By RUBEN BAUER NAVEIRA*
Thinking the unthinkable or what our lives will be like post-nuclear war
Faced with the tragic historical moment we have reached, this article proposes to think about the unthinkable – what our lives will be like in a post-nuclear war – and it is composed of five parts, to be published in five consecutive weeks, on Fridays. fairs. The link to the two previous articles is at the end of this text.
Death is not just from bombs
For those who have no idea what post-nuclear war is, I include at this point in the text my translation of the article “On Going Seriously Boom”, by Fred Reed, published on the blog The Saker[I]:
What would a nuclear war against Russia or China, provoked by the United States, be like? Let's try to imagine.
America is fragile. We don't realize this because it works fluidly, and because when a local catastrophe happens – earthquake, hurricane, tornado – the rest of the country mobilizes to fix things. The country can deal with conventional and regional disasters. But a nuclear war is neither conventional nor regional. Very few warheads would serve to irretrievably ruin the United States for decades. This should be abundantly clear to anyone who really thinks about it.
Defending yourself is impossible. Missile defenses make no sense except as a money-sink for the arms industry. This article is not the place to talk about decoys, hypersonics, Poseidon, maneuverable glide vehicles, orbital warning stations, multiple reentry vehicles, boring old cruise missiles, and so on. Coastal cities are particularly easy targets as they are vulnerable to low-flying missiles.[ii] launched from submarines. For starters, we have Washington, New York, Boston, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle – they are all gone.
A developed country is a system of systems of systems, interdependent and interconnected – water, electricity, industries, energy, telecommunications, transport, oil and gas pipelines, and complex supply chains. These are interconnected, interdependent and depend on large numbers of qualified professionals showing up to work. Modern warheads are no joke of the BB gun that was Hiroshima. Talking about restoration some time after the nuclear bombing of a conurbation is childish, because the city will have many hundreds of thousands of deaths, destroyed homes, gigantic fires, people horribly burned without any hope of medical care, and in general populations Too focused on staying alive to worry about abstractions like supply chains.
Suppression of transport can cause more deaths than bombs. Metropolises, outskirts and cities cannot feed themselves. They depend on a constant and voluminous arrival flow of food that is produced in distant regions. These foods are shipped by train or truck to distribution centers, such as Chicago, from where they are transferred to cities such as New York. Many megatons over Chicago would ruin rail lines and trucking companies. Trains and trucks require gasoline and diesel, which come from somewhere, presumably through pipelines. These, ruptured by the explosion, furiously burning, would take time to repair. Time is everything that cities won't have.
What would happen in, say, New York even if, improbably, it wasn't bombed? And here we will disregard the odds of complete, frenzied panic and chaos resulting from the realization that much of the country has been leveled. In the early days there would be panic buying in supermarkets being emptied. Very quickly the hunger would become acute. By the fourth day, people would be hunting each other for their food. By the end of the second week, people would be eating each other. Literally. This happens in famines.
Most things in America depend on electricity. This comes from generating plants that burn substances, generally natural gas or coal. These arrive by trains, which will not be running, or by trucks, which probably will not be running either. They depend on unlikely operational oil fields, refineries and pipelines. All of this depends on workers continuing to show up for work instead of trying to save their families. So, no electricity in New York, which will be dark.
That means no phones, no internet, no lighting, and no elevators. How would this play out in a city of skyscrapers? Most people would be practically incommunicado in a dark city. Massive traffic jams would form as people with cars tried to escape – where? – while the fuel remained in the tank.
Where does the water in New York come from? I don't know, but it doesn't flow spontaneously until the thirtieth floor. It needs to be pumped, which involves electricity, from wherever it comes to wherever it goes. No electricity, no pumping. No pumping, no water. And no flushing of toilets. River water could be drunk, of course. Think about the crowds.
