Sorry for the short response here, hopefully when I have time later I can expand on it.
Background: Read your posts, not the paper
Main Point of disagreement—Famine is not about stockpiling or even producing the requisite calories. It is about distributing the food from where it is produced (or stored) to the population centers where it is needed. With grain transport most of it is done via rail with major exchange centers and logistics hubs being cities. In a nuclear exchange this infrastructure is completely wiped out (both the human capital and the actual physical structures).
To be blunt, of course no city>no people>who starves? Thus the famine is averted because the mothers/father/daughter/sons have all been wiped out in the blast right?
Well the loss of all this logistics infrastructure means that suddenly rural people in non-productive (agriculturally) areas who escaped the blast also starve. Most critically here is that this is in fact a large swaths of America.
(tangential point): This is within only the first few months following the exchange; imagine needing to further plant a new year of crops w/o easily accessible fertilizer/pesticides/herbicides and fuel (both diesel and nat gas- that corn ain’t gonna dry itself). The USA is perhaps the most prepared of any country with it decades long transfer from rail to trucking, but as a country it is still far far away from being able to have a distributed logistic system in the form of trucking that could manage in the absence of rail (without taking into account the other issues a nuclear attack would cause).
If you knock out the solenoids in all our vehicles as well as the power grid and other electronics, it will be very hard to move that stored food anywhere, and most people will probably starve.
Knocking out rail infrastructure for months doesn’t seem plausible to me. Rail is made of hardened steel. Short of being inside the fireball, I don’t see how it would be damaged beyond repair. Maybe rail stations can be targeted, but that’s still a tiny proportion of the rail that exists in the US. Less-used tracks can be cannibalized and machine shops can probably produce short-term replacement rail to keep critical lines running.
As for fossil fuels, I am unsure of how much they will be targeted, but each warhead that hits an oil rig is one that’s not hitting a city. In addition, the majority of the world’s fossil fuel production is outside of the US and Russia, and won’t be targeted. A major concern is probably oil refineries, which are very concentrated in the US, Russia, and China, but the distillation of crude oil is actually mechanically quite simple, requiring only a heat source and a condenser—you can theoretically build one in your back yard, and people have. The main reason modern refineries are so expensive and time-consuming to build is their heavy focus on efficiency and safety.
Also, there’s the beating heart of American agriculture, the Mississippi River. It branches throughout the Midwest, going all the way up to the Great Lakes. The considerable majority of American people and agriculture are located within a hundred km of either it or the ocean, meaning distribution would be relatively easy, even if land transportation is heavily disabled.
I am unsure about fertilizer and pesticide production, especially in the case of fertilizer export bans by other nations. I think it depends heavily on how well American natural gas production survives, but lack detailed knowledge.
First lets constrain this conversation a bit- let’s only look at the US and the likelihood of famine occurring there (as we have already been talking about it). Secondly I think we can both agree that the result this is heavily dependent on the type of strike, how may cities are actually lost and the surrounding context of the exchange (is the US and Russia/China at war), but for the sake of the conversation lets say that the US immediately won the prevailing conflict and doesn’t have to concern itself with preforming or dealing additional military operations.
So which cities are mostly likely targeted? One needn’t look far to see that targeting logistic hubs is fairly high on the list of likely enemy action (1, 2) following close behind domestic nuclear facilities and military targets. It is hard to say but perhaps we can go with a few dozen of Americas top cities were targeted along with a few Nebraskan wheat fields and military bases (it seems to me this is the scenario that most in this thread have been talking about).
Okay, with that context lets revisit the initial problem area- what does the logistics chain of bulk commodities following a nuclear exchange look like?
Firstly, I invite you to take a look at this map of US rail lines (note that this does not include all rail connections- I’m assuming spurs and private lines are not shown). Notice many of the large intersection points are in large cities which are very likely to be hit (also most of these rail yards are actually very close to the city center where fireball damage would occur). As you say most of the rail lines outside cities would likely avoid significant damage, however most of the important logistics infrastructure lies within the rail yards this includes the rolling stock, offloading equipment, signaling/coordinating structures, and arguably the most important the human capital- would all be destroyed.
Yes, other less important or used track could be cannibalized for use and various surviving heavy machine shops somehow forced into helping with the reconstruction efforts, I am left a bit skeptical how they get a bunch of workers (who maybe just lost everything in a blast) to go clear, sort debris, re-lay track and signaling, and learn how to operate the whole system all within inside a highly radioactive zone.
