A Review of Nuclear War: a Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

People's understanding of the long term is often weak. The short term would be horrid. The medium short term would be torrid. The longer term, 100+ years out, is mostly unknown.

As a child like many others of the boomer cohort, I lived the belief "protect and survive" was futile. I am no longer sure that's healthy, any more than risking the outcome is.

I've been led to believe the North and South hemisphere weather systems are more coupled than people used to think and so assumptions transport of dust and radionuclides would predominantly lie in the north are probably wrong. Also, given Pine Gap in Australia, and the likelihood of SSN being in southern oceans, some level of strike in the south is inevitable.

What's often missed is that the big megatonnage weapons were passed over for smaller delivery systems in MIRV. Not that no high yield weapons exist, but many many more tuned yield weapons exist, as well as neutron dense weapons which would do less direct damage and just leave a lot of dead people around. Not a pretty world, but 200 years later..

The smoke blanket assumed entire forests went up. Self sustaining megafires. Lofted dust would reduce surface temperature significantly and food production would drop off. But, and forgive me if this is naieve, would persisting radionuclide levels in the ocean actually kill all marine life? Would transport of dust into the soil as we've seen in Pripyat not mean we had a more complex tainted surface? One with toxic mushrooms but also with quite high sustained wildlife levels, in some chaotic adjustment.

Also, EMP effects are confusing. Valves survive. As do magnets. Find enough old cars and you'd get magneto and batteries to do cooking and run spark gap radio in Morse until you find a golden ears stash of pentodes, and discrete parts in an old radioshack hut. It's not like we didn't make relay logic work when we had to, so losing vlsi doesn't mean we're back at vellum and gall ink, until all the ballpoint pens dry up.