I was recently asked (in person) why I think the Americans are considering starting a nuclear war if nuclear weapons are obviously world ending. I answered that the Americans don’t see it that way, and this article shows I was right:

“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability” said new DoD doctrine before it was taken offline (Steven Aftergood)

What was the reasoning behind my argument? I said that the danger posed by the nuclear weapons was incredibly overstated by the anti-war activists during the 1980s, for instance the entire “nuclear winter” argument is incredibly overstated and there is no reason whatsoever to assume a full nuclear exchange between three superpowers would produce global cooling effects that would be worse than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and mankind has seen much worse, for instance “the year without a summer” caused by Mt. Tambora eruption. The people who actually do the thinking for Pentagon have much better information than normal people do, and even better than I do, and I consider myself quite well informed in that regard.

The Pentagon analysts know the data obtained by long-term studies of the participants of Operation Crossroads:

The increase in all-cause mortality was 4.6 percent (relative risk [RR] = 1.046, 95% confidence interval, 1.020–1.074) and was statistically significant (p < 0.001). For malignancies, the elevation of mortality was lower—RR = 1.014 (0.96–1.068)—and was not statistically significant (p = 0.26). Similarly, leukemia mortality RR was elevated to 1.020 (0.75–1.39), but not significantly (p = 0.90) and by less than all-cause mortality. The increase in all-cause mortality did not appear to concentrate in any of the disease groups we considered.

TL;DR version for people with American-levels of attention span is that the Americans did a series of nuclear weapon tests in Bikini 1946, to see how nukes would influence surface ships. Everybody was exposed to radiation and all kinds of fallout including un-fissioned Plutonium, and when you read articles about it you expect everybody to have died from cancer within five years from the experiment. However, it turns out that, to quote Wikipedia, “one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months”. In the time-span of half a century.

The data from other nuclear mishaps including Chernobyl shows similar, quite surprising outcomes. Stress from relocation is the main cause of death. People who didn’t evacuate from the exclusion zone had better health outcomes than those who were evacuated. The data from the Soviet K-19 submarine, nicknamed “Hiroshima”, where the officers decided to re-route radioactive coolant of the reactor through an external pump, spraying everybody on the ship with super-radioactive coolant, stuff got into the ventilation system and everybody was exposed to high levels of radiation. Of the crew of 125, “twenty-two crew members died during the following two years” (Wikipedia). Having in mind that they were sprayed with and/or inhaled radioactive substance while sealed in a metal container, one would expect everybody to have died of cancer; however, I’ve seen survivors living to very old age.

Essentially, you can even survive the levels of radiation exposure causing acute radiation sickness and live to die of old age in your 80s. Radiation is quite deadly in extreme doses, but those extreme doses are actually extreme, the kind Pripyat firemen received during their unfortunate attempt of putting down a reactor fire in Chernobyl. However, there are strong indications that both wildlife and humans can be exposed to quite high levels of radiation in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and live quite normally.

Also, the amount of radioactive fallout released during the Castle Bravo fuckup was so large, it’s what one would expect from a limited nuclear war with dozens of atmospheric MIRV warhead explosions, and guess what, we’re still here. So, having in mind what I know, there are very good reasons to believe that the Pentagon people know more. Knowing more, they fear nuclear war less. However, the potential for miscalculations is great. They may plan for a limited nuclear exchange within a tolerable range of outcomes, and things may escalate wildly and end up as something altogether different.