For what it's worth, the Midwest would be a prime target during a nuclear war due to its ICBM silos. There aren't many places far away from both population centers and military targets that could be considered safe. Maybe New Zealand.
Doesn't change right away, takes time. But somehow over the last 4.5 years it has. (Ask me before then, yeah absolutely blinking out is the way to go.) Then again, as always, ymmv. Congratulations.
I'm really glad this one keeps making the rounds. Of course this is not even close to the first time this has been posted but I always continue going back to it after all these years.
Question: If I understand this correctly, it means all one would have to do is move 30-60 mins away from the center of a suspected target city to massively increase one's chances of surviving an attack on said city?
Assuming a single warhead and something small like NK's ICBMs which is in the 20-30kt range, yes. Now when you're dealing with modern ICBMs, like the ones the US, Russia, China and a few other countries have, the prognosis isn't as good. Modern ICBMs are MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle). For example the current Russian MIRV ICBM is the R-36M2 (NATO designation SS-18 Satan Mod 5) which carries 10 warheads each with a charge of 550-750kt. So on Nukemap punch in a single air-burst warhead in the 550-750kt range and imagine 10 of them spread over a wide area. That's what a single R-36M2 could do. Russia currently has 104 of them deployed. They also have 278 of the older R-36MUTTKh (NATO SS-18 Satan Mod 4) deployed which each carry 10 550kt warheads. Russia is in the process of deploying the successor to the R-36M, the RS-28 Sarmat (NATO designation SS-X-30 SATAN 2) which can carry a single warhead with a 50Mt charge or between 10-15 MIRV warheads or 24 hypersonic glide vehicles, depending on the configuration. A single RS-28 Sarmat in a MIRV or hypersonic glide vehicle configuration could flatten an area about the size of Texas. And if all that isn't horrific enough, it's hypersonic, which means all current missile defenses are useless against it.
I did the calculation for Ohio-class capabilities assuming it was only loaded with the smaller 100kT warheads (W76), as the 450kT ones (W88) are relatively rare, according to Nukemap's estimates for a 840m airburst a single sub can cover 1500sq km (~1/3rd of RH, 10x DC) in 20psi (severe damage or complete destruction of concrete buildings, ~100% fatality), 1800 in 1000 rem (~95% protracted mortality) and 7700 sq km (Delaware, half of Connecticut) in 5 psi (~universal collapse of residential buildings, widespread fatalities).
But at the same time, we're moving past deterrence. The USSR fell 26 years ago. There's "deterrence" and there's "we can wipe out the entire planet". It's especially disconcerting when you consider that in most nuclear armed countries, US included, the authority to launch a nuclear strike lies solely with one person.
We are in no way moving past deterrence. SALT, START, ABMT, etc essentially codified it.
And deterrence is predicated upon creating the absolute certainty in your enemy's mind that you will leave their country a smoking, radioactive hellscape if they attack you.
This requires convincing them that the decision will be made, were it to come to that. Not "Oh, but a mid level officer might ignore the command."
In nuclear game theory, the less certain your opponent is of your resolve and capability, the more likely nuclear armageddon is.
I'd imagine it makes it less stable simply from a complexity = narrower bounds of stability standpoint, but fundamentally it doesn't change anything.
That's why nuclear fingerprinting and global monitoring have been so heavily invested in. "Safety in numbers" isn't a defense if the retaliatory strike still hits all the belligerents.
You vastly overestimated the dammage from a MIRV. Nukes are sub liner as a higher percentage of the energy ends up in the upper atmosphere as you increase yield. Nagasaki's Was 20kt and had favorable geographic conditions along with wooden buildings and a large number of people from the same city survived. 500kt still have left survivors in the same city though few.
So, yes a MIV could take out 8-10 cities across Texas while not impacting 99% of the land. But, a more likely approach is to carpet bomb suberbs and redundantly target cities with different warheads from different ICBMs.
Thus, 1000 MIRVs would not get 1000x the dammage as single areas would be targeted multiple times and of course targets get harder to pick. Central West Virginia for example due to all those mountains and minimal population would take a lot of nukes or largely get left alone.
> So, yes a MIV could take out 8-10 cities across Texas while not impacting 99% of the land. But, a more likely approach is to carpet bomb suburbs and redundantly target cities with different warheads from different ICBMs.
