[BahamasEd]

a few minor points.

1. cyberwar, one government attacking another government is an act of war and the one attacked would be legally able to reply with real war.
2. The DNC is not part of the U.S. government.
3. Someone needs to explain what "covert action" means to Biden.
4. and the question no one is asking, Why are the DNC, and anyone else, using a email system that is hackable?

[Tanada]

With all the new talk about nuclear war in the conspiracy realms of the internet has the clock even moved a minute?

[Subjectivist]

Timeline
IT IS STILL 3 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
DoomsdayClock_black_3mins_regmark.jpg
3 minutes to midnight
2016: "Last year, the Science and Security Board moved the Doomsday Clock forward to three minutes to midnight, noting: 'The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.' That probability has not been reduced. The Clock ticks. Global danger looms. Wise leaders should act—immediately." See the full statement from the Science and Security Board on the 2016 time of the Doomsday Clock

http://thebulletin.org/timeline

[dissident]

Who are these clowns exactly that they can be the final arbiters of the risk?

[Tanada]

Who are these clowns exactly that they can be the final arbiters of the risk?

They are an anti-nuclear group of 'scientists' that have been trying to eliminate both weapons and power reactors since about 1952.

[dissident]

Who are these clowns exactly that they can be the final arbiters of the risk?

They are an anti-nuclear group of 'scientists' that have been trying to eliminate both weapons and power reactors since about 1952.

I know, but this time around they are snoozing and not paying attention.

[eclipse]

Say Russia and America went all-out, and exchanged about a third of the world's nukes. I went to the nuclear winter wiki but the debate about the science seemed a bit confusing. What's your understanding? Any good summaries of what might happen if we set off about a third of the world's nuclear bombs in a major war?

[sidzepp]

I guess we won't know till we have had one.
However, we do know what happened at Fukushima and Chernobyl and how bad the results are from there. We, however, do not know what the consequences of several thousand or more nuclear weapons detonating in a relative short period.

Most of your major urban areas will be reduced to ash. Your refineries. Then the radiation clouds that begin to spread out. Could widespread nuclear detonations increases activity along fault lines with increases in volcanic or seismic activity.

My goal, if the world comes to the slinging of nukes, it to hopefully be at ground zero.

[Satori]

should you ever come across it
I highly recommend the docudrama THREADS
it is about a nuclear attack on Great Britain and its aftermath

[Cog]

If I were a nuclear targeteer, I wouldn't even target cities. I would target refineries and the electrical grid. Without fuel and without an electrical grid, there are no food deliveries and no way to get them started again. Most of your population, and I mean 95%, would be dead within 6 months.

Furthermore, those 102 nuclear reactors and the cooling ponds for the spent fuel rods have to be continually cooled with pumped water. Even if you shut down the reactors you have to continue to cool them. When the fuel runs out for the emergency generators, they all melt down. Now you have clouds of radioactivity blowing across the landscape for thousands of years. That pretty much kills everyone else who has managed not to starve to death.

Nuclear winter won't be something that will concern you because you will be dead.

[dissident]

Nuclear winter is grotesquely overblown. To loft enough fine mode aerosol into the stratosphere to cover the planet with a light-reducing shroud would take a Chicxulub meteorite scale event.

The Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of 10 km (6.2 mi) or larger, and delivered an estimated energy of 420 zettajoules (4.20E23 joules, over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).[19] By contrast, the most powerful man-made explosive device ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had an energy of only 210 petajoules (2.10E17 joules, the yield of 50 megatons of TNT),[20] making the Chicxulub impact roughly 2 million times more powerful. Even the most energetic known volcanic eruption, which released an estimated energy of 1 zettajoule (the equivalent of approximately 240 gigatons of TNT) and created the La Garita Caldera,[21] delivered only 0.24% of the energy of the Chicxulub impact. The impact is estimated to have displaced almost 200,000 cubic kilometers (48,000 cubic miles) of sediment, two orders of magnitude more than the amount displaced by the second-largest instantaneous deposit, the Nuuanu debris flow in Hawaii.[22]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

We do not have anywhere near 2 million times 50 MT nuclear explosion capacity in the combined arsenals of the USA and Russia (and throw in everyone else as well). Also, individual blasts will be scattered over a wide area and will be air-burst over populated locations. The amount of dust and ash (from fires) released by a nuclear exchange would not even match the amount of dust released if all the nuclear weapons were assembled at one point about 200 meters under ground and detonated to imitate a meteor impact. And this imitation would be vanishingly small compared to the Chicxulub event.

