NapoleonGH wrote:umm Mike, you do realize that when i talk about killing everyone i dont mean in the immediate blast, i mean in the dispersion of mass amounts of long duration radioisotopes, destruction of food services, nuclear winter, etc. Do recall that what struck the planet to wipe out the dinosaurs et al hit in 1 localized area, we are talking about being able to use nukes to cover the square area of the world, lets do the math and see what happens.
And the math does not support you. Nuclear winter is a hoax; the amount of material which must be hurled into the atmosphere to produce serious long-term global cooling is vastly in excess of that produced by a few gigatons of nuclear weapons. And with more than 500 million square kilometres of surface area on Earth (say, 150 million square km of land mass) and only a few thousand weapons, they just don't have the coverage. As for fallout, need I remind you that more people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived than died?
Earth is 6.38e3km in radius, ie 6380km assuming it is spherical (a slight inaccuracy but we are tlaking about a very minor difference) by the formula of 4pir^2 for surface area of a sphere the earth has a surface area of 163000000*pi(3 sigfigs were used because there are 3 sigfigs in the base number following the rules taught by my science teachers, you use the lowest number of sig figs from a given in calculating the results. so about 512000000 sq km surface area. 11% of the world's area is inhabited by humans (according to
http://www.sarrchasm.com/sidewalks/report.html, i realize not the best source, but this is consistant with all other numbers i have found so the total inhabited area is 56320000 sq km divde by 8000 (the nubmer i have heard most often quoted for us nuke capability) leaves 7040 sq km for each nuke, an area with a radius of about 47.34km.
Most of which are low-yield. Megaton-class nukes are very rare now.
The area effected by the fallout of the very first US H-bomb (about 11 megatons if memory serves) was about 7000 sq km. If we assume that the average nuke in the US's arsenal is at the level of the first Hbomb used (considering tactical nukes being much lower and other nukes being much higher i would guess this is roughly accurate),
Nonsense; are you suggesting that the average strategic nuke is much larger than 11 megatons now? Where do you pull this information from? And where does "area affected" turn into 100% fatalities? A slightly elevated contamination level is bad, but it will hardly result in 100% fatalities. In fact, long-term contamination from megaton-yield blasts is extremely low, because most of the fissile material is blown into the upper atmosphere by the blast. Low-yield nukes actually produce more fallout.
then we can see that the US can with its nukes take out pretty much every inhabited area in the world. This clearly isnt 10 times over as I had stated earlier, but mind you this is the direct immediate fallout pattern, if one took wind into account and the destruction of food production/nuclear winter, it could take considerably fewer nukes to take out the world's population.
Your figures are grossly exaggerated. Nuclear winter effects were greatly exaggerated during the Cold War, disregarding atmospheric processes that act to remove such impurities from the air and vastly exaggerating the amount of upper-atmospheric particulate matter by ASSUMING that global firestorms would erupt and hurl vast amounts of soot into the air (note: no firestorm has ever done this; the energy requirement is much greater than chemical combustion at ground-level can provide).
In fact, a single giant impact is much MORE efficient than a dispersed series of small impact at creating certain global environmental effects. And dispersion is not godlike anyway; you can't take 15 tons of TNT, disperse it around a city, and expect it to be as lethal as a single 15 kiloton warhead. A 1000:1 ratio of effectiveness is simply ridiculous.
Smart.
