What science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia? | Hacker News Reader

What science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia?

allianceforscience.cornell.edu

118 pointssigna11151 comments

Here's a recent well-researched post that comes to essentially the opposite conclusion:

The basic conclusion of all of this is simple. Nuclear war is definitely not an existential threat to humanity, much less to all life on the planet. Most people even in major urban areas would survive the initial attack, along with a surprising amount of infrastructure. This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up.

https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness

The main difference is that he concludes that nuclear winter is mostly a myth. His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions. It would be interesting to reconcile these two disparate conclusions.

My biggest concern with that article is some of the assumptions, such as most the warheads will go after random army bases in unpopulated areas. I feel like that is a very “conventional” war attitude from an armchair tactician. My guess would be a strategy of annihilating all key US & EU population centers. Utterly destroy DC, NY, SF, LA, etc.

After spending a decade in the military, I saw a consistent theme of underestimating opponents and making plans on how we want them to act. War isn’t rational and never plays out how you want it to. The people trying to make nuclear war seem like a reasonable outcome terrify me, especially when they make assumptions about how the opponent would act that best aligns with what they want to happen.

I've read it different: But I’m going to be conservative and estimate that a quarter of the global stockpile is going towards such targets.

> I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up.

Except it would need to restart without all the easily accessible fossil fuels and lumber of that time…

Most areas of the world have more forest now than they did at the early 20th century. And fossil fuel extraction would be mostly spared from the nuclear attacks.

I hear this often repeated assumption all the time and I would love to know where it originated from?

Like what pop-sci article first misquoted a paper where someone stated that this was a possibility in a narrow set of circumstances?

I'm not saying it's wrong per se, It just seems like one of those factoids that sounds great, that fits in a nice little spot in our brains ready to be regurgitated when we hear something tangentially related. It's a little too convenient of an idea.

We now pull oil out from under kilometers of sea and seabed. We do that not for the challenge, but rather because the days of sticking a pipe in the ground and having the black gold geyser up out of it are long over.

Basically, we consume the oil that is cheapest to get to. And right now some of the cheapest oil to get to is under kilometers of sea and seabed.

What does this have to do with my question about where this claim was first made?

You sound like you found it more important that the source of the claim be found, than the conclusion of those resources not being as easily available. Barring the idea that anyone can look at facts and come to an conclusion of their own instead if it always needing to be a quote. Weird take.

I'm sorry, I mistook you for someone from the generation that was capable of witnessing the situation and drawing their own conclusions. You are correct, I did fail to link to a person who has written the conclusion on their blog, all ready for citation.

But way more knowledge of what kann be done.

> https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness

I'm a bit skeptical of this article, which seems excessively optimistic, since the estimation it does at the very beginning:

> Arms-control treaties limit both nations to 1,550 deployed warheads, although FAS estimates 1,588 for Russia and 1,644 for the US

seems to interpret numbers differently (deployed strategically/readily deployable).

Edit: the two articles complement each other in a very interesting way, for example: navalgazing.net assumes that nuclear weapons would target strategic targets, cornell.edu instead densely populated areas (I think reality would tend towards the first case).

The navalgazing.net article states that the soot research is from 80s/90s, while the reserch referenced by cornell.edu is from 2020 (I think in this specific case, the navalgazing.net is at fault).

Nuclear warhead accounting for treaty purposes is not intuitive, they aren't always counting the things you would assume. US warheads are thermonuclear, so they use a tiny plutonium primary stage to trigger the main fusion secondary stage. The "hard part" is the plutonium trigger, and without it a thermonuclear warhead is harmless and inert.

When the US decommissions a warhead for treaty purposes, they remove the plutonium trigger and put it on a shelf somewhere. The trigger assembly doesn't count as a weapon, and therefore it can't be deployed. However, since the plutonium trigger is not actually destroyed, these could be rapidly assembled into a deployable weapon. You would not expect any of these to be participating in a nuclear exchange. The US has relative few operational warheads but it probably maintains an inventory of 10,000+ plutonium triggers.

For treaty purposes, they often count delivery platforms, like missiles and bombers. This makes sense when you consider that it is easy to re-hydrate a warhead on short notice if you have the necessary components in inventory but not so easy to produce an operational delivery system which may have a lead time of years.

Do you think there is a possible nuclear war scenario where we get a "second round"?

Not one where the first round employs most of the strategic deterrent. The logistics required to do a second round is unlikely to be available.

The point of keeping inventory is that it is possible, if deemed necessary, to quietly scale up the number of warheads prior to any nuclear exchange, should the situation warrant it. Also, there is very limited capacity to produce new warhead assemblies, so keeping the old triggers around provides optionality for a relatively low cost while also creating a patina of uncertainty about capacity for adversaries.

Deployed is not inventory. 1500 warheads ready to go. The rest cannot be flushed in an initial nuclear exchange.

It's also a little complex in terms of the count. Bombers count as one independent of how many warheads they carry (the US has non-trivial nuclear bomber forces)

I would assume most nukes are small tactical nukes. Initial nukes will focus on nuclear launch facility's, command and control.

So I think a significant amount of nukes will not be used at all.

The US has only one model of nonstrategic nuclear weapon (about 100 gravity bombs); most US, Russian and Chinese nukes are large strategic “city busters,” due to the dynamics of the Cold War. If one country genuinely believes that a strategic counterforce salvo was launched, the only “winning” (!) move would be to empty the silos in a mass countervalue attack, depopulating the enemy state. This, of course, implies that if you’re going to launch an attack and you think your enemy has a robust second-strike capability, then you go all the way first, because they’ll do the same to you.

There’s a rich and horrifying literature on nuclear bargaining that’s suddenly relevant again, right up to a bunch of people (particularly in Russia) rehashing old HAK theories about being about to control the nuclear escalatory ladder in the midst of combat. It’s not a comforting time right now.