By far the most of this dust and ash particulate mass would be at sizes that would never reach the stratosphere and would sediment out. The remaining fine mode aerosol would stay in the troposphere and be washed out by the efficient rain and snow scrubbing in under two years. There would be a cold winter and a cold summer and that's it. There would not be any winter in summer BS.

[Newfie]

My understanding from the same Wiki article is that the major effect from such an exchange, after the initial destruction and radiation, is from the fin ash particles lofted into the upper atmosphere. The debate seems to be about how much ash that might be and how hot the fires are which drive how high the ash is lofted.

It sounds like the initial simulations were used the WWII Japanese bombing fires as a base. In that case we are pretty much doomed with the growing belts dropping somewhere around 30°C. Simply no food production for 3 to 5 years.

Opptomists seem to think large modern cities will not generate nears as much fire, heat, or ash.

We have no real good models for what happen in modern cities. 9/11 is probably as good as you get. But that was a small part of NYC. what would happen in any of the major Asian cities or Mexico City? My personal guess is it won't be that much different from the Japanese experience as they are filled with cheap flammable hovels.

May we never know for sure.

[Subjectivist]

Prepare yourself, things are getting explosive!

India may be reinterpreting its nuclear weapons doctrine, circumstantial evidence suggests, with potentially significant ramifications for the already tenuous nuclear balance in South Asia.

New assessments suggest that India is considering allowing for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Pakistan’s arsenal in the event of a war. This would not formally change India’s nuclear doctrine, which bars it from launching a first strike, but would loosen its interpretation to deem pre-emptive strikes as defensive.

It would also change India’s likely targets, in the event of a war, to make a nuclear exchange more winnable and, therefore, more thinkable.

Analysts’ assessments, based on recent statements by senior Indian officials, are necessarily speculative. States with nuclear weapons often leave ambiguity in their doctrines to prevent adversaries from exploiting gaps in their proscriptions and to preserve flexibility. But signs of a strategic adjustment in India are mounting.

This comes against a backdrop of long-simmering tensions between India and Pakistan — including over state-sponsored terrorism and the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir — which have already led to several wars, the most recent in 1999.

The new interpretation would be a significant shift in India’s posture that could have far-reaching implications in the region, even if war never comes. Pakistan could feel compelled to expand its arsenal to better survive a pre-emptive strike, in turn setting off an Indian buildup.

This would be more than an arms race, said Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies nuclear powers.

“It’s very scary because all the ‘first-strike instability’ stuff is real,” Mr. Narang said, referring to a dynamic in which two nuclear adversaries both perceive a strong incentive to use their warheads first in a war. This is thought to make nuclear conflict more likely.

Hidden in Plain Sight
Hints of a high-level Indian debate over the nuclear doctrine mounted with a recent memoir by Shivshankar Menon, India’s national security adviser from 2011 to 2014.

“There is a potential gray area as to when India would use nuclear weapons first” against a nuclear-armed adversary, Mr. Menon wrote.

India, he added, “might find it useful to strike first” against an adversary that appeared poised to launch or that “had declared it would certainly use its weapons” — most likely a veiled reference to Pakistan.

Mr. Narang presented the quotations, along with his interpretation, in Washington last week, during a major nuclear policy conference hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“There is increasing evidence that India will not allow Pakistan to go first,” he told a gathering of international government officials and policy experts.

Mr. Menon’s book, he said, “clearly carves out an exception for pre-emptive Indian first use in the very scenario that is most likely to occur in South Asia.”

The passage alone does not prove a policy shift. But in context alongside other developments, it suggests either that India has quietly widened its strategic options or that officials are hoping to stir up just enough ambiguity to deter its adversaries.

After Mr. Narang’s presentation generated attention in the South Asian news media, Mr. Menon told an Indian columnist, “India’s nuclear doctrine has far greater flexibility than it gets credit for.”

Mr. Menon declined an interview request for this article. When told what the article would say, he did not challenge its assertions. India’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Whether these signals indicate a real shift or a strategic feint, analysts believe they are intended to right a strategic imbalance that has been growing for almost a decade.

The Pakistan Problem
Should India sustain a nuclear attack, its doctrine calls for a major retaliation, most likely by targeting its adversary’s cities. When this policy was announced in 2003, it fit the threat posed by Pakistan’s arsenal of long-range, city-destroying weapons.

Since then, Pakistan has developed smaller warheads designed for battlefield use. These were meant to address Pakistan’s India problem: The Indian military is much larger, virtually ensuring its victory in an all-out war.

