I like Nukemap, however the problem is that there is no way to have multiple target sites.
Having a visualization of one target site is useful but if it was a full nuclear strike lots of targets would be hit by smaller yielded weapons (I am not an expert).
Industry, Military Bases, Infrastructure and Communications
AFAIK population centers are secondary targets in a first strike, however in a MAD (mutually assured destruction scenario) everything would be a target, right?
Nuclear war seems like the most plausible end to humanity, yet popular culture hasn't thought about it much since the end of the cold war. It's not a part of the zeitgeist anymore.
Nuclear armed nations are back to increasing and modernizing stockpiles rather than diminishing them. New delivery mechanisms that are impossible to track and counter. Proliferation of nuclear weapons is becoming an issue too. Everybody's getting in on the party.
Nuclear weapons are a type of great filter if there ever was one.
More crucially, neither is preventing warfare. After WWII, the victors believed that another large war could destroy humanity - not necessarily because of nuclear weapons, but due to the incredible damage their WWII technology did, and considering future improvements. The UN and (the predecessor of) the EU were founded especially to prevent another major war.
Also, they knew, after WWI and WWII (and all the prior wars) that without serious effort and dedication, warfare can happen whether or not anyone really wants it.
Bioweapons are increasingly more likely to be the end of humanity. With fancier tools like CRISPR you're getting closer and closer to having one person in a basement making something that can propagate across the whole world. Nuclear weapons are inherently limited by the fact that you need huge institutions to generate and deliver large numbers of them, and without large numbers of them you can't destroy humanity because of the large size of the planet.
Have we found diseases that could propagate across the world either (1) with virality greatly in excess of modern diseases, i.e. R0 >> omicron or (2) untreatable/curable and potentially latent for weeks to months?
A disease capable of coming close to ending civilization would need to have properties far beyond any disease observed so far. Either it needs to infect massive populations before we detect it, or it has to transmit over long distances (miles) despite e.g. moderate precautions like masking, air filtering. I think there's good reason to doubt such a pathogen could exist. The closest I could imagine would be an HIV-like immunodeficiency virus that can be transmitted via aerosol - but even that would have to cause disease much more severe than HIV without resistance among even .01% of the population.
Although in the case of nuclear, all it takes is for someone to trigger a chain reaction. That could even be done with stolen material. (Or have I read too much Tom Clancy?)
Mutually Assured Destruction; if one country thinks the other country is nuking them, they will retaliate.
As we speak, there are submarines from multiple countries lying in wait with enough nukes to take out most of humanity; they are (were?) instructed to launch if central command is taken out, like a world-ending dead man's switch. These go on 3-6 month missions, their only limit being food for the crew, and they will survive all out nuclear war just to pop up and finish the job if needs be.
Honestly why would soldiers do such a thing if central command is out?
I think that fears of all countries using nuclear weapons on each other at the same time is frequently inflated with the fear governments will just become kill everyone for no reason or will behave madly.
There is plenty to fear even when we keep everybody rational, let's stick to that
I don't know. We came extremely close to nuclear war several times, and each time it was people refusing to obey their training and follow orders that has saved us.
And then one man has saved us all by refusing the launch nuclear strike on US despite Soviet satellites confirming multiple launches from US heading to CCCP. He decided to wait for radar confirmation first despite everyone above him(and next to him) approving the counterstrike. If he followed his training we'd all be dead now.
Nuclear war seems like a plausible dramatic end. That or a big asteroid, or some nasty volcano stuff. But I feel like it's gonna be something with a long decline and no dramatic ending. Like we kill off some important ecosystem and it takes 20 years to realize and then 80-100 years to wind things up. Or like bacteria starts digesting copper or steeel and we can't do anything about it and there goes industry.
Indeed, if we're on the brink of a Venus style runaway hothouse, a nuclear war would be the better alternative. The reduction in population and thus carbon emission combined with the increased atmospheric dust would most likely arrest warming altogether, if not even undo some of the damage.
For the record no I'm not a psycho and I don't endorse nuclear war, I just doubt it would be an human extinction event.
Maybe not extinction, but it will likely destroy industrial civilization. And that may not be reversible since we’ve extracted many of the natural resources that can be reached without industrial technology.
They aren't, really. Even the nuclear winter is but a hypothesis that could very well turn out to be false.
Nowadays, mechanization and automation make large-scale nuclear first strikes pretty much pointless. Add to that the improvements in missile defense and the result is a different scenario. If we ever see nuclear weapons used in anger again it will probably take the form of artillery used against armored formations, fleets, and satellites.
This might turn a particular theater into a nuclear wasteland and throw global economy back into the 70s, but it wouldn't cause the kind of mass fires needed for nuclear winter.
The thing is the US is trying to make first strike a feasible reality by ringing their enemies with missile defense systems, which are understood to be an offensive weapon, because they could plausibly be used to deny a counter strike from an enemy after a first strike, this giving the US impunity to attack.
