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If a nuclear strike is even remotely looking likely, the last place any of Ukraine’s leadership is going to be is in Kiev. A nuclear strike would almost certainly escalate the war if not immediately into a global nuclear war that Russia as a habitable geography has no hopes of surviving, then it would cause a full scale mobilization of all military forces in Eastern Europe and probably western too. It would be an unbelievably stupid idea that would get Putin killed immediately from within and without.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:53
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aniviron posted:Which of Russia's problems got solved by invading Ukraine? The ability to do what Russia has always done, invade the rest of Eastern Europe.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:54
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Likely first use of a nuke would be a tactical one on an army position rather than a city.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:55
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I honestly can't see any scenario, even in my wildest imagination, where Putin is allowed nukes to be used more than once. He may have built a cadre of loyal stooges around him, but even they must see, in the matter of survival, that after the first nuke is used that their best bet at surviving is becoming the person who ends Putin.
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Sep 22, 2022 05:04
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Even a tactical nuke would have every country in the world come down on Russia, because while the idea of nuclear weapons as a defense only weapon against existential threats has been pretty normalized, letting Russia use nukes offensively without serious repercussions basically gives everyone precedent to use them.
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Sep 22, 2022 05:07
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Mozi posted:Likely first use of a nuke would be a tactical one on an army position rather than a city. Yeah if it happens it'll likely be a nominally low yield variety on the largest massing of enemy troops/materiel. Still phenomenally stupid, and the only crazy hairbrained thought-process I can suss out is Putin hoping for full NATO intervention so he can back out and save face.
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Sep 22, 2022 20:20
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DandyLion posted:Yeah if it happens it'll likely be a nominally low yield variety on the largest massing of enemy troops/materiel. Still phenomenally stupid, and the only crazy hairbrained thought-process I can suss out is Putin hoping for full NATO intervention so he can back out and save face. There's already NATO intervention, this is WWIII and the Russian army is fighting NATO as we speak. At least, that's the message Russian media is sending. Saying it was "Double NATO" from an actual intervention wouldn't help make withdrawing any better. Fallout from even a tactical nuclear weapon would reach Europe and would trigger a reaction far, far more intense than what we're currently seeing. Doesn't matter how much, how insignificant any actual radiation is, but the fear of "NUCLEAR RADIATION!" is very, very deeply engrained. Look at the coverage of Fukushima on CNN, full of concern about how the radiation was reaching the US. Any sort of actual NATO response would leave Putin's army in a far worse condition than anything the Ukrainians can do to it, even something as low-key as a "little blue men" NATO air force with a a hundred F-16s setting up in country.
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Sep 22, 2022 23:30
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The non use of nuclear weapons in conflicts has been so normalized I would expect the military equivalent of dragging a belligerent drunk out of a bar with "ok it's time to go" would be the best of all possible results, especially with how terribly Russia has shown itself to be able to handle itself. NATO can't actually deal with guerilla warfare, but they can sure as gently caress steamroll a conventional war.
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Sep 22, 2022 23:44
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Wheeljack posted:Doesn't matter how much, how insignificant any actual radiation is, but the fear of "NUCLEAR RADIATION!" is very, very deeply engrained. Look at the coverage of Fukushima on CNN, full of concern about how the radiation was reaching the US. Yeah any use of a tactical nuclear weapon will see mass distribution of iodine tablets, people told to avoid dairy products, stay inside orders etc far beyond the actual danger posed. I recall the Gulf War I days when Saddam was lobbing Scuds at Israel and the fear of them having chemical warheads. Instructions on how to build relatively airtight safe rooms, distribution of nerve agent exposure kits, and then of course the problems with people using the auto-injectors even though no nerve agents were used. The sheer fear associated with a WMD is way beyond the actual damage caused*, they're a terror weapon first and foremost. *Strategic nuclear attack excepted.
