How would a modern nuclear war develop and how long would it actually last overall?

>There are over 8billion people on this planet your not going to kill them all with 5000-10000 ICBMs
We alone can kill off the vast majority of that.

>xd
K, reddit.

Killing 2 billion people doesn't even scratch the service. The US can kill most of the Russians but not there would still be millions left. US cant even kill 1 billion Chinese with it nukes. China will still have hundreds of millions of people.
You fail to understand the numbers, Nukes are not enough to win a war. Not by a long shot.

Nuclear Winter would kill billions. After the nuclear war, population would whittle down to few hundred million spread across the world (southern hemisphere mostly). Lifespan of these survivors would be 30 years max and they'd all get cancers.

It would take 500+ years for humanity to get back to the same level we're at today.

Only total shitheads talk about nuclear "war" as a "war". It's not a war, it's a massive existential risk of Homo sapiens.

You're underestimating the human potential for destruction. Back in 1980 the USSR and the USA had *3* (three) times as many active nuclear weapons as there are today. This amounts to roughly 45,000-50,000 nuclear weapons (at the height of the Cold War), enough to hit almost every single city on Earth with a population of 10,000 people or more. The fallout alone would fuck over any survivors for years to come.

>You have to genocide the whole population to win a war.

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You can take a single digit number of nukes and create a radiation storm that would wipe continents if you did it with the right weather patterns,

In a nuclear war you do. Or the stronger force will win.
Nuclear war is not just police actions, Its all or nothing. Either all the enemies die or they regroup and destroy you. Population has a real advantage in warfare.

no you cannot, not even close, not even at height of usa/ussr nuclear arsenal you could do that

Let me guess kid. You think radiation is static?

as a phenomenon, nuclear winter is highly unlikely, because it would require dust to be thrown in such volume int o very specific levels of the atmosphere in such precise areas, that the Coriolis effect and jet streams would carry the dust around the world in a pattern to create a cooling event. fortunately, most targets are not in the latitudes or jet streams would be particular susceptible to debris being thrown to the required elevation

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>You can effectively kill all surface life on earth if you spread out the entire nuclear arsenal.
Nah.

>In a nuclear war you do. Or the stronger force will win.

no, you just need to fuck up enough shit to get them to stop fighting. a few limited strategic weapons would cause 10x more havoc than destroying 99% of the population, because the country would slowly destroy itself. that is another reason HEMP is a preferred attack method than straight up dropping MIRVs all over shit

Man you kids greatly underestimate the power of these weapons and how many there are.

>this entire post

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>he thinks state authority survives a full nuclear barrage
You'll be too busy picking up the pieces and fighting off mass starvation/plague/water shortage when the industry that let your population exceed pre-industrial malthusian limits 10-20 times to bother invading somebody else.

You overestimate how many of them are deployable and the probability of no missile/warhead failures.

>that is another reason HEMP is a preferred attack method than straight up dropping MIRVs all over shit
FIND me one source that this is a preferred attack option.

Kid, just simply disabling a power grid would kill billions.

Radiation isn't nearly as deadly as you assume. People don't like birth effects and cancer-ridden short lives but that is still life, and it will still go on.

It's easy to kill half the population. It's a bit harder to kill 80% of the population. It's notably harder to kill 95% of the population. It's incredibly difficult to kill 99% of the population and it's damn near impossible to destroy 100% of the population without completely destroying the biosphere, which our nukes can't do, not by a long shot. It's an exponential graph.

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Substantiate that claim.

No, you massively overestimate them and how many there are. It would take something like 30 warheads to reliably kill a major modern metropolis dead. By pounding the countryside you couldn't cover the entire surface of the planet with 70 thousand nukes, not by a long shot. You could poison the planet with salted nukes, but nobody whose goal is anything but the complete destruction of the earth is going to use those, and there is no guarantee they won't miss a spot or two.

If I need to there's no point in arguing.
See Chernobyl. That's a fraction of the power of what the US has.

Not same user, but right now there are 5,000 nuclear warheads able to be deployed right now or within 48 hours of prep, and these are 90% USA and Russian nukes, with 1000 of them being megaton-class and the rest being MIRVs with multiple weapons in the 100-500kt range. These weapons have total destruction diameters ranging from 900m-4km (3,000 feet to over 2 miles) each. Such a man-made release of energy has never occurred in all of human history if it were to happen, you are underestimating the destructive power of a modern thermonuclear warhead in a post Cold War nations' arsenal (USA and Russia).

Yes. Which would make killing the rest much harder since now only the low density, much more resilient populations remain. It's a pareto distribution.

