2 billion may die following a nuclear war between India and Pakistan [video] | Hacker News Reader

2 billion may die following a nuclear war between India and Pakistan [video]

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5 pointsamingilani10 comments

Millions of people will die on the subcontinent but I'm thinking that we blew up thousands of nukes in the atmosphere in the 50s and 60s. In 1962 178 nukes exploded in the atmosphere and AFAIK crops were fine. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally

I don't mean to downplay the severity of the situation. A nuclear offensive and counter offensive could drag other powers in to the conflict. We can only hope and pray that cooler heads prevail.

>I don't mean to downplay the severity of the situation.

Isn't that exactly what you meant to do?

Almost every day I see "Nuclear war - pfft, no worries, not a big deal" comments on here. I'm not sure why. It's a bit of a worry! Maybe the culture had enough of freaking out in the 80s and now has to pretend nothing terrible could happen from nuclear war. Or that accidents don't happen, that having a lot of nukes everywhere isn't incredibly risky.

Did you want me to give you the 4 horsemen speech? Anyway there are other things people believe that aren't true beside the nuclear winter story. Like we'll all be dead anyway from a nuke war so why bother to prepare. We seem to have taken this view but a lot of the rest of the world didn't.

India Pakistan have a couple hundred smaller nukes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...

Seems to be a lot of forest fires over a very large area recently

https://www.popsci.com/california-five-year-wildfire#page-2

And there have been bigger fires in the past which is what a lot of people say nuclear winter is mainly about.

Perhaps a nuclear winter scenario could happen in a total global thermonuclear war but even that has been in debate for a while. I don't want a war to be proven wrong.

>Did you want me to give you the 4 horsemen speech?

I don't know what that means, sorry.

Well what I mean is that an end days prophecy starts with a quarter of the world population put down by famine, war, plagues, and breakdown of civilization to the point a leading cause of death was from wild beasts. The figure is around two billion. So doom is on the menu, maybe that is what we could be served from South Asia.

Nuclear explosions close enough to the ground to draw dirt and debris into their mushroom cloud can generate large amounts of nuclear fallout due to irradiation of the debris

— Wikipedia[0]

I'm certainly no expert, and I know Wikipedia isn't the most reliable source, but I wondered if nukes exploding in the atmosphere would be different from the ground, and found that.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing

Some of the tests blew up large craters. If you haven't seen the movie Trinity and Beyond, its a good one. They started running out of atoll islands to blow up so they ferried the bombs in barges. The bravo test was done from a tower, it was the largest test we did.

Not to downplay the severity of tension between India and Pakistan but nuclear bombs impact is highly exaggerated. Anyone can check impact virtually here- https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

This site gives you single bomb impacts, not the impact of a full scale war between two countries that unload their arsenals on each other.

Even if all 140 nuclear warheads of Pakistan are deployed their impact will barely destroy a district in India. Same applies for Indian warheads. It is dangerous but nowhere near what media exgaggerate. Try nukemap site once again and see coverage area.

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