Is the power of nuclear bombs exaggerated?

Whenever people talk about nuclear weapons, they say that a nuclear war would kill everyone on the planet, and make the Earth uninhabitable for the rest of eternity, killing the Earth even. Obviously hundreds of millions would die, but how realistic is that Earth may be forever destroyed? Would any assholes really be willing to destroy their planet instead of holding up the white flag?

Other urls found in this thread:

vimeo.com/album/2167779/video/18781528
youtube.com/watch?v=WwlNPhn64TA
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate
ki4u.com/free_book/s73p912.htm
youtube.com/watch?v=WCTKcd2Ko98
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Chernobyl is already recovering & a bunch of the forests are already naturally decontaminating themselves so yeah probably

The answer is YES.
Look up what is the Israel Samson Option and see for yourself...

Yes, it's a huge exaggeration. Read a book. Nobody with an academic or scientific background thinks a nuclear war would kill everyone.

A nuclear exchange between Russia and the US would have about 5,000 nukes going on off on each side. Major cities would likely majority die. Rural areas and towns might be untouched.

Everyone should go to Nagasaki, I had a great McDonalds not 50 yards from the epicenter of the blast. If you go you'll agree we should be nuking everyone.

Recovering from what?
Chernobyl was not a place where the gates of hell opened.
People keept coming to work every day without ever stopping.
The town of Pripyat did not decay because of evil atoms, but because it was evacuated and there was simply no reason to ever return.
And in the villages around Pripyat folks never left and still live there.

We have nukes now that make Nagasaki look like a firecracker.

>but how realistic is that Earth may be forever destroyed?

Not very. At the height of the Cold War it might have been possible to reduce life on Earth to just microbes and sea life, but a modern nuclear war wouldn't even kill a majority of humans. I feel like pointing out that radiation poisoning is the real killer with thermonuclear weapons, the blasts themselves are only going to kill people on military bases in the hearts of big cities.

Radiation could easily cause drastically reduced crop yields though, and that would be far, far more destructive than the weapons themselves.

>Would any assholes really be willing to destroy their planet instead of holding up the white flag?
There are very few scenarios outside of rogue nations that would lead to a thermonuclear detonation. Nukes basically prevent major nations from going to war with one another, and this is why we haven't had a world war in seventy years.

But if it came down to it? I would rather the world be a cinder than subjugate my people and nation to another country.

Just move to an unpopulated place not close to any military base that has fertile land.

Nukes can’t even destroy 1% of the habitable land on earth.

Its not recovering, the animals are deformed and have brains 1/3 smaller the size of other actual animals. People still have higher rates of cancer and deformities.

Lol! Where did you hear that? In school? On CNN?

If you believe this you are retarded. Do you have any idea how many nukes we and Russia have detonated during testing? The whole "Japan is the only country to have been nuked" is a meme. The U.S.has been nuked countless times, albeit in a desert.

It was because of the mutually assured destruction doctrine of the cold war, the thought being that if either side attacked, they'd be forced to hit back with everything they had at once and well, both sides having a shit tonne of nukes sitting around waiting to go.

Now thats much less likely, also variable yield is a thing, so they only need to "bang" as big as they need to. A few around the middle east really would be handy.

> but how realistic is that Earth may be forever destroyed?

Here watch this, very realistic depiction of nuclear war. Kinda old but still good and creepy.

>vimeo.com/album/2167779/video/18781528

if the developed world nuked itself to oblivion, human civilization would be absolutely fucked. the only reason everything works is because we have a steady stream of food, medicine, materials, etc moving around the earth on ships, trucks, and trains. if you started nuking cities, that stream would stop, and millions would die, even if they didn't get hit directly.

that was one tiny bomb. a nuclear war like the one we were ready for during the 70's and 80's would involve thousands of gigantic nuclear explosions dropped on every major city/airfield on three continents. they're not comparable events.

Probably not enough to destroy all life on the planet, or even all humans, but it would definitely trigger a mass extinction event.

