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Comment by shaky-carrousel | Hacker News Reader

Enough? Enough for what? This is not mutually assured destruction. If Russia and the US engage, this is a madman shooting a tank with a 9mm. It may cause some damage, but he's going to be obliterated in the process.

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>If Russia and the US engage, this is a madman shooting a tank with a 9mm.

I don't know, losing for example New York City would be kind of rough. In reality probably every major US city.

Your analogy doesn't quite check out.

Yes but Russian leadership doesn't necessarily believe that the nukes don't work. If they do a massive launch then we'll probably take at least some damage, and if we massively retaliate then we'll conduct a risky experiment to see who's right about nuclear winter.

The debris thrown up into the stratosphere from our weapons detonating in Russia would likely be enough to start a nuclear winter, not to mention the fallout making everything in the northern hemisphere a lot more radioactive.

Any large exchange of thermonuclear weapons is going to break most supply chains and lead to a great simplification of society and the deaths of at least 90% of the population in the process as industrial farming stops being a thing.

The exchange on the Russian side would be minimal, if any. On the US side, it'll only need to target major cities to be effective. Destroying Moscow and Saint Petersburg would be more than enough. They could use neutron bombs, as they are cleaner, if they still have.

Destroying Moscow and St. Petersburg might be worth losing Paris, London, Washington, New York, and Los Angeles; but it certainly wouldn't worth losing Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, and other centers of the worlds history. The others also has a vote, you know.

Still, I'd rather not have to move my ski season to the sides of Mount Golgotha near Jerusalem - that glowing snow might still be radioactive after all.

More like a duel where one person has a revolver and the other a bazuka. Getting shot is better than exploding, but still very bad.

> If Russia and the US engage, this is a madman shooting a tank with a 9mm. It may cause some damage, but he's going to be obliterated in the process.

But nuking Russia is still bad since it would cause trouble (nuclear winter for example?) for other countries/whole world

Where do you live, out of curiosity?

If it kills just 100k americans that's a cost too high to pay.

The GQP‘s ongoing downplaying of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already killed more than 1 million Americans, has proven that a large part of the US electorate disagrees with you.

I think it’s less easy to ignore 1 mil American deaths if it’s from a sudden explosion. Also, covid did have huge economic and cultural ramifications.

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