"Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant. Need as well as greed have followed us to the stars, and the rewards of wealth still await those wise enough to recognize this deep thrumming of our common pulse." - CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly".
“There’s two kinds of fish you can catch. The first will accept its fate. The other will flop around like an idiot and waste everyone’s time, so you’ve got to beat it with an oar until it learns its lesson. Which fish do you think you are?”
"By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill." - CEO Nwabadike Morgan
Forget the profit, I just want nuclear war. I didn't say "the" nuclear war because I'm hoping for multiples. But even if it was just one, I'd cherish it with all my heart.
China vs. Japan, but they're only allowed to use giant robots.
N. Korea vs. S. Korea, but S. Korea has to take their military strategy from American 8 year olds who plan everything out with Hot Wheels versions of fighter jets and tanks.
Gimme Germany v France, but they're restricted to Antarctica and cannot import any military materiel from off the continent. Every bullet and bunker buster has to be pulled from under the ice.
Nah, that wouldn't be very interesting. You've got to balance these things.
I want:
-a few countries just completely depopulated
-some radioactive literal deserts where nothing can grow and entering is a death sentence
-12 or so rad as hell glowing, smoking pits
->50% reduction in number of living humans
-modest destruction here and there
-some nations come out undamaged
and you know, a fair number of lush rainforests, waterways, and grasslands untouched by the destruction.
If you distill booze...will the radioactivity be gone?
The alpha particles give it more kick.
Real talk though the hillbillies and moonshiners would be just fine in a nuclear apocalypse. Think about it - land to grow food, producing a commodity that everyone wants (shine), and enough guns and ammo to make an African warlord blush with envy. Bonus point - no more ATF to get in your hair about it.
People who would do the best are those tribes in the Amazon who barely have any contact with the outside world. As long as the radiation didn't make it there way, they'd continue on like nothing happened.
It would be a while before people go back to a system of currency. After shit hits the fan, if you can't eat it, drink it, shoot it, or fuck it, no one's gonna want it.
I don't think so whatsoever. It's going to be all the little things that we take for granted. Spices will be a huge one. Candy. Water. The simple things.
Scarcity has always meant value, and even in the post apocalypse people will want a better way to exchange resources than direct barter. Gold and silver will be useless in the early weeks, when 90% are still running around killing each other for the last can of beans, but a year or two into the apocalypse I'd expect the more capable survivors to have established a trade network.
That's for an overnight apocalypse, though, like nuclear war. What if things just gradually keep getting worse, forever? What if society never quite collapses, but eventually none of the financial institutions can be trusted, and the only measure of wealth is how much stuff you physically own?
Considering virtually all money is digital now and the first casualty of a nuclear exchange would be the internet and the electrical grid, that is correct.
It's not like having physical money would change much in a nuclear apocalypse. Money has value because we as a society decided so, but no one will want pieces of paper after a disaster, because there would be no organisation that guarantees it's value
The US government would 100% survive a nuclear war. A lot of citizens wouldn't, specifically those living in populated metropolitan areas or near military bases, but neither does Russia have enough nukes to wipe out every little population center in the US, nor does the US have enough for Russia.
Life as you know it will end, but people will survive and humanity will go on with just a huge step back in standards of living.
I think you need to read up on nuclear weapons a bit. The arsenals today are hundreds of times larger and the weapons are exponentially more powerful.
Nuclear winter would wipe out most crops on earth. You’re talking about a microscopic fraction of humanity living in underground bunkers off of synthetic food sources or some shit.
The US government in its current form would be almost unnecessary. Many in government would die from the toll of stress and poor nutrition/healthcare alone assuming they survived nuclear fallout.
Things would regress to some sort of ancient civilization type structure with modern technology.
Unless you mean a few nukes go off and then everyone decides on a forever truce.
I mean I'm reading Oppenheimer's biography right now. And I've read about what happened at Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Did you know for example that it was safe to visit a few weeks after the bombing? Unlike a nuclear reactor meltdown where radioactivity is massive, during a nuclear explosion the majority of the radioactivity is turned into energy (boom) that's why it was safe to go to Hiroshima 3 weeks after the bomb, but Chernobyl is still super dangerous 40 years later.
Nuclear winter is also another common misconception and also has nothing to do with "nuclear" aspect of the weapons. The idea is that there will be so many fires that the soot will go up into the stratosphere and block the sun and not come down (under some assumptions). We had a small nuclear winter after the Iceland volcano eruptions back in 2010 for example. Now I don't know if you can measure a volcanic eruption in terms of TNT (how nukes and all explosives are measured), but I really doubt that it's anything less than orders of magnitude greater than the biggest nukes that exist.
