could sit it out in their bunkers cheering for the destruction of all of us poor folks. I am being sarcastic, obviously. But I sometimes wonder if the rich don't have such a scheme up their ermine sleeves. Maybe people are just stupid enough to pull the nuclear trigger. I hope we just pop em all off. I would sooner be vaporized than starving to death with all those around me. I am selfish, though.

Have ambassadors to any countries been appointed in this administration? Other than the obvious ones to Trump's friends and donors.

My two cents:
Our relationship with India is tenuous, at best, and we have little to no diplomatic leverage.

Our relationship with Pakistan has always been based around either fear (economics) or money (bribery) but that is unlikely to be effective in this case.

China or Russia likely have far better negotiating power here. China claims part of Kashmir but that doesn't necessarily work in their favor here as both India and Pakistan want all of it.

This isn't the first time there has been fighting between these two but that doesn't mean this time might not be the last time.
Pakistan is the smaller and the only one heavily influenced by religious radicals of the three and therefore the most likely to use a nuke to level the playing field a little.

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How many hundreds of nukes are they going to set off, when they only have several dozen?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

And for some reason I was always under the impression that the major powers stopped large scale testing during the 60's. No idea where I developed that idea from. Time to go spend a few hours reading up on this.

Nuclear winter isn't caused directly by the nuclear explosions. It is caused by the burning of entire cities following the explosions with such intensity that massive amounts of dark soot is lofted into the stratosphere. This soot is what blocks sunlight and cools the planet.
It explained as much in the OP.

Nuclear tests in unpopulated areas or underground isn't comparable.

And beyond that, 100-150 nukes each, many considerably larger than the 15-kt estimate used in this study, isn't a few dozen.

Nuclear winter is the term for a GLOBAL cooling event caused by clouds of soot and ash entering the stratosphere, encircling the globe, and blocking sunlight.

Billions of people are going to die for a plot of land the size of Kansas?!?

The absurdity of our life and times us mind numbing.

Really. It's not going to happen.

That said, the wrong move or threat or push, is all it takes to bring that house of cards down.

Pakistan is the smaller of the three landowners in terms of population and military and has religious radicals influencing policy. They would seem the most likely to resort to a "final" solution on the issue to level their playing field.

i still feel like they might WANT to nuke India, but their nukes probably don't work anymore.

And not based on any science. People would die in in India and Pakistan if their nukes still worked but nowhere else.

India is run by nationalists of the BJP, Pakistan also has nationalists, and I would even say Islamist groups in the country are as nationalist as they are religious.

This is what nationalism has gotten us before in World War 2, this is what nationalism will get us again in the future.

That is not how this really works.

A limited exchange by these two countries, and that is all they are able to have BTW, would not equal the St Helens eruption in 1980.

Luckily, they have decided not to find out.

In the heyday of nuclear testing there were many years of 50+ nuclear explosions. Many of those explosions were far greater than 50 times the Hiroshima bomb, some greater than 1000 times.

If those tests didn't cause any appreciable effects to the weather it is difficult to see how a smaller limited would have greater impact on the weather.

Also I believe they seriously overestimate the effect of the firestorms. They seem to assume each bomb would create a firestorm yet neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki experienced large firestorms after the atomic bombs.

Last edited Sat Mar 2, 2019, 02:19 AM - Edit history (1)

How many millions of tons of flammable plastic, oil, rubber and asphalt are found in every modern city?

Also on edit: Hiroshima did in fact see a firestorm: http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects11.shtml