In all likelihood, civil society would collapse by the end of the fourth day. Those ethnically more virile would emerge from the ghettos with guns and clubs to feed themselves. The police will have disappeared, either looking after their families or looting themselves. Civilization is a thin layer of veneer. Streets and subways are no longer safe places even without nuclear war. Most will be unarmed and unable to defend themselves. People who have never touched a gun would suddenly understand the appeal. If you believe that this would not happen, convey my regards to the fairy Tinkerbell.
Thus, it would not be necessary to bomb a city to destroy it, just isolate it from transport hubs for a couple of weeks. Of course, an enemy would destroy several cities as well as critical infrastructure. Those who plan nuclear wars may be psychopaths, or just misplaced computer freaks wasting time on bloodless abstractions, but they are not fools. They meticulously calculate how to ruin a target country as severely as possible. In no more than a couple of months, perhaps two hundred million people would have starved to death. Do you think this is fanciful? Tell me why it would be fanciful.
By the way, in my days roaming the inner ring of the Pentagon, I read manuals on how to keep soldiers fighting after they had been exposed to lethal doses of radioactivity. They do not die immediately, and, depending on the dosage, it is possible to administer stimulants to keep them standing, or so the manuals say. Those manuals also discussed whether or not these undead should be told they were going to die.
Authors used the evocative phrase “change of terrain” to describe landscapes with all the trees fallen alongside the soldiers, and we’ve all heard of “Overkill".[iii] After a nuclear war, millions would slowly die from exposure to radioactivity – study Nagasaki and Hiroshima – and burned corpses would rot in the streets, too numerous to be buried by survivors with other priorities on their minds.
How would next season’s crops be planted? Answer: they wouldn't be. Where would the fertilizers come from? Parts for tractors, trucks, harvesters? Making them requires functioning industries, which in turn requires electricity, raw materials and workers. If the enemy chooses to target farmland with “dirty” radioactive cobalt bombs, these areas will become lethal for years. Nuclear planners think about things like this.
Among “defense intellectuals,” there is, or was when I covered this stuff, crazy talk about how America could “assimilate” a surprise attack from the Russians and keep enough missiles in reserve to level Russia. People like that should be locked up in sealed boxes and left in abandoned coal mines.
Also notice that Biden, Blinken, and Bolton, bibidi bobidi bum,[iv] and their families, live in Washington, the priority target. As long as the rats are on board the ship, they will not sink it. If they are discovered sailing away from Washington at three in the morning, dressed as cleaning ladies, then it will be time to worry.
***
Fred Reed's article transcribed above exposes the terrible consequences of nuclear war for those countries that have been directly attacked. As if all this weren't enough, let's look at two possible aggravating factors, nuclear winter and the electromagnetic pulse:
The phenomenon of nuclear winter corresponds to the abrupt cooling of the Earth's surface due to the suspension into the upper layers of the atmosphere of millions of tons of soot particles resulting from the smoke from nuclear explosions and the fires they trigger. This layer of soot will cover in a matter of weeks the entire globe blocking the sun's rays from penetrating the atmosphere, leading to a drop in temperatures as well as, due to the reduction in evaporation, a decrease in the volume of rain (and less rain, less food). All over the planet, this will lead to deaths in fauna and flora.
It is not possible for scientists to establish a correlation between the number[v] of nuclear explosions and the magnitude of the resulting nuclear winter. So, as an estimate: if the total number of detonations were to be in the tens, there is no way to assume their effects, because it is not known to what extent the environment would be able to compensate for them; if it were to be in the hundreds, it is assumed that both the incidence of sunlight and rain could be reduced by approximately half – which would lead the surviving portion of humanity to suffer unimaginable suffering; If it were to be in the thousands, the extinction of life on Earth is almost certain.