Such weapons could be used against invading Indian troops, halting a war before it could be lost. This would exploit a gap in India’s doctrine: It is hard to imagine that India would escalate to total nuclear war, as its doctrine commands, over a small battlefield strike on Pakistani soil.

This created a Pakistan problem for India: Its chief adversary had made low-level nuclear war thinkable, even potentially winnable. Since then, there have been growing hints of debate over modifying the Indian doctrine.

B. S. Nagal, a lieutenant general who led India’s nuclear command from 2008 to 2011, argued in a 2014 article for a policy of “ambiguity” as to whether India would launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike.

Also that year, the Bharatiya Janata Party said it would consider changing India’s doctrine, but then abandoned this position. It took power in national elections a few weeks later.

Last November, Manohar Parrikar, then the defense minister, said India’s prohibition against nuclear first use was too restrictive, though he added that this was only his opinion.

Another reason analysts suspect change: India’s doctrine initially served to persuade the United States to drop economic sanctions it had imposed over nuclear tests. Given President Trump’s softer stance on proliferation, that impetus may no longer apply.

‘The Seductive Logic’
Mr. Menon, in his book, seemed to settle on an answer to India’s quandary: “Pakistani tactical nuclear weapon use would effectively free India to undertake a comprehensive first strike against Pakistan,” he wrote.

The word “comprehensive” refers to a nuclear attack against an adversary’s arsenal, rather than its cities. It is meant to instigate and quickly win a nuclear exchange, leaving the other side disarmed.

Taken with a policy of pre-emption, these two shifts would seem to address India’s Pakistan problem, in theory persuading Pakistani leaders that a limited nuclear war would be too dangerous to pursue.

For India, Mr. Narang said, “you can really see the seductive logic” to such an approach. This would be “really the only pathway you have if you’re going to have a credible nuclear deterrence.”

It is impossible to know whether statements like Mr. Menon’s are intended to quietly reveal a policy shift, while avoiding the crisis that would be set off by a formal change, or merely stir doubt.

Either way, the intent appears the same: to create just enough uncertainty in the minds of Pakistani leaders that they become restrained by the potential threat of pre-emptive Indian strikes.

But if that threat is plausible, then the distinction between a real threat and a feint blurs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/worl ... rikes.html

[sparky]

.
Doctrine of use are pretty clear , the use of nuke is strategic and for defending the homeland by dissuasion
in plain talk nuclear weapons are to protect one's homeland against other nuclear power

so far so good , but the use of nukes for tactical battlefield use is very murky
should some unpleasantness develop between NATO and Russia , there would be questions
if one side is getting it's arse kicked would tacticals be an option?
is the use of battlefield nukes a trigger for escalation as long as they are falling on Minsk and Warsaw ?
those are not the homeland .

[Tanada]

Ah the good old fashion let them nuke each other and we will sort it out later option....

The thing is some simulations have been demonstrating a much stronger ecological consequence from a 'regional nuclear war' than the earlier ones did. For one thing everyone keeps saying each of Pakistan and India have 50 weapons. Why oh why would they stop building when they got to that 'magical' number? The USA and USSR built close to 15,000 each, and the minor powers like the UK/France/China built over a thousand each.

Thus I believe the assumption of just 100 combined is grossly low as an estimate.

Secondly the thrust of this article is that India is now planning to launch if they think Pakistan has an intention of launching, quite similar to the Launch On Warning theory that nearly lead the USA to launch at least twice and the USSR to almost launch once. How many times can our civilization roll the dice on having a human in the chain of decision making decide at the last moment to wait and see against the directives of the policy in place?

Nuclear weapons may have only been used twice on actual targets, but that is now becoming almost a non memory as more and more of the WW II generation pass into history themselves. Here is what I mean, if you were alive in August 1945 and old enough to have an actual memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as real events then you were around 10 years of age or older. Those two events were 72 years ago this August so if you were 10 then you will be 82 this year. Odds are pretty good you are now living in a retirement community or nursing home and nobody in any government anywhere listens to you very much any longer.

Heck the last atmospheric test series of nuclear weapons that generated a lot of films and media buzz was in the very early 1960's. If you are under the age of say 60 yourself then you were not aware of nuclear weapons except from historical accounts and old to very old newsreel films you can now find on YouTube but may have been shown in school.

To the younger generations who are now starting to run things nuclear weapons are something from history that had very poor quality Hollywood movies made about them, not a real threat. there were a couple nuclear war movies in the early 1980's but were they A at all realistic and B do younger people in positions of authority believe they were realistic?

