Let's start a war. Start a nuclear war.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Let's start a war. Start a nuclear war.

Willie Tomg: Feb 2, 2006

With all the various doomsday scenarios coming to fruition--climate change, financial collapse, antibiotic resistance and so forth--its easy to forget that nuclear proliferation is additionally a Big loving Problem on top of all that other nonsense, not least of which because as the Cold War has begun to fade from living memory so too has the ability to discuss them frankly as nuclear powers resume pissing on each others' leg Donbass or the Spratlys. Obviously there are still two predominant armed powers, but basically everyone on this list is up to some poo poo globally

_{Saudi Arabia almost certainly has a place on here, too, and it sure is weird US media blacks that out, probably just a coincidence.}

As the official forum of politically themed depression there's probably enough expertise to sustain a thread about this, especially if the saber rattling toward Iran or NK starts up again after midterms. There's a whole lot to chew the fat about between all the times we almost blew ourselves the gently caress up over nothing or the mathematics of ICBM interception, but by way of starting stuff off I really like this 2002 essay The Nuclear Game because it approaches both the possibilities and problems of a full on strategic exchange fairly approachably and digestibly until he starts getting very very bizarrely specific about gender roles in the postapocalypse and goldbugging.

part 1: nukes are pretty much only useful to prevent getting invaded

quote:

When a country first acquires nuclear weapons it does so out of a very accurate perception that possession of nukes fundamentally changes it relationships with other powers. What nuclear weapons buy for a New Nuclear Power (NNP) is the fact that once the country in question has nuclear weapons, it cannot be beaten. It can be defeated, that is it can be prevented from achieving certain goals or stopped from following certain courses of action, but it cannot be beaten. It will never have enemy tanks moving down the streets of its capital, it will never have its national treasures looted and its citizens forced into servitude. The enemy will be destroyed by nuclear attack first. A potential enemy knows that so will not push the situation to the point where our NNP is on the verge of being beaten. In effect, the effect of acquiring nuclear weapons is that the owning country has set limits on any conflict in which it is involved. This is such an immensely attractive option that states find it irresistible.

Only later do they realize the problem. Nuclear weapons are so immensely destructive that they mean a country can be totally destroyed by their use. Although our NNP cannot be beaten by an enemy it can be destroyed by that enemy. Although a beaten country can pick itself up and recover, the chances of a country devastated by nuclear strikes doing the same are virtually non-existent. [This needs some elaboration. Given the likely scale and effects of a nuclear attack, its most unlikely that the everybody will be killed. There will be survivors and they will rebuild a society but it will have nothing in common with what was there before. So, to all intents and purposes, once a society initiates a nuclear exchange its gone forever]. Once this basic factor has been absorbed, the NNP makes a fundamental realization that will influence every move it makes from this point onwards. If it does nothing, its effectively invincible. If, however, it does something, there is a serious risk that it will initiate a chain of events that will eventually lead to a nuclear holocaust. The result of that terrifying realization is strategic paralysis.

With that appreciation of strategic paralysis comes an even worse problem. A non-nuclear country has a wide range of options for its forces. Although its actions may incur a risk of being beaten they do not court destruction. Thus, a non-nuclear nation can afford to take risks of a calculated nature. However,a nuclear-equipped nation has to consider the risk that actions by its conventional forces will lead to a situation where it may have to use its nuclear forces with the resulting holocaust. Therefore, not only are its strategic nuclear options restricted by its possession of nuclear weapons, so are its tactical and operational options. So we add tactical and operational paralysis to the strategic variety. This is why we see such a tremendous emphasis on the mechanics of decision making in nuclear powers. Every decision has to be thought through, not for one step or the step after but for six, seven or eight steps down the line.

We can see this in the events of the 1960s and 1970s, especially surrounding the Vietnam War. Every so often, the question gets asked "How could the US have won in Vietnam?" with a series of replies that include invading the North,extending the bombing to China and other dramatic escalations of the conflict. Now, it should be obvious why such suggestions could not, in the real world, be contemplated. The risk of ending up in a nuclear war was too great. For another example, note how the presence of nuclear weapons restricted and limited the tactical and operational options available to both sides in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In effect neither side could push the war to a final conclusion because to do so would bring down nuclear attack on the heads of the "winners". Here, Israel's nuclear arsenal was limiting the conflict before it even started. Egypt and Syria couldn't destroy the country - all they could do was to chew up enough of the Israeli armed forces and put themselves in the correct strategic position to dictate a peace agreement on much more favorable terms than would be the case. But, the Israeli nuclear arsenal also limited the conflict in another way. Because they were a nuclear power they were fair game; if they pushed the Egyptians too hard, they would demand Soviet assistance and who knew where that would lead?

So, the direct effects of nuclear weapons in a nation's hands is to make that nation extremely cautious. They spend much time studying situations, working out the implications of such situations, what the likely results of certain policy options are. One of the immense advantages the US had in the Cold War was that they had a network of Research Institutes and Associations and consulting companies who spent their time doing exactly this sort of work. (Ahh the dear dead days of planning nuclear wars. The glow of satisfaction as piecutters are placed over cities; the warm feeling of fulfillment as the death toll passed the billion mark; the sick feeling of disappointment as the casualties from a given strategy only amounted to some 40 million when preliminary studies had shown a much more productive result. But I digress). This meant that a much wider range of policy options could be studied than was possible if the ideas were left in military hands.These organizations, the famous think tanks had no inhibitions about asking very awkward questions that would end the career of a military officer doing the same. This network became known as The Business. We're still out here.

So. What were nuclear weapons good for? It seems they are more of a liability than an asset. To some extent that's true but the important fact remains,they do limit conflict. As long as they are in place and functional they are an insurance policy against a nation getting beaten. That means that if that country is going to get beaten, its nuclear weapons have to be taken out first. It also means that if it ever uses its nuclear weapons, once they are gone, its invulnerability vanishes with it. Thus, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is a lot more effective and valuable than the likely results of using those weapons. Of course, this concern becomes moot if it appears likely that the NNP is about to lose its nuclear weapons to a pre-emptive strike. Under these circumstances, the country may decide that its in a use-it-or-lose-it situation.The more vulnerable to pre-emption those weapons are the stronger that imperative becomes.

This is why ICBMs are such an attractive option. They are faster-reacting than bombers, they are easier to protect on the ground and they are much more likely to get through to their targets. This is why modern, advanced devices are much more desirable than the older versions. In the 1950s the Soviet Union had a nuclear attack reaction time of six weeks (don't laugh, that of the US was 30 days). The reason was simple, device design in those days meant that the device, once assembled, deteriorated very quickly and, once degraded, had to be sent back to the plant for remanufacture. Device assembly needed specialized teams and took time. This made a first strike very, very attractive - as long as the attacker could be sure of getting all the enemy force. It was this long delay to get forces available that made air defense and ABM such an attractive option. In effect, it could blunt an enemy attack while the assembly crews frantically put their own devices together and got them ready for launch. As advancing device design made it possible to reduce assembly time, this aspect of ABM became less important.

What this also suggests is that large, secure nuclear arsenals are inherently safer than small, vulnerable ones. A large arsenal means that the owner can do appalling damage to an enemy, a secure arsenal means that no matter how the enemy attacks, enough weapons will survive to allow that destruction to take place. Here we have the genesis of the most misunderstood term in modern warfare - MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. (Another point of elaboration here - MAD is not a policy and has never been instituted as a policy option. It's the effect of policies that have been promulgated. This is a very useful touchstone - if people mention the US Policy of MAD, they don't know what they are talking about). Its widely believed that this suggests that both sides are wide open to unrestricted destruction by the other. This is a gross over-simplification. What the term actually means is that both sides have enough nuclear firepower to destroy the other and that the firepower in question is configured in such ways that no pre-emptive strike can destroy enough of it to take away the fact that the other country will be destroyed. MAD did not preclude the use of defensive systems - in fact it was originally formulated to show how important they are - but its misunderstood version was held to do so - with catastrophic results for us all. One implication of this by the way is that in spite of all the fuss over the Chinese stealing the W88 warhead design, the net beneficiary of that is the United States; it allows the Chinese to build a much more secure deterrent and thus a more stable one. Also, looking at things purely ruthlessly, its better for one's enemy to make small clean bombs than big dirty ones.

