What is nuclear war going to feel like?

I think some people are confusing doomsday descriptions of the Bible with what would actually happen during and after a nuclear war.

There are several areas with one or more targets that would be completely destroyed, in a scale that we only witness lightly with Hiroshima. But that wouldn't apply to the whole world.

Places without major economic targets, or military, or something like that, could end up untouched.

A lot of people would survive a nuclear war, mostly because there are a lot of places that aren't targeted or countries who don't even have nuclear weapons are not a threat.

However, people would be in a very tight spot afterwards. The global flow of supplies would be destroyed to a degree that would take years, if not decades, to return to minimum levels.

That means that food and every single basic component your life would be gone. From the grocery shop, all the way down to the factories that produce the goods.

Like Einstein said:

'I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.'

reply to post by GarrusVasNormandy


If any country with multiple nuclear reactors gets hit,
it will poison the world.

You think Fukashima is bad?

Imagine that x 1000.

No one would escape radiation poisoning.

The question is, do you think Russia or china would detonate high yield A-Bombs on US soil? Wouldn’t they want small tactical A-bombs so they can come in and harvest our resources after they have taken out all military installations

Darkblade71
reply to post by GarrusVasNormandy

 

If any country with multiple nuclear reactors gets hit,
it will poison the world.

You think Fukashima is bad?

Imagine that x 1000.

No one would escape radiation poisoning.

Actually, the only thing that scientists can tell you for sure, is that they can't tell what will happen.

Chernobyl is a very good lab for the worst case scenario, because it has a 'ground-zero' area with continuous radiation release. Well, even there life moved on. Places where humans stopped moving abouts were refilled with healthy natural life. Wild life returned to areas that it had left due to human "occupation".

We will get sick, and we will go through a bad time. But mother-nature will slap us down for thinking that we can destroy the whole planet with our toys.

Nature isn't made of glass. The only thing that will be obliterated and destroyed is our modern life-style, not life, nor nature...

reply to post by camaro68ss


They'd light off the biggest things they've got .. multiple 'biggest things' .. over the major population centers. (NYC, PHilly, DC, Houston, Detroit, LA, Denver and all the big cities ...) They'd spare the bread basket lands so they could take them over to feed themselves. They's strategically nuke the nuke silos with the small ones so as not to contaminate the farms.

the safest place might be southern Chile in South America, inland from the ocean...anywhere north of the equator will be blown away or highly toxic...down in Southern Chile, you might have a chance depending on the level of contaminated atmosphere, and prevailing winds....maybe it would just be a slower death.

Darkblade71
reply to post by 999zxcv

 

That was an awesome/terrible experiment!

It scared the crap out of everyone, USSR included.

If they had to use the full yield in the bomb they might have torn a hole in the atmosphere
lucky the scientist's went against the military

(?)

How will it be then and how will we prepare?

And for those who do survive, how are we going to adapt?

Will it be a future of dust and kipple or a wasteland beyond knowing.

I just hope we never have to find out what are the answers to this questions...

Hope it doesn't happen

Well lets see,

If there was an exchange in nuclear missiles, there would be more than 1 targeted they would be about 100 missiles targeted to hit different parts. So where ever you are you will almost likely not survive the first initial heat blast and your body will definitely combust into ash like everything around you including other livestock and pets, forestry and plantations, surfaces, materials, vehicles will instantly scorch and melt.

If you survive the initial heat blast then the inhalation of burning toxins like sulphurs and methanes and other gases will most likely kill you if not surrounding explosions from fractured gas pipes and other explosives.

Then the next phase will follow, a shockwave so powerful it's force will destroy and flatten all building structures and public amenities any forestry will be flattened with 250 miles or more of the blast.

If your VERY lucky to survive this then the next phase will be nuclear fallout and radiation levels will be so high you will most likely live for 2 - 4 days before convulsing with sickness and radiation illness.

Unfortunately the survival of nuclear exchange is very small. (Unless you're prepared to go down under)

Lets not forget that we've been nuking the living hell out of our own countries for decades now:

Video-map of every atomic explosion on earth since 1945

But who wants to think about such things?

SprocketUK
That was a horrible film.
Did you ever read Brother in the land? How that is teen fiction I'll never know.
Talk about grim.