>I'm ready to die for Israel right now!

nuclear missiles are so powerful it could make canada inhabitable

Nuclear war between two major powers, after destroying all major cities killing hundreds of millions would create an ash cloud large enough to encircle the globe in a matter of weeks causing an event similar to the Krakatoa eruption, creating a long lasting winter and killing billions.

no, just because you cannot personally fathom the power of one does not mean its power is exaggerated.
much like the size of a single galaxy. Its still big as fuck even though you live on tiny earth.

Where do you get your news? From the voices in your head?

Nuclear winter means worldwide crop failure. This means everybody starves.

>have brains 1/3 smaller the size of other actual animals
That's because they're Ukrainian

>would kill everyone.
oh so the fallout adn the nuclear winter would not reach places five miles away. or fifty. or a hundred.

10,000 nukes each with fallout thousands of times chernobyl (they are designed that way) and you think you will be safe down on the farm?

lol

chernobyl fallout reached America...

Nuclear winter. Soot in stratosphere. Block the sun, global cooling and mass extinction. Small words for retards that talk about muh radiation.

but wouldn't all the co2 from the bombs cause global warming?

>checked
And underrated.

There's also things like nuclear power plants, chemical plants, dams, etc. that will fail and exacerbate things either from immediate damage or lack of maintenance.

Tsar Bomba opens a hole into outer space. fuk that
youtube.com/watch?v=WwlNPhn64TA

>not understanding the dust clouds are what fucks the earth and brings nuclear winter

>Surrendering to commies

I bet you wear a buttplug and let your "girl" friend fuck you in the ass.

>creating a long lasting winter and killing billions
Nuclear winter is a meme that was debunked long ago
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate

Nukes don't produce CO2. They don't burn in the traditional sense. It's atomic fire - Atoms themselves releasing pure energy.

Keep up lad, nuclear winter is a 1980s meme
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate

but they burn all the mass in the surrounding area thus causing an increase in co2. therefore no global cooling should occur because of higher global warming. or is co2 not related to global warming. pick one faggot

We'd be reduced to a primitive level and billions would likely die, but people would survive. The problem is not the bombs, but the collapse of infrastructure and the ecological change that a nuclear winter would bring.

You mean from burning forests and things? I suppose. The ash cloud botting out the sun would have much more of an effect though. You can't have global warming if the sun never even gets there in the first place.

The "soot" you described though is created by theoretical forest fires & burning cities caused by the thermal impulse of the nuclear bomb outside of the blast radius.
Those fires are producing CO/CO2/soot/other pollutants.

wrong.
Wolves and Deer are spreading around Chernobyl because they arent hunted anymore, deformations are relativy rare (considered there is Caesium 137 everywhere) and the population is growing.

no 1/3 smaller brain, but they actually have a better chance to develope mutations which could evolve them and create a new kind within their race.

simple biology.
>inb4 Fallout fanboy
im not talking about 2 heads or such shit, they maybe get thicker fur or bigger ears, whatever the nature thinks can be useful will be given to the next generation due the natural selection.

pic related

Nuclear weapons are just big bombs, fallout is real but its not nearly as big a deal as people think. Our fear of nukes is a legacy of teh Cold War and is not a realistic assessment.

That said, all-out nuclear war would be absolutely devastating, but this is because we have tens of thousands of nukes and most people live closely packed in cities which are ideal targets for a huge bomb, like a nuke.

Yes, but it's also mainly from the bombs themselves blasting irradiated material from the ground into the high atmosphere.

If a nuclear war broke out during the cold war era then perhaps it would annihilate the northern hemisphere but even then it wouldn't of destroyed civilisation itself.

