It would have survived a global thermonuclear war even when nuclear arsenals were at peak strength, according to http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html comparatively optimistic scenario, projected by http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/about.html. A global thermonuclear war involving the United States, the USSR and China would have killed about 400,000,000 people on the first day, 5 August 1988 (7.77 % of the world’s population of 5,150,000,000 at the time). 450,000,000 people or 9.47% of the world’s surviving population would have died from injuries, fallout, exposure, starvation and disease over the next two months, and about 1 billion people or 23.26% of the world’s surviving population would have died from these causes over a subsequent period of ca. 9 months, bringing the total death toll by 31 August 1989 to 1,850,000,000 out of 5,150,000,000 people, or 35.92 % of the world’s prewar population. Life would return to fairly normal for the survivors by 2040, according to Johnston’s projection.
An even more optimistic scenario was considered in Brian Martin’s http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html, published in 1982. Martin estimated that a major global nuclear war, one involving the explosion of most of the nuclear bombs that exist, would kill 400 to 450 million people, mostly in the US, Europe and Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent China and Japan, and that agricultural or economic breakdown followed by widespread starvation or epidemics occurring in heavily bombed areas could cause many tens or even several hundred million more people to die.
However, Martin’s article was published before studies about a possible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter hit the scene, so his estimate of the postwar death toll may have been on the low side. A nuclear war’s impact on world climate was also considered by Johnston (who estimated 1.45 billion deaths in the first year after the all-out nuclear exchange), but not the most severe predictions at the time, which he considered to have been evaluated and discounted by most of the scientific community.
Brian Martin’s greatest merit, in my opinion, lies in his having http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html#fn14. However, I think he was way too optimistic in stating that a 13 megaton bomb (1,000 times as powerful as the 13 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima) "would have killed at most all the resident population of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, say 250,000". The largest currently deployed bomb mentioned in the http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ is the Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-5, with a blast yield of 4–5 megatons. An air burst of this weapon over present-day Hiroshima, according to NUKEMAP, could cause 727,790 (immediate) fatalities and 643,570 injuries (many of which would lead to death). If detonated over Tokyo, in an area with a much larger population and population density, the same bomb might cause 3,990,450 fatalities and 8,892,100 injuries, versus 117,540 fatalities and 318,540 injuries from a bomb with the blast yield of "Little Boy".
Martin suggested that the idea of human extinction due to nuclear war may be perceived as consoling by who believes in such scenario. The prospect of death may be easier to contemplate than that of life in a disrupted postwar world.
It would have survived a global thermonuclear war even when nuclear arsenals were at peak strength, according to http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html comparatively optimistic scenario, projected by http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/about.html. A global thermonuclear war involving the United States, the USSR and China would have killed about 400,000,000 people on the first day, 5 August 1988 (7.77 % of the world’s population of 5,150,000,000 at the time). 450,000,000 people or 9.47% of the world’s surviving population would have died from injuries, fallout, exposure, starvation and disease over the next two months, and about 1 billion people or 23.26% of the world’s surviving population would have died from these causes over a subsequent period of ca. 9 months, bringing the total death toll by 31 August 1989 to 1,850,000,000 out of 5,150,000,000 people, or 35.92 % of the world’s prewar population. Life would return to fairly normal for the survivors by 2040, according to Johnston’s projection.
An even more optimistic scenario was considered in Brian Martin’s http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html, published in 1982. Martin estimated that a major global nuclear war, one involving the explosion of most of the nuclear bombs that exist, would kill 400 to 450 million people, mostly in the US, Europe and Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent China and Japan, and that agricultural or economic breakdown followed by widespread starvation or epidemics occurring in heavily bombed areas could cause many tens or even several hundred million more people to die.
However, Martin’s article was published before studies about a possible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter hit the scene, so his estimate of the postwar death toll may have been on the low side. A nuclear war’s impact on world climate was also considered by Johnston (who estimated 1.45 billion deaths in the first year after the all-out nuclear exchange), but not the most severe predictions at the time, which he considered to have been evaluated and discounted by most of the scientific community.
Brian Martin’s greatest merit, in my opinion, lies in his having http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/82jpr.html#fn14. However, I think he was way too optimistic in stating that a 13 megaton bomb (1,000 times as powerful as the 13 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima) "would have killed at most all the resident population of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, say 250,000". The largest currently deployed bomb mentioned in the http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ is the Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-5, with a blast yield of 4–5 megatons. An air burst of this weapon over present-day Hiroshima, according to NUKEMAP, could cause 727,790 (immediate) fatalities and 643,570 injuries (many of which would lead to death). If detonated over Tokyo, in an area with a much larger population and population density, the same bomb might cause 3,990,450 fatalities and 8,892,100 injuries, versus 117,540 fatalities and 318,540 injuries from a bomb with the blast yield of "Little Boy".
Martin suggested that the idea of human extinction due to nuclear war may be perceived as consoling by who believes in such scenario. The prospect of death may be easier to contemplate than that of life in a disrupted postwar world.