For a mysterious reason, all of the nuclear bombs/rockets/etc. detonate exactly at this moment...

>What is nuclear fallout

They dock in civi ports from time to time.

>likely the end of advanced civilization on this planet.
I wouldn't be so dramatic.
Remember, all of those bombs are mass-stored in underground storage facilities or missile silos.

Would those facilities be obliterated from the face of the Earth? Of course.
Would it irradiate the Earth in the nearest vicinity? Sure.
Would it destroy civilization? Doubtful.
No one stores their nukes over-ground, so the damage to the atmosphere would be minimal.
It would, however, quite effectively decimate the military of all countries.

Hell, even full nuclear exchange wouldnt end life on earth. It would make it pretty miserable though.
And with the nuclear deterrent gone, its time for a dirty dirty conventional war.

Are we disregarding seismic activity here, or?

The average yield of a basic nuclear weapon is over 100 kilotons, which is enough to ruin an area so badly that even breathing downwind of it for miles can kill you for the next sixty-odd years thanks to radioactive contamination.
Nuclear explosions themselves wouldn't take out the population centers, but the environmental damage of a distributed explosion rocking planet Earth with a conservative estimate of power equal to 1 million kilotons would be pretty fucking bad for the planet.
Keep in mind that when the Chernobyl Reactor had a meltdown they basically kept a 1000-odd square mile area around it poisoned since before you were even born, and the Reactor actually did LESS widespread radioactive contamination then a 100 kiloton explosion would do.

yes
no one in this thread has any idea what the fuck they're talking about

if every nuclear weapon in the world went off at once regardless of where they were we would be living a few miserable generations at most

Not end all life. Didn't say that. Just advanced civilization.
The weather patterns would be pretty erratic, and most of them would carry (because nukes are widespread enough that rain clouds would ALWAYS be passing through an irradiated area) enough radioactive contamination that going outside on a rainy day would have a very high likelihood of a person getting cancer.

Good point. If the explosions are enough to make tectonic plates shift sufficiently or destroy them outright, then all bets are off.

You people are forgetting that with so many nukes deep underground at once we could very easily tear the Earth a new asshole through the massive fucking amounts of seismic energy going on. At the very least any volcano that's able to become active again would blow its load, especially the supervolcanoes.

Dude Israel would be a crater. A dedicated person can run around the edge of the country in a day.

Like 3 nukes can glass the whole country.

The problem isn't the bombs themselves but the environmental damage long-term.
One of the reasons we stopped doing nuclear tests is because we found out that once contamination happens we basically can't fix it and we just kind of have to wait it out and hope it gets better eventually since there's not a lot of reliable ways to fix radioactive decontamination.

I kinda doubt most storage facilities are 500 meters deep like the holes used in the tests.

The explosions in the silos shoot the radioactive material straight up into the air, and winds spread the fallout on incredibly long streaks that devastate children and elderly without impacting wild animals.

There's a lost generation and then the world picks back up and is probably stronger after the dark times, and there's a sudden spike in people that are less sensitive to radiation.

Globalization effects reverse for a bit, and the first world is the least affected.

Nobody knows how much (if any) nukes they have.

One would be enough.
You could fit Israel into my home state in the US and have room for six more right next to it no problem.

No it would definitely fucking be the bombs themselves. When the Tsar Bomba was being tested there were concerns it might change our planet's orbit. With every bomb going off at once that makes the Tsar Bomba look like a firecracker.

>When the Tsar Bomba was being tested there were concerns it might change our planet's orbit.

Yeah, that's kinda melodramatic.
Same sort of people who thought the CERN Collider would create a black hole I imagine; alarmists convinced of the horrific power our species commands.

No, I doubt the human race could ACTUALLY destroy the Earth.
Just ourselves. Really, that's what we're best at honestly. We've spent our entire history as a species perfecting the process.

>Same sort of people who thought the CERN Collider would create a black hole

It does create create black holes, though, they just collapse onto themselves before they can interact with matter.

And they all get superpowers, huh?

Something that was solved several years ago. Nuclear weapons are kinda tame in that aspect. This is not Fallout with perma-radiation several centuries after the detonation.

You don't seem to understand how truly devastating nuclear bombs are.

One nuke going off in a storage facility would probably prevent the others around it from going off simply by destroying them.

Nukes aren't chemical explosives.

When the first nukes were being tested there were concerns the reaction would ignite the oxygen atoms in the atmosphere and completely destroy the entire planet in a chain reaction that turns the Earth into a second sun.

Nothing I said implied that. You would see increased cancer rates, increases stillbirths, increased deformations, and people dying from radiation exposure - slowly and horribly.

Probably a huge panic for a while, then when all is said and done another huge panic trying to figure out why and how it even happened.

This. "Oh no we'd be fine, they're underground." You're talking about ALL THE NUKES. We're dead. If you don't die in the initial conflagration, the aerosols blocking out the sun for decades and levels of background radiation incompatible with life will finish you off. The people who die instantly will be the lucky ones.

We're talking about a scenario where everything goes off at exactly the same time, which is already pretty fantastical, so presumably fratricide wouldn't be an issue.

Fucking nothing. They're all in silos or under the sea. Shit thread.

not even remotely close to everyone dies. It would be a tragedy of incomprehensible scale, in terms of staggering loss of life, economic devastation, and sudden loss of MAD protection against more mundane wars. Humanity's recovery would be ugly too, for the overwhelming majority of the damage would be in the "civilized" world. The real shitholes would be untouched.

