Calculating Technological Regression from Global Thermonuclear War

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Willy

The DoDs are the official ones acording to military research and scenarios, they are most likely the most accurate, a layman can get his hands on.

Which counts for very little. Just because it's 'official' doesn't make it any more or less accurate, the people making the maps still have their own hidden assumptions and agendas.

Don´t believe in the stuff some so called survivalists sell.

Nothing to do with 'survivalists'. It's simply a matter of what nuclear bombs do and don't do. The 'end of civilization' scenario for nuclear war is almost certainly nonsense. It would be plenty bad enough, but the human race would survive and so would technological civilization.

No sorry wrong, there is a lot of difference in the half life of radioactive particles, basically the ones wtih the heavy radiation, have ( mostly ) a very short half life. Therefore the threat level first will drop drastically. Now to the big but a lot of other have a long half life, so the radiation level after a few month will be still dangerous and stay so for a very long time. there is also a difference in what peopl call dangerous, in war this means for soldiers safe enough to cross and fight on. For survivors who stay there and try to live from the products of farming etc it´s still deadly. Exposure time means a lot, also the accumolation of radioactivity. Another often neglected fact is that the radiation at waist level, where most dosimeters are, is significantly lower than on ground level. In fact you can cross a radiated area in 20 h and be fine, but sleeping in the same area for 8h will certainly kill you.

For a while, yes. But note that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been rebuilt. Over a million people live in Hiroshima. The radiation levels at the Trinity site are higher than background, but it's not a lethal death spot. Yes, the high-output isotopes decay fast. Then there's a long, slow decline as the lower-energy isotopes decay. Exactly how steep the slope and how long the time period depends on the bomb and the location, but on a historical scale the decline is still fast.

A century after a nuclear war, the radiation levels would be mostly irrelevant except in special case spots.

[Tom Mazanec]

A century after a nuclear war, the radiation levels would be mostly irrelevant except in special case spots.

I assume any nuked nuclear waste dumps or power plants would be such special case spots?

[AlexanderHowl]

It is the effects over the next ten years that matter for most scenarios. As mentioned above, a full scale nuclear war is equivalent to a VEI 8 volcanic eruption, which pretty much ruins human civilization. Considering that such an war would destroy every data center, industrial center, power plant and natural gas/petroleum processing facility, transportation center, etc. the survivors would be tossed back to TL5 at the best, which lowers the carrying capacity of their civilization quite a bit.

For example, going from TL8 to TL5 reduces carrying capacity by 75% and average wealth levels by 58%. Three-quarters of your population starves to death and the survivors live much meager lives until people are capable of rebuilding the technological infrastructure. The scary thing at TL8+ though is that a lot of the information is digital, so it would have been lost when the major data centers were nuked and/or inaccessible without electricity (though early TL8 would be much less impacted than late TL8), so it would be difficult to recreate a lot of the technology required for TL6+.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

It is the effects over the next ten years that matter for most scenarios. As mentioned above, a full scale nuclear war is equivalent to a VEI 8 volcanic eruption, which pretty much ruins human civilization. Considering that such an war would destroy every data center, industrial center, power plant and natural gas/petroleum processing facility, transportation center, etc.

No it wouldn't. Lots of those things wouldn't be targets in a plausible nuclear war because they aren't even in the alliances that would be exchanging party favours.

[Flyndaran]

People are very certain about what would definitely happen in a vaguely defined situation that, thankfully, we have no real information about.

I don't think the, again thankfully, localized events count as much use for making such declarative statements about the global effects of a nuclear doomsday scenario.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

People are very certain about what would definitely happen in a vaguely defined situation that, thankfully, we have no real information about.

There is a lot of truth to that. The answer requires a lot of edge information on really complex systems that are hard to understand, including:

• Weather and Climate Patterns
• Sociology during crisis
• Logistics chains under stress
• Biology and radiation
• Military Planning

That doesn't mean we should give up on trying to figure it out: its means we should have our eyes open about how much we actually do or don't know.

[AlexanderHowl]

Whenever two politics decide on nuclear total war, they have already decided to destroy everything because they know that they would not have a chance at winning if they did not do so. During the Cold War, the USA and USSR both had civilian infrastructure as secondary targets because they could assist in the recovery of the enemy's military. In addition, targeting infrastructure like dams produces the largest bang for the buck, as the resulting flooding would divert enemy resources from military actions.

For example, if the Chinese decided to invade Russia to claim Far Eastern Russia, the dams along the Yangtze River (and its tributaries) would likely be among the prime targets for Russian nukes. Removing 132 GW of electrical production, plus the damage caused by the resulting flooding, would be worth a few dozen nukes, especially since one-sixth of the Chinese pollution would likely be temporarily displaced. It would actually be more humanitarian than targeting Chinese military bases, as many of them are located near or within large population centers.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Whenever two politics decide on nuclear total war, they have already decided to destroy everything because they know that they would have a chance at winning if they did not do so..

It doesn't mean that they waste megatonnage on uninvolved nations in Central Africa or South America.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

It doesn't mean that they waste megatonnage on uninvolved nations in Central Africa or South America.

Or South East Asia. There are a lot of people living there, and the winds coming in usually cross the pacific before arriving. India has a decent chance of escaping a nuclear conflict as well.



Its also an interesting question if a US-USSR nuclear exchange would target China or not.

[AlexanderHowl]

When African and South American nations export resources to your enemy, they are involved in a total war scenario, whether they declare neutrality or not. This is especially true with state-sponsored capitalism such as that practiced by China, where investments in African and South American nations would allow for the rapid recovery of China if it was devestated by war. The rational choice for a nation at that point is the target the major trade partners of their enemy, in order to deprive them of the resources required for recovery, which is why every nuclear war scenario of the USSR seemed to involve nuking the 'neutral' trade partners of the USA.

A similar calculation would likely come into effect in a nuclear conflict between Russia and China, as Russia cannot win in a conventional war against China. I am afraid that the USA would come to a similar conclusion if China decided to invade the US allies in East Asia or Southeast Asia, though the USA would likely not waste nukes on 'neutral' nations unless the Chinese somehow crippled the US Navy. The USA would prefer to use diplomacy, as nuking the ports of Africa, Oceania, and South America would have long term negative effects, but it would nuke them if it felt that it had no other choice.