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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I would rather be at ground zero for any missile that works (assuming most of them won't even get out of their silo due to corruption). While much of the world will survive initially, the disruption to economies world wide will likely kill a ton of people conventionally due to hunger, lack of water, healthcare, and violence. That's not likely to be very pleasant anywhere. Humanity would survive, but for a lot of people it might be a short miserable life. Even today there are many places suffering a terrible existence; imagine that on a global scale where no one can afford to help other countries.

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The ratio of people killed vs farmland destroyed would likely mean there was plenty of farmland available in the aftermath. Lack of oil, fertilizer, and electricity would be the largest issues but if keeping people fed only requires something like 1-10% of current farm output that’s probably easily achieved.

Lack of water could be an issue in some areas but simply walking to fresh though not clean drinking water is viable in most areas.

Violence after disasters is more trope than reality. People will loot after a disaster, but it’s not like people are going to show up to Best Buy and work after a nuclear war. Looting is more useful to humanity than simply letting food rot because people can’t work the self checkout machine.

Starvation is more typically driven by organizational, infrastructure, or other tangential issues than by the lack of land. Africa is the best example. It's an absolute utopia in terms of the resources needed for survival, a simply beautiful land in general, and home to the highest rates of starvation in the world. It's those tangential problems that are causing it.

And these tangential issues would emerge in spades after nuclear war. For instance one of the most basic is logistics. Think about how insanely much is just involved in getting an ear of corn from a farm to you. At the most fundamental you're relying on machinery, drivers, oil, gas, refineries, roads infrastructure, food processing infrastructure and a whole lot more - before that ear of corn is anywhere near you. And then there needs to be a means of distribution, and more.

Our entire economy came on the verge of collapse because of COVID, and nuclear war would have an impact with so many orders of magnitude greater than COVID that I think even dreaming of anything even vaguely resembling normalcy afterwards is unrealistic. Violence happens after disasters when the food runs out. In practical disasters that tends to not happen due to rapid aid, delivery, support, and organization. In nuclear war, the food will run out.

That gets into a wider issue, people aren’t going to want to starve and will in general try quiet hard to avoid that fait.

Saying the current social order breaks down isn’t enough to suggest Anarchy will take it’s place. A farmer who wants to collect a harvest without oil will want manpower, and survivors will want to eat. That’s the basis of civilization.

Sure suburbs in their current form don’t work without cars and oil. But, people can migrate quite far on a half a tank of gas and their feet.

What you're saying is completely true. At the same time it's also true that tens if not hundreds of millions have died of starvation within the life of many still alive today. And the same was no less true of those individuals who undoubtedly did everything they could, and sought food absolutely everywhere they possible could. But they were looking for something which simply was not there. Sometimes human will and human ingenuity, no matter how strong or how brilliant, is insufficient to overcome a situation.

And within these stories one can also see what happens to societies once normal social function starts to collapse. While this [1] article reads like a propaganda piece, the tales it recounts are neither unique nor exceptional given the situation. Of course it does feel weird to be here kind of arguing that, "Yes we will starve." I think my main point and motivation is that the consequences of what we're discussing simply cannot be overstated. There is a dangerous amount of misinformation that increasingly seems to be headed towards, 'Maybe nuclear wouldn't be 'that' bad.' Perhaps not misinformation. Because it's true that it wouldn't be 'that' bad, it'd be vastly worse.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-fa...

I agree that famine would be a serious risk, but when I look at major famines they seem to largely be imposed by government action. Irish, China, Russia, North Korea etc.

The Irish potato famine occurred in part because of the potato blight, but it was a multi year issue that at it’s core related to growing exports (cotton, grain) in favor of local food. Russia’s industrialization created famine because so many farm workers where sent to factories. China had similar root causes, the 18year old worker in that story went home to see their family and many fields where fallow. Steal all the food or workers from a village and people starve.

That’s not to say drought etc didn’t play a role, but the American dust bowl isn’t remembered as a famine because there was feedback between the amount of food crops planted and the need for food.

The majority of world's population lives in areas that wouldn't even be targeted in an all-out NATO-vs-Russia exchange. Noone is going to bomb South America, Africa, or most of Asia, so even if everyone in "participating" countries would die (which far from being true), you'd still need most of the current food demand. And the supplies of food generally flow out of the affected countries, the industrialized regions feed the developing regions with staple crops (receiving in return imports of "optional" food like coffee, cocoa and bananas) - case in point, the ongoing events about grain supply from Ukraine (and also Russia) to Africa and Middle East.

A limited exchange between a subset of current nuclear powers is even less deadly. If we assume China, India, and Pakistan, who all have nukes, don’t participate then the worlds economy might not collapse. Similarly an exchange between India and Pakistan would only disrupt most of the world if it involved salted nukes or similar horrors.

On the other hand WWII involved most of South America, Africa, and Asia to some degree. If WWIII got similarly out of hand then nukes might take out all of the worlds chip making capacity, oil refineries, and deep sea ports as strategic assets making thing far more unpleasant.

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