Quote: (08-03-2016 03:26 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:
I've heard tell that if even one major city got nuked the resultant fires would cast enough ash into the sky to ruin crops for long enough that a serious famine would ensue.
In any serious nuclear scenario the living would envy the dead.
Not likely from a single nuclear weapon. There have been "ultra-Plinian" volcanic eruptions in modern history that injected tens of kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, far more than any single nuclear strike ever could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pina...c_eruption
We still seem to be doing mostly OK.
I don't spend a lot of time worrying about these scenarios, as there essentially only two ways things could play out:
A limited nuclear engagement with maybe a dozen or two missiles exchanged, mass confusion ensues, nobody has authority to do anything, and the war is self-limiting. Most strikes wouldn't be on cities. There would be an enormous number of casualties, perhaps up to a million or more dead, and it would be a catastrophe unlike anything the world had seen. Still, while life would be difficult for many of the survivors for a time I don't see it as a catastrophe the planet, humans or even modern technological civilization couldn't recover from relatively rapidly...though in many ways the world afterwards likely be a very different place.
A massive nuclear engagement, with thousands of weapons exchanged. I find this scenario fairly unlikely, as there are significantly fewer weapons in the world than there were in the 1980s, and safeguards are better.
For most of us, pondering what you'd do is sort of a waste of time, because if you live in a major population center the answer is pretty straightforward: you wouldn't live long enough to contemplate it. Even scenes like the one where San Fran gets destroyed in the recent Terminator movie don't do the destruction justice: cities wouldn't be getting just one or two bombs on them, but dozens or even hundreds in carefully calculated and timed grid patterns, like cluster munitions.
If you look at the various Soviet targeting maps from the late 1970s early 1980s that we're fairly confident about, on New England the entire east coast is packed; I couldn't tell exactly how many strikes were targeted on the Boston metro area but it looked like more than 50 (including every airport with a runway longer than about 5000 feet.)