Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnews!military
From: hall@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (john hall)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Nuclear Devastation
Summary: "traditionally calculated" wrong
Message-ID: <7001@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 31 May 89 03:45:52 GMT
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From: john hall <hall@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>


In article hall@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (john hall) writes:

>On the generic quality of "destroy the world n  times" statements.
>

In article pnelson@antares.Tymnet.COM (Phil Nelson) writes:
>This is obviously a silly way to calculate; 

That was the  point of the post.

>hall
>On Nuclear Winter: Ben Bova has a story where the US and USSR know
>the limit on nuclear winter, the USSR launches a strike just under
>the threshold, meaning a US retaliation kills the world.

>Phil
> ... this strategy will work if ... the US _believes_ 
>the nuclear winter hypothesis, regardless of whether the 
>hypothesis is correct (unless they >decide to retaliate anyway).

Ben Bova's point.  Implies the US should never accept the
nuclear winter hypothesis officially.

>From: Brian Dickson

>A method of calculation which gives a more graphic 
>representation of the destructive power of fission bombs is:

> which equals about 0.4 of the surface of the Earth. 
> In other words, a saturation bombing could place about 
> 40% of the Earth's surface inside a lethal blast
> radius of a nuke. Of course, this 40% includes northern Canada, Sibera,
> Greenland, the Australian outback, both polar ice caps, etc. 
> 63 000 000 square kilometers is a lot of teritory.

The 200,000 warheads seems like an exageration.  I think
that most modern artillery shell nukes are smaller than
Hiroshima.

Still, considering the considering the number of warheads
that can not reach most of the Earth's land mass (the shells),
the warheads destroyed in action, and the warheads that
overlap (multiple warheads per target) it is clear just how
far we are from the destroy the world 30 times numbers.

>From: sun!portal!cup.portal.com!mmm
>I remember seeing an article in BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS 
>which calculated 1000 warheads of 1 megaton each would be 
>enough to "destroy" Europe.  Their criterion was producing 
>enough fallout to kill everybody who wasn't in a real deep shelter.  
>They assumed ground bursts to maximize fallout.  

Ground bursts, with the exception of hard targets, are a
relatively stupid way to use nukes.  Destruction/nuke
goes way down and fallout distribution depends on the
weather.

Nuclear war is horrible enough without exaggerating it.

John Hall