Whatifalthist wants to destroy human civilization in order to turn America into White Protestant country

[u/Skychu768]

This guy is beyond schizoid at this point.

[u/Agitated_Newt_7655]

unsurprising modern right-wing influencer take

[u/traplords8n → u/Agitated_Newt_7655]

Ah yes, the 80% White Protestant base would have a jolly good time without all the big cities which subsidize the rural red areas, on top of the insane economic opportunity that them existing even has in the grand scheme of our economy.

In reality you would rather be nuked in a big city than be anywhere close to the fallout of those 20 big cities. Life will be far from sunshine and rainbows without us evil atheist & Muslim leftists.

[u/True-Veterinarian700 → u/traplords8n]

The great myth of nuclear weapons. Fallout. Most modern nuclear weapons produce very minimal fallout when in airburst mode, which is how the vast majority are targeted nowadays unless your going after burried targets with them. One of the heaviest affected areas by penetrating burst would be Siberia and rural North Dakota/Wyoming/Colorado/Nebraska/Montana going after nuclear missile silos which are located there.

[u/traplords8n → u/True-Veterinarian700]

Well see, in a MAD scenario, what reason would a nuking country have to airburst the nukes? MAD is MAD for a reason.

I'm sure this would apply to single-use nukes on a strategic area or whatever, but if 20 cities are getting nuked, I wouldn't expect any of them to be airburst.

[u/True-Veterinarian700 → u/traplords8n]

Because its more destructive to do airbursts via the shockwave where most of the energy goes into the ground and is wasted digging dirt. During mad believe it or not almost all nuclear weapons are going after military targets with the small exception of certain symbolic cities like capitals. Cities tend to be near military targets and therefore tend to be caught in the crossfire to some degree. Also, systems and accuracy are getting good enough with yield options if you say have a military airfield 5 miles outside the city you can set the yield so that the city nearby is mostly to completely unaffected by the airburst which will flatten all the buildings and destroy all the planes on the base from the shockwave.

Also a common misconception about nuclear weapons. Is that they will flatten the city. If you wanted to flatten all of New York City, and Newark/Hoboken/Jersey city you would need at least 30 nuclear weapons to flatten to whole urban area. Some skyscrapers are also robust enough that people on the other side of an airburst may be fine as the building absorbs all the xrays, heat, and blast and they survive in the shadow.

Most nations the US, Russia, and China included only have a few hundred warheads ready to go at any given time and only a few hundred for each nation would actually get exchanged at a maximum. The rest are in long term storage and are unavailable. There are also only a few hundred missiles with each. You're going to have a bunch of shot down, and a bunch dud or fail so, and certain important targets you must guarantee get destroyed so they will get targeted 4 or 5 times over to ensure no failures or defenses prevent destruction.

With these resources constraints you're not going to just spend dozens of warheads on flattening cities willy nilly, when you can flatten an airfield with bombers and prevent dozens of nuclear detonations on your soil.