Aha, I hear you say what about the mad dictator? Its interesting to note that mad, homicidal aggressive dictators tend to get very tame sane cautious ones as soon as they split atoms. Whatever their motivations and intents, the mechanics of how nuclear weapons work dictate that mad dictators become sane dictators very quickly. After all its not much fun dictating if one's country is a radioactive trash pile and you're one of the ashes. China, India and Pakistan are good examples. One of the best examples of this process at work is Mao Tse Tung. Throughout the 1950s he was extraordinarily bellicose and repeatedly tried to bully, cajole or trick Khruschev and his successors into initiating a nuclear exchange with the US on the grounds that world communism would rise from the ashes. Thats what Quemoy and Matsu were all about in the late 1950s. Then China got nuclear weapons. Have you noticed how reticent they are with them? Its sunk in. They can be totally destroyed; will be totally destroyed; in the event of an exchange. A Chinese Officer here once on exchange (billed as a "look what we can do" session it was really a "look what we can do to you" exercise) produced the standard line about how the Chinese could lose 500 million people in a nuclear war and keep going with the survivors. So his hosts got out a demographic map (one that shows population densities rather than topographical data) and got to work with pie-cutters using a few classified tricks - and got virtually the entire population of China using only a small proportion of the US arsenal. The guest stared at the map for a couple of minutes then went and tossed his cookies into the toilet bowl. The only people who mouth off about using nuclear weapons and threaten others with them are those that do not have keys hanging around their necks. The moment they get keys and realize what they've let themselves in for, they get to be very quiet and very cautious indeed. Another great - and very recent example - look how circumspect the Indians and Pakistani Governments were in the recent confrontation - lots of words but little or no action to back them and both sides worked very hard not to do anything that could be misunderstood. (When the Pakistani's did a missile test they actually invited the Indians over to watch in order to ensure there was no ground for misunderstanding. The test itself was another message from both countries to the rest of the world - basically it read "Don't sweat it, we know the rules")

One anayst from The Business was asked what Saddam Hussein would have done if Iraq had possessed nuclear weapons in 1990. He replied that he didn't know what he would have done but he did know what he would not have done - he would not have invaded Kuwait.

part 2: formally, nukes are surprisingly useless in a military sense and everything you guess about nuke targeting is wrong

quote:

The Nuclear Game (Two) - Targeting Weapons

One of the interesting aspects of a nuclear war is planning how its going to be done. Most fictional accounts of this process seem to assume that cities will be the primary targets and there will be one device allocated per city. This is very far from the truth. In fact, nuclear attack plans are very complicated things and, in a quite real sense, they don't exist. What does exist is a whole series of strategies aimed at achieving specific results. Which of those strategies are adopted and in what combinations is determined by the specific events taking place. Very often we'll hear of people talking about "The SIOP" as the Holy Grail of the US nuclear war plans. A good touchstone because there is no such thing - if people claim to have worked on the SIOP, they are being economical with the truth. What does exist are a very large number of plans and options that are put together on a mix-and-match basis.

Unfortunately planning a nuclear strike isn't just a matter of working out which cities to destroy. In fact it isn't even a matter of working out which cities to destroy. In fact, we don't target cities at all per se. We target things, some of which happen to be in cities. Its necessary to remember the key; nuclear weapons are a tool, no more, no less. We don't blow up cities just because they are there any more than we fix a TV antenna on the roof by digging a hole in the back garden.

Since we are using a tool to do a job, the first stage is to work out a series of objectives (ie decide what that job is). Normally discussions of such things rotate around strategies being either counter-force or counter-city but its a lot more complex than that. At the last count there were about 30 distinct targeting strategies that could be adopted. As an example, there could be:-

Counter-military - aimed at destroying a country's armed forces. Such a strike would be aimed at things like arsenals, ports, airbases, military training sites etc

Counter-strategic - aimed at taking out a country's strategic weapons force. This would hit the ICBM silos, SSBN ports and bases, the SSBNs themselves, bomber bases, nuclear storage depots etc.

Counter-industrial - aimed at destroying key industrial assets and breaking the target country's industrial infrastructure

Counter-energy - aimed at destroying a country's energy supplies and resources plus the means for distributing them.
Counter-communications - aimed at disrupting and eliminating the target country's communications (radio, TV, landline, satellite etc)communications systems.

Counter-political - aimed at erasing the target country's political leadership - note this is MUCH more difficult than it seems and is very dangerous. Killing the only people who can surrender is not terribly bright

Counter-population - aimed at simply killing as much of the enemy population as possible. A very rare strategy.

There are plenty of others. One of the things that gets done at this level is to think up targeting strategies, work out the target sets associated with that strategy and the resources needed to eliminate that target set. Based on that we can then work out if that particular target strategy is an effective use of resources. Note also that adopting one particular target strategy does not preclude simultaneously putting another into play. Mix and match again.

So lets look at a typical targeting problem in an average sort of strike. We are going to give the capital of Outer Loonyistan a really thorough seeing-to. Now we don't just explode a bomb in the center of the city and say bye-bye. Believe it or not that won't do any real good. Initiate a 1 megaton device over the center of London and 95 percent of the cities assets and 80 percent of the population will survive (this means that, proportionally speaking, Londoners will be better off after a nuclear attack than they were before it took place. This was the basis of at least one Get Rich Quick scheme proposed in The Business).

So we start by selecting a specific targeting strategy. Now we have to estimate the weight of attack Asylumville is likely to come under if that strategy is adopted. To do this we first work out how high Asylumville stands with regard to other potential target areas for that particular strategy. This is usually done by a careful assessment of what targets are in that area as opposed to similar target areas in other parts of the country and assuming the available warheads are distributed according to the target density in that area. Then we assess how many warheads are likely to be inbound and crank that into the priorities we've established to see how many are likely to be fired at Asylumville. It'll be a lot fewer than you think. This means is that we have to look very carefully at the city, its geography and the distribution of its assets in order to work out how to take it down.

To do this we need some maps. We need a standard topographical map, demographic maps and asset/resource maps. Take the targeting strategy and the likely target set associated with it and plot them on that map. Now think out how hard that target set is going to be to destroy. The problems now become apparent. Some targets are best attacked by surface bursts, others by high airbursts. Some, very hard targets need almost direct hits to destroy them; others are so small (and so hard) that hitting them is very difficult.The sort of things we might look at hitting, depending how we do things, are communication facilities, railway marshalling yards, factories, oil refineries, government offices, military bases For example, if the target strategy is anti-communications,amongst the primary targets will be airfields and railway marshalling yards.They are notoriously difficult to destroy, the attacker needs big warheads and needs to ground burst them so the target is physically scoured from the ground. There is a lot of thought needed here; you'll find there are far more potential targets than real warheads so you'll have to allocate the warheads one way, then try to work out the effects. To give you some idea of how that list grows, there are something like 50,000 priority nuclear targets in Russia. Some of them are weird and tucked right out of the way (one of the most critical non-military targets in the USA is where you would least expect it). Now many of that 50,000 target list will be virtually on top of eachother. One initiation will get several of them. That pulls the list down immensely, probably to around 3,000 - 5,000 targets.

OK back to working over Asylumville, the capital of Outer Loonyistan. If its like most other capitals, it'll probably merit a total of between five and ten devices to take out all the things we want to. One of the key tools used here is a thing called a pie-cutter. Its a circular hand-held computer. You set the verniers on it to the specifics of the weapon used (altitude of burst, yield etc) and it gives you a series of rings that show the various lethal effects of the bomb to certain distances. Put it down on the planned impact point and you'll get what the bomb will do. You won't get a pie cutter (they are classified equipment) but you can make your own from publically available data using tracing paper and compasses. . We end up with a map of the city after being worked over. Normally, at this point somebody says. Dammit we didn't get [insert some key assets] and we start again. The first shot at targeting will be stunningly disappointing so you play games with warhead types and yields and with burst locations until you get as many of target set as you can. Take that marshalling yard; sounds easy doesn't it? Believe me railway marshalling yards are a whirling son of a bitch to take down. They are virtually invulnerable to airbursts; we have to groundburst a blast directly on the yard. 800 yards outside and you might as well not have bothered. The problem is those yards are not that big. So now we have a problem called CEP. This stands for Circle of Equal Probability (NOT Circular Error Probable which is a totally meaningless term invented by those of the intrepid birdmen). This is a measure of the accuracy of the missile and is the radius of the circle that will contain half the missiles aimed at the center of the circle. That means that half the inbounds will fall outside that circle. Now we have a second concept; the radius of total destruction, the radius within which everything is destroyed. Its astonishingly small; for a 100 kt groundburst its about 800 yards (now see where the marshalling yard came from).. Now if the RTD exceeds the CEP we're probably OK, if it doesn't (and in most cases it doesn't) we've got problems.