'

I've never heard of the book to be honest. After watching threads, I immediately lost all fascination with nuclear holocausts.

I was half tempted to watch it on YT, but then the vivid memories of the lady wetting herself in the street as she sees the bomb coming in, the boy and the girl getting cut to shreds by the glass window (I still have an irrational fear of houses with big windows because of that haha) and the men arguing in the bunker all came flooding back.

You have to hand it to the British, they nail gritty real life drama to a T. And if that is the reality of nuclear war, please God never let it happen.

reply to post by derfreebie


The wealthiest people would not even be on earth to suffer the effects. The ones responsible for it will be on their orbital, lunar or even martian retreats, and their descendants will return to earth when it is habitable again in order to restart their civilization. These people aren't stupid, they are not the most powerful people on the planet for no reason.

Keep an eye on projects such as Mars One. These could potentially be arks, not just in the eventuality of nuclear war, but any one of the myriad of ELE's that threaten us. When these things start to leave the planet then maybe you should prepare.

Aqualung2012
Lets not forget that we've been nuking the living hell out of our own countries for decades now:

Most nuclear tests have either been underground, or high altitude. There is a vast difference in the atmospheric effects of underground/high altitude detonations, and detonations that actually destroy ground targets as large as cities.

en.wikipedia.org...

Nuclear winter (also known as atomic winter) is a hypothetical climatic effect of countervalue nuclear war. Models suggest that detonating dozens or more nuclear weapons on cities prone to firestorm, comparable to the Hiroshima city of 1945,[1] could have a profound and severe effect on the climate causing cold weather and reduced sunlight for a period of months or even years by the emission of large amounts of the firestorms smoke and soot into the Earth's stratosphere.[2]

Similar climatic effects are believed to have followed large comet and asteroid impacts in the past, due to sulfate bearing rock being pulverized and lofted high into the air combined with the ignition of multiple forest firestorms,[3][4] which is sometimes termed an impact winter, and following a supervolcano eruption, pluming sulfate aerosols high into the stratosphere, known as a volcanic winter.[5]

An actual nuclear war would inevitably to cities as targets, which would lead to a nuclear winter, and in such a case all most all vegetation on the planet would die from sudden, substantial temperature drops.

Immediately, that means no more crops. No more crops and civilization crumples like a wet napkin trying to support a boulder.

reply to post by CaticusMaximus


Star for a great reply. I agree, and understand that all of that is true.

The video I posted shocked me though, back when I first saw it... and it almost served as a bit of a comfort to me in light of this thread...

...until your well stated reply.

I tried

This is a great question, and I think it depends on various factors. But first of all, do not waste any energy worrying about the Ukranian mess going on at the moment, because the odds of nuclear war being triggered are, by my estimates, 19 to 1. Others may not agree exactly with those numbers, and I won't get into how I arrived at that conclusion, but the point is that such an outcome is not very likely. In fact, the chances may be even less than 4-5%, which means the outcome is possible, but will happen only a handful of times out of one hundred. I don't think the odds are in favor for a nuclear strike by the US or Russia.

I say this because Putin obviously cares about what the West thinks, otherwise why bother with attempting to make a Crimean takeover look justified? But that is not the point of your thread, so moving on...How close one is to the blast will make a huge difference. Many people think of a nuclear explosion wiping out a very large portion of a country like the US, but the truth of the matter is that the actual explosion, while much larger than conventional explosives, is not that large. A large city could definitely be taken out with a high-yield warhead, that is for certain, but it would take many nuclear warheads exploding on impact or in the atmosphere for a significant portion of the population to be wiped out.

And the truth of the matter is that out of all the nukes that would be launched at the US, not all of them would reach their target. The US has an anti-ballistic missile shield, a conglomerate of independent units, that could take down a nuclear tipped missile. I would say the US is more advanced in this area than any other country, because there are likely some elements to the US program that remain classified. I believe this shield started with Raegan's Star Wars program, but I'm not certain, and has remained in existence until now, although it did suffer some setbacks occasionally.

Basically these systems shoot an intercepting projectile at incoming missiles. It takes a distinctive type of system to intercept most nuclear projectiles, because of the high velocities, so it will take a different system to intercept an ICBM as opposed to a ballistic missile that is meant for shorter ranges. In fact, some of the systems that the US has for such a purpose, intercepting missiles, contain no explosives. They are basically akin to a large bullet, which will impact its target with quite a lot of energy. It is really neat in my opinion.