I read something recently that suggests that Russia thinks it could not prevent a US counter-strike even with a full Russian first strike, which makes a full first strike by either side pretty unlikely, since the US posture seems to be no first strikes. In which case, the next most likely scenario might be: A destroys a city, B destroys a city in response, and then A tells B: "we are retaliating one more time, how about we stop after this?" And then everybody stops because the alternative is worse.

I wish I could remember where I read it. It still isn't particularly comforting, but maybe better than the all-out-nuclear-war scenario.

IMO once you’re into countervalue strikes you’ve unleashed something you can’t really control, so I’m skeptical of the game theorists who think you could kill everyone in Boston or St. Petersburg and still have a diplomatic conversation that isn’t fueled by bloodthirsty revenge. As one US wargame AAR mordantly put it after accidentally killing off a few billion civilians, nuclear weapons are not the best way to communicate intent, even in a tabletop exercise.

Unnervingly, Russian (and Soviet) policy has always assumed a smooth ramp from conventional to nuclear war and back, while US policy since Kennedy has seen nuclear escalation as an irrevocable step change in warfare (more reassuringly, China is, like the US, also unlikely to add nukes into a conventional conflict).

Russian doctrine therefore encompasses using a limited demonstration strike to compel an end to conventional hostilities on Moscow’s terms. It’s hard to imagine NATO not responding, though, because the obvious effect of not responding is Europe living under Russian control enforced by the constant threat of nuclear destruction. What that response would look like is uncertain, though warplans certainly exist, but it would absolutely set us up on an escalatory spiral.

> Russian doctrine therefore encompasses using a limited demonstration strike to compel an end to conventional hostilities on Moscow’s terms.

What Russian doctrine says this? This sentence is a complete fabrication.

Sidorenko’s work is a good place to start, as it demonstrates the significant amount of effort (relative to NATO forces) that went into creating a Soviet doctrine of nuclearized ground warfare. But Russia has actually leaned more aggressively into limited nuclear use (starting with the 2000 MoD doctrinal review), since they’ve lost the relative advantage in conventional military mass that the Warsaw Pact had over NATO; in current Russian thought, the use of tactical nuclear strikes to control the political progress of war is a more important component of their perceived correlation of forces than in the days when they could overrun NATO in the Fulda Gap in hours with armor and artillery. (NB, prior to JFK’s New Look retool, the US policy in Europe was nuclear retaliation against Soviet conventional assault, so for a decade or so the US, and very much its European allies, were much more willing to use nukes than the Soviets.)

Over the last decade, Russian leadership has repeatedly floated public hypotheticals (including the Zapad military field exercises) in which nuclear threats (or, in their war games, simulated nuclear strikes) are used to deter NATO from operations “beyond the edge of the Russian empire” (such as majority-Russophone regions in the Baltic states), which is in keeping with an evolving strategy generally termed “escalate to de-escalate” in the West. In fact, where Western game theorists developed an intricate theory of nuclear deterrence vs compellance, the Russian literature refers to both using сдерживания, seeing threats to compel and threats to deter as functionally identical, strategically speaking. (Compare with the PLA’s “Science of Military Strategy,” both editions of which discuss the PLA’s nuclear arsenal in deterrent terms in the event of a general war in East Asia against Western forces.)

This is what unnerves game theorists about the Ukraine war and Russia’s poor performance there — if it weren’t for global public opinion (crucially China and India at this point), their doctrine certainly encompasses an escalatory demonstration strike (a tactical-yield weapon on a largely uninhabited area of farmland, for example) used to quickly “de-escalate” the war, freeze the lines at a position of relative Russian advantage, and force Ukraine into negotiations.

HillRat is not alone it seems:

https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russian-military-doctrine-ca...

US boomer subs are incredibly stealthy and can operate anywhere in the ocean, including spending much time and effort practicing under arctic ice (see the Ice-X series by SmarterEveryDay). I have no doubt US has the capability to camp subs under the ice, send launch codes via low frequency radio, surface and bring enough hurt to devastate Russia. The ability of Russia to effect a full decapitation first strike is on the order of nil.

Hi Joe, your buddy Putin is on the line - I am about to launch a missile on New York. Do me a favor do not launch full scale counter attack in return. But feel completely free to drop one on St. Petersburg.

You are gravely mistaken. The nuking of launch facilities means that each side will have to launch almost its entire arsenals within 15 minutes, guaranteeing a very large exchange to avoid having your own weapons become crippled. The dynamic leads to dramatically more detonations, not less

That would have to mean that ALL nukes are on launch sites ready to be deployed.

> His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions.

As made by some of the original nuclear winter paper authors.

Mostly going from memory there's a lot that's wrong, unsupported, questionable, or nor longer relevant about the TTAPS paper. The easily unbalanced one dimensional model of the atmosphere, where there are no winds or oceans, particles can just go up and down. No support for the size range of soot produced. Very few cities in the US or USSR with enough fuel to produced real firestorms like the Tokyo one in WWII. And now many many fewer nukes in both nation's inventories.

Looking at the devastation of wildfires it is hard to imagine that effects could be so contained. A nuclear war would be the biggest source of ignition imaginable in close proximity to forests and cropped fields.

Also, I am a bit cautious about the line about densely populated areas. A city has the manpower to take control of its rural hinterland, provide workers for manual work, and outgun opposition. It may turn out to be more resilient in the long run. An isolated ranch seems secure right up until 100 guys from the local city show up.

We’re comparing oil wells burning to ash from nuclear bombs. Oil doesn’t burn hot enough to compete and doesn’t consume enough secondary matter. Nuclear weapons vaporize things that oil would merely burn

Burning oil wells lack the ability to inject dust and soot directly into the stratosphere, as opposed to a big mushroom cloud.

Who wrote that article? What is their expertise?

This only possible if command, and control infrastructure is intact.

If C&C is destroyed, Russia cannot do a coordinated launch of its full arsenal. If C&C in Moscow is taken out, it will be up to people in command bunkers in Russia to decide on taking own action, fully knowing that random fire at will launch is futile against a seriously NBC prepared adversary.