What all this ends up with is we have to fire multiple warheads at single targets in order to be sure of getting them. This is a complex calculation since the optimum number of warheads for Asylumville will depend on the attack pattern and priorities. But we'll eventually end up with number that represents the best compromise between destructive effects and warhead use. To estimate the effects on the area as a whole, take the demographic map, plot the event points, altitudes and yields on that map and apply the pie-cutter set for overpressure. The overpressure needed to destroy various types of building are public record (US houses are very very soft and vulnerable) so you know roughly what will be destroyed up to a given distance. Note that the blast circles will overlap in some places. Blast also isn't logical; ground irregularities will funnel it is some directions so that an area close in may be unscathed while others much further away will be flattened.

Now we have to get them there. Missiles are not terribly reliable and a lot can go wrong. A Rectal Extraction figure suggests that only about 60 percent of them will work when the blue touchpaper is ignited. So we have to add extra warheads to allow for the duds. To give a feel for the sort of numbers that we're talking about, the British calculated that they needed 32 warheads to give Moscow a terminal dose of instant sunrise. In other words, the British nuclear deterrent took down Moscow and that was it.

Key point here on the efficiency of defenses. In the 1950s, the UK V-bomber fleet was assigned to hit over 200 targets in the Western USSR. As the 50's turned into the 60's the ability of the V-bombers to penetrate Soviet airspace came under increasing doubt. The UK shifted to Polaris - one submarine at sea, 16 missiles, three warheads per. Total of 48 targets assigned. But the USSR started to install an anti-missile system that was reasonably capable against the early Polaris-type missiles. So the UK modified Polaris in a thing called Chevaline. this took one warhead from each missile and replaced the load with decoys - then targeted all 16 missiles onto Moscow. ONE target. In effect, the Soviet defenses had reduced the UK attack plan from 200 targets to one. In other words, it was 99.5 percent effective without firing a single shot (bad news for Moscow but great news for the other 199 cities with targets in them)

That's why so many devices are needed - the inventory evaporates very fast. Thats also why defenses like ABM are so important (and the urgency behind deploying the new US Missile Defense System). The defenses don't have to be very effective to work (although the new US system is looking good), its the complexity they throw into the planning process. As long as we can assume that if we get a warhead on its way to its target, that target is going to be hit, then planning is relatively easy and the results predictable. If, however, we can't make that guarantee; if we have to factor in a possibility - perhaps a good one - that the outbound warhead will be shot down, then planning becomes very uncertain. Now put yourself in the position of somebody planning a strike - do you wish to gamble your nation's change of survival on something that MIGHT work. Of course not. So Strategic Paralysis strikes again. A defense system doesn't have to work against an attack to be effective because it works on the minds of the people who make the decisions.

i'm in the process of nuking the character limit so i guess this should be split up.

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logikv9: Mar 5, 2009; Ham Wrangler

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Willie Tomg: Feb 2, 2006

part 3: A-country and B-country, and why it sucks to be in either, the guy gets pretty weird and speculative at the end and frankly thats where he starts to lose me because there's a lot of ways things can break and a lot of ways for it to be put back together, but i generally agree that if the birds fly then you'd better have guns and clean rations in the country or life will Suck Bigly. even moreso, i mean.

quote:

The Nuclear Game - The Attack And After

So far, when discussing nuclear weapons, we've always been working under the presumption that the historical situation applies and that we won't see a nuclear exchange. Lets look at the grim side of the equation now. The sirens are going and the National Emergency system is screaming its head off. What's the world going to be like in 25 minutes time? One thing we have to make clear before we start. We're talking about the biggest cataclysm in human history. When we say things like "doing well" or "doing badly", those terms are relative. Another thing is that most people's preconceptions about a nuclear war and its aftermath are wrong. Nevil Shute Norway did the world a great disservice when he wrote "On The Beach". The skewed viewpoint represented by that novel has been perpetuated ever since. A good modern example is the so-called "nuclear blast mapper" available on the internet that purportedly shows the effects of an initiation on an input home address. It doesn't, it doesn't even come close. A third preconception we have to get rid of is that there is such a thing as a limited nuclear exchange or a flexible response. There isn't now, never has been and never will be. The reasons why are primarily a C4I set of consideration but the inviolable rule is this "One Flies, They All Fly". Any exchange, no matter how limited, will escalate out of control until both participants have used all their devices.

Any country can be divided into two parts. The "A-country" is the big cities, the industrial and population centers and the resource concentration they represent. Big cities got to be that way because they are in desirable locations,near good ports, river crossings or mountain passes. When the city goes, so does the locations. The "B-country" is everything else. In effect the A-country represents big vulnerable collections of assets gathered into single spots. The B-country represents dispersed ranges of resources spread over large areas.This is a very important distinction. The relative value of the A-country and the B-country depends on the country and society involved. However one thing is constant, the support and supplies that the A-country needs to survive comes from the B-country. Given time, the B-country will rebuild the A-country. The survival of the B-country is, therefore, critical while the survival of the A-country might not be. Now, the primary asset of the B-country is its population; they are the ones who will generate resources from the B-country and turn them into product. So, the critical thing for a post nuclear environment is population. Save as much of that as we can and we're a jump ahead. That sounds eminently humanitarian. In reality it has awful consequences but we'll come to those later.

The extent to which the A-country can be rebuilt and the speed with which that can be achieved depends on the damage inflicted on the cities. One of the preconceptions that plague discussion of a nuclear war aftermath is the assumption that the cities will be totally destroyed write-offs but, in reality, the situation is by no means so simple. There's a few things that are important here. One is that big devices are a rarity. There are no 100 megaton devices, very few 25 and 10 megaton devices and not all that many 5 megaton weapons. The largest devices in widespread use are 1 megaton weapons and the majority of strategic weapons are in the 350 -150 kiloton bracket. 50 kiloton strategic weapons are quite common. The reason is quite simple. The destructive power of an explosion is distributed in three dimensions (actually four since the time component is very important) so the destructive power of a device is directly proportion to the cube root of its explosive power. Even worse, the destructive effects of a device are like many other distance related phenomena; they obey the inverse square law. Double the distance from the blast center and the effects are reduced by a factor of four. Therefore, a 1 megaton device is not 1,000 times as destructive as a 10 kiloton device, its ten times as such and those effects attenuate rapidly with distance. However, very big devices are MUCH heavier than small ones and consume disproportionate amounts of fissile material. Put all this together and its much more productive to have a large number of small devices than a small number of large ones.

Another is how the devices are used. The radius of destruction of nuclear devices is actually quite limited; this is a natural outgrowth of working on the inverse square law. Even with one of the "big" 1 megaton weapons, its fury is largely spent by the time the blast wave has reached ten miles from center. The smaller devices have lesser radii although the workings of the cube power rule mean that those radii are not as small as the difference in explosive power suggests. Nevertheless, the relatively limited effect of the devices shows that the general civilian presumption that ground zero for a nuclear strike on a city will be the city center is likely to be wrong. The devices will be targeted onto specific parts of the city that are judged to be of especial value. These may actually be in the suburbs or other peripheral areas.

So how does a nuclear device destroy things? The primary effects that result from the initiation of a device are (in no particular order) a light flash, a heat flash a blast concussion wave and a sleet of direct radiation. In fact, of these the last is of relatively little significance. The range of the radiation is very short and is further attenuated by the inverse square law. Its only significant within the areas where blast and heat are already lethal. If thermal blast and concussion have already reduced you to the size, shape and color of a McDonalds hamburger, irradiating you as well is incredibly superfluous. Thus the direct effects we are interested in are light, heat and blast and they do arrive in that order. The further an observer is from the point of initiation, the greater the gap between them. This is very important. The flash of light that will blind a victim close in serves to warn a potential victim further out. Once a few miles out from ground zero, the light flash tells the population that a device has gone off and its shadows show them sheltered areas from the next effects to arrive. If an area is shadowed from light, its shadowed from radiant heat as well. The heat flash is the first really destructive effect to hit. This is direct radiated thermal energy; like light it travels in straight lines. It will set anything inflammable on fire to a considerable distance from ground zero. Interestingly, it won't set non-flammable things on fire and, for example, must enter a house via windows etc before setting that house on fire. If the windows are masked (for example painted white), the heat flash is unlikely to set a brick-built house on fire (US-style frame houses are a different matter which is why it makes me uneasy living in one).

