Here’s a page showing humanity’s nuclear arsenal over time. It’s currently down to the same level it was in roughly 1958. And note, the bombs in 1958 were generally much higher-yield than the ones we have now because the precision of delivery was very poor back then - they had to be large to be sure to hit their target. And half of the current-day arsenal is in Russia, which has notoriously poor reliability for their weapons due to extreme corruption so I wouldn’t expect all of those to function.
Bear in mind that anyone launching nuclear weapons isn’t going to be doing it with the goal of wiping all of humanity out, they’ll have more limited military goals. There will be specific countries that they’re targeting, and specific facilities within those countries, and they won’t be selecting those based on how “extinct” they make people. The Russians would “waste” a whole lot of nukes on relatively empty land in Montana, for example, trying to destroy the missile silos there. They’d have no reason to nuke targets in Africa. There’d be plenty of civilization left to rebuild after a nuclear war.
Alright. Your turn, where’s your information showing that humanity faces extinction from this?
From the Wikipedia article it appears he’s taking the “nuclear winter” approach. I pointed out the criticisms of that in my comment above. But even his notably extreme version still doesn’t support the notion that this would lead to literal human extinction. It also appears he’s rather out of date, he hasn’t been a nuclear war planner since 1971. If you look at my sources above about humanity’s nuclear arsenal over time you’ll see how significant that is.
Please keep that at forefront here. This subthread is about human extinction, not about “oh no I guess we have to reinvent steam power” or some other drastically less-bad outcome like that. I have never said that I don’t think a nuclear war would be bad, of course it would be bad. My position is that it’s not going to render humanity extinct.
A nuclear holocaust, sure. But not one big enough to cause human extinction.
Since this is a science community, I guess I’ll lead by example. Here are some numbers.
Here’s an article that tries to project the effects of a full-scale nuclear exchange at the height of the cold war in 1988. Net result is that by 2040 human civilization is back on its feet. We have a lot fewer nuclear weapons now than we did back then. A more recent study predicted 90 million deaths from a US-Russia nuclear war, which is a tragedy but not a particularly big blip on the world population graph.
Here’s a page showing humanity’s nuclear arsenal over time. It’s currently down to the same level it was in roughly 1958. And note, the bombs in 1958 were generally much higher-yield than the ones we have now because the precision of delivery was very poor back then - they had to be large to be sure to hit their target. And half of the current-day arsenal is in Russia, which has notoriously poor reliability for their weapons due to extreme corruption so I wouldn’t expect all of those to function.
Nuclear winter has been drastically overblown in popular culture. We’ve had volcanic eruptions put comparable amounts of particulates into the air and the effects haven’t been anywhere near what the nuclear winter doomsayers have predicted.
Bear in mind that anyone launching nuclear weapons isn’t going to be doing it with the goal of wiping all of humanity out, they’ll have more limited military goals. There will be specific countries that they’re targeting, and specific facilities within those countries, and they won’t be selecting those based on how “extinct” they make people. The Russians would “waste” a whole lot of nukes on relatively empty land in Montana, for example, trying to destroy the missile silos there. They’d have no reason to nuke targets in Africa. There’d be plenty of civilization left to rebuild after a nuclear war.
Alright. Your turn, where’s your information showing that humanity faces extinction from this?
I recommend reading Daniel Ellsburg’s Doomsday Machine.
From the Wikipedia article it appears he’s taking the “nuclear winter” approach. I pointed out the criticisms of that in my comment above. But even his notably extreme version still doesn’t support the notion that this would lead to literal human extinction. It also appears he’s rather out of date, he hasn’t been a nuclear war planner since 1971. If you look at my sources above about humanity’s nuclear arsenal over time you’ll see how significant that is.
Please keep that at forefront here. This subthread is about human extinction, not about “oh no I guess we have to reinvent steam power” or some other drastically less-bad outcome like that. I have never said that I don’t think a nuclear war would be bad, of course it would be bad. My position is that it’s not going to render humanity extinct.