Only silo based ICBMs are kept in state of high readiness, and can be fired "with a press of a button." That limits targets by range, number of delivery vehicles, and whether the warheads have their own individual last stages. Russian has 3 major silo based ICBM field, each built with 1 major target in mind: 1 for Europe, 1 for the US, and 1 for China. We don't know how many of missiles will be retargeted, or how many can, but we are certain that a lot of ICBMs employed, say, in the Russian Far East, cannot reach most of the US even with a single warhead.

The highly improbable scenario of Russia being allowed to launch all of its ~1000 at short notice, and launch them only at densely populated cities is predicted to cause 50M deaths in USA without BMD, people taking to nuclear shelters, and no civil defence defence response.

In reality, it's practically impossible to successfully fire their whole arsenal without prior notice, and fire it on designated target only in Europe or North America.

The realistic estimate is that the US will face 300 to 500 warheads.

>The realistic estimate is that the US will face 300 to 500 warheads.

Does this include boomers?

I suspect that, given the a) greatly reduced number of Russian SSBNs at sea since the USSR's dissoluton,[1] and b) improvements in Western technology since that event, the US and allies a) have every Russian SSBN under 100% surveillance by a SSN, and b) can take every Russian SSBN out with a good approximation of success. Am I off base in my thinking?

[1] Yes, I know about the Russian ability to launch in port. Events of the past month have made me less confident about this ability's functionality.

> Does this include boomers?

No, only silo based. No submarines at sea, or any mobile land based ones, as they will delay the first strike, and out the preparations for it. Warheads on them are tiny as well.

The anti nuclear weapon propagandists have worked overtime for half a century to scare into people the notion that nuclear war would mean the end of humanity, the end of civilization. They're lying, largely for good intent I imagine (granted some of them actually believe it).

One of the dumbest quotes by a famous smart person I've run across is the Einstein quote about WW4 (it would be fought with sticks and stones), which most people here are likely familiar with. For a scientist it was comically irrational, emotional and false; a scare statement, nothing more.

Obviously we don't want a nuclear war to ever happen. If it does, neither humanity nor civilization will end. Russia could aim all of their nukes at the US and would struggle to kill more than a third of the US population at worst, and that's if their weapons all work and are all accurate. Russia couldn't kill everyone in Texas with their nukes if they wanted to. The vast majority of the rest of the world and its civilizations would continue on just fine.

And in a wider sense, the planet would shrug off the nuclear event. Even if it caused an extra million cases per year of cancer (an extreme outcome), the human population would shrug that off too (80 million net population is being added still). When it comes to material thrown up, that would be trivial, as someone else noted about prior wars and how that came to not much consequence.

So is it rational to keep lying to the population about the end-of-the-world risk that nukes (don't) pose, in an effort to prevent their use? Maybe, probably? They certainly pose a risk in terms of vast destruction, vast death, and the end of cities that get targeted. You could kill 300 million in a mass nuclear attack and that population would be replaced numerically in four years (which isn't to ignore all the other obvious effects, including that the new population isn't an instant stand-in for the people now missing).

> Obviously we don't want a nuclear war to ever happen. If it does, neither humanity nor civilization will end. Russia could aim all of their nukes at the US and would struggle to kill more than a third of the US population at worst, and that's if their weapons all work and are all accurate. Russia couldn't kill everyone in Texas with their nukes if they wanted to. The vast majority of the rest of the world and its civilizations would continue on just fine.

The linked article is definitely alarmist, but seems to be accurately reflecting the current beliefs of atmospheric scientists. The most recent paper they cite is this one: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD03...

I've only skimmed it, but it would seem to disagree with your position of no risk to civilization. They are predicting full on nuclear winter: "Despite this, the models agree that a nuclear winter would follow a large-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, a result previously found by a large number of diverse but much less sophisticated models in the 1980s."

Can you convince us that we should believe you rather than the atmospheric scientists? I actually do believe you might be right, but you are in the difficult position of having us discard what appears to be the current scientific consensus in favor of what appears to be amateur speculation.

This may be a mystery best left unsolved. If we insist on figuring it out experimentally, I recommend waiting until I'm dead of some non-nuclear-fireball cause.

There is no reason to escalate tensions in Ukraine to the point where this is an option, anyway. NATO should back off, call it Iraq 2.0 and agree that there are to be no NATO-supported military on Russia's doorstep. The current policies are recklessly provocative.

No, Russia should stop bombing people

And the US, having bombed more people all over the world than literally all other nations combined.

А у вас негров линчуют.

Regimes come and go but whataboutism lives forever.

> А у вас негров линчуют.

Google Translate: "And you have blacks linch"

My assumption as to a more natural translation: "And you have Blacks lynched"

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

> whataboutism lives forever

As does hypocrisy.

Whataboutism is a natural consequence of regarding double standards as something negative

Where do you see a double standard? Did iso1210 say that the US should keep bombing people?

This is just apologism for Russian atrocities masquerading as pointing out a double standard. As we’ve seen in the West for more than one hundred years now.

Two wrongs make a right?

  > Two wrongs make a right?

No. But when the US normalizes a behaviour and other countries follow suit, why are those other countries criticized but the US is not?

For what it's worth, I'm on neither side of the Ukraine-Russia debate. Both are horribly corrupt states, and NATO has been prodding Russia over the ex-Soviet states for a decade.

Excuse me? Dutchie here, the US have a horrible reputation even among their allies. They are as much criticized as Russia is right now. Maybe even more so considering that we get more imagery from the "exploits" of the US.

Stop with this double standard whataboutism, and maybe find some other circles to hang around in: you'll find the critique you wish for there.

Stop with this double standard hypocrisy, and sanction the US as well if you really care about war crimes etc.

It's proof by contradiction. Either you are against bombing innocents or you are not. By holding a stance that only Russia bombing innocents is wrong you are not only for bombing innocents you are also a russophobe at the same time.

It’s not a proof. It begs the question and starts from the assumption that the OP is ok with the US bombing people. Then it uses the dodgy premise that the US is worse than Russia when considering the metric “number of people bombed” (which I assume includes things like Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Vietnam war, not bothering with details such as the fact that these were actual wars and not unprovoked agressions), ignoring any other metric like “number of killed foreign civilians”, on which Russia, as the proud heir of the USSR, would be vying for the top spot with nazi Germany.

So yeah, faulty premise, cherry picking, and circular logic, as well as putting words into someone else’s mouth. It is just sub-standard trolling.

By holding a stance that only Russia bombing innocents

Who is holding that stance? Must every conversation start with a comprehensive list of all unjust things currently occurring anywhere in the world?

I think the tradition is that only conversations about unjust things done by Russia must start with a comprehensive list of all unjust things done by USA.

Unjust things done by other countries can be discussed freely.

> Who is holding that stance?

The one who was willing to risk nuclear war for Russian actions, it's above in this comment thread. I am making pretty reasonable guess that the same person was not wanting nuclear war over similar actions of US.

So we’ve gone from proof by contradiction to guess on top of guess.

No agenda, right?

Hang on, when did anyone in this thread say they were not against bombing innocents? You’re making rather bold assumptions here.

One party is currently torturing and murdering civilians, which tends to skew the conversation in a particular direction. Once Russia has withdrawn all troops from Ukraine we can discus behavior of other nations.

Most parties are currently torturing and killing civilians, but some have better PR departments. Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Aafghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Venezuela, and the list goes on and on. Nobody cares until white people die though.

Guantanamo is a stain on the US and will be for the foreseeable future, just like internment camps for Japanese people during WWII. But comparing either with Grozny, Aleppo (seriously, why mention Syria at all?), or Mariupol is either completely disingenuous, or entirely uninformed. It is also a complete false equivalence to compare them to the neo-gulags, just ask Navalny.

Which city did the US flatten since Dresden? How many hospitals did they voluntarily bomb? Hell, how many hospitals did the US bomb at all (and no, I don’t assume that number is zero)? Now, compare that to what happened in Karkhiv alone.

Playing chicken when Assad used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians and Putin razed Grozny were stupid mistakes. This is not a reason to let the same thing happen again in Ukraine.

No. But one definitely gets punishment and rightly so. The other never will. They just say fuck you. We are the good guys, we are exceptional and we have the biggest dick. Look what they promised to ICC should they ever try to indict their nationals.

I imagine it must feel great to be able to say something like this if you don't live in the region. Some of us don't have such comfort though.

The Poles, the Baltic states, etc. know Russia all too well and have an fear of Russian power that is justified. However, NATO is not some simple fix as current events demonstrate. Central Europe is a region between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Russian imperial propensities are not appeased. On the other, NATO (vel American) incursion and regime change has provided a pretext for grievance and military action.

The only long term stable geopolitical option for the region is the historic option: a powerful regional state and/or bloc that can simultaneously dampen Russian imperialism as well as "Western" ambition, like this one[0] which is a nascent project that I suspect can lead to a high degree of regional solidarity that will stabilize all of Europe and therefore contribute to the stability of the Eurasian landmass.

[0] https://3seas.eu/

Except that almost every single Central and Eastern European country benefit tremendously from interference by the West. The region was mostly left alone after WW1 so we ended up with a bunch of isolated states run by quasi fascist regimes 1930's. And guess how that turned out?

It's a very poor pretext. NATO doesn't threaten European countries to join it and doesn't invade them if they don't. It's the countries themselves who choose to associate with the West, Russian aggression being one of the contributing factors.

Disagree. russia forces puppet dictatorships on its neoghbours , but when that fails they spread lies and invading / annex them. Haven't this happened multiple times already?

NATO has a moral quandary on their hands. It's reasonable to argue that a given decision is the wrong one, but it seems ridiculous to lay the label of "recklessly provocative" on anybody but Putin, who threatened to nuke Europe over "offenses" for which a nuclear holocaust is, to put it lightly, not commensurate.

Putin’s been threatening to nuke or invade its neighbors about once a week for the past two decades already. Nothing but hot air, just a brand new audience who aren’t used to hearing it all the time.

How I wish it was just hot air.

Prior to recent events , he stated that no first nuke strike...

two things are clear:

- Putin has been left in charge by the same people that now are surprised Putin is being Putin. also US were too busy in Afghanistan and trying to make China look like the biggest threat to international peace.

- NATO should never ever intervene in areas that do not belong to NATO. When it happened it didn't go well (Bosnia and Herzegovina 1995, Kosovo 1999)

Neither of those things are clear at all.

I don't think anybody in Russia is surprised by Putin. They are, far and away, primarily responsible for him being in power.

NATO stopped some pretty horrific atrocities from spiraling even further out of control during those interventions. The not going well part mainly happened before they intervened. And yes, nothing is ever perfect.

> I don't think anybody in Russia is surprised by Putin.

who ever said anything about Russians?

You should also aknowledge that Russians don't know as much as we do about what's really happening in Ukraine right now.

> They are, far and away, primarily responsible for him being in power.

ridiculous.

Now it's clear why things are unclear to you, you don't even know how Putin got in charge in the first place.

> NATO stopped some pretty horrific atrocities from spiraling even further out of control during those interventions

No, it didn't.

Nothing NATO did prevented any atrocity, the atrocities had already happened, they could be stopped in many other ways, NATO chose bombings because bombing was the easier option and the one that assured that as little men as possible would be killed on NATO side.

The fact that it (kinda) worked doesn't imply that it did go well, it went very bad indeed.

NATO bombings worked same way they worked in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia, middle east in general: they didn't.

They just killed a lot of people for no real gain, what actually stopped those wars was the capture of the dictator of the day, not the bombs.

Milošević survived all of that and was also running for presidency in 2000.

He was arrested on suspicion of corruption, abuse of power, and embezzlement. The international tribunal could not charge him with anything, he died of heart attack in his cell in 2006 without a verdict under very unclear circumstances.

Ask William Perry (former Secretary of defense) what he thinks of those actions in retrospect.

