If there was a nuclear war that decimated the world's population, what would the world be like after it? I've heard of nuclear winters and radiation sicknesses and such, but I don't really have a good picture of what would happen, and i'm suddenly curious. Can people explain/direct me to information please?
>>6
A race of shut-ins is just what the earth needs.
It was only a matter of time/.
Hey, who'd be better suited to living their lives in deep mineshafts below the earth's surface?
and emerging 1500 years later as a race of mole people, coming to the surface only to kidnap little girls?
Nuclear war would be more devastating in global economic terms than in immediate loss of life. You'd count on big parts of the world being mostly unchanged. Every (current) nuclear player is in the northern hemisphere and wind patterns would keep fallout from the north from ever reaching the south at any dangerous level. In fact, fallout in lethal doses can only travel so far. It can contaminate food and livestock at great distances, but if your choice is cancer in a decade or starvation now, most people will choose to eat.
In the immediate area of attacks, you'll have an area that will be uninhabitable for awhile (measured in years or at most, decades), but radiactive elements decay, that's what they do. Surrounding these areas, for some distance downwind, you'll have areas that will have suffered little from the blast, but took fallout. Fallout is hard to see and experience until it's too late. It's just dust from material burned by the blast and carried on the wind until it setles to earth. The more material vaporized by the blast (this is basically depedent on how close the bomb was detonated to the ground), the more fallout. These areas would be quickly abandoned as people figured out their situation and fled. Most would probably wander into the wilderness and there die of radiation poisoning they've already received anyway if not starvation or complications from exposure later. Basically, more would die in the months following the attacks due to radiation and the panic it creates than would die in the actual attacks.
After about three or four months, even areas hard hit by fallout will be fairly safe to reoccupy. However, the fallout will still be there and it will still contaminate nearly everything. If the food was exposed to radiation, it's probably still safe to eat, the problem is moreso eating food with particles of fallout on it. These particles could enter your body and stay there, pumping out gamma radiation until they've decayed fully, which may be well after you've died even a natural death. Dust masks would be popular fashion accessories among survivors. Remember: crops in the field were dusted and would be unsafe, but grain in silos, granted it wasn't exposed to the air would be fine.
The attacks will cause untold amounts of environmental damage. Fires will rage within the cities and their outskirts and no one will be there to put them out. The blasts could also hit things like oil refineries and chemical plants which will likewise burn and could have a deadly impact on survivors too. Smoke and dust in the upper atmosphere may cool the planet briefly, but a long-lasting nuclear winter is unlikely. Every year, volcanoes pour tons of material in the atmosphere and hardly make a dent in the climate. Man can't do in one day what a volcano can over the course of a year.
The places that are hardest hit will be determined by the war. It all depends who strikes first and how the counterattack is planned. Since both sides have early warning systems, they may choose to simply attack the economics of the target country, knowing full well that they won't be able to hit the missiles in their silos before they launch. Each side will want to hit airports where their respective bombers could land.
In any event, electricity is going to be the first thing to go. The electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear blast anywhere near a power grid will overload it. Modern electronics will likewise be hit by this pulse and they're likely to fail also. The end result is a total blackout: no electricity, no communications. After the attacks, the means of repairing the grid will be out of service for some time. Depending on how close they are, power lines will be damaged just by the heat of the blast and power poles will be knocked over. Even with generators, your fuel supply will be severely interupted. If your generator depends on electronic fuel injection, the electronics may be fried by the blast even if it's far enough away to physically survive.
On that note, modern automobiles use electronic fuel injection and the components within this system are subject to EMP. The same will hold true for locomotives and even modern aircraft may be unusable due to electronics damage. On the upside, older autos will work just fine. The downside is that these are less fuel efficient and fuel supplies will be very limited.
Houses that are even some distance from the blast may lose some or all of their windows. Boarded up windows will be a common sight, and since people can't simply go buy boards anymore, they'll use whatever they can find. If your house lacks a fireplace, you may have a hard time with winter heating. There may be no gas, no electricity, and no running water for years to come.
This brings up another problem: buying things will be next to impossible. Credit cards won't work. Cash might, but it might not depending on who you're working with. Trade goods will, but what will you trade? How will you eat? Can you garden enough to feed yourself and your family for years on end? This is when the real die-off starts. Those that survived the initial attack and the fallout are now living without electricity, without running water, and increasingly without food. People will get sick and die because they're malnourished and no more medicine is being produced. People will continue to get sick from radiation as they eat contaminated food out of desperation. Without clean water, it's hard to decontaminate food. Vermin will overtake food stocks without the production of pesticides. People will starve.