In addition to meaning less evaporation, and therefore less rain, and therefore less food, nuclear winter can mean a lot of other things as temperatures drop. In a “tropical country” like ours, very cold temperatures for prolonged periods can cause:
– Loss of pressure inside LPG cylinders (cooking gas), resulting in the gas being blocked from exiting, or in it being released in liquid form, causing damage to the pressure regulators;[vi]
– Freezing of water in pipes both in distribution networks and inside homes, with ruptures in them making them unusable when temperatures rise again;[vii]
– Snowfall with its accumulation on roofs, whose slope angles are gentle, designed only to drain rainwater; depending on the volume of accumulated snow, the excess weight tends to cause roofs to collapse, leaving entire populations homeless in the intense cold;
– Even agriculture that can be practiced with reduced rainfall may become unviable due to frost, snowfall or even freezing of the soil, resulting in the need for populations to deterritorialize (migrate) due to hunger.
The chances are bleak: the United States and Russia each have about 1.600 nuclear bombs ready to be used (apart from a three times larger stockpile of currently inactivated bombs). To make matters worse, the Earth's environmental balance is already severely compromised, which compromises the planet's ability to counterbalance the effects of a nuclear winter.
In turn, the electromagnetic pulse or EMP (English acronym for electromagnetic pulse) results from the detonation of a nuclear bomb. If the bomb is detonated at low altitude, its direct destructive effects override those of the EMP. However, if detonated in the high stratosphere or even in space, the electromagnetic pulse is long-range and will impact the Earth's surface in the form of a “cone”.
Any and all electrically conductive material reached by the pulse will conduct it[viii] for a fraction of a second, and this electric current will be more intense the greater the power of the bomb, the lower the altitude of the explosion, and the smaller the distance (radius) to the center of the base of the cone[ix] (This is if it is a conventional bomb; nuclear powers develop specific bombs to maximize the EMP effect, about which little or nothing is known as they constitute military secrets).
Electrically conducting materials interconnected over long distances, such as kilometric high voltage transmission lines, will absorb more of the pulse, and thus the current overload will be much more intense in them, damaging them and paralyzing the electrical energy supply. In electronic equipment, circulating currents are very low, which makes them extremely sensitive to any overload. data centers that are affected by the EMP will have been in practice destroyed, and nowadays practically all of the countries' critical infrastructure (the aforementioned high voltage transmission lines, railways, ports, refineries, oil and gas pipelines, floodgates in dams, subways, control air traffic, optical fibers, satellites, etc.) is controlled automatically by computers; Worse still, due to economies of scale, this control is often implemented in a nationally centralized rather than distributed manner.
Household electronic equipment, such as personal computers, TVs and cell phones, can also be destroyed, and most likely will be if they are plugged in at the time of the EMP (but they can be damaged even if they are not[X]). The rise of the overload current is very fast (nanoseconds), and so ordinary surge protectors will not protect them (surge protectors based on transient voltage suppressor diodes, or TVS diodes, will have a better chance). Small electronic devices, such as cell phones, palmtops, pen drives or external hard drives could be “shielded” and placed inside food cans made of tinplate (those made of aluminum are not protected).
In automobiles, the electronic injection and ignition modules will be damaged, and the vehicles will stop working. In theory, the body (as long as it is made of steel, and not aluminum or fiber) could act as armor, but nowadays it is thin and made of alloys aimed at saving fuel by reducing the weight of the vehicles. However, old Kombis and Beetles will continue to run, because the injection of the mixture of gasoline and air into the cylinders is done by a part that no one manufactures anymore, called a carburetor, and the spark for ignition of this mixture is provided by other parts that are just as obsolete. as for the plate and the coil.
In the same way, valve radios or TVs are more robust than transistorized ones, in turn more robust than those with microchips, but they all conduct electricity and thus they will all be affected, and the continuity of their operation will depend on the capacity of each one of them. to withstand overload. And of course, all flying planes hit by the EMP will crash.[xi]
A single EMP bomb exploding over Brazil (at high altitude it can affect several nearby metropolitan regions, such as Rio, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte) means that the country will have been directly attacked. Why would Brazil (or South America) be attacked in a nuclear war?
