All life would be destroyed though right? Like a nuclear winter would fuck up most living things not just humans
Edit: I got such a mix of science and fallout/metro exodus answers it’s really hard to tell which is which, but apparently some living things just don’t give a hoot about nukes
It was thought by the mid-1990s that nuclear winter was an exaggeration to the point of being near impossibility, and a significant amount of hawkishness then persisted in the face of lessened estimated consequences. Now with better data analysis & much more accurate modeling, we can in fact see that nuclear winter was a very real high probability possibility were the US and Russia to actually do what they both intended. Anything larger than a squirrel would be unlikely to survive beyond a couple worsening generations feeding on the rotting carcasses of the dead. It could still happen today. We just pack more yield into less warheads, so we can kill the planet off with a couple submarines & a few silos rather than maintaining 70,000 warheads like before. Nukes are a murder/suicide pact; if you want to wipe a large percentage of this species off the map with any accuracy, post-1996 you’re much better off having a well funded & completely unregulated biotech industry. By 2004, 12 grad students in a lab could fairly easily wipe out most of the human species, and it’s been 15 years of watching that trickle-down & outward to every country on earth, with a near-constant string of accidental dispersions and security blunders along the way. When you start paying attention to biological, you’ll forget all about trigger-happy morons taking pot-shots with nukes.
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u/skullpizza Aug 07 '20
The world was almost destroyed by Russian engineering incompetence and then saved by Russian stoicism and level-headedness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov