Good point re Australia hosting missile tracking capabilities, I agree that it might be targeted given that. I’m less worried about carrier groups and such things being hit. I don’t disagree that some of these might be hit, and this may result in some fallout in the southern hemisphere, it doesn’t seem like enough to move the dial. The ocean has a lot of area.
I didn’t cover sterilization or birth defects from either the initial fallout or from ingested radionuclides later on. These are both problems, but I would be quite surprised if they killed a large percentage of people’s children or grandchildren in places not near places hit with a nuclear attack. If you have a source for a good assessment of this, I’d be quite interested. The best I have seen is in On Thermonuclear War and we know a lot more about radiation than we did back then.
In a future post I want to discuss how long term effects from various technologies, disasters, weapon systems, etc. could combine to lower the habitability of earth. I certainly think nuclear war could play a big role in this, but not cause extinction without other significant factors.
I don’t think I agree that nuclear war planners would use nuclear winter effects offensively. A lot of effort in nuclear war planning goes into counterforce targeting, which is explicitly to reduce the effectiveness of the enemy’s retaliatory (or reserve / 3rd wave) nuclear strike. This suggests some priority to limiting damage to one’s own side. My impression is that the “mutual suicide pact” approach to deterrence is less popular than it used to be.
“Something that I hadn’t considered before: would it be possible to move people into target areas (before attacks) or radiated areas (afterwards) by using conventional and/or area denial weapons?”
I don’t think so. Generally if you want to increase casualties you would want to have people concentrated as much as possible, so move people into already large cities. However, people during wartime (and pandemics) usually tend to move out from such places, this is shown both by historical experience and to me seems to be the logical way to act (as cities are targeted due to critical infrastructure they contain and most services cities offer become severely limited).
Even if the countryside were targeted deliberately for this effect, conventional weapons cannot be used efficiently for this kind of area denial, for such nuclear weapons seem to be the most effective, maybe alongside with chemical weapons, but those have the same limitation (fallout directed by weather conditions, wind in particular) with far less power.
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Good point re Australia hosting missile tracking capabilities, I agree that it might be targeted given that. I’m less worried about carrier groups and such things being hit. I don’t disagree that some of these might be hit, and this may result in some fallout in the southern hemisphere, it doesn’t seem like enough to move the dial. The ocean has a lot of area.
I didn’t cover sterilization or birth defects from either the initial fallout or from ingested radionuclides later on. These are both problems, but I would be quite surprised if they killed a large percentage of people’s children or grandchildren in places not near places hit with a nuclear attack. If you have a source for a good assessment of this, I’d be quite interested. The best I have seen is in On Thermonuclear War and we know a lot more about radiation than we did back then.
In a future post I want to discuss how long term effects from various technologies, disasters, weapon systems, etc. could combine to lower the habitability of earth. I certainly think nuclear war could play a big role in this, but not cause extinction without other significant factors.
I don’t think I agree that nuclear war planners would use nuclear winter effects offensively. A lot of effort in nuclear war planning goes into counterforce targeting, which is explicitly to reduce the effectiveness of the enemy’s retaliatory (or reserve / 3rd wave) nuclear strike. This suggests some priority to limiting damage to one’s own side. My impression is that the “mutual suicide pact” approach to deterrence is less popular than it used to be.
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“Something that I hadn’t considered before: would it be possible to move people into target areas (before attacks) or radiated areas (afterwards) by using conventional and/or area denial weapons?”
I don’t think so. Generally if you want to increase casualties you would want to have people concentrated as much as possible, so move people into already large cities. However, people during wartime (and pandemics) usually tend to move out from such places, this is shown both by historical experience and to me seems to be the logical way to act (as cities are targeted due to critical infrastructure they contain and most services cities offer become severely limited).
Even if the countryside were targeted deliberately for this effect, conventional weapons cannot be used efficiently for this kind of area denial, for such nuclear weapons seem to be the most effective, maybe alongside with chemical weapons, but those have the same limitation (fallout directed by weather conditions, wind in particular) with far less power.