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Sep 23, 2022 04:56
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Nukes in any capacity have only been used in warfare twice, and never while there were multiple nuclear armed nations at loggerheads with each other. The use of any nuclear warhead today is a significant step closer to total world annihilation, literally nobody knows how it would play out except it would probably make everyone super nervous of a first strike. If you thought paranoia was high during the Cuban missile crisis, you haven't seen anything until people realize that nukes really are in play this time.
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Sep 23, 2022 05:12
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Capt.Whorebags posted:Yeah any use of a tactical nuclear weapon will see mass distribution of iodine tablets, people told to avoid dairy products, stay inside orders etc far beyond the actual danger posed. This has already happened or been announced. And when I went looking, I found more examples than the one I was thinking of... there was a run on EU pharmacies for iodine tablets back in March. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2022/03/09/iodine-demand-surges-across-eu-due-to-nuclear-fear/?sh=60e735355f80 The EU was planning to give 5.5 million tablets to Ukraine last month and now Poland is getting ready to distribute them in case there's a nuclear plant disaster. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-distributes-iodine-pills-fears-grow-over-ukraine-nuclear-plant-2022-09-22/
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Sep 23, 2022 07:14
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Main Paineframe posted:Those articles are both pure conjecture, and pretty clickbaity about it. The idea that this annexation nonsense means nuclear war is just around the corner requires several fairly large logical leaps, and provocative headlines like "Russia pushes the panic button and raises the risk of nuclear war" are so out of proportion to the actual contents of the article that I can only conclude the editors see good numbers from nuclear clickbait. It's also strange since Ukraine has been striking Crimea for a while now which has been annexed since 2014.
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Sep 23, 2022 12:19
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People are assuming that Russia's nuclear arsenal even works at this point. They require extensive maintenance and we've seen how well the rest of Russia's armed forces have faded over the past 6 months.
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Sep 23, 2022 16:24
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Zotix posted:People are assuming that Russia's nuclear arsenal even works at this point. They require extensive maintenance and we've seen how well the rest of Russia's armed forces have faded over the past 6 months. They don’t all have to work for it to be the most heinous thing to happen in the past seventy years.
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Sep 23, 2022 16:30
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MrYenko posted:They don’t all have to work for it to be the most heinous thing to happen in the past seventy years. A missile that lands and doesn't work? We saw plenty of those the first few weeks of the invasion.
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Sep 23, 2022 16:41
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Zotix posted:A missile that lands and doesn't work? We saw plenty of those the first few weeks of the invasion. The point is that even if just 1/100 works, it's going to get very spicy
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Sep 23, 2022 16:44
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mobby_6kl posted:The point is that even if just 1/100 works, it's going to get very spicy Only if he launches more than or approximately 100 missiles If he launches one to five and all five fail...
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Sep 23, 2022 16:51
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Oops, I just tried to use a nuclear weapon in anger for the first time anywhere in 80 years, on the people I'm supposed to be "saving," and it didn't actually go off. The western nations know that my military is a total clown show and my nukes don't even work, so MAD is not longer really in play, but I'm still going to threaten the world into inaction after being made the Boogeyman. Somehow, this will not end with every single one of my palaces exploding simultaneously, along with any form of national cohesion and any possible form of positive legacy.
Volmarias fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Sep 23, 2022 |
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Sep 23, 2022 16:52
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Just to go full Clancy chat, it would sure be something if he launched five missiles that all failed, threw up his hands and launched all 15,000 missiles he has at his disposal all directly at Kiev destroying it about twice over in total, resulting in Russia failing to destroy Ukraine while simultaneously disarming themselves
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Sep 23, 2022 16:54
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Like others have said, MAD might not be in play, but the USA isn't going to start invading anytime soon because chances are there are some out of the 5k~ ish that still do work. If Russia launched everything they had, you're still looking at millions of deaths and parts of the USA and Europe becoming uninhabitable. Russia would almost certainly be erased from the face of the Earth however.
