Nuclear war between US and Russia could kill 5B people

Even if only 1 or 2% of Russia's presumed arsenal of several thousand was functional enough to get through, and even if only half of those weren't knocked out before making their targeted impacts, you'd still be talking about at least dozens of nuclear bombs exploding on the western side of the world. Most of these would strike places inhabited by millions of people and enormously important amounts of critical infrastructure.

Add to that the arguably larger number of bombs working enough to be successfully launched by the U.S and its nuclear-armed allies in retaliation against Russia (and a greater percentage of them reaching their targets, because after seeing its military "perform" in Ukraine, I simply don't believe that Russia's anti-missile measures would be particularly effective).

With all of this combined you'd still be seeing an absolutely catastrophic global situation of human, social, political, economic and climatological destabilization. At least tens of millions would die immediately and at least tens of millions more would die in the months of war, further mutual attacks, radiation, regional nuclear fallout effects and global economic (think food distribution in particular) effects that would follow.

In no time at all, we'd be facing a whole new geopolitical and devastated economic landscape in which more people have died than in all the wars of history combined.

Even if this were not the utter Armageddon of a full blown nuclear war of thousands of raining missiles, it would still devastate the peace and better human trends of the planet as we know them today. Ultimately, it would then also be a humanitarian tragedy on a scale never before seen in modern world history.

That's nothing to disregard, and it's almost certainly something that would brutally damage the lives of every single person commenting here in some deeply personal, hard way, at the least.

One of the reasons why many treaties came a long after WW2 was because for the first time ever, we had weapons on a scale that could truly cause civilization ending events. There is talk about strategic strike capabilities and from the little bits that trickle out from within, it is considered a potential path forward. But it is a path forward that is both political and literal suicide.

A scenario played out in the book 'Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America' by John Michael Greer makes a decent point. Say the US decides to strategically strike an opponent. They manage to take out 199 of 200 potential retaliatory strikes - a great success in terms of the ratio. But that one missile that gets through detonates over San Fransisco becoming the single most deadly event in US history. It just isn't seen as a viable path forward.

Luckily those in power are there because of those below them, you cannot be too loose of a cannon at the top but even that doesn't put ones mind at ease as you just do not know on what could happen. Maybe the lunatics to get control of it all. Strange things can happen.

This makes some assumptions about how nuclear weapons would be targeted and detonated, assumptions which may not be correct.

Countervalue vs counterthreat targeting has been a back-and-forth for a long time in nuclear strategy discussions. The Nature paper relies on an assumption that there would be significant countervalue targeting—i.e. targeting cities and population centers rather than strictly military targets. This may not be a correct assumption about how U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are targeted.

Second, the way that nuclear weapons are detonated has implications for the amount of burning and ash. Detonating weapons at ground level would limit the radius of destruction and increase the longer lasting fires burning the cities and projecting ash upwards into the atmosphere. But this isn't how nuclear weapons detonation has been modeled, pretty much since the Manhattan Project, because scientists realized that the shock of the detonation would destroy a greater radius if the nuclear weapon has detonated in the air above the target. This increases the radius of destruction, but decreases the long-lasting fires and ash projection upwards. Obviously it's not eliminated, but there is a significant difference depending on the manner in which the nuclear weapons are detonated. Both the U.S. and USSR have understood this.

While an all-out nuclear exchange that employs countervalue targeting against cities and detonates nuclear weapons at the ground level could result in what the Nature article models, that is an unlikely scenario given what we know about U.S. and Russian thinking/targeting/strategy. More likely is 1) not a full exchange, 2) counterthreat targeting, 3) detonation above targets. This will still result in ash, and fires, and destruction, but will be substantially different in overall outcomes.

It ain’t pre winter of ‘92 no more with “the day after” looming in people’s minds. Instead it’s “l-l-l-l-let’s play chicken!” (Bob Barker voice)

Curtis LeMay was 60 years too early.

Facts are russia is corrupt and bankrupt, they havent serviced/maintained nuke arsenal since forever. They cant even make new ICBMs anymore, their fifth try blew up on launch pad https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/23/russia-sarma... just like four previous attempts.

The problem isn’t Putin or Xi committing global suicide, it’s they’re not paying attention to the details: Sgt. Boris or Liu driving off with thermonuclear warheads and selling them.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/gregory-kulacki/xi-jinpings-thoughts...

We've been discovering our stockpiles of arms to be less functional than hoped. And that's with stuff that was tested and could be used as part of storage.

The nukes were never meant to be used, the chances of them malfunctioning are somewhat higher.

That's before you subtract the hype of "nukes are the ultimate weapon" from any calculations. Hiroshima is still an active, populated city. People assume nukes are "finger of God" erasers, but they're really rather inefficient explosives with simple physics.