>Nowadays, mechanization and automation make large-scale nuclear first strikes pretty much pointless. Add to that the improvements in missile defense and the result is a different scenario. If we ever see nuclear weapons used in anger again it will probably take the form of artillery used against armored formations, fleets, and satellites.
I don't think BMD has really improved enough in the last 40 years to make "limited nuclear war" (at least between the US and Russia or maybe China) a real possibility. I also can't find, in my 30 minutes of research, anything supporting the idea that the US/NATO has any small tactical nuclear devices hanging around anymore.
>popular culture hasn't thought about it much since the end of the cold war
And thank God for that! Fear of nuclear war is a terrible scourge, and reduces quality of life. And I'm not convinced that the fear did anything to reduce risk - so it was all cost, and no benefit. Good riddance to "The Day After" style fear, and do not return!
It seems more likely these days that we'll have a bad nuclear accident, or a terrorist attack, than a world-ending event. TBH I'm fine with that, as it's nothing compared to the Cold War MAD doctrine.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have raised the alarm, as have other respected and Conservative voices. There is definitely a heightened risk right now, particularly because of the lack of respect of Russia.
I just learned from the blog that the author also published a book on the history of nuclear secrecy last year. I've read the introduction and am very excited to go through more
The author posts as /u/restricteddata on Reddit - often on /r/askhistorians, and always very informed and interesting. Consultant on the “Manhattan” TV series, too - which I enjoyed.
> The far-flung complex of mines, ore-processing mills, feed material plants, gaseous-diffusion plants, production reactors, chemical separation plants, metal fabrication plants, and weapon component and assembly plants was still largely concealed behind the security barriers established by the Atomic Energy Act ...
> Of the 3,700 tons of uranium concentrates (U308) that the Commission received in 1953, only about one-quarter (1,100 tons) came from mines in the United States; the rest was produced in the Belgian Congo (1,600 tons), South Africa (500 tons), Canada (400 tons), and Portugal (100 tons). ...
> As for foreign sources, the leveling off of production from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo would be more than offset by projections of rapidly increasing deliveries later in the decade from the Union of South Africa and Canada. ...
Hewlett was (quoting the author) "the first official historian of the Atomic Energy Commission ... [whose] volumes on AEC history are extremely useful resources."
I really miss the original Nukemap. The modern one, a forced re-implementation because API providers massively increased their fees, it nicely done in open source software. Unfortunately it now relies on fancy features like webgl to draw the ellipses/circles on the map where before it was just vanilla JS. Many browsers and machines, all of mine included, do not support webgl. RIP nukemap.
I like the suggestion at the bottom of side bar, when I just tried Nukemap[0]:
> Fallout: Your choice of burst height is too high to produce significant local fallout. The minimum burst height to produce appreciable fallout for a yield of 100 megaton is 5.49 km.
Its really helpful. Guess, I should retry it with recommended value.
Considering 92% of strikes were done with the defaults, I'd expect it to roughly be a list of English speaking cities by population. With the remaining 8% I'd expect NYC and some Japanese cities to be overrepresented.
Nuclear weapons is humanities biggest existential threat, and few people talk about it in popular culture. At any given point in time, we're 30 minutes away from the complete destruction of civilizations we know it today. I highly recommend diving into the movies & books below to begin understanding the issue and simply be in awe that humanity is capable of creating such horrific and destructive weapons.
First, watch "Trinity And Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie" [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114728/]. It gives a great overview of the nuclear weapons program history and his incredible video footage of tests.
Next watch "Threads" [https://archive.org/details/threads_202007]. Be warned, it's depressing, but it does a great job dramatizing what a nuclear attack might look like, including its generational impacts.
When you get through these three pieces of material, you'll have a much better understanding of the history behind this weapons, how destructive they are, and hopefully think critically about whether or not they're worth the risk.
The thing I worry the most about is unintentional or accidental use of a nuclear weapon quickly snowballing into something that ends humanity within 30 minutes. That's what's at stake.
I grew up knowing that my life could end any time in a flash... still could because I live very close to some of the heaviest industry in North America, a prime target if there ever was one.
My house would be pushed over, then burn, no doubt.
I mean, the real fear for me, is not being vaporize, but learning to live in a post-judegment day style dystopia.
I can see no way that a strike does not lead to escalation.
Our world is so specialized, that even if we have the ability to keep growing crops locally, most of us simply might not have access to the information to how get access to water, grow food, and build shelter in the time we need to survive until we can reestablish society.
I mean we've seen what people are capable of if there's a hint that some people may be buying more toilet paper than they need. That's just the tip of the iceberg; if there is a nuclear strike, the resulting panic and "everyone for themselves" that follows will take care of the rest.
That latter point is pretty much the introduction to Threads:
"In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable."
Having a visualization of one target site is useful but if it was a full nuclear strike lots of targets would be hit by smaller yielded weapons (I am not an expert).
Industry, Military Bases, Infrastructure and Communications
AFAIK population centers are secondary targets in a first strike, however in a MAD (mutually assured destruction scenario) everything would be a target, right?
example targets for UK
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/06/article-2650518-1...