Comment by moffkalast
6 days ago
> the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty
Erm, it's kind of demanded for people to go out and die to defend national sovereignty in nations that have a draft. For myself, I'd prefer to be vaporized than bleed out in a trench if it really comes down to it.
Realistically speaking you'll die of an infected and untreated burn wound though, the severe blast and burn area is just much much bigger than the fancy "everything just goes poof" core.
Realistically speaking you're going to die of starvation or get shot by marauding gangs, or die of cancer a few decades later from radiation in the food change. NukeMap [1] has good visualizations of the relative fireball vs. blast vs. thermal radiation vs. fallout radiuses. One thing that stands out: most of the suburbs is going to survive the initial nuclear exchange. At worst, they'll have a few broken windows.
The problem is that if you eliminate ~20% of a nation's population, supply chains, continuity of government, and the economy aren't going to last long. Social organization breaks down much more widely than people die. The resultant pullback of all the trapping of society - reliable food supply, clean water, transportation infrastructure, electricity, heat - is going to kill many more people than the nukes will.
[1] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Not only 20% of the population, but wiping out cities is going to make everything grind to a halt. Best case, tiny pockets of social order is going to remain in very hard to reach, remote rural areas which also has local access to food. We are talking about maybe thousands of people in a population of hundreds of millions. The rest are in for a decade of pure hell.
Yah, but you could enter the ruins of some shop, get some booze there, and walk straight into ground zero. Feeling the buzz. Getting tired...drifting away...
Vaporized is good with me. Not so keen to have my body melt over several days due to acute radiation exposure though...
Giving up is really very common in war.