Apocalypse Now
When the Cuban Missile Crisis hit, the world found itself on the brink of a global catastrophe - a large-scale nuclear war between the two superpowers, the USSR and America. What would be the remnants of human civilization after a massive exchange of blows? The military, of course, predicted the outcome using computers. They love to calculate everything, this is their strong point.
Walter Mondale once said that "there will be no veterans of the third world war." Contrary to this seemingly absolutely correct observation, in just a few decades since the creation of the atomic bomb, the world has turned into a huge powder keg. Although, if only gunpowder. By the end of the Cold War, the number of strategic nuclear warheads and related medium-range ammunition alone in NATO and Warsaw Pact arsenals exceeded 24,000.
Their total capacity was 12,000 Megatons, more than a million times to repeat the tragedy in Hiroshima. And this is without taking into account tactical nuclear weapons, various mines, torpedoes and artillery shells stuffed with nuclear warheads. Without an arsenal of chemical warfare agents. Apart from bacteriological and climatic weapons. Would this be enough to bring about Armageddon? Calculations have shown that - for the eyes.
Of course, it was difficult for analysts to take into account all the factors, but they tried, in various institutions. The forecasts were frankly depressing. It has been calculated that in the course of a large-scale nuclear war, the sides will be able to bring down about 12,000 bombs and missiles of various basing with a total capacity of about 6,000 Mt on each other's heads. What can this figure mean?
And this means massive strikes, first of all, at headquarters and communication centers, the locations of the silos of intercontinental ballistic missiles, air defense positions, large military and naval formations. Then, as the conflict grows, the turn of industrial centers, in other words, cities, that is, zones with a high degree of urbanization and, of course, population density, will come. Some of the nuclear warheads would be detonated above the surface to cause maximum damage, some at high altitudes to destroy satellites, communication systems and power systems.
Once, at the height of the Cold War, the military strategy that implied all this madness was called the second strike doctrine. America's Defense Secretary Robert McNamara defined it as "Mutually Assured Destruction." American generals calculated that the US army and navy would have to have time to destroy about a quarter of the USSR's population and more than half of its industrial capacity before they themselves were destroyed.
We probably should not forget that, in terms of the invention of new weapons, mankind has advanced much further than in the manufacture of anticancer drugs, so that the American bomb "Kid", which destroyed Hiroshima in August 1945, is nothing compared to modern exhibits. So, for example, the power of the strategic SS-18 Satan missile is about 20 Mt (that is, millions of tons in TNT equivalent). This is approximately one and a half thousand "Babies".
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The thicker the grass, the easier it is to mow
This phrase was said by Alaric, the legendary Gothic leader, who made proud Rome shudder. In a hypothetical nuclear war, the inhabitants of all large cities without exception would become this very grass. About 70% of the population of Western Europe, North America and the former USSR were urban and suburbanites. With an exchange of massive nuclear strikes, they would be doomed to immediate death. Calculations show that the explosion of even a bomb as outdated by today's standards as the "Kid" over a city the size of New York, Tokyo or Moscow would result in the immediate death of millions of people. Just imagine what losses could be when using thousands of atomic, hydrogen and neutron bombs.
This, at one time, was more or less accurately predicted. As a result of a large-scale nuclear war, in most of the cities of the opposing sides, the fate of radioactive ruins was prepared. Shock waves and heat impulses would destroy buildings and highways, bridges, dams and dams in areas of millions of square kilometers in a matter of seconds. This is not so much in relation to the entire land surface of the Northern Hemisphere. But, quite enough for the beginning of the end.
The number of people who evaporated, burned out, died in the rubble or picked up a lethal dose of radiation had to be calculated in seven figures. Electromagnetic pulses, which propagate tens of thousands of kilometers during high-altitude nuclear explosions, caused paralysis of all power supply and communication systems, destroyed all electronics and would lead to an accident at those thermal and nuclear power plants that would have miraculously survived the bombing.
Most likely, they would disrupt the Earth's electromagnetic field. As a result, it would provoke destructive natural disasters: hurricanes, floods, earthquakes.
There is an assumption according to which the massive use of weapons of mass destruction would change the position of the Earth relative to the Sun. But, we will not deal with this hypothesis, we will limit ourselves to such "trifles" as the destruction of storage facilities for spent assemblies of nuclear power plants, and depressurization of military laboratories that produce bacteriological weapons. Some regular superflu, hundreds of times more deadly than the notorious "Spanish flu", once in the wild, would complete the case that was started by the cholera and plague pandemics that rage over the radioactive rubble overflowing with decaying corpses.
Mankind has accumulated millions of tons of toxic chemical waste, primarily dioxin-containing. From time to time, accidents occurring, in which a small part of them end up in river basins, lead to local environmental disasters. Better not to imagine what could have happened in a disaster on a one-to-one scale. Serious scientific sources claim that this complex issue has not been deeply investigated. Apparently, as unnecessary. And so it is clear that this would be the end.
Bah, yes, we have forgotten about penetrating radiation - the fourth factor behind thermal radiation, shock wave and electromagnetic pulse, which distinguishes nuclear weapons from other products that are designed to destroy their own kind. Colossal territories would be poisoned by radioactive contamination, which would take centuries to regenerate. In rural areas, crops would be affected by radiation, leading to starvation among survivors.
Increased doses of radiation are a source of cancers, newborn pathologies and genetic mutations due to DNA strand disruption. In the post-apocalyptic world, after the health systems were destroyed, these issues from the field of modern medicine would have moved under the jurisdiction of sorcerers, because the survival of individual doctors does not at all mean the preservation of medicine as a whole. Millions of those who were burned and crippled at the first stage of the nuclear conflict, immediately after the exchange of strikes, do not count. They would have died in the first hours, days and months after the nuclear Apocalypse. Long before the appearance of healers.
