From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Tue Oct 19 1999 - 10:25:56 MDT
O'Regan, Emlyn wrote:
> What about all that destroying the world 30 times over stuff? Nuclear
> winter? Do you mean to say that television has been lying to me?
>
> Please be gentle in replies, I'm feeling kind of vulnerable right now.
The 'destroy the world' stats seem to have started back in the late 50s or
early 60s, when people started noticing that we had more bombs than the
Russians have major cities (and vice versa). Then MIRV warheads became
popular, and it got to where you could plausibly plan on bombing every
military installation in the other guy's country and still hit every city of
significant size. Since media people tend to think 'my country = all of
civilization' and '1 bomb = 1 city', the idea that a nuclear war would
completely destroy human civilization became commonplace.
Realistic estimates have always placed the probable death toll much lower
than 100%. The world is a big place, after all, and no one has anything
aimed at most of it. Even in high-threat regions like America I don't think
the estimates ever broke 50% mortality, and they have been declining for
some time now. One of the good effects of the move to the suburbs is that
it makes your cities so spread out that it takes a lot more bombs to destroy
one.
Nuclear winter was a purely theoretical study, based on rather laughable
computer models. The scientists who supported it did so for ideological
reasons - when pressed they would tend to concede that the theory was
implausible, but then justify their support of it because it would 'make the
world safe from nuclear war'. It would be just as plausible to argue that a
nuclear war would increase global temperatures (by causing so much
combustion), or increase or decrease rainfall, or destroy the ozone layer.
Most likely there would be only a very modest effect on world climate -
there is nothing about a nuclear war that makes it likely to cause bigger
effects than a major volcanic eruption.
As far as 'destroying civilization', in the sense of reducing us to a
primitive technology base, that seems to be considerably more difficult than
is generally appreciated. The typical nuclear war scenario would
essentially destroy all major cities, but there would be well over 100
million survivors left in suburbs, small towns and rural areas (this is a
very pessimistic number, BTW). That leaves you thousands of intact machine
shops and hundreds of small manufacturing plants devoted to low-tech goods.
You also have plenty of agricultural equipment, intact local transportation
systems, working oil fields, mines, and a modest supply of power plants.
Your port facilities are all wrecked, but you can get them operational again
with a modest investment of effort (concrete piers will easily survive a
typical city-killing air burst), and the same is true of airports and the
interstate highway and railroad systems (destroying long stretches of road
and rail is impractical, so the best an attacker can do is take out key
bridges). Most of your shipping is at sea at any given time, and will
therefore survive, and the same is true of rolling stock (trains). All in
all, it is hard to see how we could regress below the WWII-era at all.
Re-establishing regular trade with untouched regions of the world would take
a few years at most, and from there we are less than a decade from
recovering a modern tech base.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@transcient.com
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