Last to arrive is blast. Unlike light and heat, both of which travel in straight lines, blast can be funneled by structures, deflected and masked. The windows we carefully painted white are history; smashed by the blast wave and its associated wave front of debris but they've done their job. The heat flash has gone. Houses are actually quite well designed to resist pressure from outside - its pressure from inside that gives them problems. Again, if you can keep the blast out you've got a good chance. Impossible close in to ground zero but progressively easier as we get further from that point. Closing the shutters on windows inside the house is good; even taping the glass in a lattice pattern is astonishingly helpful. Compared with military targets, civilian structures have relatively low damage resistance. In the jargon we've been looking at, this is called protection factor (PF) - most civilians can, with a few minutes warning give themselves a PF of around 40 - meaning they are 40 times more likely to survive than an unprotected civilian. In other words, even though the structures surrounding them are soft and weak, there is a lot they can do that will greatly increase their chance of survival. Note that - even when the sirens are going off, there is still a lot you can do that greatly increases your chances of surviving - provided you have a chance of surviving in the first place.

Lets imagine somebody has taken a serious dislike to your home town and decided to remove it. For all intents and purposes, the effects of initiation are generated in the center of the device initiation and travel outwards evenly in all dimensions to produce a perfectly symmetrical sphere or fireball. Now think of the geometry of this. If the device is initiated at ground level, a so-called ground burst, half of all that energy will go into the ground, scouring out a crater but effectively being wasted. More goes skywards. Some will be reflected down towards the earth but very little; effectively that energy too is wasted. The only energy that is actually useful is that produced in a narrow segment around the equator of the spherical ball produced by the initiation. Thus, for this type of attack ground bursts seem very inefficient. They are.

So what do we do about it? Again, think of the geometry. If we lift the detonation point into the air, the segment of the sphere that will spend its energy destroying valuable things is increased and the amount that scours out a crater gets smaller. Keep thinking along these lines and we reach a point where the sphere of the fireball doesn't quite touch the ground at all. In this case almost all the energy from the lower half of the fireball destroys valuable things and none goes to digging a crater. This is called a low airburst and it remains a low airburst as long as the altitude of the point of initiation of the device is less than the diameter of the fireball (ie there is a fireball radius between the bottom of the fireball and the ground). If the point of initiation of the device is at an altitude greater than the diameter of the fireball it's a high airburst. If the intention is to knock down cities, low airbursts are the most effective way of doing it.

We haven't mentioned fall-out. The dreaded stuff that destroys humanity.Well, there's a reason for that; the device has only just been initiated, there isn't any fall-out yet. Fall out is caused (mostly) by debris from the ground being sucked into the fireball, irradiated and spewed out of the top. This radioactive plume coalesces in the atmosphere and falls back to earth. It's a mix of isotopes of varying half lives. The most vicious of these isotopes have short half lives and are gone in a few hours (usually before the fallout makes it back to the ground). The milder ones can hang around for millennia but their effects are tolerable (speaking relatively again). The really dangerous ones are those that have a half life of between 5 and 6 years - these are long-lived enough to be seriously contaminating and hot enough to be dangerous. The worst is cobalt). Now the blast and heat throw debris outwards, where does the debris sucked into the fireball come from? Answer is the crater scoured in the ground by the energy from the device that went into said ground. But hang on, we've just discovered the best way to knock a city down is to use an airburst that doesn't crater the ground. Doesn't that mean no fallout? That's right, airbursts are relatively clean from a fallout point of view. They do generate some fallout from atmospheric dust and water vapor and a bit more (some very nasty) comes from the debris of the device but not as much as legend holds. This is especially the case since modern devices are very clean indeed and the debris from their initiation is far less than from the older designs.

All this means that dropping a nuclear device on a city doesn't necessarily destroy it. In fact, an acquaintance of mine, Peter Laurie, used to start off his lecture on such things by suggesting that 1 megaton device dropped on London would do only trivial damage to the city. After the lynch mob had been brought under control, he'd put a pie cutter on a demographic map of London and prove the point. We touched on how limited the damage caused by a one megaton device initiated over the City of London would be in Part Two. To be fair,that includes people and property slightly damaged but repairable. The catch is that London wouldn't have been hit by one but by several (in fact four 350 kiloton and two 1 megaton weapons in one particular attack plan). This would still leave a substantial proportion of the population and a larger proportion of their assets intact.

The implication of all this is that despite being subject to concentrated attack, the A-country isn't totally destroyed (although its society is) and remains a storehouse of people and goods. As an institution a big city is not viable for a variety of reasons but that is a long way from saying its simply flat, black and glowing in the dark. Its quite possible (depending on the attack patterns) that the big cities may be relatively unscathed.

So what's been going on in the B-country. One attack pattern is to hit the nuclear weapons stationed out there. These are mostly silo-based missiles. The only way to destroy those is to explode a device directly on top of the silo and scour out of the ground. In other words, a ground burst. And they create huge amounts of fallout. This means that a counter-force strike is inherently much more dangerous to the survival of the population than a counter city strike. Weird isn't it? A counter-value strike attacking the population in their home cities gives them a reasonable chance of survival while a counter-force strike restricting the target plan to military targets and rejecting a deliberate attack on the cities radically decreases that chance of survival. It's a point we've seen happening over and over again - when dealing with nuclear weapons we often end up going places we never thought we would. Thats because the logic behind nuclear weapons use and the effects of that logic is often counter-intuitive. It also demands careful though and examination of reality, not preconceptions or postures. The B-country also gets hit by counter-city strikes but the dispersed nature of the population reduces their direct effects.

OK so its over. The devices have ceased to arrive and eventually, probably after some 36 to 48 hours the all clear sounds. Notice another thing here; most accounts (The Day After for example) of a nuclear attack have a spasm lasting a few minutes and thats it. Sorry, Ain't So. The exchanges go on for days.

What happens now? From now on we're looking specifically at the USA. We have to get the B-country working again. As we touched on earlier, the cities are not viable places to live. Without their support infrastructure, they will become plague pits and charnel houses - just like the cities in 1632 . They have to be evacuated and the people distributed in the B-country to make up for losses there. In the B-country people are ambling around with Geiger counters plotting what's hot and what isn't. At this point life gets grim. We triage the population. One triage is condition. Who cannot be saved and will be left to die, who can only be saved with massive (and probably impractical) effort, those who can be saved with the means available now (the ones who get priority) and who will recover without treatment. On top of this is another triage. The population is prioritized according to need for protection. Pregnant women and children are top, young women of childbearing age second. Young men third, older men fourth, old women bottom. This is ruthless and brutal but its essential for survival. Given a choice between saving a young woman who can bear children and an old woman who cannot, we save the potential mother. We do the same with food. Food and water are checked for radioactivity. The clean food goes to the children and young women, the more contaminated food to the lower priority groups. That old woman? She gets the self-frying steaks.

In this situation the US has a terrific advantage over the rest of the world. Its called the Second Amendment. The B-country population is largely armed, sometimes quite heavily. They do exactly what Founding Fathers envisaged - provide a body of armed people whom the local authority can assemble to maintain order. (The Supreme Court may argue that interpretation of the Second Amendment but by now they are doing so with the people who wrote it). In a more general sense, post-holocaust fiction usually has gangs of outlaws preying on the defenseless citizenry. Interestingly that doesn't seem to happen. In disasters people tend to work together rather than against eachother (for example in US urban disasters Hells Angels biker gangs have made sterling contributions to relief efforts using their bikes and riding skills to get emergency supplies through to places others can't). While lawlessness and disorder do occur, the ease of forming a civilian militia (using the term properly here meaning something very much like the Sheriff?s Posse beloved of Westerns) brings that situation under control. Other countries are unlikely to be so fortunate.

So we're in a race. Can we rebuild the B-country so that its firstly self-sustaining without the services provided by the A-country while the stockpile of pre-attack assets survive. Can we reconstruct a working society fast enough so that we can feed enough people to keep going? Can the surviving women bear enough children (and survive doing so) to replace the death toll. For the loss won't stop with the attack. Diseases we consider trivial today, measles, chickenpox, influenza, will be mass killers. No medical treatment. Unless your lucky enough to be where some medical facilities have survived, a broken leg that gets infected is likely to be a death sentence. Its possible to look on this world as a 17th century US colonial environment and there's a lot of truth in that. The downside is that the colonial pioneers didn't have the decaying charnel houses of the cities to worry about. This is another key thing to bear in mind; many more people will die after a nuclear exchange and will die in it. Eric was quite correct in making his Doctor fear disease more than any other factor - its a thing that worried everybody looking at post holocaust (and now you know why the US has such well-equipped clinics tucked away in remote places).

