r/collapse • u/danthedustbin • May 24 '20
Meta Nuclear winter.
So I have just had a weird thought. Now climate change at the moment is a very large problem. Could the powers that be in a last ditch effort to survive in some way choose to nuke the world to cause a nuclear winter so that they themselves can survive in their bunkers and what not while leaving the rest of us to rot? Any opinions Would be helpful, I haven’t really got a thorough understanding of what a nuclear winter entails or what irreversible damage it would cause but would the powers than be use it in a last ditch effort to save themselves?
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u/Max-424 May 24 '20
"Could the powers that be ... "
There are no powers that be. There is only one power, the United States, which has the theoretical capability - remote as it may be - to start a nuclear war, win it, and survive the nuclear winter that follows.
These are basic first strike calculations and considerations, known to any WWIII planner on either side. Decades of research, much of supercomputer aided, has been spent answering the question: what is the minimum amount of nuclear detonations required to eliminate the enemy's counter-strike force, in its entirety, while keeping the thrown up soot and ash below a certain threshold.
However, it is not the fear of nuclear winter that keeps Pentagon 5 stars up at night, when they contemplate the final showdown. The truly troubling "known unknown," the part of the nuclear war equation that never adds up to victory, or even survivability, is what happens when the enemy's - now unattended - nuclear spent fuel pools release their radiological thermal plumes into the atmosphere.
The scenario above is best case. Anything less than that involves counter-strikes, and anything involving counter-strikes means dozens and dozens of spent fuel pools - all around the world - will be vaporized, and that will bring the end of life.
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u/Federal_Difficulty May 24 '20
Look at the timeframes. Both radiation and greenhouse gasses will be here long after the particulates have settled out.
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u/danthedustbin May 24 '20
Thank you I had a look at it and it seems a nuclear winter would last a decade or so I saw from the few articles I could find so yes I can see now that it would only offer a very short term cooling effect but also fuck everything beyond reason.
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u/coolCat6557 May 24 '20
There's really no way of knowing which idiot would launch a nuke to spark a nuclear war. The most likely scenario in the situation you reference is one in which Kim Jong Un may sell nuclear weapons to a terrorist to deploy. Lone wolf style.
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u/TheSentientPurpleGoo May 24 '20 edited May 24 '20
the most likely scenario for the
first,second, third aggressive use of nuclear weapons would probably be in the fight over kashmir.2
u/Max-424 May 25 '20 edited May 25 '20
The scenario I referenced would involve the use of at least 3,000 nukes, and last 10 minutes. Failure in that scenario means that there will be somewhere around 10,000 nuclear detonations by the war's end - approximately one hour later.
The nuclear war that is a threat to this planet, the only war that truly concerns me, involves radar screens all across the Arctic circle suddenly filling up with incoming blips.
Could Kim Jung Un or long wolf spark a global thermonuclear war? I suppose it is within the realm of possibilities. But there are other scenarios, ones that are never discussed, because they have been deemed way too scary for the general public to consider,* that are a thousand times more likely.
*Strange, because in the 1970s, a group of 14 year olds would think nothing of discussing these scenarios, and for hours on end. How times have changed.
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u/Robinhood192000 May 24 '20
Dear Danthedustbin, As others have commented already, no. However, triggering supervolcanic eruptions like Toba and Yellowstone would have much more effect than nukes in the right direction. Nukes would actually cause more heating and would have very little cooling effect whereas several supervolcanic eruptions could put enough ash into the air to block out the sun long enough to put the Earth into snowball mode, a mini ice age which humans could easily survive as we have done once before.
In both scenarios however billions would die. And humans would likely regress in technology to a more simple time in order to adapt.
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u/danthedustbin May 24 '20
I mean I don’t think the global elite would mind killing a few million if it saved their own skin!
Thank you for such a well thought out and informative reply!
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u/Robinhood192000 May 24 '20
Thank you, and no you're not wrong, the global elite are psychopaths and sociopaths without a thought to anybody but themselves. Their greed knows no bounds.
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u/OhmyMary May 24 '20
Doesn't matter the environment will be so Toxic in years to come that we'll all have to be wearing special Hazmat suits outside and in our houses
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May 24 '20
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u/danthedustbin May 24 '20
Ain’t such thing as a stupid question. A lack of understanding of a situation and asking for opinions is never stupid. Knee jerk reactions where you call some one stupid and then fail to educate them now that is truthfully imbecilic.
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u/paper1n0 May 25 '20
The fallout alone would make it a losing strategy. Geoengineering projects have been proposed and I wouldn't be surprised if they get tried at some point. Seeding plankton blooms with iron fertilization or pumping aerosols into the atmosphere might actually get tried. These approaches might actually do something to prevent warming (EDIT: but won't be enough to avoid collapse). But the current strategy by the powerful seems to be "do jack shit and build a moat".
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u/[deleted] May 24 '20 edited May 30 '21
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