How destructive are nuclear weapons really?

>not an existential threat to humanity ... [but] 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.

So, it's exactly as destructive as I think. I get it - some people focus on the worst case scenario of a human-species-ending nuclear winter. I'm not actually particularly interested in how likely or unlikely that specific outcome is, as the "lesser" outcomes are plenty horrifying enough, and don't call for a general downplaying of nuclear attacks like this.

The conclusion:

>Nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be. Some of this is because the threat has routinely been exaggerated by anti-nuclear groups, and some of it is the result of arms control efforts over the past half-century, which have significantly reduced the potential human toll of a nuclear war

It’s odd to me that he blames exaggeration of nuclear weapons on anti-nuclear and anti-proliferation.

It would seem likely to me that the exaggeration is more due to pro-nuclear forces and nuclear state powers, with the aim of promoting peace through power and deterrence.

> For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live.

This person is delusional.

The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario.

There are some good points here mixed with some large assumptions.

The good points:

- Weapons fuzed for high-altitude air burst, which maximizes the damage area at the expense of not being able to kill hardened targets, are not going to produce dangerous fallout.

- The typical warhead now is significantly smaller than the multi-megaton ones that were typical during the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The large assumptions:

- Hardened, remote military targets will soak up a lot of warheads that could otherwise be targeted to wreck cities or general-purpose infrastructure.

- Civilization will only regress to an early-20th-century level after every oil refinery has been destroyed and the surrounding populations decimated.

That last pair of assumptions in particular raises my eyebrows:

"To put this into perspective, there are currently about 1,200 international airports and 732 oil refineries worldwide. Allocating a single warhead to each of these would leave only a thousand or so for every single other target on the planet."

and

"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."

It hardly matters if most people survived the initial attack if all the oil refineries are gone, along with all the infrastructure within a couple miles of each oil refinery. Early 20th century technology supported fewer than 2 billion people, most of those being people who already knew how to farm without artificial fertilizers. Today we are nearly 8 billion and a much smaller fraction have any experience farming. A nuclear war that globally knocks technology back to the early 20th century, even for "only" a decade or so, would lead to the death of most people now alive. At that point I'm skeptical that there would be enough survivors to sustain even as much specialization of labor as found in the early 20th century industrialized economies. Technology level and population could fall much further.

I strongly encourage anyone who wants a taste of what nuclear war would look like to watch Threads[1].

Despite being the most terrifying depiction of nuclear war that I've ever seen, and it is probably overoptimistic.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, a general in charge of UK's nuclear strategic defense met with his Soviet counterpart and asked the latter what he thought of Threads and the latter laughed and said the entire UK was an overkill zone.

In the US you are either by major population areas (as most people are) and will probably be targeted by many weapons in the megaton range, and if you're in remote areas you're probably near some missile bases and will be wiped out too. Nuclear winter and fallout will get the rest.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Srqyd8B9gE

I'm not very comfortable with all the talks I hear or read about how nuclear war isn't so bad since russia invaded ukraine

I think it might be for the better that we think nuclear weapons are world ending in that it stops them from being used

Destroying the entirety of Manhattan beneath 80th st or so, along with a significant part of Manhattan-facing Brooklyn and Hoboken shorelines, with a single reasonably placed bomb is actually about as destructive as I imagined (following their 3 miles out rule).

But sure, let's lighten up about nukes!

This essay is leaning very hard on the fact that there are 5% the number of warheads today as there were at the peak of the cold war. Nuclear weapons are exactly as destructive as we think; the sum total of the nuclear arsenal is far smaller than when many of us formed our impressions.

I’m surprised by the bad response this article received. All media I’m aware of speak of nuclear war in very vague terms and suggest an outcome similar to that which we see in entertainment science fiction. Long before the war in Ukraine I have been occasionally trying to dig a little deeper into the actual possible outcome of a nuclear war, but found only vague or outdated information and I’m very grateful to the author of the article for doing good research. Yes, it is based on major assumptions, but those truly are the best thing we have since the discussed situation is genuinely unprecedented. I’m also surprised by the disgust people here express towards the supposed “normalisation of nuclear war”. Much like the general public was taught by films such as Terminator that AI is something that will end the world, the perception of nuclear warfare was similarly shaped by media. When AI started seeing widespread use in daily life it became important to address the ingrained misconceptions. In the same way, now that there’s a war in Europe and Russia is threatening the use of nukes it is important for people to have a reasonably accurate idea of what such use would entail. The idea of “nuclear war is simply unacceptable and we must avoid it at all costs” is good very getting upvotes on social media, but truth is that taking all available steps to prevent such a war is equivalent to appeasing Russia in all cases.