Why? Wouldn't it be more useful from a militaristic perspective to take out enemy missile silos, industrial plants which could be converted to produce wartime materials, and to take out military bases? Essentially, target cities, ignore the residential areas except for ones that are near a missile silo? What strategic advantage could possibly come from carpet bombing suburbs?
The world only has on the order of a thousand of these things. Russia, as the GP points out, only has ~300. They can't just glass the opposing hemisphere, they have to pick and choose important targets.
Total war, if you reduce the US population from 300 million to 10 million we are a vastly smaller threat mid term. Consider, if you removed everything but 1,000,000 infantry they would need to go make food, bullets, boats etc. On the other hand if you have 100 million civilians they can quickly train a few % how to shoot and will be very angry while producing a surplus to keep a war going.
The general assumption is an ICBMs counter attack happens when your attack is in the air. So, you would mostly be hitting empty silos thus your country has little military or economic strength left. Worse, it's much cheaper to fake some silos in the middle of nowhere than a suburb. 'Wasting' nukes on corn fields is very costly.
How has a 500kt warhead left survivors in a city? No warheads or bombs that large have ever been deployed in an actual conflict and so have never been used on a city.
The 100% kills zone is surrounded by a much larger 99-95% kill zone. Militarily 98% = total destruction, but when you start talking about 100,000 people you need several 9's.
Yes - unless there are ground bursts generating fall out, and the wind is blowing in your direction.
The only way to survive fall out is to stay in a shelter with good shielding for an absolute minimum of two weeks. In an all-out war in which most cities are attacked, that could easily extend to months, or even a year.
Unless you have a Geiger counter or dosimeter you won't realise you've been irradiated, and it can take two to four weeks for a fatal dose to kill you.
For the first part of that you may well feel absolutely fine.
However, if I understand correctly, you will have a golden window of opportunity of half an hour or so while the fallout is still mostly in the air. It's probably possible to escape the fallout zone on a cycle if you start moving ASAP perpendicular to the wind direction.
Considering that there is almost zero public shelters anywhere in the western world nowadays, if a nuke goes off nearby I'd say it's a good bet you're dead even if you survive the blast.
On the contrary - if a single nuclear weapon explodes and you survive the immediate effects not too badly injured I'd say there is a very good chance that you'd survive. Of course, for an attack with thousands of weapons there would be other problems but that's not the scale of the threat to the US from NK.
why would you need public shelter? i have relatively big cellar in basement of my apartment building where I could squeeze my family, so does my mother, while my father's cellar is like 4x5m, he could stay there with many people
only when I think of my sister who built house without basement or same goes for cousin, I guess they don't stand much chance
Well, for starters, I currently live in the UK and I don't know anyone who lives in a building with a basement. They are just not very common here. And second of all - even if you do have a basement - do you have any supplies in there? Air filters? Fresh water? It's cool for a day or two, but if you have to stay there for two weeks then it's just not good enough.
Which is not a negligible threat. A major logistical crash will drop your standard of living down to what can be grown or made locally (compare the fall of the Roman empire) and a sudden one (such as a nuclear war) will for a while drop you down to what has already been stored locally - very very little, in this age of just in time delivery. Expect immediate and very violent food riots.
Pretty much. I live about 15 miles from the White House and my assumption is that I'd probably survive the initial stages of a nuclear war. Weapons have actually been getting a lot smaller in recent decades. At the peak of the Cold War, weapons with tens of megatons of yield were not uncommon. Right now, the biggest bomb in the US arsenal is 1.2 megatons, and most are much smaller. A lot of this is because of accuracy: giant bombs were needed for strategic weapons in the 1960s because you'd be lucky to get such a bomb within a couple miles of your intended target. With modern weapons able to hit a chosen city block (or a chosen room of a building if using GPS guidance) you can use much smaller weapons.
The deadliness of nuclear weapons tends to be overstated at all yields. For example, look at all the ridicule that the old "duck and cover" method gets. It's actually a highly practical method that would save a lot of lives, even with the old gigantic bombs.
Now, don't get me wrong. Nuclear war, or even a single nuclear strike, would kill a shitload of people, and there's some merit to the idea that "the living would envy the dead" that you see a lot of other commenters espousing here. But popular ideas like "one bomb would destroy the entire state of Texas" and "the combined nuclear arsenals of the world are enough to destroy the planet N times over" are completely wrong.
