this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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In a full scale nuclear exchange between two countries that have enough firepower to glass the planet several times over, yes life as know it currently would be ended. No, 100% of all life would probably not be destroyed, but irrevocable damage would be done. Being concerned about climate change and not nuclear war is bizarre, do you think nuclear war wouldn't damage the climate? For those who didn't die in the initial blasts or the resulting nuclear fallout, the lasting effects of nuclear war on the climate would be staggering. I do not understand how somebody who claims to be worried about the environment can literally be advocating nuclear war.
Downplaying tactical nukes as "merely big bombs" is the most assinine take for justifying nuclear war I have ever heard. A tactical nuclear weapon is still a nuclear weapon. You are still talking massive shockwaves and radiation that will poison the surrounding environment and will absolutely have devastating effects wherever they are used. They are not conventional bombs and should not be thought of as such.
That isn't even factoring in how likely it is that one side will escalate to strategic nuclear weapons should any nuclear firepower be used. There are strategic nuclear weapons that exceed the bomb of Hiroshima by 100x in some cases. Some of which the US has stationed in NATO bases.
I'm not justifying a nuclear war. And no one would blow the whole planet, because that makes no sense.
In a full scale nuclear war, the south hemisphere would be largely untouched for example.
Then it would be the large cities and the military places that would be nuked, which would leave large places of low population area untouched.
Then you should see what Hiroshima and nagasaki are today. They're more living than many places on earth.
You have no idea what a nuclear bomb does, you have no idea how radiations work, and you have no idea how war works. You're just scared.
Again, climate change is a far bigger threat to mankind than any nuclear war can be. That's hard fact.
Japan had the infrastructure left to rebuild those cities. If a full nuclear exchange occurs, there will be no infrastructure, no healthy land for agriculture, no population to rebuild anything, there is just no possibility of recovery. I'm sorry but your take is unhinged.
No land for agriculture would be destroyed because it wouldn't be bombed in the first place.
Regular bombardments in Ukraine are more pouting than a nuclear bomb would be because heavy metals don't decay as fast as radioelements in the soils.
You are ignorant. You should read more.
True, I do enjoy reading more. Any literature you can recommend on the topic? I'm mostly relying on my understanding of nuclear famine, and the logical consequences of destroying vast amounts of infrastructure and population.
Well, I understand now why the kremlin propaganda wave the nuclear threat like that. It does work.
In the meantime it didn't take any nuke to shake the food and energy markets. A blocus in the black sea and an embargo on Russian gas was all it took. So yes, a nuclear warhead would definitely destabilise world economy. But that's more because it'd be a war in the western world.
The problem is that you're missing the specifics. A nuclear war wouldn't be the destruction of the whole world. It'd be a few countries. It wouldn't be more destabilising than covid for example. It wouldn't be more destabilising than a war in Europe or on America's soil. Would some government shatter? Yes. Would it be the end of world? No.
No country is planning on painting the world in nukes for the sake of maximum radiation and destruction coverage.
Global warming though is already starting to alter agriculture productivity and conditions of life. It m's already causing problems for food, water, disasters and rising ocean levels. If you want to be scared for an actual threat, you should look this way.
I would argue that the destruction of major productive centers would be as disastrous as climate change. Why can’t both be true?
I could also be minimizing the threat of climate change by saying that the world won’t end because of it. It is an unreasonable bar however for us to consider something to be destructive. I don’t think it’s controversial to not want millions of deaths.
Because climate change will make some places, if not all, not livable for humans. Humanity is under threat of extinction.
A nuclear war will only have "local" consequences. Africa will be left untouched for example. Humanity on a large scale would be fine.
Incredible how we went from "I don't know what world war 3 will be fought with, but I know that world war 4 will be fought with sticks and stones" to "actually nuclear war isn't so bad, it's just a temporary hurdle"
I live in Japan asshole, I have been to both. The amount of people who died in the aftermath of the bombing more than double those killed in the initial explosions. Leukemia was one of the biggest lasting effects, which predominantly affected children. Cancer rates went up. There are still people alive (albeit very few anymore) suffering aftereffects of the bombing; including people who lived far from the blast at the time of the bombing.
Those were 15-20kt blasts and only two. There are strategic weapons in both US and Russian reserves hundreds of times more powerful than that.
I wasn't saying a bomb does't kill people. I'm saying nukes can't end humanity. That's a hard fact. Unlike global warming.
Nuclear bombs are as damaging as war can be. That's all. You're from Japan? Then how many japanese died from the war before the bombs were launched? How many people the Japanese killed before these bombs? Compare the numbers.
Statistics are cold and heartless. Radiations don't kill more than napalm, shrapnel or lead.