| Sorry to add to the endlessly repeated refrain of online discourse, but: source? > You could hit Texas with all of Russia's nukes simultaneously and you'd still fail to kill everyone in that state. It's not hard to imagine pockets of holdouts who happened to be deep underground or whatever, but could you share the facts and analysis you're basing this assertion on? > If you perfectly deployed all of Russia's nukes against population centers in the US, you'd struggle to kill half the population in that one country. Half the US population lives in 146 counties, shaded here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/bnh1ib/half_of_the... More info: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/blog/unequal-counties The best estimates I can find say that Russia has just under 6000 nuclear warheads, e.g., https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-... "Perfectly deployed," that averages 41 warheads for each of the above 146 counties. I can't find reliable assessments of the average size/yield of Russia's warheads, but directionally, I struggle to understand your claim that even perfect deployment of this nuclear arsenal would have a hard time killing half the US population. (As an aside, killing even 10% of the US population, so ~33 million people, in a nuclear strike would obviously be utterly unprecedented in the history of our species.) > If there were an exchange of several thousand nuclear weapons between the US and Russia (highly unlikely even in a nuclear war), the world would keep marching on, despite the vast destruction in several nations. There would be no nuclear winter at all, not even remotely close. Could you provide supporting materials to help me understand the confidence behind these claims? |