"REALISTIC" OPTIMISM AND A POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE
The American Religion
The secret to surviving nuclear war is a Positive Mental Attitude mixed with a little Not Being Inside The Blast Zone.
Don't worry about dumb stuff like fallout and nuclear winter, the biggest danger in the nuclear apocalypse is bad vibes.
Gotta hustle if you're gonna succeed in the nuclear wasteland! Rise and grind! Do what you love! The early mutant ghoul gets the three-headed worm!
If there's a nuclear exchange and a couple years later I'm doing the same tax forms I would have preferred the inferno.
COVID has normalized single-digit percentage death rates as "survivable" and "not a big deal". Turns out normalizing what otherwise would be unacceptable deaths of neglect can become instrumental in manufacturing consent for sending everyone into the meat grinder in order for Liberalism to survive.
EDIT: From the same lib: "3/4 of everyone you know might die but if you survive you will still have to go to work, etc". Wow, that makes it SO MUCH BETTER. https://twitter.com/Empty_America/status/1498398932514353159?s=20&t=SK_xJVo7eQU18Gabrwb4Mg
That is my family: 3% of people dying is acceptable, especially when they aren't young neurotypical able bodied working people.
Fuck em
I've seen tons of people here that are way too doomer about nukes in general (which I'll admit is not exactly the worst thing someone could be doomer about), but a large-scale nuclear exchange would end civilization as we currently know it if for no other reason than killing 90% of the population and EMPing all current infrastructure is just a tad disruptive.
Humanity (let alone life in general) would survive a nuclear war and civilization would restart, but in the sense that we restart at feudalism and maybe speedrun the last 1000 years of human development except with guns and a knowledge of what penicillin is.
not super sure of that after all the massive explosions would kick up dust blocking the sun right? and the disruption to the ecosystem that would follow from that and the radiation/blasts on top of the disruption of the blasts and any survivors being isolated from each other with no communications infrastructure left.
Seems like something that would be a bad idea
Nukes are almost exclusively used as airburst weapons for exactly that reason, as you don't yeet much dust into the atmosphere if you detonate a few thousand feet above ground but you do still get the city-flattening blast. Even if you're crazy enough to use a nuke you still probably don't want to block out the sun and poison the soil forever, and if you do you'd just build a cobalt-59 bomb instead which you could detonate in your own backyard for the same effect.
The actual radiation from a nuclear war would only be a major threat for the first few weeks afterwards, after which it would rapidly decay down to something resembling current background levels.
yes extreme radiation is by it's nature not a proble for that long as the intense stuff has short halflives but in that week it could fuck up the environment real bad. Also it's a missile that you've sent off that moves really quickly precision control of the precise moment of detonation is not achievable. Nuclear war is a super bad idea
Frankly prolongued industrial action by truckers could bring america and a lot of other western countries to their knees.
I don't disagree with most of your post, but this:
Also it’s a missile that you’ve sent off that moves really quickly precision control of the precise moment of detonation is not achievable
is objectively wrong. We've had the ability to detonate warheads at extremely precise altitudes/timings for basically as long as we've had nukes; even the ones dropped on Japan were detonated as airbursts. Altimeters are pretty basic pieces of equipment with high precision.
And the altimeter is an essential component of any computer rocket guidance system ever made.
Anti-aircraft shells also use one for longer than nuclear weapons and more precise.
Frankly prolongued industrial action by truckers could bring america and a lot of other western countries to their knees.
Now if only the truckers weren't stupid clowns who protest vaccines and masks
that protest started being about being forced to quarantine for 2 weeks everytime they crossed the border which meant they lost money every trip it just got carried away with stupid culture war crap
a large-scale nuclear exchange would end civilization as we currently know it if for no other reason than killing 90% of the population and EMPing all current infrastructure is just a tad disruptive
I just want to point out that 90% of the world dying sure sounds like doomsday to me. But maybe Posadists have the right idea.
It absolutely is, but for comparison 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas died within 20 years of Columbus setting foot on Hispanola from old world diseases and then the remnants had to deal with centuries of slavery, genocide, and oppression from a population that didn't, and yet there are still plenty of First Nations peoples around today. There's a meaningful difference between apocalypse and Everyone Is Dead Forever.
civilization would restart, but in the sense that we restart at feudalism and maybe speedrun the last 1000 years of human development except with guns and a knowledge of what penicillin is.
haven't we already used most of the major resources on the planet that are easy to extract without mechanization and globalization? stuff like basic electricity and guns might come back, but i don't know if advanced electronics that require using rare earth minerals or heavy industry would. if that were so we might just get stuck at like mid 19th century levels of technology forever afterwards.