But it wouldn't be a human extinction event. Every existing nuclear weapon detonating according to a deliberate pattern to maximize loss of life probably wouldn't be a human extinction event. Popping them all in their silos wouldn't cut it.

I personally would die though. LIve right next to a huge bomber airbase.

They're only 100 feet deep, which means exactly jack shit when you're talking modern nuclear weapons.

Though, to be fair, most fallout is the product of a nuclear detonation too close to the ground. The flash of X-rays and neutron plasma transmutes lesser elements into poisonous unstable heavy elements. 99% of this is eliminated by the fact that modern nuclear weapons are designed for airburst detonations. The airburst is not only more efficient, because less of the blast is wasted on digging a crater, but safe because less matter is transmuted. Pretty much the only fallout is from the leftover bits of bomb casing. Still, detonating them in silos would produce a significant amount of fallout, potentially enough to poison the surrounding regions for months.

The threat of nuclear winter has been long overstated. Yes, a large scale nuclear event would lead to a lot of deaths, and a global cooling scenario that would lessen agricultural outputs. This would be compounded by the fact that we're probably due for another mini-ice age. There's some evidence to suggest that global cooling periods occur on a cycle and the industrial driven greenhouse effect is the only thing holding the most recent one back.

Still, the radiation from the detonation areas is largely centered in unpopulated areas and, being underground, doesn't have an incredible opportunity to spread. Because of this, it would take a lot longer to fade, potentially decades, but humanity would survive. Western civilization might not, but that's dying anyway.

here.

Britain would probably not be to bad as most of their nukes are stored in the trident subs

probably more than 3.

>Canada is safe
>Australia is safe
>a large part of Asia and Indonesia is safe
>entirety of South America is safe
>Africa is safe

Just by virtue of the first three, the civilization will survive.

Are you high?

Fallout is the real kille,r not blast and not immediate radiation.

And fallout is comprised entirely of how much dirt is sucked into the explosion and shat out into the atmosphere.

And all of these weapons are directly surrounded by earth, but with a clear path of access to the surface.

This would be worse in the long term than an actual total nuclear exchange.

what the fuck is a operationally deployed nuclear weapon doing in north italy

NATO, I suppose:
>As of November 2009, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey are hosting U.S. nuclear weapons as part of NATO's nuclear sharing policy.[3][4]

Underground nuclear explosions don't generate much fallout.

Not every country is full of nukes, there are a few modern countries that aren't anywhere near a nuke, see most of Canada, AUS/NZ, most of central asia, all of south america and africa, scandinavia. It would effectively destroy the US as a country although there would be quite a few completely untouched areas but their entire military and government would basically be destroyed in an instant, and most of Europe along with the most important areas in Russia and a lot of eastern bloc countries would go down in flames. It would seriously mess shit up globally, but modern society would survive and there would be no danger of a technological regression outside of isolated areas where populations were forgotten about or assumed dead.

Fucking silos are like putting dynamite in a folger's can with the plastic lid on top. The majority of the blast will shoot straight up into the air taking surrounding dirt with it. The fallout would not only be extreme but the explosion isn't fighting the momentum of the landing to bring matter from the surface to the air.

This would be much closer to Chernobyl than a traditional bomb detonation, though with a much shorter duration.

Albaquerque is fucked, if I remember correctly

>No one stores their nukes over-ground, so the damage to the atmosphere would be minimal.
Are you kidding me? Do you even realize what effect a few nukes detonated in an underground base would have? In best of cases you will end up with a crater so large to drain the Mississippi for months to fill it, and an completely wiped out state.

>Australia is safe
we're doomed

Actually they have hinted in numerous occasions that they have at least 200.

A lot of people would die. Wouldn't destroy the world though. Turns out the guys talking about nuclear winter were mostly bullshitting to try and scare people into disarming.

Most of the nukes would go off underwater or in huge underground bunkers that would largely contain the blast. Israel would simply cease to exist because they keep so many of the things airborne in case of surprise Jihad. India might get fucked because they're retards and keep losing warheads only to find them in grain silos weeks later. Russia wouldn't even notice that it happened because their nukes are all positioned for attacks on Europe or America--I.E. in the middle of the steppe or in Kamchatka.

China would be fucked because China is 80% inhospitable desert, and they keep their warheads in the habitable belt.

Wouldn't be an extinction event but it would suck mightily.

Is this scenario just the purpose built nuclear weapons exploding, or do all the nuclear power plants catastrophically fail too?

>still can't kill Madagascar

Fuck.

Nuclear power plants can't go off like a bomb, though them going Chernobyl and fucking melting would mean that Sweden is double fucked.

you might want to ask that to /k/
one tripfag (Oppenheimer) is said to work for a think tank that works with the US nuclear troops

Followed by a time of brief peace; humanity united under a common fear. Several smaller countries may be picked on after blaming a big dog, and at worst we lose a few thousand active duty soldiers.
10 years time it all goes back to normal.

Life goes on. "Nuclear winter" was anti-proliferation propaganda from cold war scientists who got away with it thanks to no internet and primitive modelling software. The oil well fires of the first gulf war disproved it - if every nuclear bomb in existence today detonated, it would do almost as much damage to the environment as a big volcano eruption.