For example: Because Brazil is one of the leaders of the BRICS, which promotes the de-dollarization of the global economy that led the United States to war; Because, knowing that their countries will be destroyed, the United States and other Western countries in the nuclear club such as the United Kingdom and France decided to “empty” South America so that their survivors could migrate here (for this purpose there are neutron bombs, which kill people without destroying buildings); Because the Brazilian military aligns itself on the basis of “automatic pilot” to the United States, which, if implemented,[xii] it will obviously attract reaction from the opposite side (these people need to be kept under control; Brazil's absolute neutrality in the conflict is mandatory); Because some psychopath decided that, since his little corner will be destroyed, then the whole world will soon be destroyed too.
We can survive an EMP bomb, although with enormous additional difficulties. But not thermonuclear bombs or neutron bombs. If we are attacked in this way, or if a severe nuclear winter comes, what can I tell you here? Nikita Khrushchov said that “the survivors will envy the dead.” I can only say that it has been an honor, a privilege and an immeasurable pleasure to have shared my life with you so far, and that I hope we will all be okay on the “other side”.
Next Friday, August 16th – in case we are not directly attacked – we will post the fourth part of this text: “A setback that could last centuries or millennia”.
*Ruben Bauer Naveira He is a pacifist activist. Book author A new utopia for Brazil: Three guides to get out of chaos (available here).
To access the first article in this series, click https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/a-guerra-nuclear-causas-e-consequencias-i/
To access the second article in this series, click https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/a-guerra-nuclear-causas-e-consequencias-ii/
[I] Today disabled; the link points to the file containing the blog's collection.
[ii] T. N.: this video, which shows Russian Kalibr cruise missiles filmed by Dagestani fishermen over the waters of the Caspian Sea on their way to Ukraine, gives an idea of how close to the water such missiles can fly. The Kalibr model is neither launched by submarines nor is it hypersonic, but the Tzircon model is both.
[iii] N. do T.: use of a volume of nuclear weapons beyond what would be sufficient to destroy the enemy.
[iv] T. No.: reference to movie in which rats are transformed into race horses, as well as the initials of the names of the three politicians.
[v] Evidently, if it were possible to establish such a correlation, it would not be enough to just know the number of bombs detonated – it would also be necessary to know the total power released (or the average power of the bombs); As there is no way to establish it, for the purposes of the estimation we make here, the order of magnitude of the number of detonations is more than enough.
[vi] In countries with harsh winters, propane gas is used in cylinders, which continues to vaporize even at a temperature close to -40°C, while in Brazil, for commercial reasons, a mixture of propane and butane is used, which only vaporizes from around +4°C (in a total of forty municipalities very cold Brazilians, a mixture with more propane and less butane is mandatory).
[vii] In countries with harsh winters, the water distribution network is buried depths in which the ground temperature remains above 0°C even at the height of cold weather; inside homes, pipes coated with thermal insulation are usually used.
[viii] I do not have the training in nuclear physics to understand the principles of electricity generation from an EMP, but I know that electric currents are conducted from one point to another, that is, along some route. What I can understand is that equipment composed of electrically conductive materials will receive electrical current if it is plugged in (and even more so if it is turned on), or will charge itself with static electricity if it is not plugged in, in which case currents will circulate internally within it.
[ix] In fact, the EMP “cone” is distorted due to the Earth's magnetic field, and so an EMP incident on the northern hemisphere will have more intense effects south of the center of the cone's base, while in the southern hemisphere it will be the opposite; Only if the EMP bomb exploded close to the equator would its effects be symmetrically distributed.
[X] See note viii, above.
[xi] In special aircraft resistant to an EMP like the American presidential plane A none of the flight-critical systems are electrical or electronic.
[xii] Army General Fernando José Sant'Ana Soares e Silva, chief of the Army General Staff, declared in a speech in a promotion ceremony for general officers on April 05, 2023, that: “[…] in the future, without a shadow of a doubt, our country will suffer all types of pressure from foreign powers, including military pressure, with the purpose of coercing the people Brazilian to serve other interests […] not only must we be ready to enter into combat, we must be ready to win the war”.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
