Is there enough nuclear weapon to totally destroy Earth?

Question

A friend of mine told me that only Russia has enough to destroy the world 6 times.

Answer 1

You hear about the nukes that Iran or NorKor may use, but the real bulls in the glass shop are the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US. Their arsenals can obliterate a million Hiroshimas, but there's less than 3,000 cities greater than 100,000. And the number of military installation is relatively small.

A mere 100 megatons will initiate global impact winter. Will we have a nuclear war in the near future? Probably not, but we've come mighty close on more than one occasion. The last close call was in 1995 when the Russian 'suitcase' holding the launch codes was activated for the first time in history because of a scientific launch by Norway that the Russians mistook for an attack on them. .....and that was POST-Cold War.

The aging Russian command and control systems and their aging early warning systems should be our greatest concern..

The next World War will involve a nuclear exchange, how could it not. In the first 30 minutes, nearly a billion people will have been vaporised, mostly in the US, Russia, Europe, China and Japan. Another 1.5 billion will die shortly thereafter from radiation poisoning. The northern hemisphere will be plunged into prolonged agony and barbarity.

Eventually the nuclear winter will spread to the southern hemisphere and all plant life will die. You ask when world war three will start, you are asking whether there's enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth. My answer is YES, and we've been under the nuclear sword of Damacles since the 50's.

Our biggest risk is an accidental launch of nukes by one of the nuclear powers

Answer 2

It depends on what you mean by destroy? The Earth will be fine...there would be a different earth and the life that we see now would change, but the earth suffered from similar events in the past and has just gone on with time. The last one was from the Ice Age and well before that several large comets have hit the earth with just as much potential hazard as all the nukes in the world. As far as human life, there would most likely be a nuclear fallout followed by a nuclear winter if all the nukes were detonated throughout the world at once. But, lets say that that was not the case...there have been well over 2500 nuclear tests since the beginning era of "the bomb", although I would not recommend you drinking from Nevada water the earth is in descent shape.

There are two distinct groups of nuclear weapons. There are the large ones (strategic 20-25 megatons) and the (tactical 1-2 kilotons). The strategic weapons are very large and can destroy about a 40 mile radius with an 80% kill rate.Much of the debris from the blast is showered into the stratoshere and can be globally problematic. The tactical weapons destroy about one square mile and the debris from the blast goes into the troposhere only and is only problematic to the regiuonal area. With this being said,...

Most nuclear weapons are tactical size. Russia and America have thousands of strategic sized weapons..., but most other countries only have the tactical sized weapons like N Korea, India, Pakistan etc. China has a small number of the strategic sized munitions, but only a hand full.

During the cold war the reason for the overkill on strategic sized nuclear munitions was for a fail safe. If the first two or three missiles did not hit there target then the fourth or fifth would. So, many of these weapons would hit the same target in the same location two or three times. Bad for that region, but safer for the world. However, with so many weapons pointed from Russia most of the United States would be affected by a full scale war.

Now lets talk trade winds, most of the weapons are targeted at Europe, Asia, and North America. These are all continents located in the northern hemisphere. The trade winds would take up to six months or more to actually dwindle into the southern hemisphere, which should give much of the worlds population a chance at survival.

Answer 3

Depends on what you mean by "destroy".

If you are thinking "blow up the planet like the Death Star in Star Wars", then No. Not by a long shot.

If you mean exterminate all life on the Earth, then no, again not by a long shot.

If you mean wipe out all humans. No, again not by a long shot.

If you mean make one hell of a mess, kill between 1/3 and 2/3 of mankind, and toss the past several thousand years of civilization pretty much into the dumper... yeah we can do that.

The US and Russian nuclear arsenals are down substantially from where they were during the bad old days of the Cold War. Then each side had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Now we are down to several thousand each, with the French, British, Chinese having (I think) several hundred weapons between them, the Indians, Israelis, Pakistanis having several dozen each, and the North Koreans having one or two.

Now to understand what this means I want you to do something. Go get a world map. Start counting all the cites you see. Understand that any nuke will pretty much take any city on the planet out of comission. Even a "small" Hiroshima type bomb will make a hell of a mess. If you do the counting you can see that there aren't that many things on the planet worth nuking... even the biggest countries in the world can be taken out of the history books with no more than a couple of dozen nukes.

Then why did we build so many? Because both the US and the USSR needed to make sure that even if the other guy hit them with a really really good first strike, and they lost 90% or 95% of their nukes, the 5% or 10% that survived would be enough for their counterattack to scrape the other guy off the map.

So like I said, it depends on what you mean by "destroy".

Answer 4

More than likely, it would just lead to a stand off, as no nation would really want to take a hit from nuclear weapons. That said, we are actually destroying the planet with overpopulation... So yes we will eventually destroy the world.

Answer 5

Yes and you need not be a scientist to figure this one out. Look at the damage two "atomic" detonations did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, multiply the size and population of those two cities x the force of a "nuclear" detonation x the amount of known nukes by the 7 countries we know have them.

Personally, I was NBC in the army. I think if they all went of simultaneously or close to it they might actually be able to alter the earth's orbit and as little as .0000000000000001 % could cause complete destruction of everything living on the planet.

Answer 6

I don't know if destroy the world is the right wording. Wipe out 95% or more of the worlds population and most of the wildlife, yes.

Answer 7

US has a lot more than Russia. The missile gap during the Cold War was a lot larger than the Russians wanted to admit.

But to answer your question. There are more than enough nukes to kill all life on earth. You can't destroy the earth tho. It may take million years, but the earth would fix itself eventually and start over again.

Answer 8

Between the U.S and Russia there are tens of thousands of warheads. If all the nukes were fired at once and they all detonated, the earth would be a giant marble of glass. I wouldn't want to live through that.

Answer 9

The last I heard, we had the overkill factor down to about 3 Earths. At one time, it was said to be at 11.

Answer 10

One us nuclear sub that carries about 24 nuclear missles with around 12 warheads per each missle. Therefore long story short one balistic missle sub could take out half the world.
Oh yeah and there's about a half dozen of them patroling at a time.