Originally posted by: Aegeon
Originally posted by: Hayabusa Rider
You mean you hope that's the scenario. You are projecting based on data which is most likely flawed. Of course I forgot to mention that if you blanketed China enough to wipe the country out, you probably create enough radiation to wipe out most of the human population.
Call it a draw then.
Wouldn't that be worth it?
As far as the data goes, I'm reasonably confident its accurate for the moment. The thing is China lacks many ballistic missiles that can hit the mainland US. This may change numbers wise in the future, but not drastically anytime soon. China simply has a rather limited nuclear long range arsenal. By contrast the US clearly has sufficient nuclear weaponry to take out all of China.
By the way, you're drastically overrating the effects of fallout from nuclear bombs as far as locations significantly far away from the blast area go. For starters, due to a desire to create more power bombs, the US's nuclear bombs of today are much more efficient than the ones used a Nagasaki and Hiroshima, converting more of their radiactivie material to energy, leaving less for the actual fallout. Most of the fallout is going over the Pacific, Japan might take some radiation, but even there the effects will be limited. The Pacific Ocean is large enough to pretty much harmlessly disperse the radioactivity that lands there. Now keep in mind how long weather patterns take to go from China to the US's West coasts, and remember this is the amount of time it should take for significant amounts of the radiactive material to land anywhere in the US.
One factor that most people don't realize about fallout is how fast it
decays. Fallout follows the t-1.2 law which states that for every sevenfold
increase in time after detonation there is a tenfold drop in radiation output.
Example, a reading of X level of radioactivity at Y hours after detonation
would indicate a level of radioactivity of .1X at 7Y hours after detonation.
This is accurate for 2,500 hours (14 weeks) following the explosion,
thereafter the doserate is lower than t-1.2 would predict. Example, if a
dose rate of 100 REM/hr was found at 1 hour after detonation(this assumes all significant fallout from the bomb has fallen, therefore starting with the
seven hour point is probably more realistic) would be 10 REM/hr at 7 hours,
1 REM/hr at 49 hours(2 days), .1 REM/hr at 343 hours(2 weeks), .01 REM/hr at2401 hours (14 weeks).
http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Falls/1984/fallout.htm
What's particularly worth noting here is that in 49 hours, fallout's radiactivity drops to under one hundreth of what it was initially. The half-life of many nuclear bomb elements is short so they don't last for very long. On top of this, anyone receiving fallout will be receiving significantly less than one hundreth the amount China itself was initially exposed to, given the fallout is going to be dispersing and decreasing in density, and a bunch of the fallout is going to be going into the Pacific Ocean. By the time the fallout reaches the West Coast of the US, its effects are going to be quite limited.
Admitedly the US might for humanitarian reasons decided to just nuke China enough to destroy any resemblance of a coherent government and make a very firm example of them, but concerns about the worldwide effects of fallout and nuclear winter are typically highly overestimated when calculating these scenarios.
