2d ago

Fellow Eurobros, I know it's unlikely, but if it came to this which front would you rather fight at?

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Russia can't defeat the US in conventional warfare, but is much-more-comparable from a nuclear aspect. So Russia has a significant incentive to use nuclear weapons.
I'd guess that the US probably has a shot at actually getting a first strike off versus Russia. So the US has a significant incentive to use nuclear weapons.
Anyone intending to make serious use of nuclear weapons has very little reason to hold back if they expect a high likelihood of the other side responding massively. So they've got a significant incentive to go all-in.
I think that there's a pretty good probability that a major war between Russia and the US of the "only one of us is walking away from this" sort goes very nuclear very quickly.
- If Russia or the US launch nuclear weapons, over 90% of the world population will die over the following 10 years. However, global warming would be solved.
  
  Nuclear winter solves global warming
  
  https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter
  Even using the most conservative numbers here, an all-out exchange between the US and Russia would produce a nuclear winter that would at most resemble the one that Robock and Toon predict for a regional nuclear conflict, although it would likely end much sooner given empirical data about stratospheric soot lifetimes. Some of the errors are long-running, most notably assumptions about the amount of soot that will persist in the atmosphere, while others seem to have crept in more recently, contributing to a strange stability of their soot estimates in the face of cuts to the nuclear arsenal. All of this suggests that their work is driven more by an anti-nuclear agenda than the highest standards of science. While a large nuclear war would undoubtedly have some climatic impact, all available data suggests it would be dwarfed by the direct (and very bad) impacts of the nuclear war itself.
  
  90% of people being dead and the other 10% being pre-industrial is what'll fix global warming, we don't need nuclear winter for that.
  
  The direct effects on the world of a nuclear war between the US and Russia isn't going to include killing 90% of the world's population.
  
  You're right. It won't be 90% of the world population, but it would definitely be more than 90% of the countries involved (e.g. NATO, Russia, and China). As far as the world population, people in countries of the southern hemisphere might have more chances at surviving, but with geopolitics changed that drastically with an impossible to resolved food shortage, things could become chaotic pretty quickly. Don't argue with me. Here are the sources I based my opinion on.
  Kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrIRuqr_Ozg
  Their background sources: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-nuclear-winter
  
  It will if we decide to be dicks about it
- Russia's entire military budget is somewhere in the same order of magnitude of what the US spends just on maintaining its nuclear arsenal, so no, they are not comparable there either.

64 comments