governments together.

Verdict: US: gone, USSR: super gone, Europe: gone, China: gone. Billions die in the initial exchange, billions more die in the ensuring two years of collapsed trade, crop failures, disease, radiation and general post-war misery.

Severe damage to the environment, global temperature drops in places (adding to the misery).
 
The thing is, the 1980s was the era when nuclear war would really, really give you the post-atomic apocalypse fiction reality. 1960s atomic war would make the whole world look like London after the blitz, with the USSR as the doomsday state. London survived, Britain survived, and it rebuilt quickly and overcame, but the scars were still there long after the bombs. The 1970s would be somewhere in between the two. But the 1980s was thirty years into the Cold War, with enough nuclear build up to wipe out civilization many times over. It won't be Tarzan or Planet of the Apes, but it would be "The Day After". Civilization, in its most basic necessities, is collapsed. And all that is left are a few standing memories, ashes, and a fraction of those that were once alive left to survive, continuing only because they had no other choice but to live because they did not die.
 
Actual strategic weapons were limited to about 3-5,000 each IIRC between the USSR and US, with the other nuclear powers having much smaller arsenals; no idea on the relative tonnage. It must also be remembered that this stockpile would be subjected to interception methods, reliability issues, and simple distance that will limit its effectiveness. For example, an SS-18 launched from around Moscow is too far away to strike Cape Town in South Africa. Nuclear Winter wasn't, and still isn't, a likely prospect in the aftermath of such an exchange.
 
What I need help with is information that would help me with the setting; such as casualties, environmental effects, and likely targets.
This is an excellent source though it takes place in 1988.
Actual strategic weapons were limited to about 3-5,000 each IIRC between the USSR and US
By 1984 the US and the USSR both had around 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads with thousands more tactical weapons.
 
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apollo11

Banned
The Northern Hemisphere Civilizations are gone. The real question is what becomes of untouched South America, untouched portions of Africa and Oceania.
 
I always thought the scenario laid out in Twilight 2000 rpg was pretty credible. That's late 90's thought and nukes as function of conventional war in Europe starting over reunification of Germany.
 

apollo11

Banned
An interesting aspect of post-war city development might be dual forces of decentralization and higher urban density. On the one hand post-war governments might want to decentralize critical industries and population centers to make their nations less vulnerable to future nuclear attack. There were some plans to do this in the United States after WW2 according to Raven Rock the book and even some of the suburban growth we saw is (allegedly) born out of that defensive outlook. On the other hand the cities/towns that do develop would probably be fairly dense due to economies of scale needed to provide public services. Also the increased cost of primary resources like coal and oil would limit suburban growth. The cities of the post-war world might be interconnected webs of concrete towers and apartments separated by rail connections with each zone having a specific but limited key economic function.
 
A 1980s nuclear war is as catastrophic a scenario for the human species as one can imagine, with killer asteroids, a lethal pandemic or a gamma ray burst being on a par or worse. The Northern Hemisphere is wiped out. There will be survivors, but it will be years before anything resembling civilization there is reestablished. Entire peoples are wiped from the face of the earth. Humanity and technology will survive in the Southern Hemisphere, but this will be a catastrophe for Sub-Saharan Africa as sources of outside aid are cut off. Australia and New Zealand keep "Western Civilization" alive, but as importers of much of what they consume, their standard of living will decline. Hits on Auckland and/or Sydney would worsen the situation considerably. What happens with South America is a question mark due to a long history of poor governance stifling great economic potential. IIRC, Brazil, Argentina and Chile were all governed by military juntas in this period. They could do great or they could do terribly. As with Australia and New Zealand, hits on a few large population centers worsen things considerably. It's a grim world. Humanity will survive in some form, of course, but things may regress a few centuries or more in a lot of places before they start getting better again. If they do at all. Modern civilization is a very intricate and delicate thing built on centuries of social evolution but human beings themselves have fundamentally not evolved much physiologically or mentally from what they were thousands of years ago. If you wipe out that social evolution overnight, it's not hard to imagine this world in reality making the film Threads look like an overly optimistic view of things.
 

apollo11

Banned
IIRC, Brazil, Argentina and Chile were all governed by military juntas in this period. They could do great or they could do terribly.
From what I've read on this forum it's unlikely those South American nations wouldn't be struck by the Soviets. Also @CalBear has noted that Soviet bio-weapons could make the recovery even worse for the few remaining nation-sates.
 
China I believe would be hit by the USSR. Japan and Korea are likely to also be fucked. (Citation needed) Unsure about India. Likely to be hit maybe by USSR and or Pakistan?

More likely the USA and potentially China. India had close economic ties to the Soviet Union, to the extent that it would likely be considered a Soviet ally in a nuclear war or at least a state that could assist a Soviet recovery. The Chinese had existing beef with India although their limited nuclear stockpile would more likely be reserved for the Soviets.
 

apollo11

Banned
Here is something I've never seen considered on one of these threads: What happens to the loose nuclear weapons? Would there be a bunch of warlords locked in perpetual MAD? City-states unable to consolidate into larger continental nation-states because every 100 miles is some backwards tyrant with a left over nuke?
 