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Sep 23, 2022 16:55
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The only part of their military the Russians have been continuously funding is their strategic rocket forces. Seems like a very very bad bet to think they won't work
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Sep 23, 2022 17:01
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What would the effect on CO2 emissions be from a global nuclear war? I'm sure there's RAND estimates on how quickly civilization might recover out there somewhere. Even a partial collapse might pause economic activity enough to possibly stabilize emissions targets.
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Sep 23, 2022 17:38
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I think that's completely speculative. Through the roof if it kills off plant life across the planet.
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Sep 23, 2022 17:57
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qhat posted:I think that's completely speculative. Through the roof if it kills off plant life across the planet. That seems like a stretch. Recent studies have estimated a high end for a nuclear war releasing about 150 Mt of soot, while the Chicxulub Impact released around 70,000 Mt. We have fossil indications that life recovered from the KT extinction in about 4 million years. That leads me to think that a nuclear war, while devastating for human civilization, would be far below the devastation needed to kill off all plant life.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:11
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DrSunshine posted:That seems like a stretch. Recent studies have estimated a high end for a nuclear war releasing about 150 Mt of soot, while the Chicxulub Impact released around 70,000 Mt. We have fossil indications that life recovered from the KT extinction in about 4 million years. That leads me to think that a nuclear war, while devastating for human civilization, would be far below the devastation needed to kill off all plant life. Yes, the planet kingdom will largely laugh it off. Nuclear winter would barely dent the seed bank in the soil. As soon as conditions recover seeds will be germinating again.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:19
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DrSunshine posted:What would the effect on CO2 emissions be from a global nuclear war? I'm sure there's RAND estimates on how quickly civilization might recover out there somewhere. Even a partial collapse might pause economic activity enough to possibly stabilize emissions targets. Oh hey, it's the plot of Kingsman
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Sep 23, 2022 18:25
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Whether it's total world calamity or a small blip in the long run, but considering we have no empirical data on the effects of global nuclear conflict on a planetary ecosystem, I think everyone is largely agreed that It's Definitely Not Worth The Risk.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:55
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I read a ton of post-apoc books, so I can't remember where it's from, but I read a passage that said along the lines of "it's easy to kill a lot of humans, but it's very difficult to kill all of them." I think that no matter what would happen after nukes flew, there would be some isolated pockets of humanity left scattered around.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:56
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qhat posted:Whether it's total world calamity or a small blip in the long run, but considering we have no empirical data on the effects of global nuclear conflict on a planetary ecosystem, I think everyone is largely agreed that It's Definitely Not Worth The Risk. Shouldn't we try it at least once and see what happens? Seems pretty harsh to make a judgement without experiencing it first.
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Sep 23, 2022 19:01
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The Zombie Guy posted:I read a ton of post-apoc books, so I can't remember where it's from, but I read a passage that said along the lines of "it's easy to kill a lot of humans, but it's very difficult to kill all of them." I think that no matter what would happen after nukes flew, there would be some isolated pockets of humanity left scattered around. DrSunshine posted:What would the effect on CO2 emissions be from a global nuclear war? I'm sure there's RAND estimates on how quickly civilization might recover out there somewhere. Even a partial collapse might pause economic activity enough to possibly stabilize emissions targets. DrSunshine posted:That seems like a stretch. Recent studies have estimated a high end for a nuclear war releasing about 150 Mt of soot, while the Chicxulub Impact released around 70,000 Mt. We have fossil indications that life recovered from the KT extinction in about 4 million years. That leads me to think that a nuclear war, while devastating for human civilization, would be far below the devastation needed to kill off all plant life.
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Sep 23, 2022 19:43
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I wonder how 150Mt of soot compares to the stratospheric aerosols of a major volcanic eruption. Krakatoa put about 90Mt into the atmosphere in 1883, and that doesn't seem to have really done much.