Think about this fact for a minute, the last major media event atmospheric test footage was shot before 1965 and world population at that time was a hair over 2 Billion. That means 5 Billion people or more of those currently living did not experience those events as news of the day. The Cuban Missile Crisis was even longer ago.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF HUMANITY HAS NO PERSONAL INGRAINED FEAR OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS ON THE GUT LEVEL.

If you do not think that makes war more likely then I do not understand what you are thinking.

[Subjectivist]

Oh great, thanks for the new nitemares!

You've seen what a nuclear winter looks like, as imagined by filmmakers and novelists. Now you can take a look at what scientists have to say. In a new study, a team of four U.S. atmospheric and environmental scientists modeled what would happen after a "limited, regional nuclear war." To inexpert ears, the consequences sound pretty subtle—two or three degrees of global cooling, a nine percent reduction in yearly rainfall. Still, such changes could be enough to trigger crop failures and famines. After all, these would be cooler temperatures than the Earth has seen in 1,000 years.

Let's take a detailed look at some of these super-fun conclusions, shall we?
First, what happened?

The team imagines 100 nuclear warheads, each about the size of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, detonate over the Indian subcontinent. The team members are imagining an India-Pakistan nuclear war. It seems unfair to single out these nations, but I guess they're the poster children because they have relatively small nuclear stockpiles compared to countries such as the U.S., Russia and China. The idea is, If these lightweights can do this to Earth, imagine what the bigwigs can do.

After the Indian-Pakistani nuclear exchange…

Five megatons of black carbon enter the atmosphere immediately. Black carbon comes from burned stuff and it absorbs heat from the sun before it can reach the Earth. Some black carbon does eventually falls back to Earth in rain.
After one year, the average surface temperature of the Earth falls by 1.1 kelvin, or about two degrees Fahrenheit. After five years, the Earth is, on average, three degrees colder than it used to be. Twenty years on, our home planet warms again to about one degree cooler than the average before the nuclear war.

Earth's falling temperatures reduces the amount of rain the planet receives. Year five after the war, Earth will have 9 percent less rain than usual. Year 26 after the war, Earth gets 4.5 percent less rain than before the war.

In years 2-6 after the war, the frost-free growing season for crops is shortened by 10 to 40 days, depending on the region.

Chemical reactions in the atmosphere eat away Earth's ozone layer, which protects Earth's inhabitants from ultraviolet radiation. In the five years after the war, the ozone is 20 to 25 percent thinner, on average. Ten years on, the ozone layer has recovered so that it's now 8 percent thinner.

The decreased UV protection may lead to more sunburns and skin cancers in people, as well as reduced plant growth and destabilized DNA in crops such as corn.

In a separate study, published in 2013, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated 2 billion people would starve in the wake of a 100-A-bomb war.

Okay, I know I've just made your day with this list. Still, there's a point to all this doom and gloom, the modelers write in their paper. The scientists want to motivate countries to destroy the estimated 17,000 nuclear weapons they still hold.

Will this work? Well, scientists and artists have been imagining the dire consequences of an atom-bomb war for decades. The very idea of a "nuclear winter" entered the popular imagination in 1983, when a study, authored by a team including Carl Sagan, first proposed that soot from fires after a nuclear war would block sunlight from reaching Earth.

Twenty-five years later, environmental scientists began using modern climate models to figure out what might happen after a nuclear war. Yep, these are the same models that scientists use to predict the effects of human-driven global warming. This new paper combined a number of those state-of-the-art models. If you check out the paper, published in the journal Earth's Future, you can see how these conclusions compare to previous climate-model-based calculations. Different modeling efforts have come up with slightly different years for when the Earth would be coldest after a nuclear war, for example, but they generally agree that the effects would be, well, severe and long-term.

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/c ... uclear-war

[Cog]

Sagan also predicted the oil fires in Kuwait after the First Gulf war would lead to global cooling. It had no effect at all.

[Tanada]

'A third of the world would die': What would happen if you lived in a nuclear winter?
The reality of even a small-scale nuclear war is unimaginable. Even on the other side of the world you wouldn't be safe.

That's according a scientist who helped pen the book And Then You're Dead: A scientific exploration of the world's most interesting ways to die by Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty.

"During the Cold War it was widely understood that both the United States and the USSR had the capability to destroy the world with nuclear weapons. What people didn't know was how easily they actually could do it." the book says.

But now, thanks to sophisticated weather models, scientist Paul Doherty learned that even a small nuclear skirmish could lead to devastation.

Should nuclear war break out, Doherty wrote you aren't immune to the devastation even if you are on the other side of the globe, news.com.au reported.

