Does the prospect of nuclear disaster still frighten anyone these days?

[Thumpalumpacus]

They dropped the charges on that one, since with Otto Kranzbühler Dönitz had a lawyer, who really knew his job and the anglosaxon system of case law, precedence and cross examination. He wrote to Chester Nimitz and got his client off.

Doh! The ending completely slipped my mind, thanks for the correction.

I think mutation conveys the wrong popular perception. There won't be X-men or a different specie running around. Notably Elevated rate of cancers and congenital genetic defect with wide spread unhealthful consequences better convey the likely result.

Indeed, those would be the results. I certainly didn't mean "mutation" in the comic-book sense of the word; it is apt in its original sense.

It is also difficult to see why population would be more isolated than in pre-industrial Europe of 17-18th century.

A fair point.

All this depends on the scale of nuclear exchange, of course. Lengthy and widespread failure of modern infrastructure leaving little in the way of major, undamaged industrial and economic centers that can quickly (within a decade or two) reestablish much of world wide network of trade and commerce is almost inconceivable without a full on nuclear exchange between big blocks of allied nuclear powers, a situation which has not existed since 1989, does not exist and has no foreseeable potential to exist. Even if Russia and the U.S. were to unload their entire arsenals at each other today, over 70% of the world's industrial and economic capacity would not be directly effected, and even absorbing the impact from drifting fallout, global connectedness, one still expect the world outside the U.S. and Russia would make good the loss of Russia and the U.S. in 1-2 decades.

I suppose I'm not so sanguine about the upshot. 17,000 warheads will put a hell of a lot of dust and soot into the atmosphere, and the effect on both ecology and agriculture don't seem all that rosy, to my eyes.