I want to do something
Offline India is champing at the bit and making some of us very nervous with the way they are levelling accusations and snarling at Pakistan. It should be fairly common knowledge that both of these countries have hated each other for quite some time, and both of them have nuclear weaponry aimed at each other. While I couldn't give two shits about the Indians and Pakistanis finally just having at it, I do rather object to the Eastern hemisphere suddenly becoming an irradiated and uninhabitable wasteland.
Does anyone know of an internet group that has formed with the intention of cooling hotter heads over there? Or perhaps something even more proactive one can do to prevent those two bodies from vaporizing each other and poisoning all of Asia/Eurasia/Europe/Africa?
"Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full."
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
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My suggestion has always been to travel back in time and stop the two countries from being formed.
I'm sorry, Kevin. I have no better to offer than that. It would be interesting, though, to find an online group to participate in that could reach some part of the Indian or Pakistani populations. I imagine connecting with the youth and young adults would do well. I understand that there is some opposition to an escalation among the youth.
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
Could you elaborate on what you mean by the above ?
On the surface it would seem that you don't care about the loss of all those lives and the impact on the world economy and the fact that many, many thousands of people from those countries are working here and around the world and have families still over there, and that there are many US and European companies over there etc......but I want to make sure.
If that is your attitude I am not going to debate it. I would just like to know.
I just read somewhere recently that the ammount of debris/soot put into the atmosphere by a nuclear exchange between those 2 countries would have a severe impact on temperatures throughout the planet.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
Kevin, what's with all this bitching about wanting to do something? Get on your knees and start praying! duh...
I heard that nuclear winter was a fantasy. Nuclear weapons don't kick up enough dust to impact world temperatures like that. Perhaps around 2,000 nuclear weapons were detonated in a fifty year period, but notice the lack of dust blocking out sunlight. If you want to worry about dust choking out sunlight, worry about volcanoes, nukes won't hurt you in that manner.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
That's an average of 40 a year - only 2 in an urban area - nearly all underground (ie kicking up no dust/soot) after the 1960s. Some were in the ocean, too. These would mostly go off in urban areas. I've heard that nuclear winter may be less than we have been told too. Obviously a nuclear war is a bad thing either way.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
Uh. Sure, I guess.
It means that if two countries consensually want to smash their tanks and troops into each other until the cows come home, I don't particularly care. The overwhelming consensus of the current global civilization is that organized warfare and military action are A-Okay with them (I'm a dissenter here, but I yield to the consensus), so - by all means - anyone who feels like slipping-on the dueling glove can go ahead and reap what they sow.
Nuclear weapons are powerful enough that they completely re-frame my perspective (and, in many ways, violate traditional standards of consent to an unreasonable degree), so I'm much more vocal when it comes to dissenting against their use (or even having them around).
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
One point that always seems to get missed in this general type of discussion is that nukes are not just one gigantic scary thing. There are numerous practical concerns attendant to the development and use of nukes. Not the least of which is that they are pretty difficult to make decently without doing lots of testing. And neither India nor Pakistan has done lots of testing. Trust me, we would know if they did.
In fact, we know with a very high degree of certainty what they have actually tested.
In the case of Pakistan, they have done two tests of two bombs each and the yield for each of them was so small that they would be nearly useless for a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) scenario. In fact, all four of them were only large enough to be used for purely tactical uses such as collapsing a bridge or sealing off a mountain pass.
In the case of India, they too have only a small number of tests under their belts and of those, none were the huge types that would have been used in a USA/USSR MAD type of exchange.
In any case, fallout is largely dependent on the practical facts of the deployment. If the bombs are detonated at sufficient altitude (and that is not very high above ground for the tiny bombs that we need to consider), then fallout need not even be considered as a large after effect.
Actually, there is some reason to suspect that the largest of the bombs that India has tested was possibly what is known as an “enhanced radiation” device. That is technical speak for what everyone else calls a “neutron bomb”. Some not has to be paid here to the fact that most of the popular media has never bothered to find out what a neutron bomb is or can do.
Neutron bombs are not the magical device that kills people and leaves infrastructure intact. Sure, if you are within a few hundred feet of the core when it goes off, you will just drop dead right where you stand. However, the radius at which that happens is actually quite small. And they don't make for large amounts of fallout either.
What a neutron bomb actually does is to irradiate metal that happens to be in it's effective radius such that the target metals tend to remain lethally radioactive for a few days after the bomb is used. So they are great against columns of tanks out in the middle of nowhere. If the enemy decided to invade and neutron bombs were used to repel the invasion, the crew would all die and the tanks would not be safe to reenter for a couple to several weeks after the detonation.
So no, nuclear winter is not likely on the table. However, if they did decide to both drop their full loads overnight, I would not recommend that you eat foods from the middle states of the USA for a good couple of months. And even when you do start, you should take a full dose of potassium iodode every day for a few more weeks just to be on the safe side.
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