What are the implications of a Nuclear War today?

Discussion in 'World Events' started by niani84, Apr 25, 2012.

  1. niani84 Registered Member

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    Let's say what migh happen if a known nuclear power like North Korea or Iran gave a nuclear weapon to a terrorist organization that has sworn to destroy Israel or the United States. how would the U.S or Israel respond if the weapons were used?

    What are the implications of Nuclear war today? For example, how would the United States and the world be affected if a nuclear weapon were to explode in Washington D.C, London, Tel. Aviv, or Moscow? The consequences of such an explosion in Washington, D.C would be disastrous, not just for the U.S, but for the whole world in general.

    :bawl: Help!
     
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  3. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Everybody dead within three years.
    Cockroaches mutate, evolve and achieve space travel capability within two centuries.
     
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  5. Balerion Banned Banned

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    You're never going to see a nuclear war. The only reason we dropped them on Japan is because we knew they didn't have any to retaliate with.
     
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  7. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    It depends on if we knew where it came from and who is responsible for detonating it.
     
  8. Diode-Man Awesome User Title Registered Senior Member

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    Nuclear war would destroy the planet and make it uninhabitable. No one (in the right mind) really wants to use nuclear weapons because of this. Anyone who overlooks this is a fool.

    That said, more countries with nuclear weapons = less chance of nuclear weapons actually being used due to the utter desolation it would cause for both sides of a nuclear war.
     
  9. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    Nuclear bombs are not all that effective. I mean, one bomb isn't going to "take out" New York. Sure, it'll smash a hole in a city, but, that's not going to "end civilization".

    Biological warfare is much much much MUCH more worrisome to me. Particularly because some humans on this rock still think Sky-Daddy this or Sky-Daddy that.

    That's a big worry.

    Then there's all the pollution, over population, potential climate change, a natural occurring flu. Yeah, nukes are pretty low on my worry list TTYTT.
     
  10. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I think that the chances of a massive, civilization-ending nuclear war, with many thousands or even tens of thousands of detonations, has receded significantly since the end of the Cold War. That's the good news.

    The bad news is that nuclear proliferation is continuing and nuclear weapons are finding their way into less and less stable hands. So the chances of a smaller regional nuclear wars, or of nuclear terrorism, is going up.

    That would effectively decapitate the civilian US government. The US military obviously has contingency plans for that eventuality, and the result would doubtless be that those responsible would be tracked down and they would be reduced to a glowing hole in the ground.

    I expect that any nuclear power would respond the same way. It would retaliate with its own nuclear weapons against those it believed responsible.

    Of course. Hundreds of thousands would die, maybe millions. World geopolitics would be destabilized. The world's economies and markets would totally tank. If people believed that more nuclear weapons were loose in terrorist hands, there might be panic in cities worldwide.

    But there are different grades of disastrous.

    If, let's say a nuclear weapon leaks out of Iran, North Korea or Pakistan into terrorist hands and goes off in a major city in some nuclear power, the terrorists responsible would be identified and their hideouts nuked. If the bomb was stolen due to bad nuclear stockpile security or something, then it's very possible that the offending nation's nuclear facilities and bases would be nuked. If it was believed that the country provided the bomb intentionally, then the offending country's capital and government would probably be targeted as well.

    That's probably a lower grade of disastrous than a 1960's-style US-Soviet nuclear exchange where each country tries to wipe out pretty much every military facility, population center, industrial asset, port, communications node or anything else of interest in the opposing country and all of its allies. With even armies in the field hurling tactical nukes at each other.

    That would have created enough fallout to kill a significant percentage of the population worldwide, even in non-combatant countries, would have brought on nuclear winter and likely been associated with plagues, famine, skyrocketing cancer rates and plummeting birthrates and life expectancies. It probably would have ended industrial civilization worldwide and driven the surviving fraction of the human race back to a post-apocalyptic feudalism. It's conceivable that it might have even driven mankind to extinction.

    Today, I doubt if a full-scale nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, or between Iran and Israel in a few years, would involve more than a few hundred nukes. That would be totally devastating in the countries involved (Israel is a tiny country and it wouldn't take all that many nukes to kill just about every Israeli.) A regional nuclear war would create clouds of fallout that would spread worldwide, get into crops and so on. But it would happen on a far smaller scale than an old-style US-Soviet exchange.

    So the direct explosive destruction would be significantly less, and most of the impact outside the countries involved would be due to the worldwide economic and geo-political tsunami that the events would doubtless unleash.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2012
  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    There was an op-ed in the paper about this recently. The writer said that it's generally acknowledged that nuclear deterrence really works. The evidence is that for forty years the USA and the USSR were constantly glaring at each other and ready to go to war at the touch of a button, yet we never did. By the standards of history, that was a miracle. In the previous forty years we fought two wars with Germany.

    That memorable closing line in the movie "War Games" is true: "The only winning move is not to play."
     
  12. NietzscheHimself Banned Banned

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    ... More job opportunities...

    Free tv's, free housing, more natural resources, less assholes, more respect for good books and a general taste for the way life was meant to be lived.
     
  13. anky2930 Banned Banned

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    Everybody dead within three days.
     
  14. Red Devil Born Again Athiest Registered Senior Member

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    no power
     
  15. TAMallick Registered Member

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    Nuclear weapons should destroyed from this world for ever. If some country hold it, for balance other country try to achieve it. Not only dangerous for using, also it may blast accidentally. Have we ability to protect from that kind of dangers?
     
