
Why a Post-Nuclear World Would Look Nothing Like “Mad Max” - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/why-a-post_nuclear-world-would-look-nothing-like-mad-max
======
grive
A somewhat less popular cultural reference could be The Road from McCarthy.

Human scavengers roaming what's left, true, but mostly famished and trying to
find food before anything else.

Maybe this time is the time we will renew the fear of nuclear annihilation.
With Trump elected, Europe is turning to itself for its defence, and is
already considering a common nuclear deterrence. Depending on its
implementation, this could mean the end of the non-proliferation treaties.

Time to watch Threads again.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I must watch Threads given all the talk about it in this thread, but I guess
I'll be the lone dissenter that will come out and say that _The Road_ was an
absolutely horrible movie. I found it so drawn-out, boring, interminably long.
I realize it was presenting life in a post-apocalyptic future, but that's no
excuse to have no plot to truly speak of in its 111 minutes of runtime.

Then again, I hated _Mad Max_ and only sat down to watch it at the theater
because of the ridiculously-good critical reviews it had amassed. I found it a
pointless exercise in hedonism and a testosterone-fueled car chase filled with
gore and nudity for their own sake.

~~~
dawnerd
I'm glad I'm not alone in hating Mad Max. When the credits rolled I was left
wondering what the plot even was. It felt like nothing more than an excuse to
blow stuff up and chase around cars. Absolutely no idea how it got such high
marks.

~~~
Crespyl
> excuse to blow stuff up and chase around cars.

Is that such a bad thing?

It had a guy playing electric guitar on top of a giant flamethrower, because
that's the kind of movie it was.

Maybe not for everyone, but I thought it managed to do what it was trying to.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" It had a guy playing electric guitar on top of a giant flamethrower"_

I'm reminded of the movie _Idiocracy_.

------
thinkloop
Water shortages is a weird topic. The article focuses on finite underground
aquifers, but how much world water consumption depends on that (I actually
would like to know)?

From what I gather many (most?) cities have water "systems". Dirty water is
flushed, evaporation and human processes clean it, then we drink it on the
other end. It's a continuous renewable cycle. We are reusing the same
molecules, not consuming a limited resources. In many cities, water is nearly
unlimited. The system just has to be able to cycle enough for the pipes to be
full at any given moment.

Some places like California have too much demand, for the rate at which their
water cycles, so they have to be careful. But places like NYC or Chicago have
nearly unending supplies of sewage to process.

The amount of water on earth today is the same as 4 billion years ago. It
doesn't disappear, it just gets dirty.

The water problem is actually an energy problem. There is more than enough
water on earth for probably a trillion people. The problem is it's salty, and
desalination is extremely energy intensive. If we figure out cheap renewables,
or fusion, or just have to pay a greater percentage of our salaries for water,
we're really not going to run out.

I know tfa talks about nuclear holocaust but I wanted to discuss regular water
issues/fears.

~~~
maxerickson
Use of sewage for potable water is still pretty rare.

New York City famously has tunnels up into the mountains for most of their
water supply. One of them was featured in Die Hard III, where it was used
(while under construction and dry) to smuggle dump trucks full of gold.

Chicago draws water from Lake Michigan and discharges sewage into (artificial)
headwaters of the Mississippi.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Folks in upstate New York _hate_ NYC for the water supply. Much of the economy
of the "southern tier" region is crippled by the requirement to keep water
quality pristine (NYC being one of few cities that doesn't significantly
process incoming water), and to manage water flows (including that of the
Delaware River itself) to optimize the reservoirs, at the expense of fisheries
and stuff.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Mind, having the Hudson horribly polluted from previous industrial activity in
regions like Schenectady/Albany/Troy isn't all that great, either.

------
ptaipale
tl;dr: Sensationalist but unconvincing.

This is because of statements like made here:

> _“But global warming would be over.” Why? “Because CO2 production would stop
> with the destruction of civilization.” Man-made climate change, and the
> drought conditions that come with it, would cease._

I find this is just ignoring reality. CO2 content in atmosphere is the result
of a balance in the world. It's a result of processes that bring more CO2
there, and process that remove it.

There's plenty of CO2 production that happens without civilization. And almost
all of CO2 removal is not the result of civilization. The balance is not quite
solid, but it is there.

The man-made climate change is about changing that balance (and the balance
with some other gasses like methane). Annual man-made CO2 emissions are
however only a small portion of the total CO2 currently in atmosphere, and of
total CO2 removed. Even if civilization wouldn't make any CO2 emissions, the
CO2 content of atmosphere would not go to zero.

For CO2 levels in atmosphere, there is an annual fluctuation of about 3–9 ppm
which is negatively correlated with the Northern Hemisphere's growing season.
[1]

Thus, a far more important factor in the CO2 balance of Earth after a nuclear
winter would be how vegetation and seawater plankton survive. If large areas
of forests were destroyed, and if seas would be poisoned, then the conversion
of CO2 to oxygen and absorption of carbon to plankton would change
drastically. The impact of that would be vastly larger than the CO2 output of
any human industries.

Climate change would not be over because of lack of civilizsation; climate
change would be unpredictable because we wouldn't know what are all the things
that blew up in the air and what impact they have.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere)