But anyway, what I was getting at before I went off on a tangent is that the nuclear fallout after an explosion is going to reach much further than the explosion itself. Depending on the magnitude of the attack, there could even be a nuclear winter. Many things would go wrong with our way of life, and it would not be easy. And in my opinion, from a strategic point of view, if a nuclear missile attack does come, it will involve a large number of warheads. No nuclear nation would purposefully launch a nuclear strike with a handful of missiles. And once nuclear weapons are launched, there is a high probability that the nation being attacked would retalliate with nuclear weapons. Thus comes about mutually assured destruction.

But the other option to MAD is the reason the Star Wars program was invented I believe...To give an alternative to mutually assured destruction, by being able to keep these missiles from striking their targets. I think the US is capable at the moment to bring down maybe 20-30 incoming nuclear missiles, but I am not certain to be honest. That is just a guess on my part, knowing some of the systems that are in place. If I remember correctly, the US strateg shifted to focusing on regional defense systems as opposed to larger ones, and therefore there could be large gaps in the defense system. Surely such information would be highly classified, so that the enemy could not easily bypass our systems.

If one was certain that life after a nuclear war would be hell on earth, and that the chances of survival were small, then being in the direct path of the blast might be the easy way out. I definitely do not think one would feel any pain at all. The worst thing would probably be not dying from the blast, but being hit with massive doses of radiation. The world's nuclear arsenals are not advanced enough at this point to use non-radiation causing nuclear devices.

Something that most people don't realize is that even if all the nuclear devices in the world were detonated, the dose of radiation, if divided up among the population of the earth, would be well below the lethal limit. A nuclear war probably would not end life on earth, and the effects of radiation would depend on how close one way to the blast. The radiation component of such weapons are definitely the most far-reaching lethal effect, but one still has to be relatively close to get a lethal dose.
Another thing most people don't realize is that the only nuclear devices ever launched in aggression, in WWII Japan, did not really cause much fallout damage. All of the radiation damage that was done was accomplished within the first minute or two of the blast.

And what I mentioned about nuclear arsenals not being advanced enough to reduce radiation has to do with two things. First, the fact that there are different types of atomic weapons, with different radiation levels being generated...And second, the possibility that a hydrogen bomb could be produced that substitues the primary fission stage for something else. I've heard talk of such a thing, but I don't know how feasible it would be...But I think it is possible.

So to sum it up, you would still have to be relatively nearby to a nuclear explosion to be killed, and it would take a whole host of individual explosions to produce an appreciable amount of damage to the entire country.

FlyersFan
www.nuclearsecrecy.com...
Interactive nuke map. Blow up whatever you want and see the effects.
I 'blew up' Philadelphia with Russias biggest nuke (which would be used on Philly).
I'm wiped out. So I dont 'have to worry about a nuclear aftermath.

edit on 3/19/2014 by FlyersFan because: (no reason given)

thanks for posting that, i couldn't remember the link.

i'm on lantau island near the airport of hong kong.

so i will be toast right away. altho there are a couple mountains between me and Central, where they would lob a nuke.
nothing to hit here cept the airport.

reply to post by woodwardjnr


that happened to me too after the 9/11 attacks.

When Bush started talking about WMDs and the media knobs squawked about nuclear war, I ended up having a dream about being caught in a nuclear blast.

Pretty scary dream for a 10 year old

reply to post by tsingtao


I'm dead either way too, dropping the big one on both cities near me.

At least we can have a little fun with this subject despite the implications

reply to post by DeadSeraph


we do not possess enough bombs as an entire race of creatures to cause a "nuclear winter" this is entirely cold war sci-fi made up for our enjoyment in novels, movies and video games. When you look at the worlds nuclear weapons, their yield and the area they actually are effective on, it's basically enough to blow up all of the US, or maybe All of Russia(big difference in size there but still not the entire earth... oh and russia is the bigger one... by a lot.[Russia, canada, USA, china, Australia I believe. Top 3 I'm pretty sure of.... actually the US may not be a top 3 largest by land mass country])