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

[Anomalocaris]

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.

I agree in the worst case of a all out nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia, there would likely be some degree of nuclear winter, resulting into tens of millions of additional causalties from agricultural failure in the 1-2 years after the exchange. But I think on the whole that would be a short term effect, and it's effects will moderate within 1-2 years. The main questions is how much instability the short term femine would generate. I suspect it would generate a lot of instability in less developed parts of Africa and certain parts of Asia and South America. But I think it would not have too much effect in those ares in Euroasia untouched by the nuclear exchange where the bulk of the world's capital and productive potential is comcentrated. Those would be western and Central Europe, some of of near east, china, Japan and Australia. So long as these remaining centers of wealth and productivity don't than go to war against each other, I don't think disturbance in less developed parts of the world, catastrophic humanitarian diseaster as they would be, would likely have too much impact on the overall productive capacity of the world and by extension the world's ability to weather the storm resulting from the removal from the scene of the U.S. and Russia.

In the best case scenario, other developed parts of the world is chastened at least for a couple of decades by the nuclear exchange and more or less coopoerate in building global recovery. Maybe I am an optimist, but if a nuclear war does break out that wipes out its leading power, I think there is 50/50 chance at least that the imindof the other powers would be temporarily focused on avoiding conflict with those who can really hurt them.

Of course in the worst case scenario the remaining nuclear powers, scrambling to fill the vacume left by the destruction of the U.S. and collapse of russian authority over 1/4 of the Euroasia, gets in each other's way and fights additional nuclear battles against each other.