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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

Internal US government documents estimate something like a 90% population loss after a war that only targets our ICBM silos. (Ie not one missile hits a populated area.) The fallout destroys our food supplies and wipes out livestock, making farming impossible: most of the US population starves within a year. There is a reason the US government doesn’t spend a lot of effort preparing the population for a nuclear war, and it isn’t because of “anti-nuclear activism.”

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There appears to be a fair amount of internal dissension within the government on that point. Nuclear War Survival Skills [1], also a government publication, explicitly calls out this attitude as both scientifically inaccurate and irresponsible, as there are a number of things the population can do to dramatically increase their survivability in a nuclear war.

[1] https://ia800501.us.archive.org/35/items/NuclearWarSurvivalS...

Yes, the publications the U.S. made for the population back then were reassuring.

The people who actually plan the wars these days expect maybe 15 to 20 million people to still be alive in the U.S. a year and a half after a full general war.

Do you have a source for this?

Yes.

And can you share your source?

Sounds like it could be a classified source considering he’s referring to contemporary war plans

Elsewhere in this thread he links to David Teter's OPEN-RISOP as his source. [1]

The quality of OPEN-RISOP is generally pretty good, and the author worked at Sandia National Labs about 10-20 years ago. Targeting at least is pretty consistent with what I'd expect as high value targets. OPEN-RISOP's counterforce + countervalue scenario only tallies about 60M fatalities (~20% of US population) from the original attack. chakalakaps must be assuming cascading failures of infrastructure & food production after the initial attack (a la Threads [2]). While this is a distinct possibility, it's far from a given - and this is also one of those areas where being prepared (eg. having a year of dried foodstuffs stored, or a small personal garden) can give you a distinct survival advantage.

[1] https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/tree/main/TARGET%20...

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

David has mentioned on Twitter and Reddit (when asked) that he estimates 90% to 95% of all people living in the U.S. would be dead within 18 months after either of his attack scenarios that involve countervalue due to complete breakdown of all infrastructure, production, supply chains, communications, etc.

Studies done in the 60s and 70s were aimed at much larger scale conflicts than would occur in 2022. However the general sentiment is accurate. Food production post-nuclear war is a wildcard, dependent on both fallout pattern, global capacity to increase food production, global interest in helping countries devastated by nuclear war, and targeting.

The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles. The assumption that both sides haven't done some planning for both scorched earth targetting approaches, and "survivable" exchanges also seems suspect. Who's to say that Russia wouldn't target conventional military infrastructure, and civilian population centers, having assumed that all deployable warheads would already have been fired? They could reasonably assess that the value of targeting silos which have already fired their missiles is low, and the need for post-war food production will be high.

Alternately, they could adopt a scorched earth targeting policy to maximize fallout and leave the US in a permanently weakened state. I'm sure all nuclear powers have tried to maximize their choices in how to deploy weapons in any conflict.

"The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles."

That's what SLBMs are for. An SLBM launched off the Oregon coast could hit missile silos in Montana in under 5 minutes. Launch in the middle of the night and there's not enough time to get the President out of bed and brief him before the missiles impact. (For that matter, if you park an SSBN 500 miles off Washington DC, it can get nuked in 3 minutes, probably killing the president as there's not enough time to get him down into the bunker. That's why the U.S. developed the SOSUS network, so you can't park an SSBN 500 miles off Washington without us knowing about it.)

Modern SLBMs (1980s and onwards) are explicitly designed for this role, with depressed flight trajectories, low CEP, MIRVs, hardened silo penetrators, and warhead yields calibrated to destroy typical silos, given an accurate ground burst.

There are multiple plans for multiple contingencies. A couple of different examples are here:

https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP

The fallout thing is kinda a unlikely thing. Fallout from typical ground-bursts is something that denies area for weeks at most.

There are weapons systems that can do area denial for much longer by using weapons salted with materials that will remain radioactive for many years (essentially the plot of Dr. Strangelove -- that "doomsday" system is based on realistic weapons possibilities, and the Russians in the past decade intimated that they have developed a submersible drone system designed to cross the ocean and detonate huge salted weapons to poison the U.S. coasts for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_... ) -- but as far as anyone in the open source info world knows, these kinds of weapons are not deployed.

It seems to me that underground targets would cause worse fallout than other targets because ground-burst rather than air burst would be used.

Making my point. The gravest estimates come from the nuclear powers themselves

I'd love a source

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