And those of you who survive will envy the dead
And these ominous words were said by John Silver, one of the most famous heroes of the English writer R. L. Stevenson. They are said for a completely different reason, but surprisingly fit into the context of describing the world after a nuclear war. Scientists agreed that nitrogen oxides generated in the fireballs of nuclear explosions will be thrown into the stratosphere, where they will destroy the ozone layer. Its restoration could take tens of years, and this is at best - given our level of scientific knowledge, it is impossible to predict the timing more accurately. Once (about 600 million years ago), the ozone layer of the stratosphere played the role of a kind of cradle of life, protecting the Earth's surface from the deadly ultraviolet radiation of the Sun.
According to a US National Academy of Sciences report, an explosion of 12,000 megatons of nuclear warheads could destroy 70% of the ozone layer over the Northern Hemisphere - supposedly a theater of war, and 40% over the Southern Hemisphere, with the most dire consequences for all life forms. People and animals would go blind, burns and skin cancers would become commonplace. Many plants and microorganisms would disappear forever, finally and irrevocably.
Our arrows will block the sun from you
This famous phrase: "Our arrows will cover the sun from you," said the envoy of the Persian king Xerxes to the Spartan king Leonidas, who fortified himself in Thermopylae pass. Leonid's answer is known from history textbooks: "Well, then we will fight in the shadows." Fortunately, the brave Spartans did not know the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. In the "shadow cast by atomic arrows", there would be simply no one to fight the battle.
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was impossible to contain the fires due to the water pipes destroyed by the shock wave. A "fire storm" has developed. This is the name of a powerful fire that causes an intense vortex movement of air. The city was covered with a huge thundercloud, and it started to rain - black, greasy and oily. Attempts to fight the fire, which was generated by the atomic flash and many short circuits in the power grid, ended in complete fiasco.
We can say with absolute certainty that in the event of a large-scale nuclear war, there could be no such attempts, because there would be simply no one to put out the fires. In general, the fire would have spread out in earnest, where there is a sea of flame that engulfed Dresden after the ritual raids of the allied aviation. Nowadays, industrial centers contain colossal reserves of paper, wood, oil, oils, gasoline, kerosene, plastics, rubber and other combustible materials that are capable of blazing to blacken the sky. Emitting into the atmosphere over the Northern Hemisphere millions of tons of particles of smoke, ash, highly toxic substance and highly dispersed radioactive dust.
Calculations prove that in a few days impenetrable clouds comparable in size to the continents would cover the Sun over Europe and North America, and impenetrable darkness would descend on the Earth. The air temperature would drop by 30 - 40 ° C. The earth's surface was struck by a crackling frost, which in a short period of time would have turned it into permafrost. The cooling would continue for centuries, exacerbated by the gradual decrease in ocean temperatures. That is, as the end result of a large-scale nuclear war - a climatic catastrophe.
At first, severe storms would have arisen due to significant temperature differences between continents and the ocean. Then, as the temperatures dropped, they would have subsided a little, the surface of the seas and oceans was covered at first with ice crumbs, and then with hummocks. Even at the equator it would be more than cool, about - 50 degrees Celsius! Animals and plants that would have survived a nuclear cataclysm would certainly have perished from such cold weather. Extinction would be universal. The jungle would turn into a forest bound by severe frosts, a taiga of dead vines and palms. Well, people who would miraculously survive would probably know that there is real hunger.
Radiation would permeate almost everything - air, water, and soil. Surviving viruses and insects, undergoing powerful mutations, would spread deadly new diseases. A few years after a nuclear war, at best, an insignificant shadow would remain of the seven billion population - about 20 million people, scattered across the Earth submerged in nuclear twilight. Maybe it would have been "Twilight of the Gods." Humanity would return to its primitive state under incomparably worse environmental conditions. I don't want to think about looting, ritual murders and cannibalism, but, probably, the most terrible pictures of the apocalypse painted by science fiction writers would become commonplace.
Degenerate descendants of the Normans
There is no doubt that humanity would be very lucky if it could survive at all as a result of the cataclysm. And what kind of knowledge he would have preserved, and the memories of cars, airplanes or televisions passed down from generation to generation would not be akin to the legends that Plato brought to us. Albert Einstein once said: “I don’t know with what weapon the Third World War will be, but I know for sure that the Fourth World War will be with stones and sticks”. Do you think this is not a particularly optimistic forecast? Can you imagine yourself as just Robinson on a desert island and honestly admit: will you be able to recreate a hot water system, design a radio or just a telephone?
Alexander Gorbovsky in his book Fourteen Millennia Ago gave an example of the fate of the Norman settlements, which were founded in the XIV century on the coast of North America. Their sad fate is very indicative. In a nutshell, it looks like this. The colonists brought with them from Scandinavia the knowledge of pottery, the ability to smelt and process metal. But, when the connection with the metropolis was interrupted, they were assimilated by the local Iroquois tribes, who were at a much lower stage of development, and the knowledge was lost forever. The descendants of the settlers were thrown back into the Stone Age.
When, 200 years later, the European conquerors found themselves in these places, they found only tribes that were distinguished by fair skin and used a certain number of Scandinavian words. And, that was all! The great-grandchildren of the Vikings did not have the slightest idea of the collapsed and moss-covered structures that were once iron-smelting furnaces and mining mines. But they did not have a nuclear winter …