Also the legality of the operation is still unclear.

You knew if your country was 30kms of sea away from former Yugoslavia and you could see the sky turning bright and red at night or fishermen kept digging up unused bomb flushed into the Adriatic sea by NATO bombers, together with a lot of toxic and dangerous chemicals.

Just a few pointers to shed some light on the whole fiasco

- United States bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (bombed because allegation that proved to be false)

- Niš cluster bombing (cluster bombs were already illegal in 1999)

- A Perfect Failure: NATO's War against Yugoslavia - Michael Mandelbaum: Kosovo's consequences were just the opposite of what NATO intended: suffering Kosovar civilians, regional instability, and a fuming Russia and China.

But yeah, I guess American propaganda worked if there are people that still believe 23 years later that bombing the Balkans was "good". The Mandela effect is stronger than I thought.

How Putin came to power and how he is now in power are two distinct things. I was talking about the present, with 20 years of many/most Russians just basking in Putin's killer tough guy shtick while he had his soldiers massacre and rape people indiscriminately, and invade countries around the region. Many Russians know exactly what is going on and still support it. And they all have a responsibility to attempt to overcome their media blackouts and find out.

I am intimately aware of the Kosovo situation, and not from US sources. I had to do a fair amount of reading to understand since I was constantly exposed to both Serbian and Albanian perspectives. This always turns into a flame war whenever it is mentioned online, but suffice to say there are many people who think they would not be alive today if it were not for NATO's actions. And that war was 23 years ago. The same thing could be more precisely done today of course. Again, I do not claim they were perfect at all. However, exponentially more innocent people were killed by the Serbs than those bombings ever killed. And civilian deaths were never the intention.

As for Milošević, let me pull out my tiney tiny violin. Whatever we might disagree on, I do think we can agree he was a war criminal, full stop. Whether he was convicted is irrelevant.

> How Putin came to power and how he is now in power are two distinct things

They are not.

> I was talking about the present, with 20 years of many/most Russians just basking in Putin's killer tough guy shtick while he had his soldiers massacre and rape people indiscriminately, and invade countries around the region

Not differently from what US has done in the past 20 years.

Russians are responsible for Putin's actions no more than Americans are for what their DOD does.

> but suffice to say there are many people who think they would not be alive today if it were not for NATO's actions.

That doesn't imply, __again__, that it wasn't bad.

Many people would not be alive if Stalin hadn't defeat Hitler, that doesn't mean it was good.

> However, exponentially more innocent people were killed by the Serbs than those bombings ever killed. And civilian deaths were never the intention.

Arithmetic is the weapon of dictators, not of democracies.

> Whatever we might disagree on, I do think we can agree he was a war criminal, full stop. Whether he was convicted is irrelevant.

Failure to bring criminals to justice is the reason why the death of civilians is unacceptable.

In our democracies nobody is a criminal, unless convicted.

Even war criminals such as Milošević.

It's not enough to know they are criminals to kill them in a prison's cell, that's what people like Putin do.

But most of all, democracies should __protect prisoners at all costs__, not kill them (if your country hasn't abolished death penalty, it's not a real modern democracy and can't be taken seriously when talking about "freedom rights") not let them die in prison and not discard their deaths because they were enemies.

I call myself a democrat because I would never do to them what they would probably do to me.

If we go around bombing civilians and keep doing things like this, covering up the atrocities[1] with lies and false myths[2], we are in no position to believe we are better.

That's why NATO should not intervene outside of NATO territories, because that's what NATO pact is about.

Protecting its members, not policing the World, especially those parts of the World that we kept unstable with our bombs.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/13/us/us-airstrikes-civilian...

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538830

Many people would not be alive if Stalin hadn't defeat Hitler, that doesn't mean it was good.

The defeat of Nazi Germany wasn't good? The fuck?

The main article cited here [1] just runs a climate model assuming that a nuclear war would put 150 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Where did this assumption come from? From here:

  "Turco et al. [1990] give a range of 20– 290 Tg of smoke injection over the Northern Hemisphere, and our 150 Tg case is just in the middle of this range."

In case terra-grams is not your favorite unit of mass, you can mentally exchange it for MT = mega tons. The Pinatubo eruption for comparison put 20 Mt of soot in the stratosphere. As far as weather or climate are concerned, it went basically unnoticed.

What else put a lot of soot in the atmosphere? Saddam after Gulf War 1. Not much happened then either. So much of a non-event it was, that Carl Sagan (one of the co-authors of the aforementioned 1990 Turco paper) conceded that their nuclear winter prediction was wrong [2]

  "It was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6° C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared."

[1] http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockNW2006JD008235.p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...

In any realistic exchange, there will be entire countries spared from the effects. Particulate matter rarely crosses hemispheric boundaries. Most of Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand would be spared. Given the roughly 1k standby weapons each side has, neither Russia or the US would waste missiles on anything other than military targets and capitol cities of nuclear powers involved in the exchange.

This isn’t the Cold War where weapons numbered in the 10s of thousands. Every continent is not split between East and west. There is limited reason China/NK would involve themselves in a nuclear escalation between Russia and NATO.

The part we should be concerned with is that the above makes a nuclear exchange over a proxy war far more likely. Alternately, if both sides decide on a second use policy similar to chemical weapons in ww2 - a conventional war becomes possible.

Half the planet would be dead and uninhabitable for a long time. USA has 88 nuclear power plants. No question they will all be targeted. So it's Chernobyl time 88, but there will be noone left to cover each of them with a sarcophagus.

The projections for a 500 warhead attack estimate 100-150 million dying immediately from the fireballs, shockwaves and fires. Then most survivors will die from the radioactive fallout, radiation sickness, starvation. Most animal life will end too.

Actually that is forbidden, at least according to some convention which exact point of origin I'm too lazy to search now.

Anyway, targeting NPP's with nukes is a big NO, NO! Same for things like dams, btw.

