Kahn actually ran studies to come up with his numbers of a nuclear war causing a ten year economic regression and only killing 50% of a country. His point was that on a long enough timeline it would/will eventually happen, and with adequate preparation a country could ensure both objective victory and survival for the majority of its populace and civilization.
Someone has to think about the unthinkable. Wishing nukes away won't make them disappear, and as shown in Daniel Ellsberg's the Doomsday Machine, nuclear weapons have been used as weapons of war in U.S. foreign policy for decades as indirect threats and bluffs. They will eventually be used again as explosive ordinance. Civil defense was lambasted and deprioritized in the west because people thought with their hearts instead of their minds with regard to the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
Decades of poor science on nuclear winter based off of the terrible TTAPS climate model have engendered the notion that nuclear war is a death sentence to humanity. It's not true, academia knows it is not, but nobody will push the subsequent corrective nuclear winter stories because the fear of nuclear winter keeps nuclear hawks at bay in political office. The top answer in this quotation question has a ton of links on this: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax
They are weapons of war. They are effective weapons of war. They will eventually be used as explosive ordinance and not just threats and bluffs. Calling them unthinkable and anyone who plans for survival following their use a horrible person is bad emotional rhetoric. We should have an implementable plan for civil defense like China and Russia do. We should not allow fear to prevent the survival of our way of life.
There were only 3 billion on the planet at the time, too. Estimates for U.S. casualties were 120 million dead in 1969. Out of 202.7 million
That still would have left the U.S. as one of the largest countries on the planet, and fallout would largely have dissipated after two to six weeks. Congress, the president, and the federal reserve agents would likely have survived thanks to top secret bunkers and Looking Glass. The military would have been wiped out. Food production would be largely unaffected for grains and vegetables, but nearly every nonhuman animal in the midwest, coastal cities, and big sky parts of the country would be dead from fallout. Food delivery and distribution would rely largely on coal rail and river barge transport, but it still did mostly at the time. It would take ten years to rebuild a refining capacity and restore the power grid and military Things would eventually return to normal. The cities would be rebuilt and reinhabited.
I know it is hard to believe, but look at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, German firebombed cities from WW2 like Dresden; they were rebuilt from the ashes. Germany was nearly entirely destroyed by WW2. It came back.
Barring nuclear winter actually occurring (which the Kuwait oil field fires kinda proves won't happen), total nuclear war is something countries can recover from, which makes it even more likely to happen in the future. As Ellsberg put it, "any nonzero chance is crazy."
"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
Someone has to think about the unthinkable. Wishing nukes away won't make them disappear, and as shown in Daniel Ellsberg's the Doomsday Machine, nuclear weapons have been used as weapons of war in U.S. foreign policy for decades as indirect threats and bluffs. They will eventually be used again as explosive ordinance. Civil defense was lambasted and deprioritized in the west because people thought with their hearts instead of their minds with regard to the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
Decades of poor science on nuclear winter based off of the terrible TTAPS climate model have engendered the notion that nuclear war is a death sentence to humanity. It's not true, academia knows it is not, but nobody will push the subsequent corrective nuclear winter stories because the fear of nuclear winter keeps nuclear hawks at bay in political office. The top answer in this quotation question has a ton of links on this: https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax
They are weapons of war. They are effective weapons of war. They will eventually be used as explosive ordinance and not just threats and bluffs. Calling them unthinkable and anyone who plans for survival following their use a horrible person is bad emotional rhetoric. We should have an implementable plan for civil defense like China and Russia do. We should not allow fear to prevent the survival of our way of life.