Nothing is going to live under a radiation cloud.

What are the little green mountain things supposed to represent? I notice a few of them in suspicious places- perhaps the Russians want to hit those places to see what havoc would ensue? Dunno about the ones in Baja and Washington though.

Oppenheimer we need you. Get your ass in here and educate these people.

Modern airburst nukes produce little fallout.

Not same user, but here's a list of all potential US nuclear targets.

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>See Chernobyl. That's a fraction of the power of what the US has.
What about Chernobyl? Wildlife is thriving and people still live there. The other reactors produced power for 10 years after the disaster, with people coming to work every day.

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>You can effectively kill all surface life on earth if you spread out the entire nuclear arsenal.

You got this part wrong.

>I'd worry more about solar radiation than a nuclear war if you're in a 1st world country.

You got this part right.

They also produce less of the fissile byproducts that older weapons would.

Substantiate this claim
>substantially less things survive
Is not the same as
>nothing survives
The earth has had many catastrophic extinction events that kill off 95% of all life. Nothing has ever killed 100% of life.

Also forgot to mention, the adversary in this scenario is Russia, since it is the only other nation on Earth that is able to launch more than 1,000 nukes like the USA.

>the term nuclear "war" is a misnomer. proper term is "nuclear extinction even".

You should stop getting your information from video games and movies.

ITT:

We learn why 90 percent of humanity should be converted into clean energy sources.

>Two weeks after North Korea threatened to launch nuclear strikes against the U.S., the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the federal government has still not implemented all of the recommendations made eight years ago to prevent catastrophic blackouts caused by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

>The recommendations were made in 2008 by the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electro-Magnetic Pulse Attack (EMP Commission).

>Although the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Energy (DOE) have taken actions to prepare against an EMP attack, they “have not established a coordinated approach to identifying and implementing key risk management activities to address EMP risks,” concluded a March 24 GAO report.

>In addition, “DHS has not fully leveraged opportunities to collect key risk inputs – namely threat, vulnerability, and consequence information – to inform comprehensive risk assessments of electromagnetic events,” even though such events “pose great risk to the security of the nation.”

>The report was requested last July by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee as it was looking into the EMP threat posed by Iran and North Korea.

>In 2008, the commission warned that “a high altitude nuclear explosion is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences.” If such an attack were to cause a nationwide blackout lasting as long as a year, up to 90 percent of the American people could die due to starvation, disease and societal collapse.

>large urban centers left irradiated for decades to come

Wrong.

>In 2008, the commission warned that “a high altitude nuclear explosion is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences.” If such an attack were to cause a nationwide blackout lasting as long as a year, up to 90 percent of the American people could die due to starvation, disease and societal collapse.

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You've rounded way too highly on the number of deployed warheads according to FAS's numbers, but I cannot argue you on other points.

>What about Chernobyl? Wildlife is thriving and people still live there.
Ya decades later. That small event killed nearly every living large animal relatively immediately. The main thing that caused the die off there is it destroyed all the pollinators. Nothing of any significant nutrients grew there for a long time. Now times that event by a few 1000s of times. You're done. The problem is you kids only think of the initial blast and not how it effects the environment long term.
If you want to be autistic about it some beetles and lizards would be left. Maybe mice.
I said surface life and that's true.

That is not a source stating it is a preferred attack option, merely possible the impact if it was one.

>If I need to there's no point in arguing.
If you make a statement, you are required to support it.
*merely the possible impact

Nobody is disputing that a lot of people would die in a nuclear war. But that is by a huge margin not the same thing as extinction. Life is resilient as fuck, killing a lot of it is easy but killing all of it is incredibly difficult. Just because billions would die doesn't mean everybody would die. Just ten thousand years ago there were maybe a million humans in the world, total. That's an eyeblink in gelogical timescales. And we survived a bunch of ice ages and moderate to major extinction events.

Humans are by now likely the single most adaptable type of life on earth. If not now, soon we likely will be. We're not particularly resilient physiologically, but the ability to intelligently shape our habitat is a gigantic leap forward.

It’s a variable. Launch to detonation is something like 30-45 minutes per missile, not all missiles get launched at once. There could be a week or more of sporadic exchanges, as each side negotiates and launches a few to show resolve. Nobody is going to spam their entire arsenal, because that throws away their only deterrence.

Figure, a protracted nuclear war will last for a month or so.

>up to 90 percent of the American people could die due to starvation, disease and societal collapse.
Yes, they would. And there would still be tens of millions of people left over. Are you retarded or something? Even if 7 billion people die there will still be hundreds of millions left over, which is about what we had 200 years ago.