~~~
sqeaky
I think the bigger point is that in the face of nuclear annihilation CO2
doesn't matter.

Just maybe the particles launched into th atmosphere, the radioactive fallout
and the death of the human race are more important than CO2

~~~
ptaipale
The death of human race would mainly come via climate change. No nuclear war
will directly kill all people, nor will radioactive fallout of even an
extensive one. But if the climate would get _really_ much colder, then the
human race might be in danger.

For the majority of existence of anatomically modern human being (50 000 years
to 200 000 years, depending on definition) the world population has been less
than 5 million people (the population of world 10 000 years ago). I think it
is quite likely that a similar population could be maintained today, with
today's technology, by building artificial environments, running on nuclear
power and other modern technology. Think of Caves of Steel. Major powers
surely have done some preparations towards that.

It would be what was attributed to Stalin having called "statistics", of
course [1], but it wouldn't be the extinction of the human race.

[1] [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-
statistic/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/)

~~~
sqeaky
I am curious as to why you think "No nuclear war will directly kill all
people" and then after that climate change would be a problem.

I agree a limited exchange might leave people in hardened bunkers alive. But a
full exchange, we have sop many weapons[1] it seems entirely that only the
luckiest in hardened bunkers would survive and largely they would emerge in a
polluted radioactive wasteland.

There are only about 3,000 cities[2] with more than 10,000 people, and only
about 19,000 cities in total. We very nearly have a warhead per city, but a
city does not need a warhead to hit it to die, irradiating the farmland will
kill off everyone just fine. They will have trouble growing food because of
pollution levels, radioactivity.

I guess you could call a spontaneous transformation in a barren wastes
"climate change" but I think that would be underselling the problem. I also
think doing that does a disservice to the modern political about climate
change.

[1] [http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-
arsenals/](http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/) [2]
[https://www.quora.com/How-many-towns-counties-and-cities-
are...](https://www.quora.com/How-many-towns-counties-and-cities-are-in-the-
USA)

~~~
ptaipale
There are lots of smaller cities and towns, and not all people live in cities
or towns. Nuclear attacks would not cover all land areas where people live.
Thus the detonations would not kill all people directly.

Would the radioactive waste kill people? That is something which is harder to
calculate. But the dangers of radiation are much exaggerated, and humans are
generally more resilient than most people think.

But nuclear winter, drastically reduced temperatures, particles in the air
that prevent vegetation from growing and which thus changes the composition of
the gasses in atmosphere? That sounds a real threat.

~~~
sqeaky
I agree that radiation dangers are exaggerated for most things. The amount of
radioactive material left over in most nuclear detonations is staggering. Most
fission bombs consume only a tiny percent of their fuel and scatter the rest
as particles. Unlike a simple meltdown like Chernobyl there is no container to
hold this. Put another way all nuclear weapons are also immensely powerful
dirty bombs.

To contrast further, I am well aware of stories of survivors in Japan, even
the one survivor who is still alive (last I heard) who was thrown tens of
meters twice, once per blast. He and most others only survived because of
immediate medical attention and then sustained infrastructure that could not
survive a doomsday scenario.