The northern hemisphere would see the destruction already well described. In the eighties, a substantial part of American manufacturing was dispersed through smaller cities away from the major metropolitan areas that would be destroyed the most. While some of these areas might seem to be new seeds for growth, we must consider the impact of nuclear winter. The median temperature at 40 degrees latitude could drop to -50F. Not only would water be frozen, but structural steel undergoes a solid phase change close to this temperature and becomes brittle. Many pieces of surviving infrastructure could be in danger and collapse to wreckage.

If a story is set 20 years after the event, we can assume temperatures will have returned to normal for some time. Survivors who remained in mostly rural areas would have been able to survive on the food stored in grain elevators. Most of the world’s survivors would be from tropical and subtropical regions, invoking some very fierce ethnic/religious/racial conflict.
 
Here is something I've never seen considered on one of these threads: What happens to the loose nuclear weapons? Would there be a bunch of warlords locked in perpetual MAD? City-states unable to consolidate into larger continental nation-states because every 100 miles is some backwards tyrant with a left over nuke?
Probably not. The expertise it takes to deploy a nuke is not publicized. The best a rogue, postwar county warlord could do is harvest material for a dirty bomb, if he didn't encounter a lethal dose of radiation doing it.
 

apollo11

Banned
Probably not. The expertise it takes to deploy a nuke is not publicized. The best a rogue, postwar county warlord could do is harvest material for a dirty bomb, if he didn't encounter a lethal dose of radiation doing it.
It doesn't take much in the way of societal/economic development to produce nuclear weapons. If North Korea with its 12.38 billion dollar economy can harvest this decades old technology then post-war states should be able too. Only this time there won't be superpowers like the US to stop proliferation. For example Brazil's population in 1983 was almost 130 million people. Let's say half of them die. So 65 million remaining. Now let's say Brazil fragments into different states, ehh four of them. So each state would have about 16.25 million persons. Now let's assume abject poverty with $300 per capita GDP nominal per state. So each rump state would have a GDP of $4.8 billion at the staring line.

Let's assume they can remain independent states. Within 30 years at 7 percent economic growth and 2 percent population growth you'd have societies with $36 billion nominal GDP and almost 30 million person populations living at $1200 GDP per person. That's enough to support a nuclear and missile program.

It should be noted that it's not the science of nuclear weapons that's rare, that genie is out of the bottle. The issue is getting the materials and facilities to make them. That's more of an issue of human and capital/material assets along with a willingness to invest in them. I see no reason why post-war states wouldn't invest in nuclear weapons to retain their independence from neighbors just as pre-war states did.
 
longtimelurkerinMD, I thought of Twilight 2000 as well. The biggest problem with that was the targeting was so unrealistic. Missile strikes missed some obvious targets. Because it was an RPG, they had to leave much untouched for players to explore.
 
It should be noted that it's not the science of nuclear weapons that's rare, that genie is out of the bottle. The issue is getting the materials and facilities to make them. That's more of an issue of human and capital/material assets along with a willingness to invest in them. I see no reason why post-war states wouldn't invest in nuclear weapons to retain their independence from neighbors just as pre-war states did.
If the postwar world got down to that sort of patchwork of nation-states, that's exactly what would happen. I just think the logistics in a post-WW3 world would be prohibitive, given the world's new attitude towards the Bomb. As for left over bombs from the pre-1983 arsenal, they would be "uncrackable" by novices or any scientist without precise information from their manufacturers.
 

apollo11

Banned
If the postwar world got down to that sort of patchwork of nation-states, that's exactly what would happen. I just think the logistics in a post-WW3 world would be prohibitive, given the world's new attitude towards the Bomb.
What new logic towards the bomb? I figure the realpolitik needs of not getting conquered by your neighbors would trump whatever taboos would arise concerning nuclear weapons. Or in any case states that didn't have that aversion to them would be more likely to succeed. The possession of nuclear weapons for a post-war state would be a game changer because at minimum you would be safe from conventional invasions and could use the peace-dividend on reconstruction or construction of non-military society. Once you have that second-strike capability only another nuclear state could dethrone you.
As for left over bombs from the pre-1983 arsenal, they would be "uncrackable" by novices or any scientist without precise information from their manufacturers.
True. That said I'm sure many states or stateletes will be run by rump-military organizations that could or would have that information. For the most part though you are correct. I suspect post-war societies would construct new devices and at most recycle fissile material.
 
Actual strategic weapons were limited to about 3-5,000 each IIRC between the USSR and US, with the other nuclear powers having much smaller arsenals; no idea on the relative tonnage. It must also be remembered that this stockpile would be subjected to interception methods, reliability issues, and simple distance that will limit its effectiveness. For example, an SS-18 launched from around Moscow is too far away to strike Cape Town in South Africa. Nuclear Winter wasn't, and still isn't, a likely prospect in the aftermath of such an exchange.

What interception efforts - the only place on the planet with a working ABM system was Moscow and that is likely to have been only marginally effective as it would almost certainly be overwhelmed by sheer volume.
 
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