International help may come, but they'll be dealing with problems all their own. Even as this aid arrives, will it be enough? There will be problems in transporting it and keeping it viable to distribute.
Rebuilding will be difficult with an ailing workforce. The entire infrastructure will need repairs and many of the skilled workers we previously had will now be dead.
On the plus side, there will be a labor shortage thanks to the famine, so nearly everyone will be employed. If only by the UN for your daily MRE.
So yeah, nuclear war is bad.
>>11-15
Thanks very much for all the great info!
So anyway, the short answer to the original question is that the world wouldn't really face a war that decimated the whole world's population. It's not going to go from suburbia to Road Warrior immediately. However, the economic crisis following the war could lead to further wars in unrelated countries, etc. These could spiral out of control and cause further famine and more death on their own.
For instance, if the US were suddenly eliminated, Israel would have lost its most powerful ally. The same would go for South Korea. Any of these hot spots could erupt into war given the opportunity. The US keeps a lot of military personnel abroad in Germany, Japan, and Korea and so bases there might be hit regardless of whether or not these countries were involved in the conflict that led to the nuclear war. Losing even a single city to nuclear war could be enough to cripple most countries for a very long time. The damage done by 9/11 is nothing compared to a nuclear blast and look at how much chaos that caused.
Eh. Anyway, I'm aware of all this because my parents went ultra-paranoid when Ronald Reagan started talking about bombing Russia. These were my bedtime stories.
http://www.oism.org/nwss/ This is a pretty paranoid book, but again, if it ever were to happen, it would suck. This is mostly about living in a hole for awhile.
Now wait just a minute hear...
Good info, Nuclear.
Just wanna add my irrelavant, possibly obvious, two cents. I think the likelihood of a nuclear war is very slim. Considering the main reason countries go to war is because one wants to take money/resources from another, the use of nuclear weapons will be rather contradictory. The nuclear radiation cause by the blast would render the country you want to steal stuff impossible to squeeze resources out from. i.e If you wanted to destroy a country to get it's oil or something, using nuclear weapons would mean the countrys too fucked up to get the oil from anymore.
we'd all die
>>20
Russia has non-radioactive nuclear equivalents now.
>>22 Russia has non-radioactive nuclear equivalents now.
wat
Is that like some hippy greenpeace version of nukes?
>>24
No, he's talking about Russia's stupidly large Fuel Air Explosive. It isn't a nuclear equivalent, he's delusional. The thing is the size of a damned school bus and takes a cargo plane to deliver.
Anyone within a mile of the thing (or is it a half-mile?) is fucked, though.
Real men use Tsar Bomba.
>>25
I wonder whether it's as big as the USAF's new MOAB.
Really big FAE devices raise the question of what they're really good for. Are they really more useful or effective than, for example, dumping the device's weight in cheap conventional iron bombs on the target?
I believe US military doctrine holds that big FAE devices, and similar things like the "Daisy Cutter" are best used for rapid minefield clearance, though I have also heard rumors that they dropped a large number of them on Taliban positions in Afghanistan in 2001-02 also.
Or the two countries could be competing for control of a third country that has an outside resource. Nuke the competitor and you can take control of the third country without threat from another major world power (because it not longer exists)
>>29
not if said competeitor nukes you back. Hence the idea od Mutually Assured destruction.
>>28
The russian's bomb that >>22 speaks of was called the FOAB. Its bigger than MOAB. and yes, its stu[idly big but its more destructive than the bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki. While those two bombs are shit compared to today's bombs, they are perfect for leveling a country to steal from t because it is conventional explosives. I, Personally, have always liked the idea of using chemical warfare. it can be cleaned up if you know what it is and its only gonna kill the enemy. Imagine the hell that would ensue if n enemy nation managed to contaminate the natians water supplis with massive amounts of lsd (say 10,000 parts per billion solution in our water.) it isnt hard to do as the stuff is potent and large batches can be made. if the major cities all went on lsd trips simultaneously, all that would be required would be standard cruise missle attacks to trigger mass hysteria from everyone havign a bad trip. Counter that! as of right now there is NO effective way to cut an lsd trip short. and the average trip time is about 8 - 12 hours. so, ya. that trumps nuclear war. thats how id fuck a country up.
