Re:Ask HN: How do you plan to survive a nuclear war?
by mateo1 on Saturday March 19, 2022 @02:18AM
(#30731603)
I wish you were joking but you're not. I hope neither you nor your loved ones die "very soon" after the blast trapped in rubble or with their skin flailing and their clothes fused to their bodies. This combination of half-truths and certainty is very, very dangerous.
Re:Ask HN: How do you plan to survive a nuclear war?
by moistly on Saturday March 19, 2022 @12:13PM
(#30734965)
Please point out the "half-truths."
Everything I wrote, save the last paragraph, is well-documented.
My opinion, expressed in the last paragraph, is supported by the atrocious levels of corruption in Russia and its obvious effect on the Russian military as demonstrated by everything we've seen of their performance this past month.
Also, it's really quite sick that you wish me to die a lingering, painful death. That you've expressed such a desire is perhaps something you should ponder long and hard: it isn't healthy.
Re:Ask HN: How do you plan to survive a nuclear war?
by mateo1 on Saturday March 19, 2022 @01:33PM
(#30735726)
You all but said that a nuclear war is an acceptable choice. As for wishing your death, I literally did the exact opposite. It is you who considers a few million deaths acceptable, what I'm saying is that you should try to understand that you might be included in the statistics.
Re:Ask HN: How do you plan to survive a nuclear war?
by moistly on Saturday March 19, 2022 @02:01PM
(#30736016)
I said no such fucking thing, and you said you hope I don’t die very soon, implying you hope it drags out, and you haven’t identified any half-truths. Get bent.
Re:Ask HN: How do you plan to survive a nuclear war?
by tomjen3 on Sunday March 20, 2022 @06:13AM
(#30741464)
You are not wrong about the local effects of it, but that can happen with conventional weapons too. The firestorm in Dresden and Japan were as horrific as you described and predates operational nukes.
Re:Ask HN: How do you plan to survive a nuclear war?
by phillipseamore on Saturday March 19, 2022 @12:37PM
(#30735175)
The real power of nuclear weapons is in all the FUD surrounding them and absolutely not in using them. Having or threating to use a nuclear weapon is many times more effective than actually deploying it.
If you can find the publication "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson H. Kearny, published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory — it was posted in an HN thread the other day — look to page 23: "Unsurvivable 'nuclear winter' is a discredited theory that, since its conception in 1982, has been used to frighten additional millions..." The document has quite a few "Myth/Facts" items for one's consideration.
Reading Wikipedia regarding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should provide some amount of comfort. About a third of their populations died immediately/very soon after the blast. Of those surviving: "the average lifespan of survivors was reduced by only a few months compared to those not exposed to radiation."
So if you live in a big city, the odds are already in your favour. If you live in a smaller city or town, you're probably not going to be nuked anyway.
Radiation falls off exponentially quickly. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both re-occupied within a year of the bombing.
More than 2000 nuclear bomb tests have taken place. In 1961 alone, 140 tests were conducted. For decades after, forty to sixty nukes a year were detonated. And yet more radiation was sent up into the atmosphere via a few nuclear power plant incidents. And yet we've continued ticking along just fine. The detonation of a few hundred bombs will not have a big global impact. It certainly wouldn't cause anything like a nuclear winter.
Finally, it seems very likely that Russian corruption is so pervasive that it's unlikely that their missiles have been well-maintained. You don't get to be a billionaire oligarch by spending government funding appropriately: you steal it and tell the bosses that, sure, those warheads you never plan to use are in great condition. IMO if the command comes down the line, the missiles will largely fail to launch; and of those that do successfully launch, few will make it to their target, and fewer yet will successfully detonate.