OTOH, before these the Brits had no problems targeting Germanies dams whith some ingenious things, which hopped over the water several times like described in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise

But that was before this convention was born.

Anyway, remains to be seen who gives a shit about such things in all out confrontation.

Even if no NPP is targeted directly (which I doubt), I don't think enough workers would remain (or care) to maintain the plants' safety in the event of a nuclear war.

Do you think Russia cares about some rules, especially in the case of a nuclear war?

Of course! Every kook goes by the book!

Anytime, to shine, in front the temples of the just wars, to be a part, of the eternal row of stars, from before the beginning of history, just another killing spree.

The question is which edition, because differences in interpretion, lead to sedition, which in turn gives just another reason, to loudly shout TREASON!, for anybody else, while the wheel in thy sky turns over time, unimpressed with all that shine from below.

Soon there will be the next overthrow.

> There is limited reason China/NK would involve themselves in a nuclear escalation between Russia and NATO.

I've seen someone say (without citation) that US would nuke China too in a full-scale nuclear war with Russia just so that China doesn't inherit the world.

Curious if anyone has a reference to that.

A lot of people say stupid things on the internet.

One more reason that we need nuclear power. It keeps going when the sun doesn’t shine for whatever reason. If the Netherlands’ greenhouses switched to electric heating, they can produce food year round. Indoor farming is an unsung hero of modern agriculture that we can use much more of when we get the cost of energy down. And it’s also a way for us to survive all sorts of catastrophes, not only a nuclear war.

I would guess that nuclear power plants are one of the first pieces of infrastructure to be targeted in the event of a NATO-Russia nuclear war. The reasons why nuclear power plants are less likely to be attacked in a conventional war don't really apply in that case. And you wouldn't even need to waste a nuke on it; a conventional warhead would do the job just as well.

Solar, yeah, I suppose losing ~50% of your output capacity is not awesome. But better to be operating at 50% than to be destroyed completely.

A regional conflict like India / Pakistan is far more likely than a superpower apocalypse and nuclear power would be hugely helpful in that situation. The same goes for a major volcanic eruption or any number of other disasters we might face which affect the amount of solar energy available.

I would guess that India and Pakistan know as well as anyone else the importance of destroying an opponent's most critical infrastructure in the execution of a total war.

That's why we need underground nuclear power plants.

War in Ukraine showed how fragile surface infrastructure is.

We must close the cave gap!

Pre-industrial man survived in both the Sahara and the Arctic. We have a wider biome than rats.

Humans would survive. Whether civilization would is a different question.

The article doesn't question that the human species will survive:

> This implies that some humans would survive, eventually to repopulate the planet, and that a species-level extinction of Homo sapiens is unlikely even after a full-scale nuclear war. But the vast majority of the human population would suffer extremely unpleasant deaths from burns, radiation and starvation, and human civilization would likely collapse entirely. Survivors would eke out a living on a devastated, barren planet.

Can you? Yes sure.

Do you want to? No, 100% not.

The next one or two decades after such war will be quite painful.

Also it might rob humans their chance to be able to cope with actual existential threads.

It also might lead to further wars, including nuclear ones.

On the plus side, it seems pretty likely to dramatically reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions? That seems like the most pressing existential threat we're facing at the moment.

I wouldn't be sure about this.

I mean if humans are desperate they are much less likely to take care about their environment, and might also not be able to do so properly even if they care.

Then what about bombed gas pipelines and silos or chemical plants?

you're totally out of line but you're also right.

Talk about radical solutions...

>"but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th/early 20th century and start back up"

"Stabilize" and "back up"? What an idiot. How about constant state of war for resources that are no longer available for one or another reason and further degradation because of it.

obliterating our technical means would also mean reducing our ability to do damage.

People have successfully proven to exterminate each other on large scale by very low tech.

I think there is a part of this survival question regularly unanswered: Who will want live after surviving a nuclear war?

As someone else said - I'm not worried about nuclear war. I'm worried I won't be caught in the blast radius.

«When the living will envy the dead.»

If you’re really asking, I would love to survive and live in this case.

I'd like to, if you're alive you can always kill yourself if things are too bad, might as well have the choice.

Encountering deathclaws, radroaches, the brotherhood/etc, and hunt for radaway/radx isn't top on my list /s

But in all honesty, yeah probably not.

To me the most worrying is the number of articles with opposite point of view popping up recently stating that the nuclear exchange wouldn't result in anything catastrophic. Like someone said here in the comments "just sit in a basement for a week and all would be well". Heck there's even no basements here in Bay Area, but I doubt that would help. I'm concerned that such point of view if getting more popular could result in much higher chance of a nuclear war eventually.

they probably meant Baysment Area.

I suggest to rediscover an infamous and undone USA secret ops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot witch was essentially the natural prosecution of an UKs one, similarly undone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable

The USA are the sole who hope, want to dream, a feasible nuclear war because they need war to save their economy, not from today but always, their economical model is not sustainable: produce much for a short period, than a deep crisis, than a war and back at the start of the cycle.

So no we humans can't survive a nuclear war and to survive we need to annihilate neoliberal school of thought, witch is essentially the British school of thought extended to the USA and Germany and then to China and SK before being globalized. Only erasing those think tanks from the root we can survive.

Unfortunately many born under their school fails to understand whose their own enemy and fight for them...

The central error in this question which is ill-formed: what do you mean by "Humans".

Can humans as a species survive? Absolutely no question: yes.

Can humans as any individuals survive? Absolutely no question: no. Not statistically.

Can humans as some cultural or nation-state survive? Can humans in some particular geography/demography survive?

Honestly that's where the gray area starts.

I get that global warming is an issue but I don’t think nuclear winter is our best option at this point

https://youtu.be/WF0mEOCK2KE

Note that 104 million is not the final death toll.

What would it look like if the US didn't fire back?

This simulation does not involve an American strike at all. Some context: https://twitter.com/DavidTeter/status/1507813126288207872

> with this scenario generating about 5 Tg (teragrams) of soot as smoke from wildfires and burning buildings entered the atmosphere

It's cool to see them as one of the very few sources that properly use the prefixed metric unit "teragram". The more common equivalent is "million tonne", which is more verbose and uses the non-base unit "tonne" (megagram).

