"If a nuclear war happened, would you want you or your kids to live in the aftermath?"

When the alternative is having them live in slavery, and their children and grandchildren after them? Not that easy a question to answer.

I know a little bit about nuclear weapons, nuclear warfare, the effects of nuclear weapons and fallout, and nuclear strategy. The nuclear winter theory was based on a number of erroneous premises about how nuclear wars would be fought, how nuclear weapons work, and some other assumptions.

I don't want to get into this, because it's largely a moot point now, but most people I knew back during the Cold War era were firmly convinced that any nuclear exchange at all would immediately destroy all life on Earth, or human civilization at the very least. If pressed, they would tell you that a nuclear war would consist of Russia and the United States immediately launching all their missiles at each other all at once. After all, that's how it was in the movies, right? Remember "On the Beach?" The grotesque "Testament?" "The Day After?"

Nuclear war became a political tool for some people. The Left had been pushing the idea since the 1950s that any surrender, any compromise, would be better than risking even a limited nuclear war. "Better Red than dead." To sell this requires painting a war using even a few nuclear weapons in absolute and apocalyptic terms. Civil defense was considered anathema, because it required admitting that a nuclear war could be survived. Oddly, while Americans bought this total abandonment of our civil defense hook, line and sinker, our enemies had robust and comprehensive civil defense programs. Apparently, they were reading different books and seeing different movies.

Since WWII, the nuclear nations of the world set off, above ground, over 500 atomic weapons, with a total yield of about 500 megatons. I don't have current numbers, but that adds up to about a third of America's total arsenal. Oddly, we are all still here. Granted, this is not the same as setting them all off in a week, but like I said, no real nuclear war would happen that way. Just for the record, the Krakatoa explosion was about 10,000 megatons.

Just for fun, ask any of your non-technical friends who are old enough to have an opinion on this, what would happen if ten nuclear warheads went off all at once on the Earth's surface. Have them go into details. Interesting, no?

For the record, I had to grind through a lot of this information on nuclear effects a long while back while researching nuclear propulsion systems, including Orion.