Peshawar Lancers 1978

This is another one of those threads, technically ASB but not totally out there and warranting serious discussion.
What if a series of meteor impacts exactly like those in Peshawar Lancers occured in 1978?
Assume that the asteroid(s) sneak up on Earth undected until a matter of days before they hit (a bit asb, I know).

How would the world work out?
This isn't a humanity destroying event but it would certainly mess things up a lot....
 
This is another one of those threads, technically ASB but not totally out there and warranting serious discussion.
What if a series of meteor impacts exactly like those in Peshawar Lancers occured in 1978?
Assume that the asteroid(s) sneak up on Earth undected until a matter of days before they hit (a bit asb, I know).

How would the world work out?
This isn't a humanity destroying event but it would certainly mess things up a lot....

Asuming nobody freaks and orders a retaliatory strike?
 
Asuming nobody freaks and orders a retaliatory strike?

True.
But yes, they have a few days warning. They do know its asteroids. And also I guess sane heads prevail and they don't decide to use the opportunity for massed nuclear strikes....right away anyway.
 

mowque

Banned
why is it ASB to have the asteroid sneak up on us? They could easily do it TODAY, and we watch much closer then back then. Actually i find it way more likely we get caught of gaurd then have time to prepare.
 
why is it ASB to have the asteroid sneak up on us? They could easily do it TODAY, and we watch much closer then back then. Actually i find it way more likely we get caught of gaurd then have time to prepare.

A asteroid didn't hit us in 1978 and you'd need changes millions of years back to get one done and....arghh.....
Its a 'geographic' change basically and those are asb.
 

Thande

Donor
Well, let's see...the destruction pattern in Peshawar Lancers directly destroyed -

1) St Petersburg (which in 1978 is Leningrad)
2) Constantinople I think (which in 1978 is Istanbul)
3) Most of North America
4) North-central Europe

Then the dust renders much of the temperate zones uninhabitable and ices up all the waterways.

Less colonies left to run to, of course, but friendly countries might at least take in some refugees (e.g. Australia takes the British?) Also more mobility, though everything is more dependent on oil than it was in 1878 (which still had a lot of sailships).

The USSR will do better than the Russian Empire because 1) they haven't lost Moscow and thus all their leaders, and 2) railways, roads, and WW2 practice means that moving vast amounts of people and infrastructure in a short period of time isn't so difficult. They move the capital to somewhere like Samarkand, as in the original, but manage to keep a lot of their former northern territory under at least theoretical control.

Figure on an Indo-Chinese rivalry paralleling the Anglo-Japanese one in the original PL.
 
Agree mostly with Thande: stuff will survive more intact (the massive Cold War civil defence projects will help) even if there's more deaths overall.
 

Thande

Donor
Agree mostly with Thande: stuff will survive more intact (the massive Cold War civil defence projects will help) even if there's more deaths overall.

Well, there are more people to start with.

Excellent point re civil defence - anti-nuclear shelters and bunkers will be even more effective if it's a non-radioactive "nuclear" winter (actually caused by the impacts). That might, in fact, make a major difference. I hadn't considered that. America might well survive as a coherent, albeit drastically weakened, entity.
 
Well, there are more people to start with.

Excellent point re civil defence - anti-nuclear shelters and bunkers will be even more effective if it's a non-radioactive "nuclear" winter (actually caused by the impacts). That might, in fact, make a major difference. I hadn't considered that. America might well survive as a coherent, albeit drastically weakened, entity.

Yeah - by the 70s I think most of the NATO/Warsaw Pact countries (who are the ones taking the impacts to begin with) had enough infastructure in place to at least survive a nuclear war, in the sense that NAm and Europe wouldn't turn into lawless cannibalistic wastelands overnight. The actual impacts are in the many-megatonne ranges, I think, and the tsunamis are going to be nasty but over quick; I can definitely see most industrialized nations making it through "intact", even if the Winter's going to be a bitch.

Hmm: when did the comet hit in the original? fall? Let's say the comet is detected just as it starts breaking up under the Earth's gravity in late August, one month before impact. Confirmation wouldn't take long - I mean, any organization with a telescope could see it - so what happens then? The Cold Warriors can't blame each other, horror of horrors, so I guess we'd see a sudden upsurge of "we must all hang together"ism. I don't think they could predict the points of impact until it was way too late - IIRC the current thought is that we could predict a straight-in hit about an hour before actual impact, way too late to do anything for the poor sods underneath, and the disintegration of the comet will just make that far worse. So they can probably have a date, but not a place. Mass hysteria, exodi, survivalism, etc; this may end up proving a bigger strain on some countries than the actual immediate aftermath. I'm also willing to bet that while the US and the USSR won't do anything overt - they're about to have much bigger problems to deal with, after all - there will be at least one country that uses this to settle old scores: in 1978 I'd put my money on the PRC/Taiwan, Syria/Israel, and probably an african country or two.
 
The biggest problem is going to be food. At this point America isn't just a food exporter, it's the biggest and just got put out of commission for the foreseeable future. Add to that the fact that a higher ratio of people are surviving the impacts and you have a lot of hungry people. India would be a bad spot to go because they've undergone a population explosion recently while the agriculture industry has not yet kept up.

Also, because the world's military has been transformed to deal with these sorts of End of the World scenarios the desperate nations in the Northern hemisphere will be able to project their power. Starving nations would engage in gunboat diplomacy (at best) with any nation preceived to be doing better. The Northern nations would be competing with each other in addition to the Southern ones, and you could see a huge shift in politics as power blocks are formed to combat the Eurasians and American survivors.

On the plus side, with modern energy production technologies and widespread heating systems there won't be as much fighting over simple warmth. Again, this would mean more mouths to feed though.
 
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