[chakalakasp]

The author is wrong. The people who are experts at doing this kind of thing for a living very much believe that a general nuclear war will destroy nearly all infrastructure.

Don't just believe random bloggers with no expertise in the things they're bullshitting about. Even in the open source world, there is an entire body of expert information on this topic that contradicts what this guy is saying.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Can you point to some people / papers / where these people hang out? I'd like to do some reading

[chakalakasp]

Sure, here are a couple of resources, both for Russia and the U.S.

For the U.S. plan to attack Russia, the NRDC did an interesting hypothetical attack around 20 years ago to show the impact a U.S. attack would have on Russia. (It's hypothetical because the actual attack plans are classified to the point that even Senators on the big committees don't get to see them when they angrily ask for them.) The report on that hypothetical is here: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/us-nuclear-war-plan...

For the Russian plan to attack the U.S., this reddit thread is a guy who did this for a living answering questions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/trkfe7/three_hypotheti...

The submitter, https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/, has deep knowledge of the issue, and answers a lot of questions. He's kinda a hothead, though, if asked questions the wrong way. I chalk it up to the kind of stress that might come from realizing that the plans you helped to develop to kill hundreds of millions of people might actually get put to use in the foreseeable future.

He also answers some questions in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/tpa3ao/openriso...

The nuclear winter stuff is more interesting. Most recent papers are very much thinking it's a very big deal:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3155983 http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ChinaNWrice8inpress.pd... https://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/OzdoganNuclearWinterM... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF00... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5478 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1919049117 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JD02... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD03...

One paper that feels the nuclear winter risk is overstated is from LLNL: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2020...

This paper talks a bit about the uncertainties regarding nuclear winter right now. Mainly lack of data for modelling: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2021.1...

A lot of the questions revolve around whether nuclear detonations would create firestorms in contemporary U.S. cities, and if they did, if those fire storms would be strong enough to generate pyrocumulonimbus clouds that drew the soot into the stratosphere on a widespread scale. If firestorms do start, based on PNW fire studies, it seems that pyrocumulonimbus clouds would be a very common thing: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax1748

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I really appreciate this!