Uranium and Plutonium are some of the most dangerous materials to ingest tiny
particles of and these are exactly what will be launched and scattered into
all the food supplies. The radiation of being near tiny specks of dust can
consume the safe dose of a person for the year and likely do nothing more than
increase their chance for cancer in 30 years. Eat that same dust and die of
horrible cancer and burns in a few months. It will be in all the food because
we have enough warheads, as stated in my previous post, to erase most cities,
the resulting damage and fallout would leave no on the planet untouched
because the dust would scattered high into the upper atmosphere [1] and it
will settle every where

The preposterous devastation of a total nuclear war cannot be understated and
again I say that comparing it to climate change does climate change a real
disservice. CO2 based climate will disrupt industry and cause wars, but it
cannot exterminate humanity. The first volley in a nuclear exchange can
exterminate all of humanity before the the next planting of crops. Any
comparison to nuclear extinction makes it easy for climate change deniers to
claim climate change is hyberbole.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions)

------
berntb
Please explain to me -- how could 50 measly “Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons”
(in TFA) have an effect multiple factors of ten worse than Krakatoa, with ca
200 MT...?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa#1883_eruption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa#1883_eruption)

Edit: Also, all the fire bombed cities in WW II should at least be in the
neighborhood of a large fraction of 100 small nuclear devices. Then we have
this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Oil_fire_smo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Oil_fire_smoke)

~~~
imglorp
So it seems nuclear winter occurs not from the bombs but from the smoke from
all the fires they would cause.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter)

~~~
berntb
So if it was burning cities -- how much worse were Hiroshima/Nagasaki than the
firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden and so on?

The years of WW II ought to play in the same division?

Edit: Also see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Oil_fire_smo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Oil_fire_smoke)

------
smitherfield
It's worth noting that nuclear winter is just an educated guess about what
would happen; we obviously don't have any data on how a large-scale nuclear
exchange would affect the climate, and there may be other climatic effects
that are harder to predict.

I'm skeptical that we would see much effect from an exchange of 50 weapons;
the year 1962 saw 178 detonations.[1]

[1]
[https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally](https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally)

~~~
reitoei
Big difference between dropping a nuke on a remote atoll in the middle of the
pacific to a dropping one on a densely populated city.

~~~
fdsaaf
We turned a ton of cities into ashes during WWII without the help of nuclear
weapons (except at the very end).

~~~
Johnny555
The current nuclear arsenal is over 2000 times greater than all of the
munitions used in WWII (including the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent)

* The total energy of all explosives used in World War Two (including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) is estimated to have been three megatons of TNT

* The total global nuclear arsenal is about 30,000 nuclear warheads with a destructive capacity of 7,000 megatons or 7 gigatons (7,000 million tons) of TNT

~~~
berntb
Firebombings cause a lot of ash with little boom.

And TFA talked about a nuclear winter from burning cities when using a hundred
Hiroshima bombs, not the US/Russian arsenal. We ought to have learned about
those effects, just from WW II.

------
Symmetry
If any of you want practical advice on how to rebuild after a nuclear (or
other) apocalypse let me recommend _The Knoweldge_ by Lewis Dartnell. It's
interesting if you're just interested in the history and theory of technology,
even.

[http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/](http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-
book/)

------
mrob
Does the whole world really look like that in Fury Road? I haven't seen it,
but in the original I don't recall any suggestion that it's global, or even
that there was a nuclear war. It was just collapse of society in Australia,
which is mostly desert or semi-arid climate.

~~~
roel_v
That was always one of the weird things in both the original and Fury Road to
me: there are sort-of hints that there are lush (or at least non-desert) lands
within a few days, or weeks at most, driving. Why do they spend all their time
wasting fuel by driving around in small local circles?

~~~
justinator
Mainly, because that's where you go, if you're a bandit.

The first movie showed a relatively normal city, bordered by a no-mans land.
Max + family vacationed on the coast. The last scene, before Max drives out
into the desert is basically in a forest. Max's job was to keep the bandits
out of the relatively normal area of civilization.

The third movie showed a paradise hidden from most people, cut off by a
lifeless desert. It was only by using a plane that they were able to get to a
former city with enough resources to build families, again.

