[hopelite]

Most of these nuclear tests were underground and undersea. In a nuclear exchange, most devices would detonate above the target surface level to maximize destruction through the shockwave.

There is also the secondary impacts that would start immense uncontrolled wildfires all over the planet that would produce much of the nuclear winter effect that is assumed, due to the amount of soot and ash it would produce. But most people would not live long enough to experience the nuclear winter anyways after the explosions, the fireball, the uncontrollable wildfire, the marauding, and the starvation and disease.

If you lived long enough to make it to nuclear winter, you would probably just wish you had died long ago. If you had anyone at all with you, you might have to even make hard decisions about who you can take with you and who to leave behind, and if you managed to somehow get to somewhere where you might be able to feed yourself and survive near the equator, you would only really be living a primitive subsistence life. If you happened to have a female with you, you may try to rebuild the human population, whether she wants to or not. Yes, it’s very grim; but maybe even optimistic. But even if that is pessimistic, at best you will find yourself in a world where there is nothing left that you could rely on for contemporary existence. No communications, no electronics, nothing but manual transportation once any surviving fuel is used up on any surviving carbureted engines, no running water, and you would have to fight off savage roaming marauders, who want all your things and will have thrust everyone into a hellish version of Madmax, etc.

See any of the actual first hand accounts of what happened in the New Orleans and the Superdome after hurricane Katrina for a tiny little taste of what you would be facing.

The nuclear winter would be the least of your problems.

[OkayPhysicist]

Nuclear armageddon would not spell human extinction. Not even close. Most of the southern hemisphere would be basically untouched: No one's wasting their nukes hitting most of South America or Africa, and frankly even Australia's a stretch.

Even in the United States, in a worse case scenario, large swathes would be untouched by the direct blast effects of all-out nuclear war. There's basically nothing in Idaho worth nuking, for example. It would spell civilizational collapse, sure, since the major economic, industrial, and administrative hubs would now be smoking holes in the ground. But for people living in the agricultural interior of the US, most problems would be economic rather than desperate survival.

The effects of EMP are grossly overblown. Most electronic devices would still work fine, once you have a generator or access to the parts of the grid that would not be targets (again, even when you're firing a couple thousand nukes, the windfarms of Iowa are going to be faaaaaar down the list of targets).

The refuge crisis of people migrating from places not completely annihilated but still no longer safe for habitation (think Merced or Gileroy, California) would be straining. Such desperation would breed banditry, sure, but not to the level of a Mad Max hellscape. Most people do not have the stomach for such violence, which is why even in the most apocalyptic conditions (look at say, Syria during its civil war, or Gaza today) you only see a moderate increase in criminality.

Nuclear war can be very bad without making up silly scenarios.

[hopelite]

This is so naive. I suggest you inform yourself more about things you clearly know nothing about. Ironically Iowa would be very much affected and likely depopulated by fallout from primary nuclear targets in Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and North Dakota; not to mention the primary and/or secondary command and control targets in Iowa. Similarly Idaho not only has at the very leas secondary targets in Air Force bases and the nuclear weapons lab, but it would likely also get fallout radiation from the primary targets as winds shift. These things are based on current research and the military and government's own analysis and predictions.

There is also a book you may want to read called "Nuclear War: a Scenario" by Annie Jakobsen [1] so you can be more informed before you blather. It's a summary of what the government expects from a nuclear war, which would very much cause a nuclear winter and the death of at least 5 billion people. And she does not even take into account things you are also ignorant of, that South America/Caribbean, Africa, and Australia are very much also nuclear targets due to military installations in all those places, not to mention the famine. You should really try reading the books I mentioned about what happened during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, since you are also ignorant of what happens in America under such circumstances. There are many other events like the LA riots that also shine a light on on the reality of breakdown in the USA and any other place that is not culturally homogeneous, when the rules no longer apply and there is no one left to keep the savages at bay.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War:_A_Scenario

[lazide]

Hahahaha, no. That is not at all realistic. Just because someone wrote a giant fearmongering book about it doesn’t make it real.

Nukes are bad, but not that bad. Nuclear Winter has never checked out under any serious analysis either.

We’ve had multiple volcanic eruptions orders of magnitude larger than all nuclear armed countries arsenals too.

[defrost]

To clarify, of the 2,121 nuclear tests conducted, 520 have been "above ground" at surface level or atmospheric.

That's more than a quarter, and a good many of the above ground tests were larger blasts than the below ground tests which got smaller and smaller as time progressed and atmospheric tests were phased out.

The nuclear tests I've been present for were underground and relatively small, one fusion 3x Hiroshima yield (which is 'small' for a fusion bomb), the rest fission and micro sub kilo tonne blasts (smaller than mining bench explosions).

The largest bomb, the Tsar, was detonated high in the sky, the sea level dirtiest bomb took out an entire coral reef system and scattered radioactive fallout across the seas to Japan.

> In a nuclear exchange, most devices would detonate above the target surface level to maximize destruction through the shockwave.

... and, it should be said, minimize radioactive fallout as bombs are no longer doped to increase radiation and detonation elevations are chosen to maximize physical shock wave damage and not tear a crater in the earth throwing "fallout" up and outwards.

Nuclear winter itself is a theory that has had less support in recent times, when first put forward it served the people demonstrating against nuclear weapons to highlight the worst case scenario, and it served diplomats that saw MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) as useful way to cap post world war aggression and nuclear escalation.

Many of the scientific papers that support a nuclear winter scenario are little more than rough back of the envelope worst case over estimates with few examples that dig into details and not much support from real world oil fire and volcano data for extended multi year devastating persistence.