I seriously doubt if anyone, least of all NK, would be throwing 20Mt bombs at cities - the trickiest bit with |H-bombs isn't so much building big bombs but building small enough weapons that are easy to deliver by a missile.
The Soviets did have very large missiles (SS-18s) with an option for single very large weapons (20-25Mt) but those were for deep bunkers rather than cities.
> the trickiest bit with |H-bombs isn't so much building big bombs but building small enough weapons that are easy to deliver by a missile.
It's the opposite. Medium warheads (100~500kT) are more efficient[0] and more flexible, the original systems were huge because they were bomber-delivered, there was therefore an assumption that few bombs would reach the target and you wanted every one of them to pack as much punch as possible (no point in putting lots of small ones in a bomber as they'd all be dropped onto the same place anyway, when your explosion has an effect diameter in kilometres multiple bombs are just going to interfere with one another).
The advent of ICBM and later MIRV allowed splitting reducing the size of individual warheads as the delivery mechanism is both cheaper and more effective, thus you can have more of them and a larger fraction will reach the objective.
[0] ground effects grow sub-linearly with yield, if you increase yield from 20kT to 1MT (50x) the blast range grows by ~4x (changing burst height to optimise ground effects) and the affected area grows by ~15x
What I meant was that once they worked out staging building arbitrarily large weapons was actually fairly easy - AFAIR the team building the Tsar Bomba were criticized by their colleagues because what they were doing wasn't actually useful technically and that the real challenge was building smaller easier to deliver designs - the US W88 currently being the most advanced design that has been described in public.
Sort of. There are very few scenarios where I can imagine one nuclear bomb being dropped on a US target, accident by our own military seems most likely followed by terrorism then a suicidal nuclear power, and in all three of those scenarios I doubt the bomb would hit where any planning suggests it would.
A nuclear bomb (several hundred times larger than the one dropped on Hiroshima) was accidentally dropped in the US in 1961[1]. Luckily it (obviously) didn't detonate.
It would depend. Are you talking a single nuke from NK? Then that is plausible depending on wind / fallout directions. I don't remember where the original source for this is, but https://crisisboom.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/nuke-targets-... is a reasonable scenario for a war with Russia. Where anything with value would be struck. The east coast is practically all destroyed from 50mi south of DC up to north of Boston. Entire metro areas would be struck and you would need to be further out.
The site is down, so I can't tell if it models fallout. Not an expert, but I get the impression that you can get lethal fallout a hundred kilometers from the target site. But it would require very bad luck with regards to the wind direction.
There is a very fascinating book detailing the immediate survival of such a scenario.
I have played quite a lot with it - you typically don't get much fallout with an airburst (you do get more dead people), but in the case of nuclear terroism, which would probably be delivered by truck and therefore be a ground-burst, you do.
You probably also want to be up-wind, so that you don't get any fallout.
But yeah, a single nuke isn't close to an endgame, certainly not those suitcased sized nukes we were all so afraid of. To end the world you need massive numbers of nukes, or live in a small country.
Airbursts are generally used to maximise the area damaged at the cost of peak damage - so for soft targets like cities. Ground bursts would be used for hard targets (deep bunkers, missile silos) that are relatively small but hard to kill. I suspect in wartime fall-out wouldn't be a major factor in planning all out attacks whereas it was a big factor in atmospheric testing.
I also wonder how dangerous fallout was considered to be, in the long run. I have the impression that up into the late 60s fallout was considered dangerous in the short term but not after say a year.
It’s a nice page - I used to use it to illustrate the power of the various weapons in an intro to international politics class I taught. The Tsar Bomba was always a hit with the more morbid students.
just checked it on Beijing where I used to live and it seem only tourist city center would be eliminated with regular weapons, while most of the population outside would be untouched, I was surprised how weak is supposed to be nuclear bomb, I remembered always it was like 10-20km deadly and 50km run away zone, but maybe I am confusing it with nuclear power plant
Wouldn't mind having something similar for impending mega-earthquakes and tsunamis.
Wait, why did I move here? Oh, I guess I got sold on the rain and the high cost of living. :)