In the event of a nuclear war, the pair penned just what could happen to you.

Your first problem? Radiation.

"When the nukes went off they would irradiate the area and transmute innocuous atoms into dangerous ones. One of the worst of these nuclear bastard children is called strontium-90.

"It's light, so it doesn't take many explosions for it to coat the globe and get deep into the food supply. Once ingested it's so similar to calcium that your body absorbs it into your bones.

"Children born after the open-air nuclear tests of the 1950s have fifty times the natural level of strontium-90 in their teeth. Fortunately, that's still below the threshold for serious danger.

"Unfortunately, unlike a test, a nuclear battle will blow past that threshold.

"Once strontium-90 is in your bones its radioactive decay breaks up the DNA of your cells, leading to bone cancers and leukaemia. So if you survived the initial nuclear exchange, you would have bone cancer to look forward to, but that's only if you could also survive the more serious smoke, ash, and soot problem.

The second issue: Dust

"After the dust has cleared from the initial detonations, is that the dust wouldn't clear.

After a hundred multi-megaton bombs exploded in the air, not only would they directly distribute carbon into the upper atmosphere but they would start enormous forest and urban fires that would release massive amounts of smoke.

"On top of that, the explosions would lift tonnes of fine dust; all of which would be heated by the sun to rise and collect in the stratosphere.

"The smoke from your typical campfire stays below the clouds where it can be wicked away by rain. In the case of nuclear fallout, smoke and ash would be lifted above the clouds where it wouldn't be wicked away by rain, so it would stay parked for years and block sunlight.

"Even conservative environmental simulations show that a hundred nuclear detonations would block enough sunlight to drop the average global temperature by a few degrees. A sudden global drop in temperature of even a couple of degrees would be devastating for the world's food supply, because a single frost kills rice.

"A serious disturbance in rice production would kill as many as 2 billion people around the globe.

"In a hundred-bomb nuclear war nearly a third of the world's population would die from the explosions, starvation, or cancer, but our species would carry on. In larger, multi-thousand exchanges of thermonuclear weapons, like the one that almost occurred in November 1983 between the United States and the USSR, however, we probably wouldn't."

How close the world came to ending

In 1983 The US led NATO into a massive training exercise called Able Archer that mimicked a nuclear strike against the USSR.

However, the USSR mistook the exercise as a cover for an actual strike, forcing the Soviets to mobilise its air force.

Fortunately for the world, the US believed the USSR's mobilisation was a training exercise and so both sides then stood down.

However, Cassidy and Doherty claim if the two world powers went to war that the a large number of the world's population wouldn't live long.

"Even if you didn't live in a large city (basically every city with a population of more than 100,000 in the United States and the USSR was targeted) and, therefore, weren't killed by the initial blasts, you couldn't expect to live long.

"Within two weeks of something like this happening, 180 million tonnes of smoke, soot, and dust would coat our globe like black paint, and there it would stay.

"Light levels would be reduced to a few per cent of what they are today, so high noon would look like predawn. Midsummer highs in North America would be below zero.

"The good news is there would be plenty of dead trees to burn for warmth. The bad news: You would starve. Crops would be wiped out, and those that weren't would suffer from another problem: Bugs.

"Cockroaches and their ilk are quite durable when it comes to radiation, but their predators are not. Without any birds to keep them in check, crop-eating pests would prosper. Pests would decimate any crops that made it through the freeze."

This is an extract from And Then You're Dead: A scientific exploration of the world's most interesting ways to die by Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty, published by Allen and Unwin and available now.

Paul Doherty is co-director and senior staff scientist at the San Francisco Exploratorium Museum. He received his PhD in solid state physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cody Cassidy is a writer and editor.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/ar ... d=11857560

[sparky]

.
It's far from certain that the 3000 or so nuke warheads now deployed could change the weather
not only is there less of them but the yield is smaller ,
the megaton class weapons have been retired

[Tanada]

.
It's far from certain that the 3000 or so nuke warheads now deployed could change the weather
not only is there less of them but the yield is smaller ,
the megaton class weapons have been retired

That is believed to be true for the USA/Russia/UK/France but how can you be certain it holds true for China/India/Pakistan/Everyone Else? Smaller weapons became in vogue because targeting systems allow a more precise target selection to destroy a military target. If on the other hand your target is the seat of government for your opponent you want to take out with a high probability of removing the leadership a multi-megaton device over say Islamabad which is built on a string of hills in a mountain valley. Much easier to deliver one carefully targeted very large weapon than half a dozen precisely targeted but lower yield weapons.