If we are talking about a nuclear exchange with the DPRK and the USA the most likely people to be affected are:
SK (major dammage) all cities vunerable
US (minor dammage) possible city in the east coast destroyed
Japan (major dammage) all cities vunerable
NK (complete destruction) north korea would be wiped off the face of the earth
possibly china (if NK feels that china has betrayed them then they could do dammage to china with ease)
hong kong (because why not)

People didnt' leave, 3800 people continued to work at the other reactor up until recently etc etc

The answer is it depends. Its possible to trigger a nuclear winter if about 30 large hydrogen bombs are set off at the right altitude to kick up dust. The nuclear winter would kill massive numbers of people all over the world as crops failed constantly. That being said the government was never sure they could kill everyone with nuclear weapons so the second wave of ICBMs is tipped with bio weapons as a cleanup measure.

it is exaggerated, but the consequences would be severe regardless, even in a limited exchange. it's not just about death count, but also economics, societal collapse, refugee streams etc.
ki4u.com/free_book/s73p912.htm

We have those large things called "supercomputers" that can model different events of high complexity. Get "debunkers" one of those.

>nukes each fallout thousands of times chernobyl
Completely wrong

> the nuclear winter
Is based on wrong assumptions about burning buildings back in the 1970s

>chernobyl fallout reached America
So did Hiroshima and Nagasaki and every other nuclear test ever made

>and the ecological change that a nuclear winter would bring.
that study assumed both the soviets and the americans would bomb extremely populated cities and only cities, that most of those cities would be in neutral or only slightly aligned nations, that all bombs would be detonated at the ideal altitude for firestorms and that all cities would have the exact same susceptibility to firestorms as the average japanese city in 1945

in reality it would mostly be europe, russia and the mainland united states that would be bombed, most bombs would land outside or on the outskirts of cities with some notable exceptions (moscow had 80+ bombs allocated to it), most bombs would be detonated at the ideal altitude for airbursts or surface bursts which don't create large firestorms, and most cities would not have firestorms

that effect is negligible

Modern nukes don't detonate at ground level, and thus create far less radioactive debris.
On top of that, modern Fission-Fusion nukes create less radioactive isotopes per-Kg than pure fission bombs of the same mass.
"Nuclear Winter" is a 1950/60's thing, it doesn't apply to modern nuclear arsenals, with the exception of Kims 15-30 fission bombs and one baby fusion bomb (that they tested, but I'm sure they built a second one by now).

Thats correct. So? How does it contradict my point? Everything will burn in the vicinity of a nuclear strike

How often does it rain where you are?

In places like Australia and Africa or example they are constantly on fire some place, it goes out, its the way of things.

>Nobody with an academic or scientific background thinks a nuclear war would kill everyone.

That is an absolutely false statement. Carl Sagan put together a theory for how a nuclear war would decimate most of life on earth because of the nuclear winter that would follow. Most people don't even have a functional and realistic concept of what a nuclear winter entails.

youtube.com/watch?v=WCTKcd2Ko98

A nuclear war would create the same effect that wiped out the dinosaurs. The initial blasts would wipe out most of our essential infrastructure and emergency services. Fire would burn uncontrolled over large swaths of the United States, Europe and Russia. These fires would create plumes of smoke that would rise to different levels in the atmosphere depending on their density. Eventually the smoke would encircle the entire planet, blocking out the sun, and causing the earth's surface temperature to drop dramatically. Within a week most crops would die because of lack of sunlight.

On top of the starvation that would eventually ensue because of the lack of crops there would be other problems to deal with. Uncontrolled fires, radiation sickness, lack of salvageable food supplies, lack of clean drinking water, and people with weapons who would harm you for what little resources you have.

A nuclear war would wipe out a majority of the population of the planet. Don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

>carl sagan
you trust one of the world's most renowned environmentalists to have a rational look at the effects of nuclear war on the environment?

Unless conditions are perfect for continued long burn, the fires won't travel far and your massive climate ending soot cloud won't exist.
Hell, 2016 saw nature put up 1/3 or all the new carbon into the atmosphere, breaking all prior output records to date, and the temperature barely wiggled since.
Nukes aren't doing squat unless they pepper every forest on the planet in a grid simultaneous detonation. Then we'd be fucked. But they aren't aimed at forests, they're aimed at cities (the biggest polluters, so maybe Gaia is wishing for the bombs to fly) and other nuke storage sites.

Sagan is an entertainer. He also said that 30 years ago when Cold War anti-nuke hype was at its greatest.

>Attacks the author of the argument, doesn't address the argument itself.

Not an argument.

