Kyle Mizokami, National Interest: 335 Million Dead: If America Launched A Massive Nuclear War on Russia and China
Overall, an all-out U.S. attack on the Soviet Union, China and satellite countries in 1962 would have killed 335 million people within the first seventy-two hours.
It is no exaggeration to say that for those who grew up during the Cold War, all-out nuclear war was “the ultimate nightmare.” The prospect of an ordinary day interrupted by air-raid sirens, klaxons and the searing heat of a thermonuclear explosion was a very real, albeit remote, possibility. Television shows such as The Day After and Threads realistically portrayed both a nuclear attack and the gradual disintegration of society in the aftermath. In an all-out nuclear attack, most of the industrialized world would have been bombed back to the Stone Age, with hundreds of millions killed outright and perhaps as many as a billion or more dying of radiation, disease and famine in the postwar period.
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WNU Editor: The above numbers are from 1962. I suspect that the casualty number would be much higher today.
4 comments:
Yeah. ..335 million. Please, that's like a minor flue season in China ;)
But in all seriousness, I don't think the numbers would be much higher in the first 72hrs, perhaps even lower, and here's why:
1. The US stockpile is much smaller by now than 50+years ago. Thanks to Reagan and also Obama a bit
2. US has moved away from high yield to low yield nukes. They still have some megatones but that is very rare. Russians and Chinese have bigger city killers by far
3. Defence/missile Shields have improved a lot on the Russian/Chinese side - not so much on the US side as you know
But ultimately it doesn't matter. Sure, "only 300 million"(give or take a hundred million, who's counting among friends) will die in the first 72hrs,but double the number usually dies in the next year from fallout,starvation and internal wars/conflicts.
Also. I would not be surprised if the US actually has something deadlier by now. It's been decades since any major weapons leaks. Sure we had data breaches but there's a lot of "ufo"(in the true sense of the abbreviation -ie unidentified flying objects) in the skies of the US over the last few years and whatever technology those ufos use it's several decades ahead and the US seem to be controlling it
Does not include deaths caused by retaliatory nukes launched by computer programs designed to kick in if the "cancel launch" code is not entered in a timely manner.
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Dead man's switch
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