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Comment by mopsi | Hacker News Reader

One has to recognize the genre of "Threads" and "The Day After" - they represent suffering porn that has little to do with how actual disasters play out. In "Threads", the way people suddenly lose the ability to speak and rapidly turn into cavemen after a nuclear strike is comical. Kids grunt instead of talk, everyone shuffles around like zombies, and basic things like farming or using tools just vanish. How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild.

Hiroshima in 1957, about a mile from the epicenter of the nuclear strike: https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,...

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Those events happened when widespread support and supply were brought into to deal with the relatively limited destruction.

This is destruction on a scale that has not been seen in the likes of civilization outside the bronze age collapse.

The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.

Threads and the Day after weren't a snapshot of one single city - they were a snapshot of what would be happening everywhere else at the same time.

> The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.

Why?

Why would it be happening everywhere - in South America, Africa, Asia, and many other places - at the same time?

Asia, because there are a lot of targets there.

South America and Africa would probably get off pretty lightly. And then they'd experience the worst economic depression that has ever been seen due to the complete collapse of global trade. They're not going to be up for the job of rescuing entire continents.

No, but they’ll go on living as they have for 300,000 years.

I spent time in 35 African countries getting as remote as possible. The vast major Of remote peoples lives would not change at all if entire continents were completely destroyed (unless they cop the fallout, or the ash causes crops to fail).

The discussion here isn’t about whether the lives of remote people would be upended, but whether those countries would help to rebuild the ones hit by the war, the way devastated cities were rebuilt after WWII.

With all the fallout? I doubt anyone would be living in those place for a very long time

And yet:

"How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild."

That's what I was responding to.

The nukes that would fall today are a few orders of magnitude bigger than those that fell in Japan, and there would be many orders of magnitude more of them, and close together.

The world has never seen destruction and fallout that is even remotely comparable to what we’d get.

> Hiroshima in 1957, about a mile from the epicenter of the nuclear strike: https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,...

If the risk was a war involving bombs like Little Boy then there wouldn't be much to worry about beyond localised disaster. The issue is the weapons that are 2-3 orders of magnitude more powerful.

And you're referring to Germany, which that took casualties approaching something close to 10% of its population during WWII - so you're eyeballing a scenario where a country just lost 10% [0] of its population and saying it looks fine to you. That seems a weak argument that the damage is nothing we need to worry about. We can argue over whether nukes are going to kill 100%, 50%, 10%, etc of the population but frankly I don't see where you would want to go with that.

[0] Not from bombing, obviously, but the situation you're talking about is nonetheless one where Germany just suffered massive losses and you're saying you can't see that in a photograph after the cities were rebuilt so no worries if something worse happens.

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