How would you threaten a country that has thousands of nukes and has just used them? I can only see economic sanctiosn personally, the risk of threatening a nuclear power just isn't worth it. Better to build a massive coalition to deny them every possible resource.If Russia nuked Kyiv... would we retaliate?
I think nuclear weapons make the situation vastly different to the outbreak of ww2.
All parties now know that a full scale war likely leads to the annihilation of the planet/the human race.
There is no conceivable way to "win" anymore.
Not sure about the annihilation of the planet. Obviously yields are an order of magnitude higher now than they were in WW2, but back then it would have taken 24 20 kilo ton bombs just to cover the Isle of Wight. The ones dropped on Japan only has a 2km radius
I mean in terms of sustaining human life. The planet (ie the rock itself) will be fine, but a big enough nuclear war could lead to the planet becoming pretty uninhabitable.
It ain't going to make big parts of the planet very nice places but most of those nuclear winter, etc. scenarios were based on big old dirty multi-megaton atom bombs being used exclusively against cities - say 3-4x 10MT bombs used against an urban area would result in vast amounts of burn off, vast amounts of stuff being kicked into the upper atmosphere as well as radiation fallout.
Most countries have been moving more towards multiple-warhead missiles in the 100s of kiloton range, more often configured for airburst use where fallout is much less, and many would be used against military assets (and civilian infrastructure) to try and prevent retaliation, etc. significantly reducing the amount of ash produced and the amount of ash and other material which would be injected into the stratosphere.
The resultant collapse of society would be as much a factor as anything in terms of the conditions the survivors would be faced with.
We need 1.2 million heavy duty nukes to wipe out humanity.
Russia has 5k warheads. America 4k. France 300, Israel, UK, China circa 200 each.
Not even 1% of humanity
I never understood the fascination with the idea that you need to literally blanket every square inch of the planet to destroy civilisation. Even if the nukes only flattened the major cities, that is the entire global economy in disarray and there's more than enough warheads to achieve that.
I never understood the fascination with the idea that you need to literally blanket every square inch of the planet to destroy civilisation. Even if the nukes only flattened the major cities, that is the entire global economy in disarray and there's more than enough warheads to achieve that.
Exactly.
A large nuclear war would likely mean the end of human civilization as we know it and would cause massive damage to the planets ecosystems.
Exactly.
A large nuclear war would likely mean the end of human civilization as we know it and would cause massive damage to the planets ecosystems.
So basically you're mostly talking about western society and way of life.
Ah you've now added a new phrase of "as we know it"
As we know it where? For the tuaregs it probably wouldn't change things too badly, same for other nomadic type tribes, and even countries and cities. No-one for example is going to spend too much time attacking middle Africa, there is nothing of importance there for the nuclear powers.
So basically you're mostly talking about western society and way of life.
The nuclear winter would affect everyone left, those people in middle Africa wont be living very long when their crops fail.