I digress though, thank you for bringing up the inland water ways- I think this is one of the best reasons the US could weather intentional logistics damage the best. However I will again point out that the limited barge stock available, and particularly where the largest inland parts are located- again in large cities that would likely be targeted.
From a meta point of view, the key thing to remember here is not what is theoretically possible but what is likely using previous experience, to happen. As an example—theoretically yes, someone with access to crude oil, some metal stock, and a small amount of equipment could make a very rudimentary oil distillation system but why would they do that? I get that you originally used it just to illustrate how basic some industrial processes are (which I don’t know if I really agree), but missing in your thought process is the ‘why?’ or ‘who?’ would do all of this. Logistics is Coordination and coordination is hard.
Sidenote: Martial Law or at minimum a nationwide state of emergency would likely be declared in such an event likely simplifying decision making and coordination. However, how quickly this could be ramped up to nationwide scale following significant damage to communication systems I will leave unassessed.
I would recommend reading about the supply chain issues that have been caused by COVID and the ongoing Ukrainian War, and just extrapolate out. I realize that because we are discussing famine it narrows the scope of what we are concerned about (ie only moving food from A to B) and with a short time horizon, the issue is still surprisingly complex.
My apologies if my line of reasoning may have been hard to follow at the end let me know if there is anything you find unclear.
I think what the two of you have identified is that the hardiness of logistics and coordination capacity seems like a key determinant of how well we’d weather a nuclear exchange. If it’s robust, some combination of stores and agricultural adjustments could allow us to avoid famine. If it’s weak, we might experience famine even if there’s plenty of siloed food.
The results of the original paper could be taken, then, as a proxy for the “logistics failure” scenario. What limited food we can access lasts us for about a year, and our practical ability to adjust our agricultural practices is minimal for one reason or another. It’s not couched in those terms, but it represents them.
I think publications considering outcomes under a range of logistics scenarios, as well as modeling the impact on logistics capacity itself, would be very valuable. My advice is that, while it’s natural to be angry about academic shortcomings on an important topic, it’s helpful to be collegial. If anyone here is hoping to produce any of this research, it is probably not a good long-term strategy to start by accusing your future colleagues of “lying,” short of a flat-out deliberate misrepresentation of current, verifiable facts as opposed to a contentious choice of predictive modeling assumptions.
Sorry for the short response here, hopefully when I have time later I can expand on it.
Background: Read your posts, not the paper
Main Point of disagreement—Famine is not about stockpiling or even producing the requisite calories. It is about distributing the food from where it is produced (or stored) to the population centers where it is needed. With grain transport most of it is done via rail with major exchange centers and logistics hubs being cities. In a nuclear exchange this infrastructure is completely wiped out (both the human capital and the actual physical structures).
To be blunt, of course no city>no people>who starves? Thus the famine is averted because the mothers/father/daughter/sons have all been wiped out in the blast right? Well the loss of all this logistics infrastructure means that suddenly rural people in non-productive (agriculturally) areas who escaped the blast also starve. Most critically here is that this is in fact a large swaths of America. (tangential point): This is within only the first few months following the exchange; imagine needing to further plant a new year of crops w/o easily accessible fertilizer/pesticides/herbicides and fuel (both diesel and nat gas- that corn ain’t gonna dry itself). The USA is perhaps the most prepared of any country with it decades long transfer from rail to trucking, but as a country it is still far far away from being able to have a distributed logistic system in the form of trucking that could manage in the absence of rail (without taking into account the other issues a nuclear attack would cause).
Regarding distribution, there’s also the potential to permanently knock out our electronics and power grid with a high-altitude detonation and resultant EMP waves: https://spectrum.ieee.org/one-atmospheric-nuclear-explosion-could-take-out-the-power-grid
If you knock out the solenoids in all our vehicles as well as the power grid and other electronics, it will be very hard to move that stored food anywhere, and most people will probably starve.
Knocking out rail infrastructure for months doesn’t seem plausible to me. Rail is made of hardened steel. Short of being inside the fireball, I don’t see how it would be damaged beyond repair. Maybe rail stations can be targeted, but that’s still a tiny proportion of the rail that exists in the US. Less-used tracks can be cannibalized and machine shops can probably produce short-term replacement rail to keep critical lines running.
As for fossil fuels, I am unsure of how much they will be targeted, but each warhead that hits an oil rig is one that’s not hitting a city. In addition, the majority of the world’s fossil fuel production is outside of the US and Russia, and won’t be targeted. A major concern is probably oil refineries, which are very concentrated in the US, Russia, and China, but the distillation of crude oil is actually mechanically quite simple, requiring only a heat source and a condenser—you can theoretically build one in your back yard, and people have. The main reason modern refineries are so expensive and time-consuming to build is their heavy focus on efficiency and safety.