  16. Red Devil Born Again Athiest Registered Senior Member

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    I understand it is hard to accidentally detonate a nuke, the safeguards are myriad. A nuke cannot self detonate either, as the components are kept apart, not that I am an expert!!!

    To have a planet free of nukes is a pipe dream, especially where countries like India and Pakistan face off every day in the Khyber etc. Places like the USA would find that every ignoramus known to the amoeba classes of life would think its fine to take them on. There would be no fear factor in conflicts, which in my view, would escalate. Tactical nukes, of which there are far more, are a deterrent.

    We need them. My own country, the UK, has decimated its armed forces to such an extent, that we rely on our nuclear subs for defence. The threat is there. If we withdrew that too, we could be marched all over in a few days, our armed forces are THAT pathetic in numbers. Our Royal Navy has fewer ships than EVER in history. The Army is in the position where handbags are more of a threat than weapons, and the Royal Air Force may as well go back to gliders as the fuel has to be severely rationed.
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2012
  17. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    Eh, I seriously doubt what you're saying here. Britain's military is still in the top 5 amongst nations of the world in terms of the ability to project force, some would argue you only come second to the US in that regard... unless you're thinking of cancelling those two supercarriers under construction now? By most accounts I've read, you guys would have no problems defeating the Russians or Chinese in a neutral battlefield now and in the near future. Unless you're expecting a combined Franco-German assault, or for America to squeeze the UK out of its few remaining colonial enterprises, I'm not sure what viable threats you're so concerned with over the next 20 years. I very much doubt Argentina would like to take another shot at the Falklands after their last spanking- at best they'll only be able to get other South American countries to impose travel sanctions.

    Virtually every country aside from China and Israel has been scaling back their forces over the last several years. The F-22 is no longer in production for the US air force and it looks like the F-35 will be scaled back from original plans as well. Here in Canada there's been a slight increase in military spending under the Harper government, and only because the previous government here was neglecting the military so badly that they were practically depending on Iceland for our Atlantic defense (and of course the US). We still spend only about 50% per capita of what the UK is spending on its forces and we only have half the population, so if you think you guys are in trouble...

    You've still got a few hundred nukes last I heard, and the means of reliably delivering them to their targets anywhere on the globe. No one on Earth would have any interest in taking that on, even if they had 50 000 nukes to hit you back.
     
  18. Epictetus here & now Registered Senior Member

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    Umm...I'm gonna say, "bad'.

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    You ought to read On The Beach by Nevil Shute. It's about an American submarine crew who surrender themselves to Australia after an all out 'Cobalt War' in the northern hemisphere. There's simply nowhere else to go. The radioactivity slowly and inevitably swirls southwards through the course of the novel. Daily news report will announce such things as 'Bombay is out', meaning since their listeners last joined them that city has succumbed to nuclear radiation. There are scenes wherein a young couple are buying furniture in a Sydney furniture shop. The ever optimistic bride asks how they can pay. The not so sober, and bluntly realistic salesman replies, "I dunno , lady. You can pay in banana peels.' He knows it's just a matter of weeks before even Sydney is 'out'.

    I'm serious, it's the only novel I ever read that gave me nightmares!
     
  19. CptBork Valued Senior Member

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    If it were a Hiroshima-scale bomb produced by a nation such as Pakistan, North Korea or Iran, you'd be correct. A thermonuclear warhead would practically melt the entire city and then some.
     
  20. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Humans and most other creatures would cease to exist.
    Cockroaches would evolve to interact with the computers we left behind.

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    The geeks are the inheritors of the earth.
     
  21. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    Well, for a very large yield weapon set on airburst maybe that's sorta correct. But nobody really deploys those, and they don't tend to use airburst attacks. The types of thermonuclear warheads in modern arsenals are about 10-20 times the yield of Hiroshima, so even on airburst you only blast an area of about 6 miles in diameter. And modern doctrine wouldn't have those weapons used in airburst attacks against cities (the "countervalue" doctrine) but rather in ground strikes against nuclear forces (the "counterforce" doctrine), which are typically not near major population centers.

    Also the main direct effect on cities from a nuclear explosion is overpressure from the blast wave. Thermal radiation only produces enough heat to cause a conflagration over a small area (it produces enough to badly burn people over a large area, though), and even that is typically rapidly extinguished by the blast wave depriving it of oxygen. It's not enough heat to literally melt buildings. The firestorms that ate Hiroshima and Nagasaki were secondary effects - fires that broke out due to electrical shorts and the like, and were fanned by the residual winds from the blast. That stuff doesn't really scale up with yield - you don't get a melted city with a big airburst, you get a (bigger) hole in the city and more burn victims, and then the same type of firestorm afterword. But, again, you don't use those weapons against cities, but rather against hardened ICBM bunkers or nuclear submarine stations or the like. Or tank divisions, if it comes to that.
     
  22. kx000 Valued Senior Member

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    5,134
    Wrong. In this instance the only winning move would be American-Russian joint imperialism, that is if the worlds population can't demand peace. Two separate nations can not exist with WMD's, the risk is too great.
     
  23. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    you do know north korea is far more likely to push for south korea or japan to be attacked than the US or Israel. and speaking of Israel they are far more likely to be the perpatrator of a nuclear attack than its victim.
     

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