this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
-5 points (36.8% liked)

Asklemmy

43917 readers
1640 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nuclear weapons spread vast quantities of highly toxic, highly radioactive dust in all directions, clean into the stratosphere.

Any significant use of these weapons would render the entire planet uninhabitable, and cause total catastrophic breakdown of every ecosystem. Even if you survived the direct attack, there would be no clean air, no clean water - and in a very short time, no plants or animals. The forests and oceans would die, there'd be nothing left to cycle CO2 back to oxygen, the ocean currents would be disrupted, rainfall patterns would be destroyed (even if they weren't coating everything in more radioactive dust), it would be impossible to grow food - the planet would simply stop sustaining life. And that's not even counting nuclear winter, an ice age brought on by the sheer quantity of stratospheric dust blocking out the sunlight (not dissimilar to the meteor wiping out the dinosaurs)

It's hard to cast yourself as a winner if you're shitting your intestines out from radiation poisoning, with no hope whatsoever of anyone at all getting through this.

[โ€“] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

See, you got the basic idea right with nuclear winter, but fallout wouldn't be a significant part of is in most places. Nukes do the most damage in an airburst, and they don't make a lot of fallout unless there's solids in the fireball.

There's also the whole "no remaining cities to fight with" thing.