“Destroy the world” can mean many things. There aren’t nearly enough nuclear weapons to blast Earth itself, the planet will continue to exist, of course.
The raw destructive power of nukes may not be enough to kill most of humanity, yes. Targeted on major cities, it’ll still kill an enormous amount of people, an overwhelming majority of the targeted country for industrial (ie, urban) countries.
But that’s forgetting all the “secondary effects” : direct radioactive fallouts, radioactive contamination of rivers and water sources, nuclear winter, … those are pretty sure to obliterate in the few next years most of the remaining humanity. Maybe not all of us. Maybe a few would survive, in a scorched Earth, without much left of technological civilization. That’s pretty much “destroy the world” to me.
The article says “There are enough nuclear weapons around to destroy the world several times over”. That suggests some kind of clear-cut quantitative measure, and does not describe the actual situation.
“Destroy the world” can mean many things. There aren’t nearly enough nuclear weapons to blast Earth itself, the planet will continue to exist, of course.
The raw destructive power of nukes may not be enough to kill most of humanity, yes. Targeted on major cities, it’ll still kill an enormous amount of people, an overwhelming majority of the targeted country for industrial (ie, urban) countries.
But that’s forgetting all the “secondary effects” : direct radioactive fallouts, radioactive contamination of rivers and water sources, nuclear winter, … those are pretty sure to obliterate in the few next years most of the remaining humanity. Maybe not all of us. Maybe a few would survive, in a scorched Earth, without much left of technological civilization. That’s pretty much “destroy the world” to me.
This survey’s median estimates rate nuclear war as ten times as likely to kill a billion people in the 21st century as to cause human extinction: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/3854/global-catastrophic-risks-report.pdf
How many of the respondents had any specific expertise on nuclear wars?
A handful, who had given presentations to the rest of the group with discussion. Also climate folks.
Do you know anything about what their estimates were?
Not broken out.
The article says “There are enough nuclear weapons around to destroy the world several times over”. That suggests some kind of clear-cut quantitative measure, and does not describe the actual situation.