That really depends on what people 'think' is a lot. About 7 million Germans died in WWII (civilian + military), clearly a lot, but still 'only' 10% of the population.

The Ukraine military has reporter their own casualties as 3'000 men so far, which is huge, yet 10+ times that many people go into sport arenas every week.

If nuclear war now would kill 50% of the global population, it would certainly define our history for centuries, yet half of us (i.e more than 4 billion humans) would still be there afterwards.

"Known" nuclear weapons. Good part of the motivation of that arms race was to discourage the enemy to start a war, even if they had everything to win it. In that line, there had been rumours of doomsday devices (like Dead Hand from URSS in the Cold War) that could put in danger most life on Earth, that could be triggered if some side loses or other defined conditions. It is a level up from mutual assured destruction.

And that example is from 50+ years ago. I don't know if something more advanced was developed more recently by either side. Technology and science had advanced a lot and both sides had a pretty big budget all this time. I prefer to not discard the possibility.

"For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live."

I'm not sure what universe this cat lives in, but I'm pretty sure Moscow would far more concerned with vaporizing Wall Street than in whatever naval stuff happens in Red Hook or Port Elizabeth (rather than Annapolis or Chesapeake). Or does he think wars are still won by navies instead of bankers? :-D

It depends: Real-world nukes, or Hollywood nukes.

If real-world nukes, play with Nukemap to get an idea.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

> "Broadly speaking, we can expect nuclear weapons to be aimed at one of three types of targets: strategic (nuclear) targets, conventional military forces, and industrial/infrastructure targets. Notably absent is a direct interest in killing the opposing population, although people tend to live near infrastructure, so it is going to happen."

This is unsubstantiated and seemingly just poorly informed. Our initial nuclear targets from the 50s have been declassified [1] and it's no doubt other countries have similar targets. We planned to specifically target population centers as well as things like medical production facilities.

The reason propaganda is so heavily interweaved into war is because a war is won by breaking the will of the enemy to resist. See: Afghanistan, a country which has the GDP of a moderate sized city in a developed country and relatively primitive weapons, has now won wars against both the Soviet Union and the USA. Both had dramatic superiorities in every measurable category, except willpower. The will of the invaders broke before the will of the Afghans. And so the Afghans won.

In nuclear war, where all rules and ethics have long since been tossed aside, the only goal will be to break the will of the enemy by any means possible. And I can think of no possibly better way to completely break the will of a people to fight than finding their most economically developed and heavily populated locations, and sending the nukes square center. Even "better" is that these will be some of the softest targets. Nuclear facilities are built with the anticipation of being nuclear targets, Manhattan isn't.

[1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear...

I don’t really see why people think this article promotes nuclear war. It does help to explain a lot of geopolitical events like why Russia feels insecure even with thousands of nukes. The fact is that things aren’t over after throwing your nukes. Your still need a strong conventional army to capture or defend territory.

For Russia to be a great power (and they want to be) they have to control the Central European plane to be fully secure. No, buffer states are not enough. They have to control the countries there either as puppet states or full annexation.

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

That's not how technology works. You can't rewind things arbitrarily backwards any more than than you can wind them arbitrarily forwards. The technology required to recreate my grandfathers feed and fuel business simply doesn't not exist anymore. The horses that pulled the wagons no longer exist and would have to be bred up again. All the manufactured fittings no longer have factories and there is no one that knows how to design the machines.

If there is a slip it would be to the level of small manually run farms. Those that could not manage that particular technology would die. Which would be almost everyone.

It would make a lot more sense to recover as many machine tools as possible and then try to recreate the existing technology from the wreckage

Just one of many pro-nuke propaganda pieces prepping our minds for the next stage of war, actual nuclear war. The more we discuss the merits, the more "acceptable" the outcomes seem to become in the popular zeitgeist.

"The world can have a little nuclear war... as a treat."

Honestly the normalization of nuclear war on this forum is so disgusting that this article doesn't deserve a better response than that.

Stop crawling up your own contrarian asshole that far.

The "best" outcome of nuclear war will be so bad that you'll probably wish you were just incinerated in the blast.

