Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Hang on a second, nuclear bombs, especially bigger and newer ones, release massive amounts of radiation. It's not just about the initial blast (which I don't think I'd want to be too near, indoors or not). Depending on where and when the bomb is designed to explode (in the air or on the ground) it can produce varying intensities of nuclear fallout to a local area, which is the most damaging thing after the initial flash of high-frequency radiation and shockwave. That's the thing that settles on the ground, poisoning the water and the soil and starts to kill the local people who weren't killed by the initial blast, except it's a much slower and more agonising death. The city of Dresden was not made of wood and paper, but it still suffered badly enough from a concentrated bombing campaign, so I'm not entirely optimistic about what a large nuclear weapon could do to a modern city.

Maybe a nuclear exchange wouldn't end the world immediately, but concentrated strikes in a limited geographical area would introduce an infrastructural and humanitarian crisis that no country would surely want to deal with.

I didn't put forward that argument. The guy who I quoted had 30yrs experience in nuclear armaments. He very much seemed to know his stuff and presented a clear and structured argument which he backed up in later posts when questioned. He's certainly right on one thing, theres no way in hell that Russia has maintained even a fraction of the nuclear weapons they claim to have. I'd wager we're more at risk of an accidental detonation of one sitting in storage than one that actually makes it off the ground. You can be sure as **** the ones the Yanks, Brits and French have work though.

Its definitely sarcasm, I don't believe even the most ardent kremlinite would think this.

Latest from Kadyrov.

He has a go at all the armchair generals on Telegram, maintains that the current army leadership are in the best place to continue with the SMO.

Interesting that such a high up person in the Russian government feels to need to respond to criticism of the handling of the war.

So glad that Kadyrov could take a break from making Tik Toks where he rides in an open top jeep firing off a gold-plated Kalashnikov in the air to make this announcement.

Strange, maybe they're **** their pants? Read somewhere lots of faeces left all over the place by Russian military. Maybe they have a problem with their field rations and get diarrhea? Is this why they need loads of new boxers and y fronts?

Ah sure someone will be along shortly to tell us ocrs have retaken land again

Ukrainians and Russians are more alike that they are different and they do share the same heritage, it's even in the language they speak. If you want to associate brutality of armies as being culture, may I suggest that you look in the history books, there is more than enough brutality to go around, neither side has a monopoly on virtue.

You point out there are a lot of people dead and lives destroyed. I think we can find common ground and agree the crimes you outline should not have happened in the first place. We have the benefit of hindsight we can look at how this situation developed, what mistakes were made and learn how these can be avoided in future. The war can be dragged out it won't last forever. One side can retreat, lick it's wounds and try again. We don't want a recurrence. The question I want you to try answer is how could this all have been avoided?

Yes and no. Yes, the fallout can be, and has been in the case of Nagasaki and especially Hiroshima, absolutely lethal, as will the radiation flash. It is not guaranteed however that modern nuclear weapons will produce the same insane amounts of fallout that those two first bombs did. For starters, even the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were massively different. Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb, was a "plug" type weapon using Uranium-235 as a fuel, whose fission process, when detonated consumed less than one kilogram of the total 64 of U-235 included in the weapon, leaving the rest to produce all kinds of nasty isotopes whilst being spread about by the explosion. This greatly contributed to both the horrendous immediate after-effects of the bombing as well as to the long-lasting consequences suffered by the survivors and their descendants

Fat Man, the weapon dropped on Nagasaki, was a far more efficient, but also experimental design, a plutonium-fueled implosion weapon, which contained far less fuel, 6.19 kilograms of Plutonium 239. It also reacted far more efficiently, with about 1 kilogram of this fuel undergoing fission during the explosion, resulting in far less "bomb debris" to decay into long-life isotopes. That is not to say that Nagasaki had it easy, the explosion was just as horrendous for the people of that city as it had been for those in Hiroshima, and one unlucky person infamously experienced both explosions. However, from the studies that I could find, it appears that, even accounting for the different geography and the fact that the Nagasaki bomb was wildly off-target, detonating over an industrial and factory district, rather than the city center, the long term aftereffects, whilst still horrible, were less severe than those recorded in Hiroshima.

To the best of my knowledge, all modern nuclear weapons are plutonium implosion type weapons, meaning that they will not have as much fissile material to be thrown around by the explosion as Little Boy had. Furthermore, given the advancements in nuclear technology since the 1940s, it is safe to assume that the percentage of fissile material that is actually consumed in a detonation will be significantly higher than the 16% seen in Fat Man, though details on that are naturally classified. So unless someone detonates a cobalt or neutron bomb, the amount of unused fuel, and the isotopes produced from that, will be relatively limited.

Another aspect is going to be the altitude above ground at which the bomb will be detonated. A high-altitude air burst will produce only minimal amounts of fallout, whilst a ground-level or low altitude explosion will produce tons of it. Conversely, the effect on ground targets will be more severe in a low-altitude explosion. As with so many things regarding nuclear weapons, the exact altitudes planned for by the different nuclear powers are classified, so there's no way for us to tell how much material will be thrown up by a detonation.

In general, I noticed the complete lack of the radiation aspect in the Quora article, together with a few other inconsistencies. The author of that post overestimates the number of nuclear tests since 1945 by almost a third, with the recorded number standing at 2121 tests, of which 520 were above-ground detonations, with the vast majority of these taking place between the late 1940s and the early to mid 1960s, though some outliers, in particular the Vela Hotel incident, took place much later. And as you said, there's no mention of the intense flash of gamma radiation that is emitted immediately once fission, or fusion starts.

So no, nuclear weapons aren't as "carefree" as that Quora post makes it seem. On the other hand, we've had several hundred above-ground nuclear explosions within a relatively short time frame in the 1950s and 1960s, some of which took place relatively close to inhabited areas, such as the Nevada test site, were some explosions were visible from Las Vegas, and the areas in question haven't devolved into some mutant-infested radioactive wasteland. So I'd say the truth is somewhere between the two extremes, though I'm definitely in the camp of "let's try to avoid these things if at all possible!"