Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "There is NO DOUBT that most of human life (and a good portion of other terrestrial life forms) will perish in a nuclear exchange.";
LOL, link or lie.
The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki got about 250,000 fatalities each. There are something around 8 billion people on the planet. At the population density of those two towns to kill 4 billion people would require 4,000,000,000/250,000 = 16,000 bombs. And it might barely be possible to count up that many bombs total. But in a complete nuclear exchange most of the bombs would be targeted on military targets, not civilian. Most of the people in the US, China and Russia would survive.
Before both world wars the authorities sometimes estimated that strategic bombing would kill the majority of civilians in major cities. Of course there were a huge number of tons of bombs dropped on cities in Germany, Japan and Britain but the death toll was tiny compared to the estimates. Humans aren't that easy to kill.
It's like chemical weapons. The amount of mustard gas needed to kill a human is tiny. But in actual field conditions, the amount required turns out to be many tons. You obtain this figure by taking the number of tons of chemical weapons used in the first world war and dividing by the total number of fatalities. Same applies to small arms. The US military buys (and uses) 1.6 billion rounds of small arms ammunition per year. After five years of manufacture, the total human population should be dead. God knows how many 7.62 rounds are produced and yet the human race continues not only to survive, but to thrive. Humans just aren't that easy to kill. The calculations that conclude that humans are about to exterminate themselves from military weapons do not take into account how good humans are at surviving. To use 10 or 20,000 bombs to kill half the population you'd have to herd them into prearranged target points beforehand.
-- Carl |
