lukexcom wrote:Towards the last stages of a full nuclear exchange, one could have surviving SSBNs assigned to the role of lobbing a few warheads towards, say, Mexico, Brazil, China, South Africa, or any other regionally powerful countries per continent. At that point, with the ability to track ICBMs or SLBMs across the world extremely spotty (if functioning at all) from the full nuclear exchange, would anyone really know where the warheads came from the US or Russia?
Even if one pretended that somehow no land or ship radar or person saw the general direction the missiles came from on reentry, it doesn't much matter overall. There would be fictional accounts of some survivors even if somehow there weren't real ones. The desire to do more than nothing in response would be overwhelming, and many would attack one or both of the suspect parties regardless, a war prosecuted until what was left of those already near-destroyed nations went the way of Carthage.
lukexcom wrote:It seems to me that the idea of "spread the love" is to hinder any attempts at the regional powers making any power plays by simply leveling the playing field, and therefore giving a chance to the US government to re-establish itself (assuming the continuity-of-government plans are realistic). This could be achieved by effectively lobbing a few warheads per country. Assuming that regional powers have far higher centralized government & military structures than the US or Russia due to the high costs of decentralization, you wouldn't need many warheads per regional power to take out much of their government and military.
Even if most of the original government leaders were killed, a surviving general or somebody else would soon rise to power. History illustrates that power vacuums never exist for long. To use a random example, the original leaders of the French government in 1789 were dead not long later, with the whole original government structure destroyed, and a few years later a powerful new government existed under someone who had been a mere second lieutenant in 1785 (Napoleon).
A similar situation applies with militaries. Even if pretending the whole military of all the countries was somehow wiped out, a few years later, they'd have new weapons made as long as a moderate portion of their population and even a small portion of their industry survived, like what happened in WWII where it mattered in itself less than you might think if 90+% of a country's original 1939 aircraft were lost by 1944.
The Soviet Union in WWII lost *most* of its pre-war industry as well as 1/5th of its overall population plus a greater percentage in some areas yet rebuilt and kept fighting.
The primary targets of the nuclear war could be more neutralized by far such as if the U.S. was hit by a few thousand nukes and Russia by a few thousand nukes wiping out far closer to 100% of original industry.
But, even if a certain limited fraction of overall arsenals were reserved to stupidly hit each of the other 190 countries in the world with some nukes, there would be some countries hit by only a few nukes which had tens of percent or more of their original population and industry surviving.
To illustrate a principle, unrealistically pretend for a moment that the world's 7 billion population was divided into 10000-person cities spaced apart. There would be 70000 such cities so even the 15000 nukes in the combined arsenals of the world wouldn't be enough to get them all then. In practice, of course, some of the population is rural and much of it is concentrated into bigger cities or cities merging into each other, more efficient to take out with nukes. However, even in the so-called "spread the love" imaginary scenario, the bulk of the U.S./Russian arsenals are expended on priority targets in each other, leaving a much lesser number to use on everyone else.
There are going to be countries in the world with a number of at least moderate-size cities surviving, along with the accompanying capabilities for rebuilding industry. Some of that might be done in the style of distributed production. Germany in WWII produced new equipment up to the very end with many small facilities even while many factories and some cities were flattened, with production that never actually ended fully until the area was taken by ground forces. Airpower and strategic bombardment can fully stop that permanently if and only if there are a sufficient huge number of nukes everywhere under the sun, not just a handful of extras targeted per neutral country.
lukexcom wrote:Assuming that the nuclear exchange is limited to, say, US & Europe vs Russia & China, wouldn't the remaining intact regional powers like Mexico attempt land grabs (for raw resources, if anything) a few decades down the line anyway, as general fallout levels have receded to somewhat more reasonable levels, minus the localized hot-spots?
Decades? You overestimate fallout duration. It is lethal in the short-term in some areas but then far less. It's very dependent on short-half-life radioisotopes since, for example, a gram of a 1-hour half-life radioisotope emits 90000 times the radiation per minute of a gram of a 10-year half-life isotope, all else being equal, since the former has so many more of its atoms decaying per unit time
After a couple days radioactivity is on the order of 1% of what it was in the first hour, then it drops another order of magnitude a couple weeks later, and so on.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt quite quickly, continuing to be lived in with a greater population now than at the time of the bombings. The blast site wasn't quarantined for decades or anything like that.
