"mutually assured destruction" debunked
The notion that the short-term catastrophy caused by nuclear war would prevent it from happening is very much false. What it does mean however is that countries looking to expand will prioritize targets who cannot defend themselves with nuclear weapons (such as Ukraine).
But once only nuclear powers remain in order to expand you will have to be willing to take nuclear hits. There are multiple ways to mitigate the damage that can be caused by other nuclear powers.
0. Spreading out your population and important material/infrastructure over a large area
1. Having people and important infrastructure hidden under ground safe or mostly safe from nuclear weapons.
2. interception of nuclear missiles
3. Have great food stockpiles (ideally lasting years).
4. Doing a first strike to severely damage the nuclear capability of the country you are invading.
5. Deterring a retaliation by having a lot of nukes yourself (so a leader might be afraid to hit back even if you nuke them).
The correct strategy is to start a nuclear war at the moment you have a great enough chance to win. Otherwise if you wait you will give your opponents a chance to surpass you and you do not want that, win now when you can.
Some people have claimed that nuclear war would cause disastrous fallout but that ignores the fact that 2056 tests of nuclear bombs has already been done and most people are just fine, sure there were some issues with it (which led to testing being halted) but nothing like the apocalyptic disaster people have claimed would follow.
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally
The total radioactivity of the fission products is extremely large at first, but it falls off at a fairly rapid rate as a result of radioactive decay. Seven hours after a nuclear explosion, residual radioactivity will have decreased to about 10 percent of its amount at 1 hour, and after another 48 hours it will have decreased to 1 percent. (The rule of thumb is that for every sevenfold increase in time after the explosion, the radiation dose rate decreases by a factor of 10.)
https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/Residual-radiation-and-fallout
StaysAwakeAllWeek said:
Most of the tests were performed over a period of about 20 years, but even if they had all gone off at once it wouldn't have destroyed the world. Nuclear winter is caused by ash from the burning city below being injected into the stratosphere by the intense updraft. So if the nukes aren't targeted at cities there is no nuclear winter effect.
A nuclear winter is very much surviveable for humanity.
The winner of the nuclear war would have control over food so the survivors of the winning country would probably be fine, others might be fucked though.
StaysAwakeAllWeek wrote:
It's not even clear there would be a nuclear winter at all now with the current far smaller nuclear stockpile and much less flammable cities, plus the extra 1 degree of buffer from global warming.
AllergicTOredditors wrote:
Ok smart guy lets wargame this.
First strike, if you can take out command syructure and launch capability you would be able to limit a response now how do you do this since most advanced nations, those with satellite bound early warning detection. In order to get around this you would have to stealth only get a weapon in there so let's play the United States as the target and Russia as the aggressor, Russia gives its mythical suitcase nukes to a couple of I haven't bound zealots of any particular religious order however since they are recruiting from the Middle East factions will say they're Muslims acting in a terrorist capacity, so they're able to get suitcase nukes very close to the US Capitol during a time when they know that the nuclear football is in town and they can get close enough, within a mile., To detonate that would take out the primary responder that being the president and the nuclear football now at the same time a coordinated attack would happen on Cheyenne mountain and within 15 to 20 minutes you could get a sub launch on to primary military bases like Andrews and El Gordo that would limit strike back capability you're going to get hit you're going to suffer damage but not that much,
Now if you have the ability knock down your missiles in the boost phase, your chances of winning got even better, so you're able to knock out a lotof missiles on the boost phase with either space borne kinetic weapons or a system similar to thaad (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) your chances of winning are getting even better.
Now we get to the re-entry vehicle stage are you able to knock out incoming mirvs? Does your country have something similar to iron dome? If so then yeah we're looking at a victory here.
So several major cities have taken heads but you had the foresight to stockpile food reserves medical reserves and personnel outside of areas affected by radiation and destruction from nuclear detonations, if the covid pandemic has taught us anything then we have stockpiled and very likely have if you've been planning this attack, how about if the aggressor was China and you have ghost cities that all of the sudden became populated overnight prior to your sneak attack well your chances of surviving and winning a nuclear war just got even bigger.
Nuclear detonations aren't that terrible I know that sounds inhumane and uneducated but the fact is that the blast radius is only about 1 to kilometers and the radiation is a little over that there's plenty of websites out there that show you the effects of a standard detonation they're not going to be dropping tsar bombs on us they're going to be dropping ballistic missile warheads on us, according to Wikipedia the average yield of a reentry vehicles about 1.2 megatons , And according to simple Google searches the average destruction radius is about 7 miles this includes initial blast pressure wave shockwave and radiation, it takes out a city not an entire country and believe me one country let's say the US so you've managed to take out the nuclear football and Cheyenne mountain and knocked down most of the outbound missiles you take a few hits for five but the United States has suffered a hit on Denver hit on Washington DC very likely hit on California I hit on Florida and some of the coastal areas they're probably not going to want to continue the fight and calm it down so you have a limited exchange with a clear winner and a clear loser it just depends on how stealthily and quickly you can act before the other guy it all depends on the very first hit and that has to be a ground base explosion not as devastating as an Air blast but if you hit the targets you're meant to hit then it's super devastating and will win you the war.