>The problem is you kids only think of the initial blast and not how it effects the environment long term.
You make the assumption that we have the ability to do a chernobyl everywhere on the planet, which is false.

If I'm right about , at least two of those green mountain markers are over supervolcanos- the long valley caldera and Yellowstone. I seem to remember another large volcanic field that is more or less dormant is in new Mexico, and there is either an extinct or very dormant volcanic field in Colorado. Perhaps these places might be targeted to cause large eruptions- you could blanket all the places that grow food in ash, as well as kill a bunch of people with the ash and other aspects of the eruptions- a way to stretch out the destructive power of your arsenal. Hit major cities with nukes, set off volcanoes with nukes to destroy farmland for a while- it would be an effective one-two punch.

>Gibe moni pls t. Pentagon
Protip: EMPs really aren't that big of a deal. Tests at White Sands missile range have shown that the majority of vehicles hit by an EMP will start up again without any real issues afterwards. Worst case scenario is that some suburbs would be without power for a few days, which isn't "catastrophic" by any stretch of the imagination.

armscontrolwonk.com/archive/206626/more-emp-nonsense/

>If you make a statement, you are required to support it.
No. You're arguing for me to lower the level of competency of the argument to you. Only a fool or some kind of propagandist would argue that billions of people wouldn't die if the power grid was disabled.
A mega radiation cloud going around the world that would rival prehistoric solar flare events. Ya that would do it. And that's not going into the theory of volcanic eruption triggers. Good fucking luck with that if that happens also.

given the current population of the united states, there would be fewer people in the entire US than in norway

are you a girl? calm down that little wuss of yours, this place is bad for you go away

The world population first hit 1 billion in 1803, so a world population of 500 million would be more like 300-400 years ago. In 1960 the world population first hit 3 billion, and now here we are with 7.6 billion just 58 years later. We honestly might need a mass die off the way our population is expanding.

>The problem is you kids only think of the initial blast
If we talked only about the immediate blast all the nukes in the world couldn't even kill half a billion people you absolute fucking retard. The billion figures come from structure collapse and the return to malthusian pressures like starvation. You claim an exctinction. I dispute that, because killing 99.9% of humans still leaves you with millions of humans. You would have to be extremely thorough and kill every place several times over to be sure.

>A mega radiation cloud going around the world that would rival prehistoric solar flare events. Ya that would do it
Source: your ass. Give me a study that does some math instead of claiming bullshit.
>Only a fool or some kind of propagandist would argue that billions of people wouldn't die if the power grid was disabled.
Killing billions is not the same as killing EVERYONE you utter troglodyte

It could develop any number of ways. The least likely is a sudden all out attack.
The US has planned for an extended nuclear war lasting weeks rather than a sudden 30 minute war since the late cold war.

No

No

The US and Russia combine for about 3000 deployed strategic nuclear warheads.

>nuclear winter
Jfc

You have no idea what you are talking about. Bethesda video games are not good sources for nuclear strategy.

>HEMP is a preferred attack method than straight up dropping MIRVs all over shit
Lol. This is funny.

HAHAHAHAHA

You are clueless as well.

I tried for many years. No I'm just going to laugh at people and tell them they are stupid.
Post personal pics of me yesterday does not have me in the mood to explain anything to Jow Forums.

Lol no.

Like this guy. This guy is stupid.

Bye Jow Forums it was fun while it lasted

Tell me kid. How is killing all the major pollinators around the fucking globe not going to trigger a mass extinction. I could use a laugh in all this retardation.

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So what? There would still be more people in the US than there were people in the world 10 000 years ago.

>No. You're arguing for me to lower the level of competency of the argument to you. Only a fool or some kind of propagandist would argue that billions of people wouldn't die if the power grid was disabled.
No, I'm asking you to provide a source for your statement. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you do not support an argument in academia and when asked, it is a question of your competency.

>sandwiched between three targets for 500 warhead scenario
>father lives 10 miles from nuclear power plant, a target in a 500 warhead scenario
Just occurred to me that even if I managed to make it, I would have to run a gigantic, irradiated loop just to meet up with family in case I do survive, because I won't be able to go through Canada and I probably won't be able to hitch on a boat.

Fug

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the US would be looking at about 1 person per square mile population density

Thank you Oppen.

>killing all the major pollinator
killing 90% =! all
>kid
I'm probably older than you, fuckwad.

