One of my favorite works here is 1983: Doomsday and that hinges on a Soviet false alarm being acted on by someone who isn't Petrov.

Something that it's made me think of is something like this happening more recently, and thought about Russia getting a false alarm a couple weeks after MH 17 was shot down by Pro-Russian guerrillas in Ukraine and the subsequent rise in tensions along with existing US/EU sanctions. If that caused a situation similar to the one in 1983 and the Russians decided to launch their missiles how do you think the world would look like today given that the US and Russian arsenals have shrunken since the end of the Cold War?

Before anyone answers I looked it up and in 2014 Russia had 4,300 warheads and the US had 4,760 warheads. So a nuclear war in 2014 should be milder than one occurring in 1983.
 
In the same way getting shot in the head by a 3 round burst is milder then being shot by a full magazine.....
I know it would still disrupt/collapse society (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). I was referring more to the environmental impact, just because each country has over 4000 weapons doesn't mean they'll fire every single one (I'm estimating each side launching about 1500 warheads each, compared to 1983 where it could have been at least triple that)
 
I know it would still disrupt/collapse society (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). I was referring more to the environmental impact, just because each country has over 4000 weapons doesn't mean they'll fire every single one (I'm estimating each side launching about 1500 warheads each, compared to 1983 where it could have been at least triple that)
Wouldn't that be kinda enough to obliterate the vast majority of terrestrial vertebrate life on the planet anyway?
 
I know it would still disrupt/collapse society (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). I was referring more to the environmental impact, just because each country has over 4000 weapons doesn't mean they'll fire every single one (I'm estimating each side launching about 1500 warheads each, compared to 1983 where it could have been at least triple that)

So yes, you're right. Considerable numbers of those warheads are not ready to launch, being disassembled in storage, in maintenance, in stock and ready to go, but not in their delivery device. A portion more may not function as intended, due to being old, poorly maintained or simply not built right in the first place (one of the rationales for the overkill on both sides was the fears that their weapons might not be as reliable as desired and not being able to test the whole system without ending civilization).

All that considered, your estimate of about 1,500 weapons for each side seems reasonable. I don't know how many of them would be tactical devices and how many strategic devices.

Estimates for how many strategic weapons it would take to end the US, Europe and China as organized entities capable of fighting a war is about 300. Russia, due to being larger, would take more, simply due to having more road junctions and rail junctions - likely 400 to 500. Estimates for how many weapons needed to cause catastrophic nuclear winter: on the order of 100. So even if both sides prove to mostly fire duds, we're still looking at years of brutal famine across the world, and hundreds, if not thousands, of major cities wiped out or else heavily damaged (the cost of losing the business centre of New York or LA alone would be in the hundreds of billions in property damage and lost economic activity to say nothing of the costs of the dead and wounded).

A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could easily lead to the death of billions through mass famine in the rest of the world (let alone the deaths caused directly by such a "small" nuclear war). A US-Russia nuclear war is a beast of another magnitude. Quite literally so.

Also, considering that even the US may not have re-targeted their weapons away from Cold War era targets, and the Russians almost certainly haven't, Europe and China will be getting plenty of hits. The amount of key links in the global supply chain that are going to go up in nuclear fire doesn't bear thinking about. Industrial civilization is out for the count and dead. Odds are, if you post on this board, your life depends on just-in-time supply chains for vital tools, clean water, fuel, food and medicine. Along with us, just about everyone who lives in a city.

Do humans survive at all? Harder to say. I suspect yes. But we really have no experience with a nuclear catastrophe (or any catastrophe) that bad. So really I'm going off of my optimistic gut, talking through my hat etc.

Does life itself survive? I'm quite confident it would. Vertebrates? Again, I think so. Large vertebrates? Here it is more dicey. After decades of intensive habitat destruction pre-exchange, the nuclear winters themselves and whatever impacts occur due to desperate humans struggling to survive, then it's possible that nuclear war would accelerate the mass extinction event currently occurring on our planet. However, as we see with Chernobyl, where animal and plant life as adapted quite well to the radiation and flourished thanks to humans giving the exclusion zone a wide berth, it's also possible that the removal of human pressure in much of the world would be more of a boon than the nuclear exchange and following nuclear winter would be curses. As I said before, much remains uncertain until we actually make a try at this nuclear genocide business, and I really don't recommend that experiment until we have multiple control groups up and running.

One thing is for certain though, the cockroaches won't inherit the Earth. They are a tropical species that will die off in droves once they no longer have humans sheltering them from the winters in higher latitudes.

fasquardon
 
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