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Comment by mordant | Hacker News Reader

I've been to Ground Zero at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I've spent a lot of time in Nevada - and I'm just fine.

People grossly, grossly overestimate the long-term effects of fallout. The main negative effects of nuclear warfare would be infrastructure destruction and the collapse of food/medicine distribution - fallout wouldn't even register.

At the height of the Cold War, a full-on strategic exchange between the US and the USSR wouldn't have ended human civilization. Things would've been unpleasant in parts of North America and Eurasia for a time, but all these extreme scenarios that are sensationalized wouldn'tve come to pass.

Look at Chernobyl - it's essentially a thriving wildlife reservation, now.

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Concerning Chernobyl, maybe humans societies adopt a new threshold against thyroid type cancers, but it's still not considered safe for humans.

Hiroshima is not the reference for later generation nuclear bombs, which were magnitudes above them by payload and blast energy and different in isotopes emissioned. Bikini Atoll is still uninhabited as it deemed unsafe even though the population was originally re-relocated.

Problems might also arise from incomplete reactions which might happen with cheaper, less sophisticated bombs or intentionally with dirty bomb types meant for scorched earth tactics or to maximize economic impact due to radiation related sicknesses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll#Return_to_Bikini_...

You grossly overestimate the relevance of your own experience to the discussion of modern nuclear weapons. Those explosions were all either airbursts, purposefully designed to avoid fallout, or very low yield weapons when compared to modern weaponry.

All of which is of very little relevance to discussing modern nukes intended to cause fallout.

An airburst not only minimizes fallout, it also maximizes the damage done by a nuclear weapon. I would expect a nuclear exchange to be primarily airbust weapons, considering the intent is to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and fighting capability.

Mutually Assured Destruction refers to the combatant countries, after all, not to the human species.

One would hope so, but tactical ground bursts could irradiate entire agricultural regions in ways that airbursts couldn't.

I'd expect any MAD plan to include airbursts for big cities and ground bursts for breadbaskets.

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