(And Russia will never in a million years show any kind of restraint once it comes to launching nuclear missiles at the United States. If their nukes are like their tanks many of them may not work, and they should now know that. And once they start shooting the United States will quickly treat the remaining arsenal as an existential threat so seek to destroy them all. That means that Russia must launch all of them. Its a game theoretical problem with an optimum that exhibits bang-bang control).

The analysis is interesting and makes sense that populations wouldn’t largely be targeted, but it seems that’s assuming some kind of logical strategy to the war where the objective is to disable the forces of your opponent. That’s nice and tidy to then say populated areas won’t largely be targeted, but what if the objective in using them just becomes to create as much human suffering as possible?

"Again, nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one, but it is not as bad as it is often made out to be."

What kind of person gets up in the morning and decides this is the thing they need to write about and tell the world today? How are we served by this?

What happens to nuclear power plants if they’re destroyed by a nuclear blast? Or a nuclear waste facility? Wouldn’t that result in a Chernobyl like event, without the ability to contain it as quickly? How would the world handle a few dozen Chernobyls all at once?

"Thought experiment" from Kurzgesagt: What if We Nuke a City? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iPH-br_eJQ

You can definitely survive a nuclear war -- but you might up envying the dead.

Sadly, we have two study cases about "how destructive are nuclear weapons" and yes, really, they are Hiroshima and Nagasaki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... I've read this article quickly but there is no mention to those events, the author only compare the power of a modern nuke with Hiroshima bomb. So, how can this article be a reliable source ? About the author, I don't see his name and after a quick google search, I can't find any endorsement to that website as reliable source. This is the second article I see on HN of the series "nukes are bad but no so bad" that are no more that blogger opinions, INMO. As usual, being liked transform anything on Internet in authoritative information by induction and this is bad.

I think it's important to have accurate models of the world, in order to make sound decisions. I don't think playing a macabre Pascal's Wager with nuclear armageddon benefits no one.

It would be an unmitigated disaster. There would be incalculable suffering. But all this talk of ending humanity as a species is not at all scientifically founded.

If anything, I think this raises the stake of responsible earth stewardship (same thing with climate change). If you believe you are well and truly fucked, fatalism kicks in and you mentally check out. But if you believe that you will most likely survive, and the amount of suffering you experience will be affected by your decisions, all of a sudden you have ethical skin in the game.

Why reduce nukes 90% if that 10% still glasses the planet? There is no qualitative change. But if a 90% reduction is the difference between 8B and 1B deaths, de-armament is now approachable, has real stakes, and makes a real impact.

> In practice, most strategic nuclear warheads today are in the 300-500 kT range

Capable to wipe out all capital cities in Eastern Europe, or most of capital cities of Western Europe, I mean if only one is used, and not two, out of few thousands.

Few weeks ago something fell out of blue in Zagreb and later they identified it as a Russian spy plane. That's it.

So... I guess it's okay if Russia nukes Ukraine? Does that explain the March 27th publication date?

Nukes don't need to wipe out every square inch as the author implies. They only need to cause covid-like, ukraine-like interference to our infrastructure to reduce our planet to the iron age and only capable of supporting a fraction of its current population.

Whenever the experts volunteer their precious time--making words and pictures for total strangers--to convince us that we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads over something, it's probably time to take precautions & make preparations.

Yeah, but you know - if they start flying, we're dead. I'm in the middle of Poland, it really won't be any comfort for me that USA will survive when I'll be dead.

One thing of note left out, re destruction of population centers: The article focuses on a most-likely scenario, and doesn't discuss a most-dangerous (to civilians) one. I'm curious how much devastation could be unleashed if weapons were targeted at population centers. Depending on how effective defense systems are (THAAD, PATRIOT etc), I'd bet huge amounts of people could be killed.

The biggest problem I see with this rather sunny perspective is that it assumes all those "reserve" warheads are permanently out of action. In fact, we have to expect that they'll start getting pulled into service as soon as the first nukes fly. That is, after all, the point of a reserve is it not? So no, it's not going to stop at 3000 warheads.

I would expect a large number will be duds.

There has been no testing for years, the nature of the device requires constant maintenance, the delivery systems (rockets) require even more maintenance…

And, then you have the issue of fraud… that is, suppliers, contractors, and quality-control guys fudging the numbers.

How can we be sure of even a conservative estimate of current warheads. Why wouldn’t US/Russia have significantly more nuclear war heads than they are a) allowed and b) saying they have? Surely it’s in their interest to have more than the other.

"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say... no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops."

- Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

If all of the nukes in the world went off at once, strategically spaced out to cause the most land coverage (I.E. some kind of Dr Strangelove situation), the world would look mostly the same. Green grass, blue oceans. It wouldn't be scorched earth. But, of course, those unlucky enough to live downwind, within 100 or so miles of a nuke, would get a healthy dose of radiation to their internal organs, as radioactive dust would be unavoidable. For decades, that fallout region would be uninhabitable, because radioactive isotopes would be incorporated into plants and animals.

So yeah, not the end of the world, or even civilization, but I wouldn't want to live in that world.

Other things to consider:

Weapon reliability -- particularly on the Russian side. Will many / most of their ICBMs even get off the ground? Will the warheads actually work properly? I'm not saying they're all duds but if I was Russia I'd maybe keep 100 maintained for the sake of demonstration.

Willingness to launch -- this is probably a bigger problem on the Russian side (the Americans brainwash their soldiers better!) Even if they use tricks like obfuscating targets or claiming the target is an uninhabited 'demonstration' someone still has to push the button.

European Theatre -- Russia needs its subs to try to stop UK / American subs from nuking them so they're not likely deployed around NA (instead hunting for enemies closer to home) and thus can't destroy the silos.

As such they can't attack the US using ICBMs because they will face massive retaliation. The only way Russia can survive such a war would be to have an exchange with Europe and assume the US will not launch ICBMs (a fair assessment).

The rest of the West will be far too distracted dealing with the humanitarian crisis generated by the blasts in Europe to care about Russia.

So, if the West were to imply an invasion of Russia directly, Russia's best course of action would be to nuke a few cities in non-nuclear countries in Western Europe. At that point an invasion of Russia would be untenable (due to the need to deal with the figurative and literal fallout), and although nuclear retaliation might ensue (but not more than tit for tat), it would not be existential to Russia. And nobody would risk poking the bear again.

This is Putin's thinking and why we're not invading Russia (or even Ukraine).

However, I'd like to point out that even the destruction of a single largish city will completely ruin any appetite on the part of the West to either inflict such damage themselves or encourage any encores. You will see anti-war protests in the West on an unprecedented scale. There will be uncontrolled rioting in the streets. Any democratic government that engages in further nuclear activity will likely not survive politically and neither will their parties.

This is Putin's 'escalate to de-escalate' scenario.

While what is happening in Ukraine is horrific and terrible I'm afraid we're stuck unless we develop an appetite for this sort of shit. Which is itself horrible and terrible.

Posted earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051354

So, what's the actual conclusion? It's okay to keep pushing Russian until they fire off the nukes?!

>Broadly speaking, we can expect nuclear weapons to be aimed at one of three types of targets: strategic (nuclear) targets, conventional military forces, and industrial/infrastructure targets.

This is assuming the person wielding the nukes is attempting to use them for normal military activity. However, nuclear weapons are generally wasteful for this purpose; regular missiles work just as well, cost less money, and do not poison the land you want to invade for weeks out. If you could use nukes in an ordinary military campaign, then all the nuclear disarmament over the last 30 years would not have happened.

The only thing nuclear weapons are really good at is killing lots of people really quickly. Thus, my current bet is that if Russia attempts to use their nukes, it will specifically be a last-ditch effort to kill as many pro-EU Ukranians as possible on their way out of the country. Their current actions are consistent with this; when their initial blitzkrieg failed, they proceeded to slaughtering as many civilians as they could.

I otherwise generally agree with the article's contention that nuclear war will not be a species-destroying event. It is, however, still something worth avoiding; because in an all-out war Russia will absolutely be going after population centers first and not militarily-valuable targets. Russia's goal is not to win the war. Their goal is to make Putin look tough and powerful while goading the west into making the mistake of counterattacking so we can bleed faster than they are.

People aren't good at predicting the results of things that haven't happened before.

Honestly if I ever find a terminal into the universe I’m rolling back humans.

I imagine we'll be seeing a lot of content like this in the run up to nuking Kyiv. Despicable.

As a wannabe libertarian, I believe in freedom of speech and information. But if I had to choose a single topic of all that has to banned, it would be this.

Due to several cognitive biases human perception tends to lean towards black & white depiction of the world. In nuclear war topic black is "we all are gonna die so there is no point to use the nukes" and white is "well, it's not that bad after all, maybe we could nuke those evil Russians/Americans". Black depiction must be maintained in public space even if the preconditions are false. The Overton window must stay where it is now.

If this isn't misinformation, I don't know what is.