I LIKE YOUR THINKING. If we'd have had a few out-of-the-box thinkers like you in charge of the Iraq invasion instead of those greasy yes-men they have at the pentagon, Iraq would have been a paradise/wasteland by now instead of the shit-kicking islamo-buttfucking-anarcho-queerist dickhole it turned out to be. CAN YOU PUT ALLAH IN YOUR GAS TANK? NO MORE BLOOD FOR SAND. PEACE THROUGH SUPERIOR HALLUCINOGENS.
>>31
Stephen Hawking??? Is that really you??
And.....MODS!!!!!!!
lol. id call it a Leary Strike instead of sending in airstrikes.
wouldn't biological warfare be the best way to get just the people out of ab area?
Biological warfare is as fun and cheery a topic as nuclear war.
Weaponized disease is usually chosen on the grounds of its inability to keep spreading. You don't want to create a scenario where your weapon starts to kill your own people. In order to accomplish this, it requires weaponizing a suitable agent (say anthrax) and then dispersing it over your targets. This requires a lot more bombs and passes with aircraft or lobbing shells or however you're delivering it.
Not everyone in any given area is going to get sick and die as a result of biological weapons (again, using anthrax as an example). Given a marginal exposure, it's more likely to kill you the sicker you already are (due to pre-existing famine and war), or given that means of treatment are unavailable (likewise, due to war).
Granted you'll cause a lot of unrest and you'll kill off a lot of people, but there will be way too much clean up involved to make it worthwhile compared to conventional or even nuclear warfare. If you're going to go the biological route, get creative and attack crops and livestock. It won't be as easily recognized as a WMD (thus lessening their ability to gain international sympathy) but it may kill just as many as directly sickening the target population.
Like I keep saying, famine is always the killer. It's not flashy and it doesn't look good in a military parade, but it works.
hence i say chemical warefare is the most effective. There are many chemicals that can be used. Their applications and methodology are myriad. LSD is my favorite because it requires relatively little material, has a devestating effect that will last for at least a day, and will cause immediate devestation. It also racimates after a fairly short time and is not fatal if you know what it is. It would also cause enough havoc to leave behind only a small group of people that would pose no real threat when you moved in to secure the nation. Additionally, there is currently no way to terminate the trip and there is no vaccine for it. plus, lsd would be hard to blame on an enemy government as it could just as easily come from someone trying to make it in a lab who got nervous about being caught and simply flushed it.lol.
.....................
Can locusts be used as a biological weapon?
for example, locusts that are enhanced to not go out of swarm mode ever... (so when all the food is gone they starve and die, so your own fields will be mostly spared)
>>36
I'm taking this too seriously, but that's OK.
LSD isn't easy to make, but I'm assuming that on an industrial scale, it might be easier (and what a fun/terrifying factory to work in). Delivery is still a problem as is exposure of your own troops, at least initially. However, it does break down readily, so it wouldn't really destroy the landscape for eons. There's probably better and more easily manufactured chemicals that would have the same effect of making everyone go crazy, but it's still a nice concept...
You're still using the chemical as a weapon, so you're still violating treaties. Also, what exactly do you expect to accomplish with this? Wouldn't it depend a lot on the populace you were attacking? Certain groups might go nuts and begin killing one another, others might simply too frightened to go outside, and if you attacked, say, Santa Cruz, California, no one would notice anything was at all different from any other day...
Actually, LSD is relatively easy to make when compared to other medical supplies. It's not easy to make in the sense that any layman can make it (in the way that crystal meth is) but it is not too difficult to make.
Delivery isnt as much of a problem as you would think. As i said, infecting the water supply of a city would be relatvely easy.
As for a better alternative, I doubt it. The only other chemical know to have the same effect as LSD and be effective with such a small dosage threshhold is DOB and DOB still isnt as strong, is much harder to manufactur, and can poison the populace. I know, Iknow. Im describing a weapon. While normally, that would be a good thing, in this case, it isn't and for 2 reasons.
1. You want as much of the populace to be alive under the effects for total chaos to be achieved. This has the 2 fold benefit of disrupting the target nation's economy (and therefore supply lines to their own military) and the fact that police forces would not be able to contain this much chaos and would, therefore, call in the military to control this (resulting in a reduction in forces elsewhere and further drain on military supplies). You effectively "recruit" the populace as improvised conscripts.
