[AltaGuy]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

This might be slightly “semantics” but again, nuclear war does not mean the end of humanity. This is not to mean or be interpreted that it wouldn’t be an absolute atrocity, that millions and millions of people wouldn’t die, or that I am in any way trying to minimize the insane horrors of what that scenario playing out would look like.

However, much like the way people talk about climate change, extreme hyperbolic words should to be checked. I do not think nuclear war means the end of humans as is being insinuated above. All you have to do is a) look to already established models about the impacts of nuclear war, b) look at blast radius of the largest nuclear weapons and c) use common sense based on simple math.

Not all of Earth is going to be hit by a nuclear bomb and not all humans are going to be destroyed. Estimates of 70-90MM people will likely die, maybe more- and so obviously this would be humanity’s greatest ever tragedy. However the planet has 7B+ people on it. The residents of small town Chile or Madagascar will be fine. It is western countries that will be massively destroyed, but even then, Russia isn’t blasting every square inch of Canada with nukes, there will be pockets one can theoretically be safe.

It’s like George Carlins bit about the Earth and when people worry about the Earth. “The Earth will be fine… it’s the people that will be ####ed” (paraphrase). Yes it will be horrendously bad but it will not wipe out humanity. I can understand how this post likely won’t be taken well because it is very arm-chair semantics-like but I just want to point that out because people keep saying it and I do not think that’s quite right based on the number of nuclear bombs that would get deployed. People in Calgary, myself included, however, would likely be a target. Best models I have seen suggest up to 50 “western power” targets would receive multiple nukes and yes this would be a travesty never seen before resulting in huge numbers of dead. It is a terrifying prospect for sure.

No - you're actually very wrong. Nuclear fallout and nuclear winter have up to 95% of humans dying after a full nuclear volley. Imagine five years where the temperature on earth - anywhere - doesn't go above freezing, and what that does for our food.