Some areas would remain for years above conventional regulatory guidelines for prolonged exposure today. Tourists to the Trinity nuclear test site today aren't really supposed to stay indefinitely, with on the order of a mrem/hour there, like the mrem/hour or so of extra cosmic ray exposure on an airline flight. However, there's a huge difference between that (a very, very slight increase in later cancer chance) and the number of orders of magnitude more it takes to cause immediate health effects, kill someone anytime soon, or otherwise keep them out of an area if they were highly motivated or desperate and thus not concerned with following standard regulatory guidelines of today.
Even after being hit by a few thousand nuclear warheads with most of their destruction and fallout concentrated within a moderate number of square miles each, other areas of the 3.7 *million* square mile U.S. would have less fallout, and radiation levels not long later would be low over much of the total area outside of the around 1% of total land area which previously consisted of cities and was most targeted by nukes.
If the government didn't foolishly and evilly nuke the entire rest of the world, then over time there would be redevelopment from some of the other industrialized countries, ones which survived mostly intact. The U.S. would have become an impoverished third-world country after the nuclear devastation. In third-world countries today, foreign companies move in with imported equipment and employ some of the local populace, not necessarily under great working conditions but better than subsistence farming or starvation.
Such tends to happen with the consent of the local government since the outside investment speeding rebuilding is better than nothing. Uninformed people may romanticize pre-industrial living, with idealized depictions from past aristocratic classes who subsisted on the backbreaking labor of slaves or peasants. Some may even romanticize apocalyptic situations. However, a life being dirt-poor actually just plain utterly sucks, and people try to rise beyond if they have any opportunity, like people line up to work and get paid even moderate wages at factories in third-world countries today. (In many cases those factories really should pay much more, but almost anything is better and causes more progress than if everything was primitive).
People would recover the gold in Fort Knox eventually whether it was rubble or not, sell off mining claims where there were still incompletely consumed good sources of ore, cash in on any foreign assets they had pre-war if they were lucky and if those countries still honored them, often attempt to immigrate elsewhere if they could (time for people to swim the Rio Grande headed the other way?), etc.
As a national policy, aside from returning fire at the aggressor if getting nuked, the logical thing to do would be to hold a few hundred nukes in reserve to deter aggression, not attack third parties. However, if none of the arsenal remained, that only be all the more reason to not turn friends or otherwise reasonable people into enemies.
lukexcom wrote:Later on, IF the US continuity-of-government plans work out, a new US government wouldn't have to worry as much as much about its borders and focus on its internal troubles.
That's absurd. In your scenario, there would be a constant fight year after year, decade after decade if necessary until either it was wiped out or it won by defeating the rest of the world combined. The former is what would actually happen, for an already near-destroyed country would have no real chance of conquering the rest of the world.
Human history like WWII, the Hundred Years' War of the 14th/15th centuries, and much more illustrates that people would never forget if most of their loved ones and countrymen were slaughtered, especially not such an unprovoked massacre.
Part of the big picture is that the U.S. is actually only 4% of the world's population now and would be a lesser fraction after the war if it was hit by far more nukes than the neutral countries. The only thing maintaining relative power is far greater levels of economic output, industry, and hardware than average. If those are destroyed, the survivors are far outnumbered and weak compared to the rest of the world combined.
If the rest of the world was on the counterattack, not only would the U.S. not be the dominant world power after losing economic and technological advantage over the other 96+% of the world's population, it wouldn't survive.
Fortunately, this scenario does not seem realistic. Nobody I know in the U.S. military or outside of it would support a so-called "spread the love" policy where you attack friends and innocents alike rather than focusing on your enemies. It may be theoretically possible that everyone making policy is simultaneously amoral and brain-dead, yet it is not likely. General policy is to use nukes with restraint, usually avoid using them unless attacked by WMDs first, and then counterattack an aggressor as opposed to genociding a friendly or neutral nation.
