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Mmm yeah imma small brain here and say it cannot be won. There are nukes on subs traveling all over the ocean. Not to mention that the environmental damage and radiation will probably fuck up the world really bad no matter what. Did you know a single nuke in orbit would emp a whole continent and destabilize climate? Great, now you do
My question is "what does this mean for the nature of empires?" — can they no longer truly fall once they enter the nuclear era? How does civil war look?
a single nuke in orbit would emp a whole continent and destabilize climate
That's a bit overblown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
We've done orbital tests before and while the effects are more than we expected, they are not continent crippling or climate destabilizing.
about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms, and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian Islands.
It's definitely not good, and there's a reason we all agreed not to do that anymore, but it's really more about the damage it does to satellites that hurts everyone, and the damage being too unstructured to be worth investigating too far.
That was before we had microchips in everything, and the internet.
Today, an EMP would have vastly different effects.
If I remember correctly, EMP doesn't really work on very small devices. You need a "antenna" that is long enough to induce a strong enough current to fry your electronics. So anything connected to a long wire. The power grid is itself a huge antenna and will be completely destroyed but a small battery powered device will be unharmed.
When the power grid is down now, phones are down, the internet is down, mobile networks are down, payment systems and ATMs are down, gas stations are down, refridgeration is down, etc. etc.
Basically, 3 days later civilization is down, irreversably.
Lots of our battery powered devices have a bunch of literal antennas, though. I actually don't know the frequency ranges on which an EMP can be expected to "pump out" significant amounts of energy, but if there's enough in the bands where WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS etc operate that's going to fry devices that don't have some sort of protection built in. I also have no clue how common it is for radio modules used in consumer stuff to protect against voltage surges on their antennas, but somehow I'd imagine it's not very common.
The point, as I understand it, is that nuclear war can be technically won by nuking the enemy to smithereens and tanking their nukes as best as possible. The concern here is that because this would technically count as a victory, that it is a battle tactic that elitist assholes in the government have no doubt considered using.
Reality isn't a video game: you can't just "tank nukes".
Even a limited nuclear conflict between, say, India and Pakistan would likely lead to a global food security disaster and could kill up to a third of the world's population – see eg this article (open access). That's using less than 3% of the world's total nuclear stockpile
edit: welp I didn't notice I was in NCD
It doesn't matter how well you can tank the enemy nukes when yours alone still fuck the climate and ruin the biosphere.
But yeah, some numpty with their head up their ass probably plans on ruling over the ashes.
Maybe you can take out the air fields and the silos before anything has left the ground, maybe, but the subs are already out at sea.
MIRV makes interception dubious...
MIRV doesn't deploy until after re-entry. Modern interception occurs mid course, in orbit.
No more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.
won by whom!?
The roaches, probably.
Vault-Tec
My username is actually a Dr Strangelove reference, it's a brilliant movie.
"Alright Colonel... Bat Guano, if that is your name..."
Please, no fighting in the war room
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
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Those who died before seeing it.