Where do you get your numbers from? Also the survivors would die of hunger or diseases so it wouldn't matter if they survived the bombs or not.
I'm not saying that 1/4 of the would survive around that much also people are smart they will find away of surviving thousands of years ago are ancestors survived by Hunting, looting and stuff like that. diseases...We'll you do make a big fact because of Fallout and radiation but bunkers come with food already in it around 10-100 years of food, water and medical stuff some bunkers have Gas masks and NBC/CBRN suits making it more safe to go out on the surface and radiation that Is life threatening is usually there for 3 Months or longer depending on the size of the bomb if it was a small one in the kilotons maybe a few months to a few years if it was a megaton one maybe 5-50 years for the radiation to clam down. I'm not a expert on stuff like this I do know a lot (Probably because I own some old East German/Soviet Gas Mask and NBC Suits and I study Nuclear Weaponry) - - Auto Merge - - Yeah that Nuclear armament saved are lives you let just hope that ISIS or some one like that don't get a nuke or we are done.
Well, not really. One nuclear detonation (like maybe ISIS could muster up) would be a tragedy, sure, but it doesn't even compare to the sh**storm the USSR and USA could have rained down in the mid 80s; I'm talking tens of thousands of warheads, wiping out most of the world's population and rendering it uninhabitable for the rest.
I asked my old geology professor at my university and he said that the bombs themselves would definitely not kill us all, but the radioactive contamination that would spread into the atmosphere and water cycle, as well as the destruction of some of the more fragile parts of the earth's ecosystem, would likely kill all of us. The earth would be fine. The earth is just a rock. Us, though? We'd have it bad. The planet survived asteroids. Lots of other things didn't.
This. We wouldn't all be dust, that's an exaggeration, but the world would certainly be worse off, with many sections uninhabitable. The first hours of a nuclear exchange would've likely determined the "winner". Most likely, Europe would be toast, and US relatively unscathed in comparison.
It wouldn't have wiped out the entire species, just most of it. What was left would probably end up living in some new Dark Age. It would be spectacular, sure, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as beautiful.
I think the potential damage of an exchange between the two powers is highly overstated because a lot of people calculate the potential damage as if both parties were to use all or most of their arsenal. In reality, I believe, the exchange would've been decided quite early, with one party gaining victory when they manage to prevent the other from launching anymore counterattacks, thus leaving a good amount of both arsenals unused. Now the ground war that would've followed would've crippled the European population for the next century, and we wouldn't have the computers, internet and many of the luxuries that we enjoy today. But to say that all life would've been wiped out, I believe, is an exaggeration.
I mean.. This was America's golden age... And from what I researched, it did in fact have over 15000 nuclear warheads Ready to be used by 1959, so obviously, that would have been catastrophic for the planet if the USA did in fact Launch most of them at Russia. The Soviet Union had about 500 or 600... So I guess the USA would have been the techical victor within a Third World War in the fifties or the sixties... But it would have been obliterated alongside its enemy in the seventies or the eighties for example.
It's tough to come up with accurate figures; these were obviously pretty sensitive pieces of information at the time, and they may have been altered/lost over time, especially on the USSR side. It's not just the number of warheads though, you also have to take into account the size of the warhead and it's delivery system. ICBMs posed the biggest threat, due to their range, speed, and difficulty to intercept, and they weren't around in great numbers until after the mid 60s.