Winning that race is vital. Lose and we're extinct. The population drops like a stone as disease, radiation and injury take their toll. Then, it should bottom out and start to recover. Teams of older men and infertile women go to the cities to recover what they can. The radiation levels continue to drop. Fortunately we don't have to worry about nuclear winter, that's been largely discredited (the atmospheric models that were used were far too simplistic and the reality seems to be we may actually get a more temperate and less changeable climate out of things - somebody once described it as a Nuclear Autumn). The ozone layer also won't be a problem - it'll regenerate fast enough and the effects of the bombs may actually be beneficial.

The ugly side of life continues. Abortion and contraception are likely to be highly illegal. We MUST have those babies. There will be more than enough parents who have lost their own (or have received too high a radiation dose to chance the FLK problem) to look after any that are unwanted. Women are enslaved by their reproductive systems again. Don't like that but there is nothing we can do about it. The social pressure on women to have children will be immense in both material and moral senses. Women who can have children get the best of everything, the cleanest and best food, the most comfortable housing, the most careful protection. Women who can have children but refuse to do so will be social outcasts (and in this sort of society to be an outcast is virtually a death sentence). We're likely to see a situation where women of childbearing age are "protected" by severe restrictions ("don't go outside the house, the radiation may harm your babies" gets abbreviated to "don't go outside") . This is a grim and disturbing picture; we take an old woman out of her house and throw her in the snow to provide shelter for a pregnant mother and her children - then lock her in. Newborn babies obviously damaged by radiation are likely to be killed on the spot. That may or may not be justifiable but I think its inevitable.

No electricity, limited medicine, almost no dentistry, no travel - we really are back to the middle ages. The fallout patterns and other things shift so its likely we'll see communities having citadels they can retreat to if necessary. Gasoline runs out cars will go; we're back to horses for transport. Fortunately we don't need factories to make more horses. Justice by the way is run by Judge Lynch. Don't expect to attack a woman and survive. Guns are also a declining asset. As the ammunition runs out we'll be making weapons in blacksmiths shops. Its interesting to see what the designers will come up with, using modern know-how with 17th century assets. We'll probably see bows and arrows come back into fashion - and that means metal body armor.

Eventually when conditions permit, our new society moves back to rebuild the A-country. It'll be a long, long time before there is another Federal Government(such things need technology to survive - a calculated guess is that it would take two centuries before a powerful central government evolved again - if it evolves again).

- End of lecture series -

Its interesting to note how much of the post-nuclear attack projections have carried through into 1632. In fact, I originally bought 1632 precisely because I was interested in how Eric's thoughts would fit with the studies that I knew had been done. The parallelism was very close indeed. 1632 quickly identified the crucial problem - the need to get population levels up so that there is enough of a workforce to do everything that needs to be done. Replace refugees from the war zone with refugees from the A-country and the situations are very close. In many ways, the situation described in 1632 is a lot closer to a post-nuclear attack scenario than the novels that purport to describe such situations directly.

The gearing down of technology is another issue where there are substantial parallels - although a lot of dispersal has been done and small towns have more strategic assets than they might think. There is a reason why the Pentagon places so many contracts with small, out-of-the-way companies. The basic logic is correct though; a post nuclear environment can support limited industrialization using steam and water power and can restore limited electricity.

1632 has another lesson for the post-nuclear environment; the critical importance of getting a working society up and running and getting trade links established. The normal run of post-holocaust novels forget that yet it was the thing most people studying the situation spent most time looking at. Mike Stearns got the point straight away - if he presented himself at a think-tank we'd hire him on the spot. I suspect he'd fit in quite well.

so yeah that got a little fanfictiony toward the end there, but i think the general points he makes about targeting priorities and what warheads will be aimed where are fairly sound.

anyway. nukes. they're around, and most of their practical utility is realized sitting in a lightless room doing nothing and we may or may not finally start a land war in asia over the possibility that more nations will secure themselves against invasion. Cool beans.

# ? Aug 22, 2018 21:40

Taintrunner: Apr 10, 2017; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

hey remember when hillary clinton quoted the plot of call of duty: modern warfare when talking about pakistan

# ? Aug 22, 2018 21:50

Willie Tomg: Feb 2, 2006

I genuinely think a lot of the change in tenor toward American military adventurism post-WW2 despite the damage to the country being confined mostly to Pearl Harbor is the bombs' two uses in what for the sake of conversation i'll call "combat" making it unavoidably obvious how pointless the exercise of waging a war to overthrow or prop up whatever regime. Past that point the USA has had a lot of difficulty explicitly stating what the fuckin' objectives were in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc, because when you're a nuclear power you're either killing people or you aren't and everything else is just bizarre flailing.

quote:

It was just another secret of the war. We forget now just how pervasive the atmosphere of classified activity was, but there was hardly anybody, in all of the war's military bureaucracies, who could honestly claim to know everything that was going on. The best information -- whole Mississippis of debriefings and intelligence assessments and field reports and rumors -- went up the line and vanished. And what returned, from some unimaginable bureaucratic firmament, were orders -- taciturn, uncommunicative instructions, raining down ceaselessly, specifying mysterious troop movements, baffling supply requisitions, unexplained production quotas, and senseless rationing goals. Everywhere were odd networks of power and covert channels of communication. No matter how well placed you were, you were still excluded from incessant meetings, streams of memos were routed around your office, old friends grew vague when you asked what department they worked in (a "special" department, they always said -- nobody liked coming out and saying "secret"). Everybody was doing something hush-hush; nobody blinked at the most imponderable mysteries.

So there was barely a ripple when, in the spring of 1943, all the leading physicists in America disappeared. Overnight their offices were closed up, their colleagues professed ignorance, the deans of their colleges dismissed all inquiries with a bland shrug. There was a rumor of course: they had been summoned to some kind of base in the southwest, one of those military installations so classified that nobody who went in ever came out. But you were an insider beyond inside if you so much as knew the code name for the base -- though it was as blankly uninformative as all of the war's code names. It was just a phrase that might turn up inadvertently in a classified budget paper, or on some requisition form for scientific equipment, or at the bottom of a routing order for an enigmatic load of ore; something new was needed by "the Manhattan district."

What was it about? Nobody could say. It was obviously a radical new research project of some kind or another. But there were countless projects just like it; every side was after a superweapon, and every rumor of a superweapon on the other side had to be countered by a desperate race for its match. Weird new gadgetry was introduced in almost every campaign. This was the first war where troops in the field carried portable radio transmitters and receivers, the first where air forces attempted precision bombing, the first with jet engines, the first with napalm. The British had begun the war by stringing their coasts with a new device they thought would make them invulnerable to enemy bombers -- radar. At the end the Germans were hoping for a last-minute reversal with their own astonishing invention -- the ballistic missile. And all sides were obsessed with SIGINT -- signals intelligence, the encrypted electronic messages weaving through the battlefields and up the hierarchies of command. Axis secrets were being revealed not by spies or resistance groups (despite their popularity in Hollywood, they'd proved largely useless in the high-tech environment of the war), but by another new ultrasecret gadget: the electronic computer.

In this sense the Manhattan project was unremarkable. Maybe it was more ruinously expensive than any of the other projects, but it was just as speculative. The only thing that made it noticeable to the cognoscenti was that it didn't produce any results. Month after month, year after year there was silence from that base in the desert. Maybe what they were after was impossible -- after all, the project had been funded in the first place only because of frantic rumors early in the war that Nazi scientists were conducting similar experiments, and the Allies had since learned that the Nazis had dropped the idea as too difficult and improbable. But the U.S. project had its own momentum. By the summer of 1945 the Nazis had fallen, Europe was securely under martial law, and Hitler was missing and presumed dead somewhere in the wreckage of Berlin -- only then did the Manhattan scientists inform their superiors that they were ready to test their weapon for the first time. If the war had been over by then the test might never have happened.

But the Japanese still hadn't surrendered. It seems obvious now that they must have been about to -- their situation was hopeless, and they couldn't have endured the overwhelming fury of the American firebombing raids much longer. But the Americans didn't see it that way. The logic of the war had taught them to expect the exact opposite. Japanese soldiers had routinely responded to hopeless situations by fighting to the death and to the last man, and Japanese civilians throughout the Pacific had typically committed mass suicide rather than allow themselves to be captured. Their resistance had grown exponentially as the Americans approached the home islands. Why should anybody think it would break down now?