The old lads were rational about things, not like today's climate-religion zealots.

i've already detailed how the argument is bullshit.

an atomic bomb isnt build to spread radioactivity (except proton bombs, but nobody ever built one yet) its build to crush everything with its blast and lightning.
radioactivity is only a byproduct.

power plants however, lead to massive fallout because all the Uranium/Plutonium and nuclear Waste ( Decay chain or "Uraniums Daughters") are spreading after the accident, while nuclear weapons are made of 99,9% Uranium and Plutonium which are burned (almost) without traces during the Explosion.

the last "daughter of Uranium" is plumb and isnt radioactive.
but of course it needs a couple of thousand years to get there, still the radioactivity around chernobyl is only 50% since the accident due the disintegration of the main Radioactive Element Caesium 137.

>American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences.
That's strange, I don't see "nuclear physicist" on that list. Are you one of those morons who thinks that ANY scientist can talk with authority on ANY scientific topic?

Once again, not an argument.
Can you dispute the argument put forth in that documentary? Would cities and forests not burn after a nuclear explosion? Would they not create smoke clouds that rise to different levels based on the smoke density? Would they not eventually encircle the planet? Would this not cause crops to die out?

Address the argument with facts.

In case of a global nuclear exchange you'll need a second worldwide flood to put out those fires, not a fucking rainy day "in place where I live"

Why should I? Do you want me to find a video by a baker explaining why atomic bombs are a-okay? Would that persuade you? No? Is it because a baker is not an authority on nuclear war? Guess what, neither was Sagan.

He was also an astrophysicist and peacenick idealist, whom wanted the USA & USSR to pool their nukes together to fuel interstellar spacecraft (something environmentalists today are completely against).
Big ideas, but neither side wanted to attempt it.

>Appeal to authority

Address the argument faggot. Listen to what he says in the argument, and then refute the points.

I'm very concerned.

I'm sure he was sincere in his opposition to nukes but his information on them was from a layman's perspective, he wasn't a nuclear physicist.

>shhhh....they will never know what hit them....shhhh
>...shhhh....somebody called for an exterminator...shh....
>.shh..call down the thunder...shhh
>N.u.c.l.e.a.r_l.a.u.n.c.h_d.e.t.e.c.t.e.d
>Dadadaaaadadaaaaadadaduudadedadadaad.mp3

"Its about time"

Nuclear war would probably directly kill hundreds of millions and indirectly billions. They theorise that a nuclear winter might finish off the rest of us. That's only when there is a full exchange. That's thousands of nukes.

As for permanently making earth uninhabitable, no one says that. Earth would he lush and green again in centuries at the absolute most.

The only known screen performance of the incomparable Anne Sellors.

>Would cities and forests not burn after a nuclear explosion?
we have wildfires all the time without consequence, and cities will have massive fires for about 4-5 seconds during a nuclear explosion. it turns out that the thermal pulse creates a protective shield of smoke and the shock wave puts out most fires. you'd get fires in the rubble, but they wouldn't have any effect on the environment.

>Would they not create smoke clouds that rise to different levels based on the smoke density?
not really. you'd see them from satellites, but they wouldn't do anything.

>Would they not eventually encircle the planet?
in the same way that your farts do.

>Would this not cause crops to die out?
no.

If you provide the computers with inaccurate data they will return inaccurate results.

Didn't read it then, nice one

If the baker put forward a rational argument for why atomic bombs are a-okay then I would listen to it. Then when I found a more reasonable argument for why they are not that is backed by facts and logic I would listen to that. The person giving the argument doesn't matter, the facts and reasoning do.

>Muh appeal to authority.
You don't need to have a degree in something to have a strong knowledge of it. If that were the case then no one on pol should be discussing politics without having a doctorate in political science, because obviously they wouldn't have any valid points as they lack credentials.

that one had 21 kilotons. Today a normal one is 300-400. And is not only about dropping hundreds or thousands, but what about the accumulative effects of so much radiation in rivers plants and animals.

did kim jong un secretly attacked australia?
did the aussies shitpost him?