What would happen if NATO just didn't respond to a Russian first strike?

NATO would still have a multiple of conventional firepower to defeat Russia few times over. That's based on a scenarios if Russia somehow manages to fire all of its 1000 warheads into NATO force in Europe, without being fired back at.

Can all of Russia's deployed warheads actually reach Europe without either burning up in the atmosphere or overshooting? Not many of them are intermediate range missiles, so for most of them their range is several thousand kilometers.

Sure most Europe falls well under that, but warheads tend to be deployed on solid rocket motors as they're comparatively low maintenance. Solid rocket motors can't be shut off once they're started, so you have very little control over its burn time once its started (this is one of many reasons why the Space Shuttle had so many black zones where an abort would result in the death of the crew). All you can control is its trajectory, but targeting europe, would mean either a very shallow trajectory, relying on air resistance to sufficiently slow the missile at the target, potentially resulting in the missile and warhead burning up or tearing up from g-forces in the lower atmosphere; or an extremely steep trajectory, resulting in, again, either strong g-forces or incredibly high temperatures meaning the missile burns up or tears up in the lower atmosphere.

Given the reluctance toward a first strike, I'm not convinced that russia can strike most counter-value targets in Europe with its fixed deployments. I think of the few missiles it has that can reach europe, they're likely aimed at counter-force locations, with the rest aimed at the significantly larger nuclear force in the US. Its subs are a different question though.

Russia has plenty of solutions to target Europe, from Iskander intermediate range missiles to submarine launched ones, to gravity bombs or even the new hypersonic Kinzhal cruise missiles.

Also, the whole premise of warheads burning up on reentry is a bit ridiculous. Notice how the most recent North Korea test had an extremely steep trajectory and it worked just fine.

> Also, the whole premise of warheads burning up on reentry is a bit ridiculous.

Is it? These warheads have to reach a significant fraction of orbital velocity. North Korea's test isn't really relevant here, as we have very little details on the actual test. There's a reason the intermediate range nuclear forces treaty existed. If it was possible for any missile to target europe, then it wouldn't have been necessary in the first place (and would have been nonsensical). When you're travelling that low, at that speed, the only option is really going to be hypersonic glide vehicles.

Now the hypersonic missiles are a recent development, and it's not clear how many have been deployed or even constructed. I'm in agreement that they could easily target europe though.

The question with Iskander is how many are currently deployed with nuclear warheads, and how long would it take to increase that number? They seem only useful in a first strike, but any attempt to load them with nuclear warheads would likely be seen by NATO intelligence.

Gravity bombs, if they're used in a first strike, it won't be a decapitation or even a strategic strike; it'll just be a demonstration of force.

There are US nukes in Germany, Italy and Turkey. France and UK have their own. It would be pretty weird for Russia to not be ready at all times to target those countries. I don't know with what exactly, but surely they have thought about this.

Also, when the US anti-missile shield facility were installed in Poland and Romania Putin explicitly warned that these two countries will be added to the predetermined target list:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-europe-shield-idUS...

They’re all targets in a counter-force strike. I’m talking about a strike that’s primarily counter value.

If you can hit the force in germany/uk/france you can also hit the value there.

And a second strike is kind of by definition counter value.

Leaked Soviet era nuclear war with NATO plan:

> Vienna was to be hit by two 500-kiloton bombs, while Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and several bases in Italy were to be hit by single 500-kiloton bombs

> Stuttgart, Munich, and Nuremberg in West Germany were to be destroyed by nuclear weapons and then captured by the Czechoslovaks and Hungarians.

> In Denmark, the first nuclear targets were Roskilde and Esbjerg. Roskilde, while having no military significance, is the second-largest city on Zealand and located close to the Danish capital Copenhagen (the distance from central Copenhagen to Roskilde is only 35 km or 22 mi). It would also be targeted for its cultural and historical significance to break the morale of the Danish population and army.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine

>Its subs are a different question though.

My assumption would be that any Russian missile boat is being trailed with an opposition attack sub just waiting for it to become a sitting duck while prepping for launch operations.

The predictions I read cite 300 to 500 warheads if Russia will chose to specifically target Europe, which is unrealistic, as US will (hopefully) retaliate.

It's not me saying that NATO should not attack at all. Having even 300 nuclear warheads shot at you is no good news at all, and you need to preempt that at any cost, including doing a first strike/sabotage on your own.

The number one reason why USSR/Russia never attacked Europe is because it can't attack Europe, and US at the same time. And this is the easiest explanation why Putin been driving a wedge in between EU, and USA for all his 23 years in power.

tl;dr: Most people will die, although perhaps from famine rather than directly from the blasts or from radiation disease etc. Some will survive to have a shitty life.

Bottom-line quote:

> The price of nuclear escalation is planetary suicide, with no winners at all. That won’t save lives in Ukraine — it will simply take the death toll of the current war from the thousands to the billions.

Well, that was a cheerful Sunday morning reading. It was shocking how devastating even <1 percent of the world’s stockpile being used, much less most of it.

When the Wind Blows by Quentin Blake was a bleak look at what it might be like to live through a nuclear winter. It doesn't end happily.

On the Beach by Nevil Shute was similar, not about nuclear winter but about radiation killing everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)

Small nit, it was by Raymond Briggs

Don't know why I put Quentin Blake. Think I had a brain fart or something.

Faster we escalate this conflict, faster China would become next #1 power. Playbook from the history,...

Lets say you live in Timmins Ontario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timmins population of 40,000.

Nuclear holocaust happens. Toronto(7 hours away) has literally 0 survivors, only mutants and threedog radio is left. Same with all other large cities.

How long would it take for Timmins to notice it happened? Internet likely would be down... but such is life in northern rural parts of Canada. Nobody there associates with people in Toronto. They would see the outage and decide to go fishing. Headed to the river to catch me some sturgeon!