2.LSD is very hard to detect. It would be hard to prove that any chemical weapons were used at all. Mass hysteria and insanity would most likely be blamed as it would be very difficult to figure out what happened (LSD clears the body VERY quickly). This means that it would be hard to prove you broke any treaties to begin with.
As for who you are attacking, that wouldnt be a problem. LSD causes BAD trips if there is any significant stressor on your mind. a simple air strike would do it, as would unleashing a swarm of locust coupled with droping smal deposits of small arms with ammo on the streets. Imagine even 60% of the populace of new york city simultaneously suffering a bad trip due to the statue of liberty being blown up. Now picture that about 10% of them find random crates of loaded glock pistols lying around. I think you can see whats gonna happen. Remember, not everyone has to turn into a psycho killer. only a sizable enough number that it becomes too much for the cops.
So basically its something that is used to weaken the morale just before an impending invasion of a certain fortified city
and possibly to halt economics on a larger scale
>>40
You forgot the added snowball effect. People going mad and on a killing spree = further reducing the morale of other people thus more susceptible to go mad too.
I'm still thinking aerosol delivery. Public water supplies, at least in developed countries, tend to be fairly well fortified and the authorities would take notice if they were compromised in any way, especially with war looming. Considering that we are mostly all about attacking less developed countries, the people there are less likely to drink water from the tap. LSD in their water might be considered an improvement, since it might kill cholera in high concentrations. On that note, if the concentration is high enough, it should only take a hand-washing... but if the concentration is that high, then aren't you as the attacker more likely to be found out? You would have to dump a sufficient amount to overcome local alkalinity in the water supply, wouldn't you? Would simple filtration systems be likely to remove it from the supply? What if the country is sufficiently backwards that everyone is hauling up buckets from the family well?
Maybe it would be something to just attack a few food supplies or troops with an aerosol spray. Again, >>43 is right, you only need to have so many go nuts to have widespread chaos. There's some instances of whole German villages going mad when just a few ate rye infested with ergot... they weren't all tripping, but it breeds hysteria.
>>44 Deleted post or I messed up. That and it's still valid because I'm also always right, always.
Lol
>>38 This is a really good idea since I don't believe insects necessarily count as biological weapons (unless they were spreading disease; if they're just eating, they're just being themselves). Also, why not just blame the sudden change in behavior on global warming or cell phone towers or something?
The main problem is that they'd only be good for attacking areas already prone to them and that's basically Africa at this point. I can't think of a good reason to invade it, but maybe someone can...
Technological problems include keeping some sort of horrible insect factory secret and also developing a means of planting lots of eggs just under the soil without being detected.
You gave me an idea
drop them from a bomb containing a nutritious protein based jelly filled with eggs
the jelly will spread above a field and because it does not weigh that much + acts like jelly acts it wont penetrate the ground that deep and keep the eggs alive
and locusts can live basically anywhere, its just that in Africa they have the food to grow to large populations (we have that already because we manufactured them) plus the locusts that live there are a species that is known to swarm faster.
basically, splice African and European locusts, and alter them so they wont go out of swarm mode, make billions of eggs, put eggs in jelly and shell the enemy farms with the jelly.
you guys remind me of Moses....
Fascinating, but still, how do we spread this without being noticed? Random overflights of our international carriers? True they'd be backwards and wouldn't be able to accurately time our flights, but 22 flights from
(and largest city) Ashgabat, Turkmenistan to Los Angeles with a total of 17 passengers would be slightly suspect...
Also, what do we have to say about the sudden and random appearance of the Desert Locust on the Asian steppes? I'd just blame (???)China, and our subsequent invasion (from... Afghanistan??) as a reactionary step to ensure (?)world peace.
>>51 I don't know what happened there. Forgive me.
I confuse
>decimated
rage
Probably just like in Fist Of The North Star.
>>55 Less fighting, more starving.
On that note, why do the Japanese assume future fashion consists of things like "shirts" that cover a whole 15% of your chest (or cut-off jackets/no shirt)? Wouldn't that leave you freezing cold all the time? The same goes for some of the fashion in Mad Max. I'm assuming Afghani fashion would be ideal, that way you'd have all the clothes you'd ever need at all times... I mean, they know what they're doing, they've been living the post-apocalyptic lifestyle for decades.