How in the ever loving fuck is there a non-doomer version of a nuclear war?
There isn't, but I've seen a dozen different people on here in the past two weeks claiming that 100 nukes could permanently sterilize the planet and wrap the Earth in an endless winter haze. It's bad enough without people coming up with even more doomerist takes on it.
That's like massively catastrophic to a degree few of us could survive
People always forget that when shit gets real bad, there's no one around to safely shut down all the nuclear power plants. Even if you survive the initial blast, radiation etc, the power plants are gonna go next.Nm, my info was old or never right in the first place
Pretty much all modern plants are designed to safely shut down without human intervention. And as shitty as a new potential Chernobyl is, it's a regional disaster.
Regional disaster? What if the wastewater gets into a major waterway like the Mississip?
Then it becomes a slightly larger regional disaster, which fucking sucks for anyone living on the Mississippi but doesn't really matter in the slightest to someone living in New York, or Greece, or Korea. And again, the idea of "what happens if our nuclear power plant doesn't have qualified personnel around 24/7?" is not something that has slipped the minds of the people in charge of those plants which is why they're designed with passive safeguards like control rods defaulting to being inserted into the cores, so it's an unlikely scenario to begin with.
That's good then, cause that's one less thing to worry about. I assume older plants are retrofitted? Like the Bruce plant in ontario isn't "modern" in the sense that it was built any time in the recent past. Brb gotta update my nuclear power plant knowledge apparently lol
Yeah unlike nuclear war, power plants are not an end of civilization/life even if everything goes wrong with them.
I think that was a plot point in the show The 100, with the added feature of having absolutely no comprehension of how radiation or nuclear power plants worked
Yeah, I can't even remember where I first heard it but then it was on fear the walking dead and I must have assumed it was true? Idk i was prolly really high or something and forgot to look it up :michael-laugh: I've looked it up today and even old plants are retrofitted with modern safety devices that shut shit down immediately in the event of anything unusual. So thats good.
Actually, come to think of it, this was the most realistic part of Fear the Walking Dead lmaodid you get that from Mr Burns a Post-Electric Play? there's a monologue like that in it
capitalist realism brain level 100000. not even the end of the world will bring about the end of capitalism
Building fake shops to bring goods back to the shelves like some kind of fucked up cargo cult treat system.
any nuclear war preparation that doesn't amount to "make peace with your God" seems a touch optimistic about how bad nuclear war is
I moved from one place with an American base to another with an american base. I really thought I was moving away from the American base
there's a book about nuclear survivors in Australia after a nuke hit like New Zealand, or Southeast Asia or something and about how everyone on Australia rushed from one side of the continent to the other to try and escape the radioactive winds. eventually they all die because you cant outrun that.
Ah, I was thinking of Alas Babylon. Same concept except its Florida.
As I understand it, the southern hemisphere would be a bit better off , but would still have to deal with years of freezing temperatures and crop failures as all the fallout and dust kicked into the atmosphere blocks out sunlight.
"well actually, ive played fallout 3, so i know nuclear war is extremely survivable" [pushes glasses up on nose]
"yes, the dead would outnumber the living within the first year, but think of the silver linings"
Its not surviving the nukes its surviving the aftermath. The chaos. The desperation. The refugees. The lack of food. The dead crops. The wildfires. The sky turning black.
Everything is fine if you can still see the little holes in the night blanket that let the light in.
Yeah but it will cancel out global warming. Futurama said so :so-true:
In fairness, there's no faster way to get to zero-carbon emissions than a global nuclear exchange. Talk about your degrowth.
All the cities burning and the forests burning actually undo all that. After all that, yes, technically then you'd see a massive drop off in carbon emissions.
I don't know how many nukes are headed for the middle of the Amazon or the jungles of Indonesia. I suspect interior Africa will be one of the safest places on Earth, simply because its so far down the list of places with infrastructure worth bombing. And while radioactive waste will be a problem for animal life, plant life is significantly more resilient. No shortage of trees growing up around Chernobyl and Fukushima.
I wouldn't want to be a land-bound apex predator during nuclear winter. Or any kind of commercial agricultural crop, like livestock or rice. But Yellowstone will do just fine.
The thought that terrifies me the most is that there might be people in the Russian or American leaderships who believe that a nuclear war is winnable.
I know Russia is an evil crazy Asiatic dictatorship but the US elite has been getting high on its own propaganda supply for decades.
as if datacenters and internet exchanges aren't on the list of 'shit to blow up'
Do they even have to be? My city can't keep the lights on when the weather dips into the teens. My ISP goes on the fritz in sever weather. It really doesn't take much to knock over the apple cart.