It sounds like there's islands of habitable land, and difficult if almost
impossible distances between them. No one knows what's happening outside their
sphere, except rumors.

~~~
crooked-v
Trying to make all of the Mad Max timelines fit into a single-generation
timeline is hard at best.

Think about the kind of timescale needed for those War Boys to exist as an
entire subculture, or for the Green Place to be populated and well-known
before withering up and disappearing. The only way it makes sense to me is to
consider it happening over generations - and yet in the first movie, the
collapse of society is still only in progress.

------
JohnStrange
As far as I know, the post-nuclear world is most accurately described in the
80s UK movie "Threads". It's the bleakest and most depressing movie I've ever
seen, like a never ending nightmare. Don't watch it, unless you like being in
a bad mood for days.

~~~
jjgreen
Sheffield was actually just like that in the early 80s (but with more
hippies).

------
daxorid
Similar predictions of catastrophic global winter were made by Carl Sagan
regarding the Gulf War oil fires.

In what way is this model any better?

~~~
coldtea
In the sense that this talks about a devastation 10000s of times worse than
some oil fires.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Not really. This talks about a devastation of:

> A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each
> side detonates 50 15 kt weapons could produce about 5 Tg of black carbon
> (BC). [1]

That's 5 million metric tons. The footnote on the Wikipedia article [2] says
the oil fires produced:

> 16,000 metric tons of actual soot is produced from 220,000 metric tons of
> oil burned every day.

They started doing this in January and they didn't finish putting out the
fires until November, or almost 300 days. But let's use 200 days as a
reasonable approximation, given that some of the fires were out earlier than
that. Multiplying 16,000 by 200 gives 3.2 million metric tons of soot, so the
nuclear war soot is about 1.5 times worse than the oil fire soot.

Also, consider that humanity has actually performed some 520 atmospheric
nuclear explosions (including 8 underwater) with a total yield of 545 Megaton
[3]. And yet this 0.75 Megaton conflict is going to plunge the world into
winter? I'm not buying it.

[1]
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205/full)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#cite_note-37](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#cite_note-37)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests)

------
Lio
No one seems to have mentioned When The Wind Blows.

[http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0090315/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0090315/)

It's a gentle little film I saw as a kid. It left an impression. :(

~~~
anigbrowl
I remember it well and share your gloomy response to it.

------
justinator
_So why the clear, blue skies, George Miller? Perhaps the once smoke-filled
air in Max’s world has already cleared._

I'm not sure which Fury Road the author saw, but there are many scenes where
there is little daylight coming through, for a variety of environmental
reasons.

------
Dowwie
Well thank goodness for this revelation. My addiction to water would have made
me quite resentful of those who control it.

------
JoachimS
What is wrong with dressing up in old rubber tires, driving around in sand
buggies with flame throwers?

~~~
astrodust
The EPA might want a word, which is presumably why they've got to go.

------
guard-of-terra
Can we try to reproduce Nuclear Winter in case of runaway global warming?
Seems that we do have the emergency brake here. Won't even take nuclear
weapons - introducing soot into higher layers of atmosphere doesn't seem to
hard.

However, this will decrease carbon dioxide consumption by plants and might
allow unsafe buildup in the atmosphere.

~~~
doikor
How do you make the soot stay in the higher layers?

Soot partly is a problem now. It lands on the ice/snow and makes the ice melt
much faster (due to being black/brown)

------
jakozaur
True, volcanic eruptions in the past caused temporary much colder
temperatures:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)

~~~
kerbalspacepro
And mass starvations, just from blocked sunlight and decreased crop yield due
to sunlight decrease.

------
ChemicalWarfare
>> “Because CO2 production would stop with the destruction of civilization.”

except CO2 produced by "civilization" is at around 3-4% of the total
atmospheric CO2.

------
dTal
Isn't Mad Max the film where paper is the most highly prized commodity, but
everyone smokes cigarettes?

It's easy to forget that the vast majority of popular speculative fiction is
utter bollocks and could never happen. I wish we had more "plausible" sci-fi.

------
mxfh
Maybe the only larger swaths of lands not carpet bombed with nuclear payloads
are arid areas, devoid of any current human population.

After the nuclear fallout these would be the only areas where sustained human
life would be possible.

Even a recovering climate wouldn't change much about that.

~~~
mordant
I've been to Ground Zero at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I've spent a lot
of time in Nevada - and I'm just fine.

