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1970-01-01

     a small nuclear war

An oxymoron if there ever was one. Our previous small nuclear war ended World War II.

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The nukes were at the end of World War II. That they would have caused it to end is a myth.

Contrary to the US commanders' belief, the loss of civilian life was actually of little concern to Japan's military leadership. Several Japanese cities had already been destroyed to the same extent as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at a greater loss of life outside than in those two cities combined. (That the bombs would continue to kill people for decades afterwards was not known at the time...)

What turned Japan to surrender was that simultaneously, the USSR was advancing rapidly in the (mostly undefended) north. USSR had taken Sakhalin and was very close to invading Hokkaido. The Japanese did not want any part of Japan-proper to be under Soviet rule, as that would have been devastating to their religion and culture. Surrendering to the US was seen as the lesser evil.

No it's not

Small nuclear war = maybe 10 nuclear warheads explode. Life on most of earth continues more or less as "normal"

Large nuclear war = thousands of warheads, humanity is wiped out

Humans are like rats, we can live everywhere by adapting. It'll take more than thousands of warheads to wipe us out.

Civilization OTOH is quite fragile. Hundreds of warheads is likely enough to wipe that out.

> we can live everywhere by adapting. It'll take more than thousands of warheads to wipe us out.

How do you adapt to having no food? It's entirely possible that most plant life on earth would cease to exist, with the corresponding collapse across the food chain killing most species of animals across the world.

Any humans left alive would need to eat whatever plant and animal life survived and was available on land in areas that radiation wasn't lethal.. which might be nowhere.

A single greenhouse could keep a single family alive long enough to eventually repopulate the Earth.

Killing most humans is a lot easier than killing all humans.

A greenhouse won't work when there's no sun, no electricity, and the water falling from the sky is toxic.

Hundreds of warheads would do the trick but it wouldn't take more than a two-week power outage to bring most civilizations currently on earth to the brink of collapse.

Not sure, our reproductive system is pretty sensible to radiation... we won't be wiped instantly but in a few generations we can get extint.

Did you not read the article?

In military scenarios any use of nuclear weapons always escalates. So I don't think its possible

In a military scenario nuclear weapons have been used precisely once (twice if you don't count them as a single strategic maneuver) and it ended the war. I'm not sure we have enough data to go on.

Aren't nukes used all the time, by their mere presence?

That could be said of anything, military or not. An object, by its presence, influences the world around it. If you are talking about the deterrent effect of mutually assured destruction, I again point out that we don't really have the data. A war between large powers is likely to be devastating even if nuclear weapons are never used and that doesn't seem to deter aggression over a long enough timeline.

I don't disagree that an escalation scenario is possible or even likely. It probably is, but I don't think the term "always" really takes into account either the breadth of possibilities or human nature. Part of the problem is that we still frame this in a very binary "Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe" way. If Iran or North Korea fired a nuclear warhead, I don't think that it would necessarily provoke a nuclear response, but an overwhelming conventional response. It's unlikely that either has enough warheads to provoke an all out nuclear conflict and they could likely be overwhelmed conventionally. Our desire not to enter into a catastrophic conflict is probably quite high.

Obviously I'd really like there to be no possibility of this occurring.

Also in that scenario all functional nuclear devices on the planet were detonated, iirc.

This is the accepted (and perhaps it's very good that it is!) wisdom, but obviously it isn't the case; if the nuclear powers decided to nuke the living daylights out of Africa for some reason, it wouldn't escalate as the countries hit have no way of retaliating.

It's fictional, of course, but the movie By Dawn's Early Light covers a scenario where a limited nuclear strike could occur (essentially the two sides negotiate to nuke each other equally as much, but not to an all-out extent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Dawn%27s_Early_Light

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