You are talking out your ass. Nobody is disputing the fact that significant amounts of death would occur. What we are arguing, you dumb hick, is that there is so much life it's extremely redundant. The more you kill, the more difficult it gets to kill the few remaining survivors. You have no understanding of scale, the nature of exponential growth or geological timescales.

>not enough people to conduct complex technological farming
>not enough people to reconstruct infrastructure
>not enough people to stop infrastructure from further degrading

>killing 90%
You claim 90% loss wont cause a mass extinction?

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>complex technological farming
Yes. Which is why the 95% who rely on the farming die, leaving the other 5% to slowly build back up over millenia, just like the first time around. Learn to fucking read you moron. I already agreed that the vast majority of people could easily die.

>I tried for many years
Oppenheimer, you are the hero we need, but not the one we deserve.

That's entirely within your opinion, unless you have post-war statistics for your own particular scenario with you.

extinct = 100% dead

Sure, it will kill a lot of less robust species, but humans will be among the last to kick the bucket because humans are probably the single most adaptive multicellular life form on the planet since we aren't constrained by our reproductive rate and genetic selection when it comes to facing new challenges.

>everyone will die but me
K, kid.

>kid
dumb boomer
>but me
I am a suburban basedboy who lives within 5 miles of two groundburst targets, I'll be the among first to die, sure. But I am not stupid enough to think some fucking eskimos in bumfuck nowhere will kick it just because a few thousand nukes exploded thousands of miles from where he lives.

Here comes the self-proclaimed expert who's nothing more than self-deluded Dr. Strangelove larper.

He's clearly more intelligent and well informed than you.

Well, if a significant portion of the humans died off, then the wildlife would be left to repopulate and recover from a bunch of things we're doing that some argue is leading to a sixth mass extinction. No more overfishing and clearing large sections of forest- there's not enough people left over to do that stuff. So, nukes might avert mass extinction.

>everyone else will starve to death but those guys! They're special!
K, kid.

>no pollinators
>repopulate
You kids get dumber and dumber with every post.

He was doxxed and he was who he said he was. Some of us have been here longer than the start of summer.

>5,000 nuclear warheads

Ok, lets be generous and assume each one destroys a total area of 10 square miles. That’s 50K square miles of total destruction. Which is less than 2% of the area of the US, assuming that all of these warheads were targeted on the US. Now I suppose you’re going to go on about fallout, and radiation for centuries. Look up the rule of 7 to see why fallout isn’t the horrible bugaboo you think it is. Stay under cover for a month, and fallout pretty much becomes a non-issue.

3 weeks later, radiation has dropped to near-background levels.

Why would you believe it would wipe out all the pollinators?

Current treaties between the US and Russia limit their deployable warheads on missiles, but both countries have more missiles and nukes in storage on military bases that can be deployed within several days. The US in particular has a lot more MIRV capable MRBM and ICBM missiles in total than Russia does. In a prolonged nuclear conflict the actual number of nukes being deployed (if they survived the initial wave of detonations) would easily exceed 3,000, this is also not counting drop-bomb nukes that can also be deployed.

The entire population of the USA lives on just 3% of it's land area...

It would be over in a few hours.

You are talking about tens of thousands of nuclear missiles all with multiple warheads. Possibly hundreds of thousands.

There wouldn't be anything left worth fighting over. That's kinda the point of nuclear war.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Those warheads in the hedge stockpile would require days or weeks to be returned to service.
You fucking violently retarded moron. Why dont any of you bother to read ANYTHING at all about what you are posting about? NNSA fact sheets would have shown you what a fucking ignorant waste of oxygen you are.

>Possibly hundreds of thousands.

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you're really, really underestimating the effect of 4-6billion fucking people dying. If just a billion died, that would cause enough chao the world would collapse into anarchy. If the bombs didn't kill people the following water shortages, food shortage, and other element would.

Also, any of you that think the US and Russia downsized their nuclear arsenal to just a few thousand are god damn fucking retarded.

Because in all these radiation events they were the first thing to go?

>both countries have more missiles and nukes in storage on military bases that can be deployed within several days.
I think you grossly overestimate the number that could be made deployable and the time you would have during escalation to make that relevant.
>In a prolonged nuclear conflict the actual number of nukes being deployed (if they survived the initial wave of detonations) would easily exceed 3,000
That is a big caveat.

What about the pollinators, little Billy? None of them will survive, even if they're dozens of miles from the bombs! Every pollinator on earth will die, and all the flowering plants will go with them! We're gonna end up back in the early Mesozoic, Billy, no flowering plants at all!
Truly the hero we need but don't deserve

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