> Hiroshima and Nagasaki

That was not a nuclear war. If one country gets nuked today, the rest of the world nuclear arsenal will be expended.

There is an infinitesimal chance that only one nuke goes off, or only one country nukes and the other doesn't.

This is why Mutual Assured Destruction is such an effective peace time strategy, until it isn't.

No one knows what would happen if one nuke goes off. It’s not even a given that there would be retaliation. MAD is a very useful piece of propaganda to deter that first nuke, but it is not a given.

If Russia sent one Nuke to warsaw, and threatened that New York City, would be the next target followed by Barcelona, Paris, etc. If Putin then says: if you stand down. I will not nuke any other cities. Don't give me more reasons to send Nukes.

The sad thing is - the madman holding the nuke button has all the control. He's crazy so he'll do anything. He's old enough not to care about dying and destroying the whole world with him.

Everything doesn't just swing into action automatically. Poland gets nuked. Congresses, UN, Nato all hold virtual summits to figure out what to do. A week later, they decide this can't stand but if we can save 5 million lives in NYC, maybe we should.

It would like play out more like chess by mail, Putin makes a move, Biden makes a move, maybe Germany makes their own move, etc.

Once the game is in motion, it can go many ways. All Russia needs to do is cut a deal with a few NATO countries to let them be 'neutral' if they keep their noses out of things, and Nato falls apart, and then it leaves USA vs them, of course the way Russia military runs things that's not a big threat.

Another thing to think about - most of Russia's military officers are corrupt. They've been embezzling funds meant for supplies/equipment etc for years and now they finally need that equipment, they're getting shown off for fraudsters.

It costs iirc something like a billion every 10 years PER nuke just to update them and keep them working. On top of that I've read there could be as high as a 60% failure rate for normal nukes in action, probably due to the fact they mostly spend their entire lives just sitting in a bunker somewhere. Quality checking may not get done as often because of the radiological risks etc.

I'm betting of all the nukes in existence, Russia's by a magnitude of 20 maybe are more likely to fail than China or USA or other countries that actually have a competent military.

This is nonsense. Poland is a NATO member state. If Warsaw was attacked by Russia, it would trigger article 5 of the treaty, effectively declaring war on all member states. If the attack was carried out with a nuclear weapon, there would likely be a retaliatory strike. Voila, WW3.

Furthermore, however insane any leader of a nuclear power may be, I just got to believe there are competent, clear-headed people in the chain of command who would refuse to follow suicidal orders while not under immediate attack themselves.

The FEMA simulated strike maps from the 70s show common targets. Mostly in the midwest, large concentrations in the coasts. This of course assumes civilians are mostly left alone, which is unlikely in a large scale nuclear war.

The strike maps also show the fallout zones. Wind channels [1] take a large portion of fallout that will cover a significant amount of land mass. The map in [1] shows the case ONLY if strategic targets are hit. That doesn't include hitting major production centers, cities, places of national significance, etc. If 1/3 of Russia's nuclear arsenal made contact with CONUS [1] would most likely be nearly 100% red.

There's no doom posting here (other than the doom of nuclear war). I fully understand what they are capable of. 800Kt bombs may cause small immediate destruction (relative to other large Mt+ bombs) but it's the fallout that will kill majority of people.

Further, hiroshima and nagasaki were isolated events and the US was the only nuclear superpower. They were attacked with roughly 15kt bombs that had inefficient reaction designs, roughly 1/10th to 1/100th the size of the weapons in most superpowers arsenals today. ICBM lifted devices are so much larger than little boy and fat man we can only suppose the level of damage. SLBMs aren't much smaller.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fallout_map_USA_(FEM...

Your theory is that fallout will kill more people than the explosions themselves. Let’s test it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, each of which causes immediate casualties on the order of 100 000 people. Did the fallout from each of them kill millions of people? No. Did it rendered any part of Japan uninhabitable wasteland? No, in fact both cities were continuously inhabited from immediately after the bombing to the present day.

Fallout is not some magic poison that kills everyone on contact. It mostly causes extra cancers. People will die from cancers, of course, but I guarantee that in case of nuclear war, more people will die to starvation due to the collapse of production and supply chains resulting from large scale infrastructure and human capital destruction.

In locations of significant fall out the Sv./hr could be high enough to induce radiation poisoning. Inhalation of fallout allows alpha particles to bypass your skin and cause cancers faster (or again, radiation poisoning).

A better example than those bombings is chernobyl which despite it's relatively small sized (compared to actual nuclear weapons) induced significant levels of radiation sickness and long term cancers due to the fallout.

Certainly fallout is less dangerous than starvation. However, it also isn't something to just hand wave as not a big deal. It hinders your travel, can cause various degrees of sickness, etc. I dont think it's a far stretch to say that the total effect of a large scale nuclear war will primarily be felt in the fallout which will cause deaths in places completely uneffected by the war.

> In locations of significant fall out the Sv./hr could be high enough to induce radiation poisoning.

Yes, but those won’t be the vast red marked areas on the map you posted, it will be much more localized.

> A better example than those bombings is chernobyl which despite it's relatively small sized (compared to actual nuclear weapons) induced significant levels of radiation sickness and long term cancers due to the fallout.

To the contrary, Chernobyl again provides arguments against your theory. First, the number of people who got radiation sickness is rather low (between 100 and 200), and it only affected people who actually worked directly on the site of the disaster. Second, there is in fact very little evidence of increased cancer due to Chernobyl disaster among people other than the few hundred people on site on the day of disaster. One exception is good evidence for few thousand extra thyroid cancers, These are very easily treatable (90%+ success rates) in normal circumstances, so the might cause some problems in the nuclear war scenario, but an easy way to avoid it is to not eat fresh grown food for a few weeks right after the disaster (you can store it and it eat later).

> However, it also isn't something to just hand wave as not a big deal. It hinders your travel, can cause various degrees of sickness, etc.

Of course, but observe how you are backpedaling from your original “everyone is dead” claim. Look, if you think I am arguing that nuclear war is no biggie, you are much mistaken, and you need to read more carefully. All I’m saying is that it is very much false that everyone will die, either directly from bombs or later from fallout. Plenty of people will die, but given the realities of scale, plenty will survive too.