>muh decades old cold war propaganda

Maybe baby boomers are the way they are because they were conditioned to believe the world could end at any moment?

Are you crazy? Its more powerful then you can even think of.

>no one had built bombs designed to spread radiation
The UK has them. Lord Gilbert wanted the UK to deploy "ERW's" (Enhanced Radiation Weapons, otherwise known as Cobalt-tampered Neutron Bombs) on the Afghan-Pakistan border mountain passes to stop the flow of AQ & Taliban fighters.
He was called a racist. Luckily the House of Lords gives no fucks about such terms.

Don't mix up an appeal to expertise with an appeal to authority. Saying "the Pope says we would be fine" would be an appeal to authority and dumb. Trusting an expert on the subject is not an appeal to authority and is also not dumb.

It would be fine. The majority of the nuclear attacks would be above the equator, meaning the entire southern half of our planet would be fine. Sure, it also means that we'd have to live in the southern half for a few generations, but New Zealand looks alright, and we've got the Falklands.

bulshit. nukes don't exist

But, you simpleton, you DO have to be an expert to speak authoritatively on this topic. This isn't an appeal to authority, it;s a bsci requirement in any extremely complex technical field. Would you listen to a geologist about his theory on diseases, if he "put forward good arguments", or would you say "yeah, no, you need to study biology to talk about diseases"?

>but how realistic is that Earth may be forever destroyed?
Completely unrealistic. The damage would be catostrophic with a full nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, likely hundreds of millions would die in the exchange and billions from famine and assorted chaos, but humanity as a whole would survive.

I just popped into this thread to call you a dumb faggot.

Kilotons of what? Plutonium?

well, jolly good then.

relative explosive force compared to TNT

Jews would use their nukes because they know their surrender would not be honoured.

Hence the Sampson Option.

>thinks kiloton is a Unit of measurement for Weight
>netherland education

stop the weed

No, all nukes have around 1kg of actual fissile material, more than that and it dampens the explosion, less and it won't reach critical mass. They're rated in terms of TNT equivalent, so a 1kt nuke is as destructive as 1,000 tons of TNT.

Naw, these red scare indoctrinated fucks are gonna tell you that nukes are harmless little play toys - fucking tards all of them. Fallout be a huge bitch, especially cobalt bombs. Takes about 1000 yrs for a fission nuked site to stop eating dicks for the effects. Mutations and cancer have risen, and all around that 1950-60s nuclear testing? Fucking coincidence? There are exceptions however, air burst neutron bombs are not that bad, also nuclear EPWs get contained underground, but terrorist assholes would love to get their hand on the dirty shit that gets buried... nuke bunker busters are never an option.

Just FYI, we call "plumb" lead.

> Simultaneous fires were started throughout the blast-damaged area by fireball heat and by overturned stoves and furnaces, electrical shorts, etc. Twenty minutes after the detonation, these fires had merged into a firestorm, pulling in surface air from all directions to feed an inferno which consumed everything flammable.

Glasstone, Samuel; Dolan, Philip J. (1977). The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Third Edition. United States: United States Department of Defense and United States Department of Energy. ISBN 978-1603220163.

The only thing that stopped the firestorm that broke out in Hiroshima was the natural fire break caused by the rivers that flow through it, which meant it ran out of fuel. Yes we do have wildfires all the time, however we do not have wildfire that consume every major western city on the planet simultaneously. Wildfires also are only burning trees, not chemical processing plants, and all other industry located within a city.

Gases (like my fart) expand to fill the volume of the atmosphere they are in. However when they are thick like you see with forest fires they create a haze that can travel long distances. If you had every major city, and the forests around it burning, as you would in the event of a large scale nuclear war, that cloud would not dissipate.

Your argument is not valid.

Kiloton is weight, with regards it means equivalent to kilotons of TNT.

well, i was translating in burger, not tea.

hows it going on the island, britbong?

>(you)

>Kilotons
>Plutonium
keked

It's entirely rational that a full exchange could have that outcome. People making alternative arguments don't make a full exchange sound appealing. Just billions (concentrated in the northern hemisphere) dead and people in Africa and Australia are fine. No thanks.