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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Russia has around 6000 warheads in all and 1600 strategic warheads.

While there are a lot of cities in the EU and the US critical infra is concentrated in a much smaller number of locations.

We know from Ukraine that Russia has no problem destroying civilian targets, and it's at least plausible that a nuclear first strike would be aimed at population centres, not - as doctrine has it - at missile sites followed by military and industrial targets.

So even if only 10% of Russia's nukes still work, that's still a very bad day for everyone.

And "work" isn't a binary. A nominal 1MT weapon that fizzles and produces "only" 25kT is still a huge problem.

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It's worse than this.

Let's assume that 100% of the warheads never reach the US but 10% of them detonate domestically. Effectively, Russia nukes itself with 600 warheads.

The world consequences will still be devastating.

How bad are we talking about? We're a long way from the 1980's when the Soviet arsenal was some 45,000 warheads and the USAs was similar magnitude. There was a paper in Nature late last year * that noted that a nuclear exchange between the Russia and the USA, even with the far reduced arsenals under New START (1,550 warheads each), would still lead to global famine that would kill some 5 billion people.

But what if only Russia fired their missiles, 90% of them failed, and the remaining 10% exploded in their launcher? Most of those launch tubes are deep underground to protect them from first-strike by the USA, and would not release the same kind of soot as if they exploded in the air.

Even an exchange between India and Pakistan would result in almost 30 million of dead **, but again, that's using math where nuclear weapons (one-hundred 15Kt warheads) are detonated on or above ground.

I'm not remotely suggesting we try out and find out, I like not starving to death, tymv. The math, however, is interesting in a morbid curiosity sort of way.

* https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0 ** https://thebulletin.org/2022/10/nowhere-to-hide-how-a-nuclea...

How do we know that either side isn't lying about the depth and breadth of their nuclear arsenal?

Mutual inspections under the START treaties which took place until approx 10-15 years ago.

That's roughly how many atmospheric nuclear tests were performed.

What "world consequences" would there be? Are you talking about the effect on the Russian population and country and subsequent political economic and social upheaval from the result of Russia deciding to make a nuclear attack that backfires on itself, and also brings a retaliatory strike upon itself (which would be far more devastating than the malfunctioning nukes in the first place),? I agree would have pretty significant global consequences.

The global environmental effects of the nuclear exchange itself wouldn't be all that significant though would it? Might slow down global warming for a couple of years which could be nice.

Is that a risk? I don’t know much about warheads but is it realistic that nuclear warheads just detonate along the way? To the point where leaders might worry about it?

One of the more clever quips I heard was some scientist or other who said that there's really no need to go to the expense of building all the rockets under the nukes; you can just detonate them anywhere if you want to end the world.

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