Is it worth trying to survive a nuclear war? - Despite it's potential consequences?

if you can stay inside an intact building for 2 weeks, you might get to live in the new Hell World
And let's cannibalise other survivors, because all crops are dead, nothing can grow and eating corpses outside of shelters is a definitive way to die of radiation poisoning.

As said earlier in the thread, I would envy the dead.
But it was informative to be taught that nuclear bombs haven't really gotten stronger.
 
Chernobyl didn't wipe out the entirety of Ukraine or the world for that matter. There's actually a slice of land that Ukraine & Russia fought over called the Crimea that's known for being fertile, & that conflict happened after Chernobyl. The only places that would be affected would be the sites of the nuclear strikes, like in Japan. The majority of land mass throughout the world would still be habitable.

You just better hope it doesn't hit any major bodies of fresh water though.
Everybody talks about Chernobyl, nobody talks about Kyshtym. It's arguably the worst environmental nuclear incident that's happened, but because it largely affected wilderness instead of a population center nobody cares about it. Even still, life's flourishing in the Urals.
Everywhere that's actually been nuked is a tourist destination now for a reason too, the radiological effects of nukes have been overstated by greenpeace retard types.
 
I’m too close to Boston for concerns about survival to be a realistic problem if nuclear war breaks out. In every scenario involving a major power, Boston gets wiped out. In all scenarios not involving Russia, woe to the country that would try to nuke Boston.
 

There have been approx. 400 megatons of above ground tests. They were in remote areas, but they didn't turn those areas into Chernobyls. Hydrogen/fusion bombs are "cleaner" than fission bombs, but I think some tricks can be used to maximize fallout if the adversary is petty.

That article uses nukemap to compare Tsar Bomba (50 megatons) vs. Little Boy (15 kilotons) detonated in New York. Tsar Bomba is 3333x more powerful but only kills 29x more people. A lot of bomb energy is wasted, such as the force directed upward. I'm looking around for a magazine article that compared ten 5 megaton nukes to 50 megatons. Actually, it was a snippet of LIFE magazine from this article:

1961-11-Life-Magazine-Superbomb-more-Bluff-than-Bang.jpg
A 100-megaton bomb releases 10 times more energy than a 10-megaton bomb, but it does not do 10 times more damage. This is because the blast effects of explosions scale as a cubic root, not linearly. So a 10-megaton bomb detonated at an optimal altitude might do medium damage to a distance of 9.4 miles (15 kilometers) from ground zero, but a 100-megaton bomb “only” does the same amount of damage to 20.3 miles (33 kilometers). In other words, a 100-megaton explosion is only a little more than twice as damaging as a 10-megaton bomb. The weight of nuclear weapons, though, does roughly scale with their yield in a more linear fashion (design sophistication can vary this a bit), so a 100-megaton bomb weighs roughly 10 times more than a 10-megaton bomb, which makes it much more difficult to deploy on a bomber or missile.

ICBM defense has seemingly had a bad track record, but I guarantee that there are internal developments better than what has been publicly acknowledged. So if 5,000 nukes target America, and only 500 make it through, some areas will be "spared". Maybe we will see a shift to using suicide submarines and drones to sneak them in. A W88 could fit in your car.

All this is not to say that the results of a nuclear war would not lead to immediate health issues, a collapse of public order, or an awful new lifestyle. Put some suicide stuff in your apocalypse kit if you want, because you'll most likely be making the decision after shit already hit the fan.
 
A real nuclear war? No way. Bail
Out. The horrors you would endure are almost unspeakable. It isn’t about survival; it’s about living an inhuman existence beyond most peoples ability to comprehend just how horrific it would be.

Hell would be a vacation compared to it.
 
ITT retarded pussies

It would be epic you get to wear a cool gas mask and walk around like it's S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

AND Everyone in a major city like Washington D.C and Los Angeles gets instantly vaporized. It would probably be an improvement
 
Lol no, the whole world would we inhabitable. The nuclear weapons is far stronger now than in the past.
False, nuclear weapons are variable, and most likely set to "stun." Nuclear weapons rounded off in power and actually are lesser yield, because they are more accurate. Missiles back and still do have a specific radius they can hit accurately, and for the first few, they were big enough to mean wastes would thus. So you would use one big warhead, that you hope its blast outskirts would hit shy of an airbase, even if it was off by 100 miles.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Vyse Inglebard
You would likely survive a nuclear war. They won't hit the cities first, they'll hit places capable of sustaining a nuclear war, so submarine bases, certain air bases, military command centers, and civilian infrastructure like the power grid's interties. In the US most coastal cities are fucked since they all have at least one of these and so are a few inland cities (Dallas, Denver, Ogden, most of the Dakotas). The biggest Russian and Chinese bombs are only capable of doing a lot of damage out to maybe 20-30 miles, so if you assume they are slightly inaccurate, as long as you don't live within an hour of a nuke target you'll probably survive.

But what's going to kill you is the breakdown of society after the exchange. Logistics will be fucked nationwide. Everything will break down and there will be a major famine. The medical system will collapse for years, so if you were near enough to the blast to get cancer 4-5 years down the line, you're dead. If you're unfortunate enough to live in a third world country, you're very likely dead from either the famine or the civil unrest. I'd expect the majority of nuclear war deaths to be in Africa since they'll all starve once the supply of outside medicine and food is cut off.