The Americans still believed there was only one way they could put an end to the war: invade Japan and depose the emperor. Throughout the summer of 1945 they worked out the details. It would be a two-front invasion, like the one in Europe. The Soviet army, already massing on the Manchurian border, would in late summer move overland to the Chinese coast. The American forces, greatly augmented by the armies about to be transferred from Europe, would land on the southernmost of the home islands, Kyushu, and island-hop toward Tokyo. The American landing was scheduled for November 1, with the Russian landing to follow, and the whole campaign was expected to last through the following spring. Everybody knew it was going to be a nightmare -- maybe the single most violent campaign of the war. The figure floating around the American planning sessions was one million Allied casualties. That seems preposterously high, but the planners were still in shock over casualty figures from battles like Okinawa; Truman himself said that the invasion was likely to be Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other. Japanese casualties, if the same ratios held, would be in the millions.

It was in the midst of these desolate calculations that the news arrived that the Manhattan device had been successfully detonated in the deserts of New Mexico. What can we fairly say about what happened next? Senior American decision makers knew that they'd just been handed an extraordinarily destructive new weapon, one that could kill tens of thousands of people instantly. It seems impossible to believe that this didn't faze them -- but why should it have? Tens of millions of people had already died, a significant percentage of them as the direct result of American action; one or two atomic bombs wouldn't grossly alter that total. A firebombing raid in Tokyo that past April had killed more than 200,000 people, twice the number who would die at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and nobody afterward used words like "war crime" or "genocide" to describe it.

But weren't they told about the nightmarish effects of the new bomb? Probably. At the least, the Manhattan scientists knew that radiation sickness would be a horrible way to die. But again, what difference would that have made? We forget just how many horrible ways to die the war had already created. Any visitor to a burn unit could see torments that made hell a redundant concept. There was no sense that the bomb was worse than any other weapon of the war. And the long-range consequences, the generations of genetic damage they were about to visit upon their victims? Not discussed, too speculative.

It has to be remembered that few of the scientific breakthroughs of the war had yet made an impact on the civilian world, even the civilian world in Washington. Troops in the field were contending daily with radical innovations in electronics and medicine; the folks back home were living as they always had, in a world of glacial technological change. Less than half the households in America had been wired for phone service, and the government was still underwriting rural electrification projects to bring the vast areas outside big cities onto the power grid. People thought theoretical physics was as as eccentric and harmless as the study of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The standing joke in those days was that only six people in the world could understand Einstein -- the implication being that nobody else needed to.

So what it came down to was this: American planners didn't understand and didn't much care what the bomb did. They just wanted some big, nightmarish weapon that would break Japanese resistance once and for all -- the bigger and the more nightmarish the better. And now they had it.

The timetable can be followed closely. The first test of the bomb was on July 16, 1945. The ultimatum to the Japanese -- surrender or face "prompt and utter destruction" by a wholly unprecedented form of weaponry -- was issued by the Americans on July 26. The Japanese rejected the ultimatum on July 28. The two bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. They were dropped in close succession because the Americans were trying to bluff the Japanese into thinking there was an unlimited supply of atomic bombs (there wasn't; the next bomb wouldn't be ready for several months). The Japanese surrendered on August 10.

In other words, the war was ended by a weapon few had known existed less than a month before, and nobody at all had known would work. The Americans hadn't talked through the implications of what they were doing because there wasn't time. They had used it as soon as they knew they had it, and they had no thought other than to force the Japanese to surrender and avoid millions more deaths. It was, in a sense, an act of mercy.

But of all the words expended over Hiroshima in the last 50 years, that word "mercy" sounds the most obscene. Nobody who was in Hiroshima on August 6 ever thought of what happened then as merciful. One of the commonplaces of current discussion about the atomic bomb is that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wholly gratuitous. It's taken for granted that the Americans knew the Japanese were about to surrender but rushed to use the bomb anyway. Why? The explanation offered by Gar Alperovitz's recent, exhaustively prosecutorial study The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb is that the bombing had nothing to do with Japan; rather the Americans were already looking past the war to the new structure of power in the world and intended the bombing as the opening shot in the cold war with the Soviet Union. The writer of the catalog for the Smithsonian's commemorative exhibit suggested that the reason was more ancient and primordial -- it was a straight-line example of the basic white male lust for genocide; Hiroshima was bombed for the same reason the Indians were exterminated. Robert J. Lifton's Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial is even more absolute in its assessment: the real reason was simply that Truman and his advisers were insane, evil men in love with death.

The reasons don't actually matter much when the point is the outrage. But while it might be thought that these books are simply part of the standard line in popular history these days, in which the motives of any American government are invariably put in the worst possible light, the truth is that from the beginning people thought there was something strange and singular about the bombing of Hiroshima. Partly this was a kind of optical illusion induced by the visibility of what happened there; the images of the radiation victims circulated throughout the world, while the grisly sights from more conventional battlefields remained unseen. But there was also the overriding sense that this atrocity was beyond the limits of what victory should have cost. It was a kind of metaphysical event -- it remade everybody's sense of the war in a single subliminal flash of horror.

That's the tacit point of the best book about the dropping of the atomic bombs -- in fact, one of the few enduring classics of American journalism about the war: John Hersey's Hiroshima. It was originally published in August 1946, on the first anniversary of the bombing. It holds up exceptionally well today. My respect for it was only increased by the way I've just reread it -- after plowing through hundreds of pages of American wartime reporting (including several gung ho pieces by Hersey himself). It's a genuine shock to see Hersey's seven representative citizens of Hiroshima treated with such respect and compassion: "Mrs. Nakamura" and "Miss Sasaki" and "The Reverend Mr. Kyoshi Tanimoto" and the rest come off as figures of intricate humanity, compared to the caricatures of Nips and Japs that had infested American newspapers and magazines. In fact, the only difference Hersey finds between the Japanese and the Americans is that the Japanese are kinder and more courteous. They bore up under the nightmare of what happened to them on that August morning with a kind of bewildered decency well beyond the reach of the typical citizen of the heartland.

You can't help but admire Hersey's own evident decency, his determination to shake free of the hatreds of the war. On the other hand, there's no denying that his vivid picture of Hiroshima before the bomb fell is essentially a work of fiction. It artfully thins out or omits altogether the hysteria and desperation that was sweeping Japan in the summer of 1945, as everyone awaited the inevitable American invasion. In the real Japan millions of schoolchildren were being instructed in how to kill American soldiers with sharpened bamboo sticks, and the propaganda machines were proclaiming that the Japanese people were ready as one to sacrifice themselves for their emperor. But in Hersey's Hiroshima people are still going about their lives much as they always have, except for some vague "jitters," some nagging "anxiety" about the prospect of an American air raid. His Hiroshima becomes the transfigured image of small-town America before Pearl Harbor.

But then Hersey sees no point in going into what the war might really have been like for his seven subjects. What did that matter? Whether they were proud or ashamed of Japan's military conquests, whether they hated Americans and all other foreigners, whether they were contemptuous, curious, or had no opinion about the outside world -- all of that had instantly been rendered irrelevant. It didn't even matter what they thought about the atomic bomb itself; any mere attitudes for or against would have seemed like obscene distractions compared with the "soundless flash" that blasted their world into nightmare. "Shigata na gai," Mrs. Nakamura says about what happened to her city that day; Hersey glosses: "A Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word nichevo: It can't be helped. Oh well. Too bad."

Hersey doesn't say so directly, but he appears on the surface to agree. He presents the bombing neutrally, without commentary, as though it's a new species of natural disaster, motiveless and agentless. As far as any reader of Hiroshima can tell, the bomb came out of nowhere, was dropped by nobody, and had no purpose. This allows Hersey to avoid any explicit debate about the morality of dropping the bomb -- which would just get in the way of his desire to record what it meant to the ordinary people who were its targets, rather than to the usual subjects of military history, the godlike decision makers who were safe from its effects on the other side of the world.

But this silence, deliberate or not, still amounts to a kind of debating position. Page after relentless page carefully and unhysterically records the grotesque damage done by the bomb -- the radiation burns, the alien rot of radiation sickness -- and as you read, an unambiguous message comes through: there's no point talking about the reasons for the bombing because no reason could possibly be good enough. Victory in the war wasn't worth such cruelty. The bomb should never have been dropped on Hiroshima.

It's an argument that stands on the dividing line between two worlds, the world of the war and the world after. Hersey was one of the first to write out of a dawning sense that the dropping of the bomb wasn't the culminating moment of the war -- it was the point at which the war's graph of escalating destructiveness finally went off the scale and rendered everything that had happened before trivial. He draws this moral with typically understated eloquence at the climax of his first chapter, when he recounts what happened to all his characters at the moment of detonation. Strangest of all, he says, was the fate of Miss Sasaki, who was hit by a falling bookcase in the reference library of the factory where she worked: "In the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books."

