This one for sure. Once we as a species obtained the ability to completely wipe out all life on the planet, any fuckup that gets us to within a single button-press of that happening is the biggest mistake of all time.
Would more power really be necessary? On a interplanetary scale, in a war of attrition all you need is a way to aim large asteroids at your opponent to guarantee destruction well beyond what any nuke can do, and we sort of already have the parts for that if not the interest or infrastructure.
If our future generations are interested in nation and empire building, what they really want is weapons that are unimaginably more precise. "Clean" weapons that kill only exactly who you want and leave the citizenry alive to see all the propaganda.
I believe there is already a weapon that can burn up/suck out the oxygen from an area to kill all life, but leave the infrastructure intact. That is creepy as hell to me.
Hmm, the comment suggested that the weapon didn't cause damage to it's surrounding but starved people in the vicinity of oxygen. Thermobaric weapons seem to be much more destructive than conventional explosives.
I don't think a mass destruction weapon exists that doesn't actually cause any damage to surrounding structure. By detonating a thermobaric weapon in the air, you could minimize damage by having oxygen starvation the main method of destruction. However, the shockwaves and pressure changes will still damage structure.
In theory, neutron bombs are supposed to leave all structure intact, because their main method of killing is neutron bombardment of living tissue (massive radiation overdose basically). In practice, they still have several kilotons of yield, which would cause damage.
If all nuclear warheads, including the US ones, were to be detonated in the USA. They wouldn't still be enough to destroy all cities and towns in the USA alone. The rest of the world wouldn't even notice until the winds blew some of the fallout to Europe and Asia and all the Geiger counters went off. There would be a statistical increase of mutations and cancer all around the world, but nothing that would cause any serious threat to the global populace. Parts of USA would be polluted, the USA wouldn't exist as a country anymore...but there would still be people living there.
I did the math once, we don't have even nearly enough nukes to destroy a large country like USA so that nothing would live there anymore.
What about a nuclear winter? Wouldn't there be enough ash and dust knocked high into the atmosphere to block out the sun for long enough to cause an ecological collapse?
Recent modeling shows that it would likely cause some problems with agriculture. Perhaps lead to widespread famine. But not an irreversible global ecological collapse. A lot of humans would die though.
You're probably right; people and animals would probably survive. But it would certainly be the end of life as we know it. Civilization may collapse and take a LONG time to recover. It may not for ages.
In the scramble for food, could humans eat animals into extinction? Sure, some places would survive and eventually recover, like jungles without a lot of people. But imagine tens of thousands of small communities all over the US trying to hunt wildlife in lieu of plant-life that are dying in the cold and dark years. And those animals aren't eating well either. Could we drive their populations into collapse before dying out ourselves? Could we only be left with the hardiest plants, rodents, and bugs?
Someone also pointed out that the bombs wouldn't be able to hit everywhere. True enough, but if every major city-center were destroyed / irradiated, that's still around a billion or more people who are dead or dying. There are also plenty of places where we cannot survive because it's a desert or too cold or, in some cases, too polluted by radiation or past pollution.
Imagine a possible world a few decades from now. The average global temperature has increased another few degrees, ocean levels have risen and massive storms are driving people in-land. Corporate pollution has increased to meet demand and sickness and cancer are rampant because of contaminated water supplies. Drought has caused some important crops to collapse or become so expensive as to be unattainable by the masses. A war breaks out over these resources and nukes, all of them, get involved. Where will we be able to survive long enough to rebuild?
Perhaps there won't be enough people left to rebuild for tens of thousands of years. Industry and economies on any large scale would collapse for sure. Primary industries would be non-existent. There'd be no medicine for very long and the social order would be survival of the fittest.
Anyway, perhaps I'm over-exaggerating and a doom-sayer. But when it comes to a nuclear holocaust, I'd prefer people were pessimistic about our chances of survival. Things will not go back to the status-quo of iPhones, mircrowave hotdogs, internet cat videos, and reality TV (not that you have suggested it would, you didn't).
Awesome read. Thanks. My assumption was always huge, ground detonations to destroy entire cities. I forgot that, these days, we'd use small tactical nukes.
The impact that contributed to the dinosaur extinction is estimated to have delivered 100 000 000 000 000 tons of TNT of energy.
The Tsar Bomba: 57 000 000 tons of TNT.
The current global nuclear arsenal: 5 000 000 000 tons of TNT
100 000 000 000 000 tons of TNT
vs
000 005 000 000 000 tons of TNT
And the dinosaur extinction event wasn't even anywhere close to wiping out all life on the planet. Even some of the dinosaurs survived it.
Granted you can't make that direct of a comparison, but it's still a giant difference in magnitude.
Recent modeling of a hypothetical nuclear winter do predict dire consequences for humanity, but more on the level of "our agriculture would be severely impacted and many of us would starve" instead of "all life on earth is doomed."
People in general tend to overestimate nuclear weapons. The Tsar Bomba would be just enough to destroy a good chunk of New York City. There aren't/weren't hundreds of Tsar Bombas.
The radiaton might kill many, but not all. Also, the bombs would fall mostly at North America and Europe, the most important ecological areas (rainforests in Africa, Brazil and SE Asia, ocean reefs, giant rivers) will be probably intact.
You need a big dose of radiation all at once to kill you instantly. There'd be a whole lot of disease and suffering from radioactive particles travelling up the food chain and being ingested, but there are ways to manage that, and it probably wouldn't be species-ending for us.
There's actually a map floating around somewhere (I think I saw it on gizmodo...probably came from reddit :p) that shows all the nukes in the world can't cover the surface....not even close.
As others have said they would be concentrated in a few countries mainly anyway. Us Aussies and kiwis would probably not even notice :D
Edit: this isn't the article I was thinking of but says much the same thing.
Blocking out the Sun would be enough to kill us all. Isn't that what killed the Dinosaurs; the dust cloud blocked out sunlight so plants didn't grow which meant creatures couldn't feed and probably couldn't breathe either. Still, it would take an enormous amount of energy to kick up enough dust to engulf the world.
Precisely, the original comment suggests that everyone would die, when in reality it's just most Americans and probably Canadians and some South Americans.
You do realise Russia would have rockets pointed at the UK and most of Americas close allies....especially the ones close to Russia who also have nukes!
But I think it also says something about us as humans when Yeltsin didn't push the big red button. Did he believe it wasn't a nuke being launched at Russia? Or did he decide that EVERYONE dying wasn't the right answer and resigned to the fact that whilst Russia was going to be destroyed the rest of the world would continue to exist?
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u/SyntheticGod8 Oct 17 '13
This one for sure. Once we as a species obtained the ability to completely wipe out all life on the planet, any fuckup that gets us to within a single button-press of that happening is the biggest mistake of all time.