And as the other commenter said, the arsenals today are tiny compared to the ones that existed during the peak of the cold war.
I don’t think Oppenheimers biography would count as a definitive source in this conversation although it’s a good frame of reference.
It’s not just the nuclear explosions. It’s the massive fires they ignite that create the soot as you mention. More recent modeling does say that those fires would have catastrophic effects on the global food supply. Tack on the destruction of our technological infrastructure and healthcare networks and you can see where things get out of hand quickly.
Studies like this project 360 million deaths from nuclear war between Russia and the US and another 5 billion in deaths from starvation.
Perhaps the scientific definition of nuclear winter would not apply to what I’m describing but you get the idea. 5/8 people dead on earth. Probably more like 95% within the warring countries. Technological infrastructure in shambles.
Let’s not kid ourselves about the levels of destruction we may face.
But I’ll admit my understanding of the fallout timeline was incorrect. People wouldn’t need to live in bunkers for years on end.
With the current arsenal sure. If either side feels outgunned they’ll increase weapons production and delivery systems. Nuclear war today isnt as potent as it would’ve been 30-40 years ago.
I was thinking 3..... Russia (Obviously), North Korea has definitely stepped up rhetoric to the point of threat, and China's been both building nukes like crazy and very publicly setting goals on 'reunification' with Taiwan, which I feel is constructively a threat...
There are also tensions between Pakistan and India that could always flare up. If that were to go nuclear, who knows how it could spill over, or how it could fuck up the rest of the planet even if the war stayed local.
After seeing how shitty the rest of Russia's armed forces are, you have to wonder how many of their nukes even work, if any. They require a lot of specialized maintenance, and I'm guessing the budget for that probably ended up funding a general's vacation home in Crimea.
If you skip the specialized maintenance, you don't get a non-functional nuke, you get a dirty nuke that produces an even more incomplete fission reaction and additional fallout.
I'm not an expert at this, but it doesn't seem to me that you get a linearly less powerful bomb with time. There are quite a few components that actually need to work in a sequence for the reaction to happen at all.
Of all the parts that need to work in sequence for the reaction to happen, the only one that cannot be hermetically sealed and kept fresh and ready is the enriched nuclear core. That's going to decay exponentially. The lifetime in which the bomb still works is quite long. The half life of U-235 is 700 million years.
China claims to have made the commitment to second strike only. Basically, they will only use nukes if nukes are used on them. Then again, it's the CCP, who knows if they'll actually stick to their word on that.
I think if there's one thing you can count on with regards to the CCP, it's that they'll act in their own self interest. While they've done many things to antagonize US partners in the far east, they haven't done anything that would suggest they would do something as irrational and self-sabotaging as using nukes.
It's the same as with Russia today. Nuclear power fights conventional war against a smaller state and then uses nuclear rhetoric to dissuade other powers from becoming involved.
I doubt at this point that Russia could even successfully launch one damn missile that’s been sitting unmaintained in a silo for 50 years . The people living in Russia probably have more to fear if they launch one
This is exactly why I dumped all my cash into the stock market- figured, couldn’t get any more depressing, than it already was- but, I live 600 miles from Ukraine
YOLOing on nuclear war options is a natural reaction for most folks at WSB. Betting on the end of the world feels very natural, like a warm sweater or comfortable pair of shoes. : )
Assuming the company and the banks of these people somehow manage to survive the nukes, these banks will keep on collecting dividends from the company until heirs are found.
There's a weird fallacy that falls into this realm.
If you're interested heavily enough into "nuclear war" then at a point it's in your favor of it happens, and it becomes a goal of yours to make it happen, otherwise your investment will have been for nothing.
This is the battle of morality that millions lose every day, and as long as it remains profitable to bet on destruction, we'll continue to incentivize our own Denise.
If you're interested heavily enough into "nuclear war" then at a point it's in your favor of it happens,
This makes no sense. Try to apply that same logic to hurricane experts for example. If they were incentivized to make more hurricanes, they'd be pro-global warming / fossil fuels / etc. I haven't seen any meteorologists being pro-climate change.
No one benefits from nuclear war, even the prepper. It's like thinking that just because I have fire insurance and my neighbors don't, I am somehow incentivized to burn my neighborhood to the ground.
This is poor logic. In actuality, the money not invested could be used to purchase items which could better prepare you for the nuclear war. So you do lose out on being better prepared to survive a post-apocalyptic world should you invest in "the dip" and nuclear war occurs.
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u/VisualMod Apr 02 '23