A total extinction event is pretty unlikely: a nuclear war could perhaps end our civilization, but there'd still be folks around, even if their lives were harder. It's believed that we've already as a species gone through a very small population bottleneck, and homo sapiens can probably survive a nuclear war of even the worst kind.
That said, a thousand years is a long time to research a Death Star I suppose.
No, it wouldn't come close to doing that. It would flatten and burn cities, military bases, and missile silos that were targeted, and irradiate places downwind. But there's much more land that would not be targeted and isn't near those sites.
For example, what would be the reason to nuke the Amazon, the Arctic, or the Himalayas? How much of Africa would be targeted? What percentage of the US Midwest or Siberia do you suppose would actually be irradiated? What about islands in the Pacific? Is Easter Island going to dosed in lethal radiation from fallout tens of thousands of miles away?
for MAD to work all you need to assure is that you can damage the opponent enough that their power structure will not survive, not to destroy all of their people/land/capital.
Fej|8 years ago
goatlover|8 years ago
For example, what would be the reason to nuke the Amazon, the Arctic, or the Himalayas? How much of Africa would be targeted? What percentage of the US Midwest or Siberia do you suppose would actually be irradiated? What about islands in the Pacific? Is Easter Island going to dosed in lethal radiation from fallout tens of thousands of miles away?
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg|8 years ago
https://www.quora.com/How-destructive-is-the-worlds-entire-n...
for MAD to work all you need to assure is that you can damage the opponent enough that their power structure will not survive, not to destroy all of their people/land/capital.
platz|8 years ago
vacuum decay
Dylan16807|8 years ago
a gamma ray burst probably won't happen even once in our entire galaxy