I remember seeing a couple conclusions that some nuclear scientists came to recently:
1.) 100 Hiroshima-sized nukes (the nuke dropped on Hiroshima was tiny compared to current nukes) going off could cause catastrophic climactic results across an area the size of a continent, i.e. a continent-wide nuclear winter that would potentially lead to hundreds of millions of deaths outside of lives lost to the immediate blast + fallout.
2.) If the US and Russia both unleashed just 5% of their total nuclear stockpiles, you are definitely wiping out civilization and getting humans down to close to extinction levels.
IIRC a lot of this is worse than previously understood because past models didn’t account for just how much dirt and debris are kicked up in nuclear blasts.
It’s tough to know exactly, but it’s doesn’t cause much change in sunlight and temperature to cause mass crop failures. There are some US government estimates that the fine particulates from even a “limited” nuclear war would cause such an extensive collapse in agricultural output that you might see something like 90% of the human population starve just in the first year. Even if though that might not be a literally exctinction level event, it would be such an epochal society-altering event that there’s no sense in which a country would come out the other side as a “winner” even if they were completely untouched by the actual nuclear blasts or fallout.
The redditors who are enjoying this little visual are watching themselves and everyone they know and love starving to death in the aftermath.
This kills the entire species, right? Along with every other large animal?
These people are going to kill us all.
Yes. Even a “limited” nuclear exchange would be catastrophic.
I remember seeing a couple conclusions that some nuclear scientists came to recently:
1.) 100 Hiroshima-sized nukes (the nuke dropped on Hiroshima was tiny compared to current nukes) going off could cause catastrophic climactic results across an area the size of a continent, i.e. a continent-wide nuclear winter that would potentially lead to hundreds of millions of deaths outside of lives lost to the immediate blast + fallout.
2.) If the US and Russia both unleashed just 5% of their total nuclear stockpiles, you are definitely wiping out civilization and getting humans down to close to extinction levels.
IIRC a lot of this is worse than previously understood because past models didn’t account for just how much dirt and debris are kicked up in nuclear blasts.
It’s tough to know exactly, but it’s doesn’t cause much change in sunlight and temperature to cause mass crop failures. There are some US government estimates that the fine particulates from even a “limited” nuclear war would cause such an extensive collapse in agricultural output that you might see something like 90% of the human population starve just in the first year. Even if though that might not be a literally exctinction level event, it would be such an epochal society-altering event that there’s no sense in which a country would come out the other side as a “winner” even if they were completely untouched by the actual nuclear blasts or fallout.
The redditors who are enjoying this little visual are watching themselves and everyone they know and love starving to death in the aftermath.