Comment by 0xbadcafebee
3 days ago
Food collection, consumption is usually way too high at the outset of such a disaster and production later is in no way assured. Look at WWI, The Depression, The Dust Bowl, WWII. Many countries were effectively starving. Both rainfall and ground water assume you aren't having a drought.
Urban centers are not set up for large-scale rainwater collection. There literally isn't enough open space for all the people in cities to leave a pot outside to collect rain water, when it is raining, and it won't be enough water anyway. Even if every person in a city had a receptacle large enough to collect all the water they needed, many of them simply won't be able to haul it up and down stairs. It's completely infeasible.
What would actually happen is the military and national guard would be mobilized. They would use pumps and water trucks to visit acquifers and wells, and distribute water by truck neighborhood by neighborhood. A continuous stream of trucks constantly resupplying cities. If things got really bad they would get water from streams and boil it before distributing, but that wouldn't last long as it would take too much fuel and time. And they would need to completely secure the water supplies, both as a security concern, and to stop all removal of water except for what was absolutely necessary. Water isn't just for drinking and sanitation, it's also needed for a wide variety of processes, businesses, etc. Water really is a huge problem.
There is no way that gasoline, diesel, LPG, etc production/distribution would remain stable. It would be severely hampered and there would be shortages everywhere. Even during previous "normal" wars, fuel was a huge issue.
I don't know where you got the idea that heating wouldn't be necessary in winter? If you mean "humanity would survive", sure, but also a huge chunk of the population in cold places would die from cold and malnutrition over the first and second winter. Most people do not have a -20F sleeping bag, snow boots, wool underwear, etc even in cold places, because they have heating.
> Urban centers are not set up for large-scale rainwater collection.
This is correct. Even in suburban areas, rainfall may be irregular and supplies to collect it (and render potable, depending on the manner of collection) also unavailable to most people.
> What would actually happen is the military and national guard would be mobilized. They would use pumps and water trucks to visit acquifers and wells, and distribute water by truck neighborhood by neighborhood. A continuous stream of trucks constantly resupplying cities.
At this point, I will be explicit concerning my opinion of your 28 million direct casualty estimate upthread. I think this only makes sense if you think in terms of individual city centers being destroyed, which is a massive underestimation. Modern weapon systems with independent reentry vehicles and warheads yielding around 100 kilotons do not destroy cities; they erase whole metroplexes.
In such a scenario there are no major population centers left to supply or contingents of military to supply them at a meaningful scale. I don’t have much interest in arguing how survivors in outlying areas might migrate in response to the supply chain collapse that follows.
With only 10 large metro-areas destroyed, there are still other very large cities and metro areas. Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Jacksonville, all have over 1M people. San Jose, Austin, Charlotte, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, Denver, Oklahoma City, Nashville, all have from 700K-1M. And there's 20 more with 500K+ people. We have a big-ass country. Military and national guard are spread all over, as well as "industry" that is tapped in time of war (we don't have much of it left, but enough to be useful)
I'm not defending whatever OP's point was, I'm just saying we would have a whole lot of people left. Very few resources, and very poorly distributed, but a lot of people. If we lost 40% of the population it would still be a lot of people.
I think the 10 U.S. metro number itself is somewhat arbitrary here. It’s impossible to say precisely without looking at all parties’ deployed warhead counts and operational plans, but I have seen estimates that put the number of direct casualties over 100 million. (Russia and the United States each have well over 1000 warheads deployed.)
I do accept that towns far from both major metropolitan areas and high value military targets could survive. However, the short term social impact of supply shortages and the longer term agricultural effects of atmospheric changes are difficult to predict.