It would probably be days before anyone noticed there was a problem. It would then take weeks for anyone to care enough to find out what happened to Toronto. By the time they show up in toronto the radioactive fallout would be greatly reduced.

The world is a big place and 'nuclear winter' is just a hypothesis. In fact, with civilization being destroyed... timmins doesnt have to worry about climate change anymore. Though that might be a problem because damn that place is cold. They need some warming.

I doubt people would take days to notice that their steady supply of power, petroleums, natural gas, medication, fresh food, etc. disappeared

>I doubt people would take days to notice that their steady supply of power, petroleums, natural gas, medication, fresh food, etc. disappeared

Power wouldn't be cut. The grid would probably be over powered. Most power generation is not near the cities. NIMBY problems with building nukes in backyards.

Petroleum products? They are pretty remote, they tend to run higher reserves.

Medication and food? Kind of the same thing.

You know one thing I didn't consider. Tourism. Maybe someone from toronto would be there and notice and bring it to people's attention.

Point I am making isn't to argue over how fast people might notice the destruction of civilization. More, even in nuclear apocalypse, life goes on.

Something interesting as well. Right before an apocalypse your internet algorithm will start providing you with how to build survival shelters in the forest. Not camping, not doomsday prepping. Just survivalist type stuff.

a species so smart that it manufactured it's own extinction ... it's a bit chilling knowing that the possibility of this happening is not zero.

> a species so smart

Russia Claims Ukraine’s Refusal to Share Borscht Proves ‘Nazism’ [1]

I mean, the nuclear annihilation of humanity as a result of Ukrainian denial of borscht as a common heritage with Russia would be a perfect end of the world.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-claims-ukraines-refusal...

There is only one way to find out.

Tl;dr: most likely some of the billions of humans would survive to repopulate the world (founder effect).

A possible dramatic population bottleneck throughout human history [0].

For anyone wondering about the pompous naming: Alliance for Science.

>Our primary source of support is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

An interesting in-depth article [1].

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

[1]https://usrtk.org/our-investigations/cornell-alliance-for-sc...

Great research.

It sure is lucky that all these tax-exempt charitable foundations are so kindly disposed to us, and only promote genuine good causes!!

The alternative would be that foundations are just a trick to extract even more funds at the tax-payers expense, to fund the billionaires' agendas!

But that couldn't be! Bill, Buffett, Elon et al aren't unscrupulous self-serving billionaires - even if it makes good sense financially. They aren't using public funds to grow their businesses - or at least so they tell us in their media.

No, they have our interests at heart - trust them! Phew!

If there is nukes war, it will basically wipe out USA and likely UK as well. Russia probably has significant losses as well but due to its size and terrain plus population density, Russia will eke out a winning population to continue Russia as a nationhood after the war. US will be just left as a oral tradition. I don't think other countries will be affected much other than loss in trading opportunities in dollar. Russia has significantly more nukes than all western countries combined. And that is official numbers. They have their own uranium mines and even US has to import from them. So the number of nukes will be significantly more in the unofficial numbers. Plus, they have access to China as production centres for all the widget they needed. While US by their own suspicion paranoid manner wouldnt engage China for such production needs. With US and UK gone, whatever left as NATO will ceased to exist as they have very little nukes left to counter the remaining nuke countries.

And what about all the climate consequences?

Lol no. I don't know what it is with the fear porn over nukes. If you're more than 8 miles from the city that gets nuked you just have to stay inside for a week and you'll survive with a slightly higher chance of getting cancer. Your windows will probably get blown out and you'll have to tape trash bags over them but keep in mind that's a sonic effect; the wavefront from the blast is what causes it, not actual material from the site which takes much longer to propagate. Fallout particles are large and only suspend, not dissolved, in the air. So all you have to do to avoid it is stay inside and wait for the low half life radioisotopes to decay.

Given the awful state of most US cities a nuclear war could arguably improve the US.

> If you're more than 8 miles from the city that gets nuked

Even if you're less than that distance, you've a fairly decent chance depending on local geography and the building you're in. The inverse square law helps a lot.

If this is what we call „sciene“ we have a problem.

This is just the first part of the scientific method to create an hypothesis/theory. Unfortunately, the next part--testing the theory--is rather difficult. Making it worse, the final part is to reliably be able to recreate the results in subsequent testing.

With this particular set of tests, the only winning move is not to play.

Care being a bit more specific?

The linked article is fear mongering.

All sides understand the consequences, so nobody is going to use ALL or even part of their nuclear arsenal.

There can be a tactical nuclear bomb exchange as a show of force, but this is unlikely to cause any kind of climate change.

Moreover in the last paragraph author tries to justify that it's ok for a genocide to happen if the perpetrator has nuclear weapons

It may very quickly get out of control into a full scale nuclear war, and that may literally happen in minutes. Recently I often see articles suggesting that limited use of nukes might be ok, I hope the people who make the actual decisions don't agree with those.

War is always multi-step. The enemies try to beat each other into submission, and then use it to their advantage in negotiations.

Where does this myth of world destruction in a few minutes come from? Movies?

There is no scenario where Russia would benefit from bombing Europe or USA indiscriminately.

USA economy depends on China economy, China economy depends on USA economy, Russia economy depends on China / Europe / US economy.

And even with sanctions, most countries are trading with Russia, but the Russian economy is starting to show signs of failure. Prolonged land war would be a disaster for them.

A tactical nuclear attack or chemical attack towards Ukraine would mean an absolute nightmare for Russian economy, like signing off on the destruction of Russia economically

> fear mongering.

If there's one thing you should be afraid of it is probably nuclear war.

> All sides understand the consequences, so nobody is going to use ALL or even part of their nuclear arsenal.

Putin and the Kremlin now probably understand that they can't really trust their military readiness, which makes it that much more likely that if their nuclear launch sites are threatened that they will launch everything they have under the assumption that if they don't they will lose it, and that they need to fire everything they have assuming a lot won't reach their targets.

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