Well, what of it? All over Hiroshima people were at that moment being pummeled to death by erupting walls, boiled alive by hurricanes of steam, and flashed into nothingness in the glare of a thousand suns. Why does it seem so ironic to be struck by flying books? Because books stood for the past -- they represented the whole of the dead weight of history and culture that had just been annihilated. The bomb wasn't the end of the last war, but the beginning of the final war to come.

That may be why there's something forced about Hersey's compassion for his subjects. He hadn't really surmounted the hatreds of the past decades; he was just so frightened he'd forgotten about them. The moment the bomb went off at Hiroshima, the unbridgeable cultural divisions between Japan and America were erased -- not because their citizens attained some sort of reconciliation or higher understanding, but because they were both now part of the atomic age, where everybody on earth was a potential victim.

This was the deepest shock of the war: just how all-encompassingly destructive the new weapon really was. Hersey probably didn't know it when he wrote -- it wasn't publically disclosed for years afterward -- but the Manhattan scientists had warned their superiors that they weren't absolutely sure what would happen when they set off the first bomb. They were reasonably confident of their predicted yield, but there was a chance -- not a big chance, but it couldn't be ruled out -- that the reaction could grow hot enough to ignite the atmosphere. If that happened, then every living thing on earth would die in a single globe-encompassing firestorm. As it happened, of course, they were right about the odds: the fission bomb was nowhere near hot enough to trigger the runaway combustion of the atmosphere. But the basic issue remains unsettled to this day -- and the impulse to push to the outer boundaries of destructiveness is as much with us now as it ever was. If a fission bomb wouldn't do the trick, what about an exponentially more powerful fusion bomb? What about thousands of fusion bombs going off all at once? Would that finally be enough to unmake the foundations of the world?

Hersey was describing for the first time the war's true legacy: a permanent condition of helpless anger and universal dread. Hiroshima was the end of the line for the archaic idea that war was something that soldiers did on battlefields, somewhere on the far side of the horizon. The great strategic breakthrough of the war had been the targeting of civilian populations with weapons of mass destruction -- so that for the first time in history everybody, soldier and civilian alike, could share equally in the horror of battle. Now the postwar world was elevating this principle, making it the organizing fact of existence. After Hiroshima, Armageddon could erupt anytime, anywhere on earth, without warning, by accident. Even as people walked heedlessly in the streets, the bombs could be spiraling down from an invisible plane passing in the stratosphere; at dinnertime in the heartland, as the local news droned on about the Middle East, the missiles could already be arching over the north pole, like the ribs of a strange new cathedral.

I once saw it begin, about 20 years ago. One evening I was in the backseat of a car, gliding on a freeway out of Chicago, and I glanced out the rear window, my eye caught by an unusual bright light. There in the distance was a brilliant mushroom cloud opening up above the skyline of the city. I think it was the single worst moment of my life: I stared into that orange rose flare, that impossible death's head, and prayed that it would vanish -- and then grew sick with terror when I saw that it wasn't going to. In just another instant, I knew, the first wave of the blast would arrive. The serene suburban landscape around me, twinkling in the evening air, would erupt into a million separate sites of wreckage. The trees would flash away, the houses would vanish, the cars around us would be hurled into the air and melted into an ocean of fire. It was, I realized in those last seconds left to me, what I'd been afraid of my entire life: that the war had never stopped, that it was still escalating to its inevitable end, that everything I'd ever known was a mirage floating in the accidental lull between the detonation over Hiroshima and the shock wave that at last swallowed up the world.

Then something changed. The car took a curve, and the land readjusted itself, as though shaking free of a bad thought. Everything was as it had been; the storm had passed over me and was gone. It was all foolishness anyway -- what war could possibly reach the depths of the American heartland? The suburbs stretched out before the car, invincibly solid and inviting -- an empire of timeless privacy, opening up for me as it always did, beneath the twilight. I turned back again to look at the city and watched the mushroom cloud float dreamily out of the orange smog that hovered along the skyline and turn into the harmless moon.

# ? Aug 22, 2018 21:52

Willie Tomg: Feb 2, 2006

considering the state of 2018 rural health care, his side observation about "well equipped clinics tucked away in rural places" in 2002 is a real, real rough chuckle.

# ? Aug 22, 2018 21:54

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

no one would be crazy enough to launch nukes so I don't think it's a problem unless several nuclear powers got into a fight over uh *checks notes* the diminishing water source that feeds most of their agriculture

# ? Aug 22, 2018 21:54

Stairmaster: Jun 8, 2012

Those are some informative essays but he underestimates the spill over affect that killing hundreds of thousands would have on the neighboring region.

Also the author, Stuart Slade, has said some stuff in the past that makes me question his credibility like an insistence that bombers are a superior delivery system to ballistic missiles or the time he got mad at a Norwegian criticizing his bad alt history books and responded by having finland get owned in the following book he published.

If you want a good bit of speculative fiction on a future nuclear conflict you should grab the 2020 commission on the nuclear attack against the united states from your library

# ? Aug 22, 2018 21:59

H.P. Hovercraft: Jan 12, 2004; one thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse; Slippery Tilde

logikv9 posted:

the gay bomb is real

the f bomb

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:06

Metal Cat: Dec 25, 2017

I like to think that most major powers are sane enough to prevent nuclear war, but the fact that Israel is influenced by apocalyptic megalomania and that Pakistan/India are gonna be hit very hard by global ecological degradation is very scary.

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:11

Baloogan: Dec 5, 2004; Fun Shoe

tldr

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:13

H.P. Hovercraft: Jan 12, 2004; one thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse; Slippery Tilde

Metal Cat posted:

I like to think that most major powers are sane enough to prevent nuclear war, but the fact that Israel is influenced by apocalyptic megalomania and that Pakistan/India are gonna be hit very hard by global ecological degradation is very scary.

pakistan nuking india over that disputed territory seems most likely but don�t forget that israel was planning to nuke sinai if they didn�t get what they wanted during the 6 days war

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:17

bird with big dick: Oct 21, 2015

I watched that tv show Jericho and it was pretty good and if it happens (I hope it does!) I�ll be one of the good guys that doesn�t do rapes and only kills people if I have to like if they�re stealing my food.

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:20

the bitcoin of weed: Nov 1, 2014

one of pakistan, india, and china is absolutely going to start a war over their shared water sources in the himalayas once those start to dry up. israel probably will if we ever get a sympathetic government here that tells them to cool it with the genocide

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:20

The Dipshit: Dec 21, 2005; by FactsAreUseless

A lot of that stuff you quote is pretty garbage.

the bitcoin of weed posted:

one of pakistan, india, and china is absolutely going to start a war over their shared water sources in the himalayas once those start to dry up. israel probably will if we ever get a sympathetic government here that tells them to cool it with the genocide

This is probably going to come true though.

:smith:

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:30

Lawman 0: Aug 17, 2010

the bitcoin of weed posted:

one of pakistan, india, and china is absolutely going to start a war over their shared water sources in the himalayas once those start to dry up. israel probably will if we ever get a sympathetic government here that tells them to cool it with the genocide

group 1: yeah this is sadly likely although I don't china will start one ever.

2: only if they think they will lose a conventional war and are isolated

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:34

Willie Tomg: Feb 2, 2006

The Dipshit posted:

A lot of that stuff you quote is pretty garbage.

Probably. I kinda like some of that analysis, but I suspect the guy who closes his lecture with an extended hypothetical with women being turned into walking Axlotl tanks by the remains of society might be winging a few details.

One of the reasons I wanted to post this thread is b/c imo nuke proliferation has become a big ideological blind spot in the US at least, and I know there are a few people floating around the forums with more of a basis to talk about it (you're one of them iirc) and there are surprisingly few nonfiction sources to work from in terms of what a strategic exchange would actually look like.

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:34

H.P. Hovercraft: Jan 12, 2004; one thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse; Slippery Tilde

remember when trump wanted to reverse course on how we were drawning down our nuclear arsenal and then put rick perry in charge

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:35

Good soup!: Nov 2, 2010

they named the third xbox the xbone

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:41

Lawman 0: Aug 17, 2010

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

remember when trump wanted to reverse course on how we were drawning down our nuclear arsenal and then put rick perry in charge

is that still on

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:46

Stairmaster: Jun 8, 2012

Good soup! posted:

they named the third xbox the xbone

i doubt this is true

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:46

H.P. Hovercraft: Jan 12, 2004; one thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse; Slippery Tilde

Lawman 0 posted:

is that still on

yeah and he's still Very Retarded

here's that terrifying article about the DoE

# ? Aug 22, 2018 22:48

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

logikv9 posted:

the gay bomb is real

The Gayest Bomb of All Time

# ? Aug 23, 2018 00:11

The Dipshit: Dec 21, 2005; by FactsAreUseless

Willie Tomg posted:

Probably. I kinda like some of that analysis, but I suspect the guy who closes his lecture with an extended hypothetical with women being turned into walking Axlotl tanks by the remains of society might be winging a few details.