People grossly, grossly overestimate the long-term effects of fallout. The
main negative effects of nuclear warfare would be infrastructure destruction
and the collapse of food/medicine distribution - fallout wouldn't even
register.

At the height of the Cold War, a full-on strategic exchange between the US and
the USSR wouldn't have ended human civilization. Things would've been
unpleasant in parts of North America and Eurasia for a time, but all these
extreme scenarios that are sensationalized wouldn'tve come to pass.

Look at Chernobyl - it's essentially a thriving wildlife reservation, now.

~~~
avar
You grossly overestimate the relevance of your own experience to the
discussion of modern nuclear weapons. Those explosions were all either
airbursts, purposefully designed to avoid fallout, or very low yield weapons
when compared to modern weaponry.

All of which is of very little relevance to discussing modern nukes intended
to cause fallout.

~~~
ItsDeathball
An airburst not only minimizes fallout, it also maximizes the damage done by a
nuclear weapon. I would expect a nuclear exchange to be primarily airbust
weapons, considering the intent is to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and
fighting capability.

Mutually Assured Destruction refers to the combatant countries, after all, not
to the human species.

~~~
avar
One would hope so, but tactical ground bursts could irradiate entire
agricultural regions in ways that airbursts couldn't.

I'd expect any MAD plan to include airbursts for big cities and ground bursts
for breadbaskets.

------
grabcocque
Mad Max is not a post nuclear world.

~~~
coldtea
Following a nuclear holocaust, the world has become a desert wasteland and
civilization has collapsed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max:_Fury_Road#Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max:_Fury_Road#Plot)

~~~
Aoyagi
Yes, Fury Road was the first one to mention that. It's basically a retcon of
what the proper Mad Max films have established.

~~~
pkroll
They're all by the same writer/director, so "proper" doesn't really apply.

------
stuff4ben
Reading that I'm left thinking that perhaps nuclear war wouldn't be so bad,
well except the billions dead and the radioactivity. But we don't have to
worry about global warming and water scarcity so we have that going for us.

------
philip142au
This hasn't been thought through enough, with nuclear reactors not maintained
by people they will melt-down and pour out lots of radiation on top of that
produced by the bombs. A lot of life will be destroyed.

------
lgleason
wait, Mad Max is not a documentary ;)

With a full scale nuclear exchange we would have a nuclear winter for a the
first few years (when the radiation would be the highest). This is an
interesting read that looks at actual US government procedures following and
exchange. It's a bit dated, but was written during the height of the cold war.
[https://www.amazon.com/Day-After-World-War-
III/dp/0670258806](https://www.amazon.com/Day-After-World-War-
III/dp/0670258806)

------
coldcode
I assume a worldwide nuclear war would be an extinction level event. Perhaps
roaches will inherit the earth, but I doubt humans will.

~~~
arethuza
I don't think that was ever really the case - there was a vast amount of over
targeting where the same location would be hit tens or even hundreds of times
(notably Moscow - apparently due for ~400 warheads in the worst days of the
Cold War).

------
ucaetano
Did they forget Mad Mx takes place in the Australian Outback? It currently
isn't so different than the Mad Max version...

------
ComputerGuru
> So why the clear, blue skies, George Miller? Perhaps the once smoke-filled
> air in Max’s world has already cleared. But Robock predicts that process
> would take around 30 years. Why, then, does Max still look so young?

I think they accidentally a word. 30 years == young.

~~~
bagacrap
Max was already an adult at the time of the apocalypse.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Thanks, I thought they meant the world of _Mad Max_.

------
tezza
Next he'll be saying the Zombies / Infected arent right in Walking Dead / 28
days.

This is a work of fiction, no ?

------
fritzw
The whole article and not one mention of radioactive fallout? The
radioactivity from a thermonuclear bomb spreads through the regional
atmosphere and remains in contaminated soil for centuries...

------
finid
What worries me is that even today, there're nut jobs on our side (and I'm
sure on the other side also) who believe that a nuclear war is winnable.

During the very brief Russian-Georgian war, some folks under Bush (Bush
disagreed with them) actually toyed with the idea of bombing Russia.

And we're still baiting them in Syria.

~~~
pmoriarty
You might enjoy a movie called _" Seven Days in May"_:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_days_in_may](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_days_in_may)

