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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (51456)	5/14/2014 8:12:20 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

Re MAD people in Washington and nuclear winter. We have already had two demonstrations of what happens and apart from the local death and destruction at the time, it's not too bad. To estimate the effects of 20,000 going off more or less at the same time, just multiply by 20,000. ploughshares.org Look how many cities and towns there are around the world: mongabay.com 300 megabombs would be needed just to get those over 1 million people. Then all the military bases and individual targets such as ships would need to be bombed. It would be comparable to the Black Death hundreds of years ago in the scale of impact, though with a lot more destruction to go with the deaths. 4 x 20 megatons on NZ would get only a third of the population. With another 20 x 5 megatons, about half the population would be gone. With another 100 x 2 megatons, it would get up to maybe 60%. There are about 600 towns: en.wikipedia.org There would be no nuclear winter effect in NZ. It would create a lot of vacant ground where there are towns and cities, but not much overall impact. Total land area = 200,000 useful area [260,000 total km2] With 100 km2 leveled for each blast, that would be 600 x 100 = 60,000 km2 leveled. About quarter of the total. That leaves a lot of space to be going on with. In a year, or three, greenery would cover everything again. Lake Taupo erupting would do a comparable amount of land destruction. And shut off the electricity supplies from the Waikato river permanently. Atomic bombs wouldn't do too much damage to electricity supplies - the fragile stuff could be rebuilt. The river and dams would remain intact unless specifically targeted. Same for water supplies. It would certainly not be Game Over other than for those affected. So, just for NZ, we'd need 600 bombs out of the 20,000. That wouldn't leave enough for everywhere else. The USA would need about 5000 just to warm up. Great Britain and the rest of Europe would need 10,000. China would need 10,000. India 10,000. We are already out of stock and we haven't started on Africa, South America, the rest of Asia. That's not how they would be spread though. Targeting would be largely at enemy forces and cities. So the rubble of Washington would bounce several times. Rocket sites would get a couple each to make sure. There are many launch sites, B52 takeoff zones and other important targets. So they might not have many left over for NZ, which they could deal with at their leisure if they have spares. No nuclear winter Hawk. Only about half the world dead with perfect population targeting. Probably only quarter. Maybe only 10%. The whole USA population is only 5%. Add Russia and it's only 7%. The Greenies would think that perhaps would be sad, but a good thing [unless it affected them, which it would do]. It would certainly cut CO2 emissions a lot, once the smoke had cleared. There's a good chance that we will live to find out firsthand. They didn't go to all that trouble to build them just for fun. Putin is rattling his nuclear sabre. History is not all pleasant when bossy kleptocrats get on a roll. Mqurice