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Sep 23, 2022 21:13
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Yeah, nuclear war wouldn't end humanity, probably not even civilization. We've settled basically every corner of the globe, some places are gonna end up coming out the other side just because things happened to not end up being that bad in the region. Doesn't matter that much to all the people who do die though, and a lot of the survivors might not be super enthused either. We might be uniquely vulnerable in the present moment, with 8 Bn souls to feed, in a way that we weren't in 1883, though. Given the extreme interconnectedness and vulnerability of the global supply chain, and the deep dependence on chemical fertilizers, even a modest drop in solar input caused by a small nuclear war might result in food catastrophes across the world. Again though, we're talking about human lives and crops, but given that CO2 emissions scale on a more or less 1:1 basis with economic output, a total global economic collapse after a nuclear war might cause enough degrowth to account for emissions reductions even accounting for a post-fallout rebound in heating.
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Sep 23, 2022 21:43
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I wonder how 150Mt of soot compares to the stratospheric aerosols of a major volcanic eruption. Krakatoa put about 90Mt into the atmosphere in 1883, and that doesn't seem to have really done much. Rappaport posted:In case people are still interested in the mid-long-term effects of a global nuclear exchange, there's a new paper in Nature Food that looks at food output as a function of dust spewed into the atmosphere in various hypothetical scenarios. I haven't had time to look at their methods thoroughly, but they've sure managed to make some Sorry for quoting myself. Though the article looks at fairly large soot amounts, not "just" obliterating a single nation.
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Sep 23, 2022 23:13
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The Zombie Guy posted:I read a ton of post-apoc books, so I can't remember where it's from, but I read a passage that said along the lines of "it's easy to kill a lot of humans, but it's very difficult to kill all of them." I think that no matter what would happen after nukes flew, there would be some isolated pockets of humanity left scattered around. Yeah homo sapiens have survived multiple glacial periods and population bottlenecks. Nuclear war would end our current civilisation "era" but wouldn't wipe out humanity.
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Sep 24, 2022 05:08
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So how come most news sites keep worrying about Russia using nukes after the Donbass are annexed illegally when the strikes in Crimea and in Russian border towns haven't lead to anything?
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Sep 26, 2022 16:05
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Willo567 posted:So how come most news sites keep worrying about Russia using nukes after the Donbass are annexed illegally when the strikes in Crimea and in Russian border towns haven't lead to anything? I'm guessing it drives engagement and/or russian propaganda, because that's what they want everyone to be afraid of without explicitly threatening nuclear fist strikes
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Sep 26, 2022 16:29
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qhat posted:The ability to do what Russia has always done, invade the rest of Eastern Europe. I don't know how much russians want to get eastern european countries: in the past, those countries were just an endless pain in the rear end for the U.S.S.R. (Poland with solidarnosc, Czech and hungarian revolts, etc. etc.)
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Sep 28, 2022 18:59
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Knightsoul posted:I don't know how much russians want to get eastern european countries: in the past, those countries were just an endless pain in the rear end for the U.S.S.R. (Poland with solidarnosc, Czech and hungarian revolts, etc. etc.) Lots of arable land compared to Russia, and Eastern Europe also provides a number of natural barriers that make it difficult to invade those regions, such as the Carpathians. If you look at the historical reaches of Russian empires into Europe, they typically correlate strongly with the natural limits of the East European plains. It's also handy to control the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, once again for security, but also to guarantee that nobody can cut off your trade routes by sea.
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Sep 28, 2022 21:32
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Willo567 posted:So how come most news sites keep worrying about Russia using nukes after the Donbass are annexed illegally when the strikes in Crimea and in Russian border towns haven't lead to anything? Newspaper editors want to monetize your fear and engagement. If Putin uses a nuke in a "special operation" he'll make Russia into a literal pariah state.
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Sep 30, 2022 05:22
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Grip it and rip it posted:Newspaper editors want to monetize your fear and engagement. If Putin uses a nuke in a "special operation" he'll make Russia into more of a literal pariah state. I really hope Russia doesn't get off on all of this.
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Sep 30, 2022 06:07
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