shiv wrote:I must point out that nuclear weapons cause burn injuries. If you bump your head or cut your finger - they are also injures. One could ask "Millions of people have injuries and survive, so why should the injured be a special problem after a nuclear attack?"
This is ignorance. Burns are a special type of injury that are difficult to treat. Burns with blast and crush injuries would be "normal" after a nuclear bomb. In a big city of 20 million the combination of "burn + blast/crush" would be less than 10 a day. It would be far higher say in Kashmir where fighting causes burn and blast together. But if you get 150,000 people with burn and blast injuries in one city -there is going to be a problem. No a nation won't collapse. But "al iz vel" is not something that will come to mind
If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. You are a doctor, so you are overwhelmed thinking about the thousands of burn victims in the aftermath of a nuke attack. We have had this conversation before, but if you get 150,000 burn victims in one day, almost all of them will die. As a doctor and a human being, that is horrifying, but it still wont destroy the human capital that forms a city. Incendiary attacks were carried out on ALL Japanese, and many German cities. Yet, German & Japanese war effort carried on. If Germany did not collapse, if Japan did not collapse after massive bombing raids spreading KT level conventional bombings, why would a more modern country just collapse? The answer is that most large metropolis, especially such as Beijing that are spread out will not collapse after a single KT weapon. Sure, the city would cease to function for a few weeks, but it will recover, because you have killed or incapacitated less than 10% of the populace. On the other hand, a MT weapon will simply erase most cities on the planet from the map, killing or incapacitating everyone.
For sure, stopping a city for a few weeks, killing as many as 10% of its population will deter all western democracies, but I dont think its sufficient to deter either Pakistanis or Chinese or NoKo. If the Pakistani elite cared about the vast majority of their population, would they not have changed their hopeless policies? They continue in the hope that 'one day', they will defeat 'Endia'. These regimes - China, NoKo, Pakistan, exist to serve an ideology not their people. They have amply demonstrated this by their behavior. Therefore, to expect that they will behave the same ways as western democracies is silly.