Now I'd say it's worth surviving, if only because it will decapitate the head of the Great Satan and whatever comes after will be a better government. But for the next 10-20 years, you're in for one hellish time.
That article uses nukemap to compare Tsar Bomba (50 megatons) vs. Little Boy (15 kilotons) detonated in New York. Tsar Bomba is 3333x more powerful but only kills 29x more people. A lot of bomb energy is wasted, such as the force directed upward. I'm looking around for a magazine article that compared ten 5 megaton nukes to 50 megatons. Actually, it was a snippet of LIFE magazine from this article:
They don't use nuclear weapons that big anymore because more nukes equals more targets destroyed. The biggest anyone has are around 5 megatons, and Russia and China have very few of these (in China at least some are being retired alongside the ICBM meant to carry them in favor of one meant for MIRV warheads). The US only has 1.2 megaton nukes.
 
Biggest thing I have to worry about is that I live and work in a high priority target for a good nuking, my chances of survival increase if I happen to not be working that day. and everything after that is death by raiders.
ITT retarded pussies

It would be epic you get to wear a cool gas mask and walk around like it's S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

AND Everyone in a major city like Washington D.C and Los Angeles gets instantly vaporized. It would probably be an improvement
It will be just like Canticle for Lebowitz!
 
Considering my current location in the juncture between great superpowers, I'd be amongst the first one to visually confirm this matter. That said, If I do survive the initial blastwaves and radiation; I'm gonna do my damnest in being the hardest motherfucker on the planet and carve a great bloody swathe building the great Fingolian empire, undoing the crimes done against my people in the Fenno-Korean Hyperwar.
 
I get the impression that half the people here think a single nuke would turn all of Texas into a radioactive wasteland and the other half has looked into the technical details of nukes and learned that Nagasaki began rebuilding only two weeks after the bomb.

In the event of a nuclear war, there's a very good chance you will either be dead immediately or not really notice anything amiss until the next time you go to town. After that it just depends on how close you were to the fallout zone. If you have a chronic illness or were fatally injured or start vomiting and losing blood then best to off yourself and save yourself the trouble. But if you're still hale then spend two weeks as far from the blast zones as possible then you can start picking up the pieces. Build a compound to protect your gardens and shoot the city trash that tries to take all your stuff.
 
The answer to this question is long, multifaceted, and requires a lot of thought...

...... haha just kidding the answer is NO.

I mean, I can't speak for everyone but I already hate change and get depressed at all the things I used to love that are now gone, and that's just from standard-issue time slipping slipping slipping into the future. If everything I knew was gone in a nuclear flash and I was left on a world that was barely recognizable, I would just eat a bullet (if I could find one).

That's before even getting to things like potential health issues I already have that would make it hard for me to survive anyway. Between that and me not really even wanting to bother... well, you saw my answer already.
 
The biggest initial issue with a nuclear war would be the repeated EMPs taking out the grid and destroying all electronic devices. The lack of communication would cause a lot of panic and stress, with daily stories of foreign invaders and threats of new bombings spreading among the survivors. Plus a lot of people under 50 would be driven crazy from the sudden lack of constant dopamine hits from social media and pron access.

The answer to your question is really whether or not you can stomach living without internet and modern entertainment for potentially the next several decades.

It would take months to years, depending where you live, before the grid could be brought back online and power would probably be very intermittent for years. However, it's not actually that hard to generate electricity, and even with EMPs, a lot of simple electric motors and practically all vehicle alternators would be fine, so you could set up your own power generation easily enough. Probably with wind power or simple water wheel designs. Once you have power, even intermittent, you could pump water from wells, maintain refrigeration and air conditioning, and other modern conveniences that would bring you back to a near current lifestyle pretty quickly. It's not really possible to knock civilization back to the literal stone age; even an all out nuclear war would just put people back to the mid-1800's in terms of technology.

If you live 50+ miles from a major population center, you'll probably survive the actual bombings and radiation. Realistically speaking, any real war would likely only target very specific cities and military facilities, mostly coastal areas. If you're well away from the coasts and any major city, you should be relatively fine in the initial bombings.

But the first few weeks would be terrifying from lack of information, and the first year after the bombings would be full of diseases spreading through an increasingly malnourished population. However, this first year die-off should take out just about everyone without a food supply. Year two would be a major improvement, as the survivors would all be people with some capacity to grow or hunt food, or otherwise have access to stable food supplies, perhaps from government programs. If you don't have some supply of food to get you through this period, you will not survive this first year.

Things would be moving back to semi-normal status in the less isolated areas by about the end of the second year as the government remnants solidify their political control and begin rebuilding basic infrastructure for communication and power production in surviving cities and larger towns. That period of rebuilding could last between five years and several decades, depending on how far you are from those towns. After a decade things would be largely back to normal for most of the population, at least in first world nations. No idea how long it would take to get back to current computer technology being widely available, probably decades, but some sort of basic phones and older-style pre-internet computers would be buildable in country fairly early on. We'd be at 1970's tech for probably twenty plus years, but once microprocessors can be built again, things would jump forward rapidly.
 
Back