One of the reasons I wanted to post this thread is b/c imo nuke proliferation has become a big ideological blind spot in the US at least, and I know there are a few people floating around the forums with more of a basis to talk about it (you're one of them iirc) and there are surprisingly few nonfiction sources to work from in terms of what a strategic exchange would actually look like.

I went to the DOE for work, got my clearance, read some scenarios, and I'll say this: Mad Max ain't too far off once you hit the 2,000 warhead scenarios of a US/Russia/China(kinda, sorta) kind of exchange, even if most of them are assumed to be spent trying to bust other nuke silos in a first strike. A dozen smuggled into the right places (think major ports and naval bases) would push the U.S. into a depression that would be far greater than the Great Depression, and probably kick off one hell of a worldwide depression since the U.S. dollar underpins everything. Oh, and I personally don't like our ability to detect smuggled nukes.

I see nuclear terrorism with some of the missing USSR warheads being a likelihood up there with the India, Pakistan, and China.

If Israel ever used nukes, they'd be a pariah state, and they know just how dependent they are on the rest of the world.

Either we all sing kumbaya, kill capitalism and get along, or we are in for a hell of a century.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

remember when trump wanted to reverse course on how we were drawning down our nuclear arsenal and then put rick perry in charge

In the weeks before I left, they stopped the plutonium downblending operation to restart warhead pit production. :smith:

# ? Aug 23, 2018 00:45

upgunned shitpost: Jan 21, 2015

taking the fall of the house of saud and it's last princeling nuking tehran as my dark horse pick.

# ? Aug 23, 2018 00:52

Mariana Horchata: Jun 30, 2008; College Slice

The Dipshit posted:

I went to the DOE for work, got my clearance, read some scenarios, and I'll say this: Mad Max ain't too far off once you hit the 2,000 warhead scenarios of a US/Russia/China(kinda, sorta) kind of exchange, even if most of them are assumed to be spent trying to bust other nuke silos in a first strike. A dozen smuggled into the right places (think major ports and naval bases) would push the U.S. into a depression that would be far greater than the Great Depression, and probably kick off one hell of a worldwide depression since the U.S. dollar underpins everything. Oh, and I personally don't like our ability to detect smuggled nukes.

I see nuclear terrorism with some of the missing USSR warheads being a likelihood up there with the India, Pakistan, and China.

If Israel ever used nukes, they'd be a pariah state, and they know just how dependent they are on the rest of the world.

Either we all sing kumbaya, kill capitalism and get along, or we are in for a hell of a century.

In the weeks before I left, they stopped the plutonium downblending operation to restart warhead pit production.

thank you nihilanon

# ? Aug 23, 2018 00:56

qkkl: Jul 1, 2013; by FactsAreUseless

Cheap satellite launches provided by SpaceX will finally enable SDI to be viable. Once the US completes its SDI network expect Russia and China's spheres of influence shrink drastically.

# ? Aug 23, 2018 02:29

CountFosco: Jan 9, 2012; Welcome back to the Liturgigoon thread, friend.

qkkl posted:

Cheap satellite launches provided by SpaceX will finally enable SDI to be viable. Once the US completes its SDI network expect Russia and China's spheres of influence shrink drastically.

Given how close Georgia and the Ukraine have come to being fully moved out of Russia's influence, how much more shrinking of influence can we expect to see from Russia?

# ? Aug 23, 2018 02:58

twoday: May 4, 2005; C-SPAM Times best-selling author

I read somewhere that nuclear winter wouldn�t actually happen and that the whole theory was soviet propaganda meant to deter an American nuclear strike; thoughts?

# ? Aug 23, 2018 03:01

Mayor Dave: Feb 20, 2009; Bernie the Snow Clown

Dreylad posted:

no one would be crazy enough to launch nukes

# ? Aug 23, 2018 03:04

Duscat: Jan 4, 2009; Fun Shoe

Metal Cat posted:

I like to think that most major powers are sane enough to prevent nuclear war, but the fact that Israel is influenced by apocalyptic megalomania and that Pakistan/India are gonna be hit very hard by global ecological degradation is very scary.

nuclear war will be started by the united states

it doesn't really matter who strikes first, it's US escalation that's gonna make it happen

it's probably the US that strikes first though

The Dipshit posted:

I went to the DOE for work, got my clearance, read some scenarios, and I'll say this: Mad Max ain't too far off once you hit the 2,000 warhead scenarios of a US/Russia/China(kinda, sorta) kind of exchange, even if most of them are assumed to be spent trying to bust other nuke silos in a first strike. A dozen smuggled into the right places (think major ports and naval bases) would push the U.S. into a depression that would be far greater than the Great Depression, and probably kick off one hell of a worldwide depression since the U.S. dollar underpins everything. Oh, and I personally don't like our ability to detect smuggled nukes.

I see nuclear terrorism with some of the missing USSR warheads being a likelihood up there with the India, Pakistan, and China.

If Israel ever used nukes, they'd be a pariah state, and they know just how dependent they are on the rest of the world.

Either we all sing kumbaya, kill capitalism and get along, or we are in for a hell of a century.

In the weeks before I left, they stopped the plutonium downblending operation to restart warhead pit production.

once you're launching 2000 warheads and stopped, for some reason, in the middle of all out global thermonuclear war, why wouldn't you spend another 1000 to end technological society on the enemy's continent

still got thousands to go

# ? Aug 23, 2018 03:06

Stairmaster: Jun 8, 2012

twoday posted:

I read somewhere that nuclear winter wouldn’t actually happen and that the whole theory was soviet propaganda meant to deter an American nuclear strike; thoughts?

# ? Aug 23, 2018 03:08

redneck nazgul: Apr 25, 2013

jfood posted:

taking the fall of the house of saud and it's last princeling nuking tehran as my dark horse pick.

# ? Aug 23, 2018 03:08

H.P. Hovercraft: Jan 12, 2004; one thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse; Slippery Tilde

twoday posted:

I read somewhere that nuclear winter wouldn�t actually happen and that the whole theory was soviet propaganda meant to deter an American nuclear strike; thoughts?

yep

that kinda thing�s been their MO for awhile (even notes that one specifically at the top of the article)

basically the attempt was to conflate a nuclear detonation with the effects of a volcanic eruption. this seems plausible if you don�t know anything at all about volcanoes, making it an effective piece of propaganda on the american public lol

other works of theirs were the american government being responsible for creating aids and the idea that the moon landing was faked

# ? Aug 23, 2018 03:52

Mantis42: Jul 26, 2010

Uh, wasn't the biggest public proponent of nuclear winter theory Carl Sagan?

...Was Sagan a Red?

# ? Aug 23, 2018 03:55

Stairmaster: Jun 8, 2012

No it's real. It's just the overall severity is probably less than what sagan and co were hyping it to be.

# ? Aug 23, 2018 03:55

H.P. Hovercraft: Jan 12, 2004; one thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse; Slippery Tilde

Mantis42 posted:

Uh, wasn't the biggest public proponent of nuclear winter theory Carl Sagan?

...Was Sagan a Red?

he agreed with the hypothesis that burning an entire city might kick enough particulates into the air to produce something like it. you�ll also note that this is outside of sagan�s field

but you hafta understand that this is still at least an order of magnitude smaller than what a volcano can put out, which does have a global effect

tho yeah it�s not unreasonable to assume a shorter, smaller, local effect might happen from torching a city, or even all the cities. we see something like that from big wildfires after all, which is why there�s scientific controversy about the idea in the first place

still, it�s unquestionably soviet propaganda they propagated with the intent to deter

# ? Aug 23, 2018 04:08

qkkl: Jul 1, 2013; by FactsAreUseless

a little off topic but can anyone name the song in this video, I really like it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYRARx3qxI0

# ? Aug 23, 2018 04:12

twoday: May 4, 2005; C-SPAM Times best-selling author

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

still, it�s unquestionably soviet propaganda they propagated with the intent to deter

So.... it�s good?

The Wikipedia page is an interesting read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

# ? Aug 23, 2018 04:12

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 12:54

Blisster: Mar 10, 2010; What you are listening to are musicians performing psychedelic music under the influence of a mind altering chemical called...

I don't have anything intelligent to say about nukes, but I appreciate the Electric Six reference.

# ? Aug 23, 2018 04:13

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Let's start a war. Start a nuclear war.

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