The author does not understand tactics. Babylon fell when the river Euphrates was diverted and the Medes and Persians marched under the gate and killed the sleeping garrison. Wars are won with tactics more than weapons. It is not the number of weapons that are used that makes the biggest difference but how they are used.<p>There are a lot of scientists here. Imagine what a hundred million volts and hundreds of thousands of bare energized light ion coulombs will do to household wiring. Think electrical fires for thousands of miles. Anything with Romex is going to glow red hot and light the walls on fire. This has never been openly discussed before. I thought you might like to know before civilization is burned to the ground.
But they're destructive enough to be awful for all of us even after you remove exaggeration, so let's not soft pedal the idea of ever justifying them in any war...<p>Other than that, this is a great writeup in how it dissects the technical details of a nuclear war and puts them into perspective.
Is the US really this desperate to start WW3 (okay, it's likely just going to be Russia v. EU, since China is too clever to play ball) ? I guess all those trillions printed in the past two-years can't be spent easily (i.e without inflation) without a war.<p>Talk about monetary constipation.
Nuclear winter/autumn depends on the formation of a firestorm. Only a large sustained firestorm that sustains its own wind system will lift soot into the stratosphere. In the Gulf war, there were no sustained firestorms because fuel was below the ground and came from spot sources.<p>Today fuel loads in major cities are much lower than they were from the 60s to 80s and that makes it more unlikely for firestorms to start from cities.<p>There are a huge caveats to this thinking though.<p>1) Fuel loads from above-ground oil, natural gas, and coal storage areas are big enough to start a massive firestorm. Cushing, Oklahoma alone has enough fuel to cause severe cooling.<p>2) Nuclear strikes to some specific areas, California during a fire season, might create a firestorm that covers a large percentage of the state and burns everything down in just few hours.
The EMP; the radiation sickness; the nuclear winter; the resulting famine: just because the horsemen of the apocalypse ride precisely the required horseflesh to seat a string quartet does not make the idea Bach. <a href="https://youtu.be/cW9FqU2JNBI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/cW9FqU2JNBI</a>
The trolling on HN is getting a little too obvious with all of the "nuclear war won't be so bad" posts all over this place.<p>We all know there are a lot of vested interests itching for WW3. So the question is...why?