![]() ![]() The danger comes primarily from spreading the already very radiative spent or unspent nuclear fuel. The main concern here is that nuclear power plants and spent fuel sites contain a much greater *mass* of radioactive material than nuclear missiles can carry. Nuclear power plants could be targeted by nuclear weapons to create large amounts of fallout with a longer half-life but less energy per unit time. I'm only going to cover these briefly, but they both don't change the conclusions much. The risks of extinction from nuclear-weapon-induced-radiation wouldn't be complete without discussing two factors: nuclear power plants and radiological weapons. Even if lethally radioactive fallout from ground bursts covered all population centers, many humans would still survive in shelters. Many fallout shelters exist in the world, and many more could be made easily in a day or two with a shovel, some ground, and some boards. After several weeks, the radionuclides in fallout from ground burst detonations will have decayed to the point where humans can survive outside of shelters. The final protection from extinction by radiation is simply large amounts of mass between people and the radiation source, in other words, fallout shelters. ![]() Air burst detonations result in little lethal fallout reaching the ground, so populations not downwind of military targets would likely be safe from the worst of the radiological effects in a war scenario. This is because air bursts maximize the size of the destructive pressure wave. The other mitigating factor is that in typical nuclear war plans, ground bursts are usually restricted to hardened targets, and air bursts are favored for population and industry centers. Fallout that reaches the upper atmosphere will eventually fall back down, but usually after the period of lethal radioactivity. While fallout might travel hundreds of kms, it still won't reach places separated by greater distances. ![]() ![]() Since most of these countries are likely to be neutral in a conflict, and not near combatant countries, they should be relatively safe from fallout. Many countries, especially in the southern hemisphere, are unlikely to be affected by fallout much at all. Two other things make extinction by radiation unlikely. Even if most human population centers were covered, a few areas would almost certainly escape. Some areas will be hit bad and some areas will be hardly affected by fallout. After a ground burst, fallout is carried by the wind. The first reason is that fallout patterns are very uneven. In practice, it would be almost impossible to kill every human via radiation with the existing nuclear arsenals, even if they were targeted explicitly for this purpose. The bright red and slightly less bright red indicate fallout contour for 1,000 rads and 100 rads per hour, covering 1,140 km² and 7,080 km² respectively, from a 1,000 kiloton ground burst. Presumably this is enough to cover every human habitation, so in principle, it might be possible to kill everyone with radiation from existing nuclear weapons. That's a lot! It's still less than the 510.1 million km² of earth's land mass, but it's a lot more than the ~10.2 million km² of urban space. Okay, multiple that by 14,000 warheads, and we get 112 million km². I have investigated this issue in depth and concluded that even a full scale nuclear exchange is unlikely (100 rads per hour. A number of people have claimed that a full-scale nuclear war is likely to cause human extinction. ![]()
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