M.A.D
Mutually Assured Destruction
During the Cuban middle crisis and around the time of Tsar Bomba people in the US had the capability to make 10 Gigaton Bombs.
Checkout the super relevant movie Threads. Shows the horrors of nuclear holocaust in excruciating detail. It takes place in the UK but the situation would be the same anywhere nukes hit: complete and utter devastation for all.
More evidence that Meta is trying to destroy the world
Nukes are like Tik tac toe.
A strange game the only winning move is not to play.
“Shall we play a game…?”
Nuclear weapons spread vast quantities of highly toxic, highly radioactive dust in all directions, clean into the stratosphere.
Any significant use of these weapons would render the entire planet uninhabitable, and cause total catastrophic breakdown of every ecosystem. Even if you survived the direct attack, there would be no clean air, no clean water - and in a very short time, no plants or animals. The forests and oceans would die, there’d be nothing left to cycle CO2 back to oxygen, the ocean currents would be disrupted, rainfall patterns would be destroyed (even if they weren’t coating everything in more radioactive dust), it would be impossible to grow food - the planet would simply stop sustaining life. And that’s not even counting nuclear winter, an ice age brought on by the sheer quantity of stratospheric dust blocking out the sunlight (not dissimilar to the meteor wiping out the dinosaurs)
It’s hard to cast yourself as a winner if you’re shitting your intestines out from radiation poisoning, with no hope whatsoever of anyone at all getting through this.
See, you got the basic idea right with nuclear winter, but fallout wouldn’t be a significant part of is in most places. Nukes do the most damage in an airburst, and they don’t make a lot of fallout unless there’s solids in the fireball.
There’s also the whole “no remaining cities to fight with” thing.
because when you’re fighting with nukes there are no winners. Only a destroyed hellscape.
It’s called mutually assured destruction. 2 nuclear nations likely have the firepower to wipe each other off the face of the planet.
How can a country win when it no longer exists? It’s very hard to stop a nuke that’s been launched, and it takes an ICBM a couple hours to arrive after they’ve obviously been launched, at which a point the other guy fires back. Basically both sides of the exchange get hit hard, and have most of their cities and industrial capacity burned down with the people inside. And that’s not even considering a possible nuclear winter, which modeling suggests would last a decade.
This is also why tech to block missiles is controversial. If you open up an even tenuous path to victory for one side the odds of a war starting get much higher.
one word (and a number): WarGames (1983)
If any nuclear attack would be met with a counter attack using nukes, the whole world would suffer from the fallout that wouldn’t be contained only within the national boundaries of the countries that get nuked.
