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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.

The worst effect would be a nuclear weapon in space. The resulting EMP would probably fry more than enough electric and electronic devices to throw back whatever country is hit by it by decades.

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The EMP effect depends on there being atmosphere to generate electrical fields from the bomb gamma flux. Being close enough and line of sight from the atmosphere can be sufficient to generate the effect in the nearby atmosphere. 400km is apparently the optimum height for coverage but not strength. Too far and inverse-square ensures the flux isn't sufficient. So just detonating a bomb "in space" may not do anything depending on the direct path distance to the satellites in question (the bomb gamma flux etc. of course poses its own threat). Look it up, the physics are interesting.

The US famously did that in the 60s (detonating nukes at roughly the height of today's ISS)[1]. Also some less famous ones, including a Soviet test that resulted in the EMP destroying a power plant [2].

Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defending against that

That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosio...

> That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states

Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacement and renewable energy / datacenter buildouts with 24+ months of lead time [2] - now imagine a significant war related impact, the lead time would probably skyrocket to at least a decade.

At least one source claims that the radius from a single device could be much, much larger [3], so with proper design to maximize an EMP (which even Starfish Prime wasn't intended to do), it is conceivable that dropping just two of these things over the East and West Coast respectively would cause immense damage.

A Fallout-style nuclear war, I think, would be easier to recover from than even a small exchange of EMPs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...

[2] https://berlin.cwiemeevents.com/articles/new-normal-componen...

[3] https://atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasst...

Why do you exclude farming? Even if the tractors and other machines would still work, where would the harvest go under such circumstances? By which means? Think about how industrialized all that shit is meanwhile, with 'precision agronomy' by means of GPS, and so on? And as you said yourself: Transformers. Cooling for perishable stuff without electricity? Wanna rely on some Amish with horsedrawn carts?

Edit: Will the stocks of fertilizer last long enough, before some normalcy sets in again?

Many farmers still have really old diesel tractors around. These things run fully mechanical, sans the starter motor maybe. If there is one thing farmers are good at, it's in-field improvised repairs.

Refrigeration is mostly an issue with meat and milk, but eh, humans have managed to do fine for millennia without it.

Fertilizer however, oh boy, that will be a nightmare. We can get by now that we know about stuff like nitrogen fixers or the beneficial effects of livestock like chicken, but it requires a serious effort to rethink mindsets.

You know that most of the chickens we have won't make it for long, outside?¹ Because they are all highly 'optimized' breeds? Even coming with a handbook for that breed, several hundred pages long. Defining exactly what to feed when in which amounts and intervals, but also temperature and lighting. Where again does one get that stuff, when everything is chaos? Could more normal, robust ones be bred and distributed fast enough to compensate? In the required amounts?

¹As folks from PETA and the likes have discovered when freeing them, several times in multiple places. Beginning since at least two decades ago, meanwhile.

I doubt farmers have enough spare pre-electronics equipment sitting around to run the entire farm at the same scale. I'm sure they could improvise a way to continue farming, but output would be substantially impacted.

Humanity managed to do fine for millennia by existing in a state of frequent malnutrition and a not insignificant number of deaths from starvation. And it was never in a world with the population density we have today.

Depends? Think southern part of the United Kingdom with London and some harbours, Belgium, Netherlands, German Rhine-Ruhr Area. All with one 'stone'. Use some more stones for other large agglomerations, like Frankfurt am Main, Paris. While were at it: Hamburg+Denmark+southern Sweden. Moscow, St.Petersburg. Greater Los Angeles would be as bad. Silicon Valley/Bay Area. As would be anything around NYC/Washington DC/Philly/Baltimore. Seattle+Vancouver? Great Lakes? Any Chinese megacity? India? All of this wouldn't need that much nukes.

All of these are more vulnerable today, because of more dependency on electronics, even if they are hardened against shit like that, or in general, but many of them aren't. Which leads to cascades of dominoes falling, taking others with them.

I really wouldn't like to see that tested today at those scales.

If someone launched a nuke in space how would other nuclear powers react? I doubt they would assume "this is probably just an EMP and not a direct nuclear strike on our territory"

> If someone launched a nuke in space how would other nuclear powers react?

We'd bitch and moan and then carry on as usual. Nobody is starting thermonuclear war over fried birds. Maybe someone gets tariffed.

If you had time to plan it, you'd probably want to put the warhead on a satellite launched by a normal satellite launcher. It'll look benign until you detonate it.

Yes. I assume this is why there's a treaty against stationing the weapons in orbit or on the moon etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

I don't know how someone like me would even tell if this treaty is taken seriously. For example, going to space is really hard and has historically been somewhat unreliable at the best of times, which may mean that back in 1967 everyone was thinking "we don't even want a 1% chance that someone's failed launch to drop a 99%-usable warhead on a random location where some tiny country or organised crime group can find it".

Plot twist - someone has already thought about this and took measures of unimaginable scale...so that, no one, ever, wipes out, humanity, with nukes.

Can you do better than "measures"

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