Also, there’s the beating heart of American agriculture, the Mississippi River. It branches throughout the Midwest, going all the way up to the Great Lakes. The considerable majority of American people and agriculture are located within a hundred km of either it or the ocean, meaning distribution would be relatively easy, even if land transportation is heavily disabled.
I am unsure about fertilizer and pesticide production, especially in the case of fertilizer export bans by other nations. I think it depends heavily on how well American natural gas production survives, but lack detailed knowledge.
First lets constrain this conversation a bit- let’s only look at the US and the likelihood of famine occurring there (as we have already been talking about it). Secondly I think we can both agree that the result this is heavily dependent on the type of strike, how may cities are actually lost and the surrounding context of the exchange (is the US and Russia/China at war), but for the sake of the conversation lets say that the US immediately won the prevailing conflict and doesn’t have to concern itself with preforming or dealing additional military operations. So which cities are mostly likely targeted? One needn’t look far to see that targeting logistic hubs is fairly high on the list of likely enemy action (1, 2) following close behind domestic nuclear facilities and military targets. It is hard to say but perhaps we can go with a few dozen of Americas top cities were targeted along with a few Nebraskan wheat fields and military bases (it seems to me this is the scenario that most in this thread have been talking about).
Okay, with that context lets revisit the initial problem area- what does the logistics chain of bulk commodities following a nuclear exchange look like? Firstly, I invite you to take a look at this map of US rail lines (note that this does not include all rail connections- I’m assuming spurs and private lines are not shown). Notice many of the large intersection points are in large cities which are very likely to be hit (also most of these rail yards are actually very close to the city center where fireball damage would occur). As you say most of the rail lines outside cities would likely avoid significant damage, however most of the important logistics infrastructure lies within the rail yards this includes the rolling stock, offloading equipment, signaling/coordinating structures, and arguably the most important the human capital- would all be destroyed. Yes, other less important or used track could be cannibalized for use and various surviving heavy machine shops somehow forced into helping with the reconstruction efforts, I am left a bit skeptical how they get a bunch of workers (who maybe just lost everything in a blast) to go clear, sort debris, re-lay track and signaling, and learn how to operate the whole system all within inside a highly radioactive zone.
I digress though, thank you for bringing up the inland water ways- I think this is one of the best reasons the US could weather intentional logistics damage the best. However I will again point out that the limited barge stock available, and particularly where the largest inland parts are located- again in large cities that would likely be targeted.
From a meta point of view, the key thing to remember here is not what is theoretically possible but what is likely using previous experience, to happen. As an example—theoretically yes, someone with access to crude oil, some metal stock, and a small amount of equipment could make a very rudimentary oil distillation system but why would they do that? I get that you originally used it just to illustrate how basic some industrial processes are (which I don’t know if I really agree), but missing in your thought process is the ‘why?’ or ‘who?’ would do all of this. Logistics is Coordination and coordination is hard. Sidenote: Martial Law or at minimum a nationwide state of emergency would likely be declared in such an event likely simplifying decision making and coordination. However, how quickly this could be ramped up to nationwide scale following significant damage to communication systems I will leave unassessed.
I would recommend reading about the supply chain issues that have been caused by COVID and the ongoing Ukrainian War, and just extrapolate out. I realize that because we are discussing famine it narrows the scope of what we are concerned about (ie only moving food from A to B) and with a short time horizon, the issue is still surprisingly complex.
My apologies if my line of reasoning may have been hard to follow at the end let me know if there is anything you find unclear.
I think what the two of you have identified is that the hardiness of logistics and coordination capacity seems like a key determinant of how well we’d weather a nuclear exchange. If it’s robust, some combination of stores and agricultural adjustments could allow us to avoid famine. If it’s weak, we might experience famine even if there’s plenty of siloed food.
The results of the original paper could be taken, then, as a proxy for the “logistics failure” scenario. What limited food we can access lasts us for about a year, and our practical ability to adjust our agricultural practices is minimal for one reason or another. It’s not couched in those terms, but it represents them.
I think publications considering outcomes under a range of logistics scenarios, as well as modeling the impact on logistics capacity itself, would be very valuable. My advice is that, while it’s natural to be angry about academic shortcomings on an important topic, it’s helpful to be collegial. If anyone here is hoping to produce any of this research, it is probably not a good long-term strategy to start by accusing your future colleagues of “lying,” short of a flat-out deliberate misrepresentation of current, verifiable facts as opposed to a contentious choice of predictive modeling assumptions.