Can anyone come up with a plausible scenario where nuclear war could occur without total apocalypse...

The "whole" northern hemisphere blows itself up with nukes but the southern hemisphere is left mostly untouched because they were not important.
You get half apocaliptic world and half a world where countries still exist and all the big guys left the playground.

Sorta like This War Of Mine or Children Of Men?

I'd maybe lean away from nukes then dude - they overly complicate things with fallout and LITERAL obliteration. I'd say invasion of a major power by another (CoD MW2) followed by a ceasefire (Not a withdrawal) would be funner - you'd have parts of the game world that speak a different language and might try to shake you down, while still being bound by international law (kinda...).

If you're still keen on nukes, maybe say there was a firstwave of nuclear strikes on military and infrastructure targets. After the harsh reminder of what MAD is, everyone's a bit more eager for a peaceful resolution. Mass internal strife (Crippled economy, food shortages, short-staffed police & military forces, shame from "losing", checkpoints to control movement of citizens, etc).

My two cents bruh

wtf mate

Quite honestly, even in a modern, all out nuclear exchange, you probably wouldn't have total apocalypse. Nuclear weapons are devastating, but they're not world ending. Square cube law is a bitch.

Plus, given what limited other data we have with disasters, the "mere" annihilation of 50-70% of a population isn't guaranteed to bring down a government, let alone anywhere that isn't hit that hard (likely to be most places.)

Just have a "realistic" nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia/Soviet Union; they spend most of their missiles attacking each other's missile bases, and only about 10-20% of their arsenals on population centers, most of which will require multiple nukes to destroy.

Or why not the Aftermath of an Alien Invasion?

The world's capitals are in ruins, and while humanity 'won' by EMP-ing then nuking the ships in orbit, civil supply lines are unreliable, and then there is the matter of the Exo-tech from the wrecks being a hot commodity for the Reconstruction...

Does it have to be US and USSR?

India and Pakistan have nukes, limited engagement between them would fuck shit up locally pretty bad, but not much elsewhere (as in, outside of Asia, China would probably have to deal with a shit tonne of problems after).

France and UK have nukes, conceivably some kind of engagement could happen there depending on how different you want to run the politics.

There are several nations believed to possess either stolen USSR nukes or their own, Israel and Iran both probably have at least limited capability. You could very easily conceive of a situation where things go fucking batshit in the middle east. Hell I could see Israel going full Belka if the Muslims all suddenly organize and turn on them.

There's a book called Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman (the author of Forever War) that has that premise as its backstory. The bullet points summary of the setting is:

It's near future. The Western post-industrial nations have cheap and reliable nanotechnology. They're the 'Alliance.' The non-industrialized nations are united as a loose coalition called Ngumi. In political science they're what you might call the Global South. Atlanta is nuked. The Alliance blames Ngumi but Ngumi denies involvement. In retaliation the Alliance nukes Sao Paolo and Johannesburg. I highly recommend this book it's a great read.

Another Idea: A Solar Flare knocks out the Internet... Hilarity Ensures.

A limited counterforce-only exchange would fuck up surprisingly little of the CONUS. An ongoing conventional war could escalate into such, and further escalation isn't inevitable, that's just Cold-War era scaremongering.

most military network is already solar flare resistant

I was under the impression that even a modest number of nuclear detonations, given their impressive energy thresholds, results in enough fallout to severely alter the world's food supply chain.

The damage may not be from the detonation themselves, but from suburban metropolises suddenly having to go without creature comforts they have grown accustomed to.

But not the Civillian networks...

Have the Flares knock out the Internet, TV, civil telecommunications, and watch the military try and call their troops back.

Twilight 2000 is based on such a scenario. Lot of infrastructure fucked up and a lot of countries end up fracturing into warring states, but its not the apocalypse.

Car Wars had a limited nuclear war after a grain blight wiped out most of the food crops on earth which resulted in governments collapsing because of food riots and in the instability a few missiles were launched but it wasn't a global nuclear war so much as a limited exchange between the remnants of multiple governments.

Most people died because of the famine and civil unrest, the nukes were barely noticed because the cities targeted were mostly abandoned at the time.

Came here to post this. Total nuclear annihilation is a fiction. Sure, if all the nuclear-capable powers in the entire world decided to blanket every single centimeter of the earth in Nukes they could, but that's just about the worst way to go about achieving military objectives. Realistically, everyone has some degree of countermeasures. I mean seriously, there exist, currently, final stage prototypes, being field-tested /as we speak/, of laser point-defence systems capable of taking out not just missiles, but mortars and artillery shells. Hell, we can do that with straight up computer-targeted gunfire, the lasers are just more efficient. So in order to kill an objective for sure you're gonna have to launch a few at it. Plus you don't want to launch every single nuke you have right at the start, there might come a situation later in the war that demands one. The radioactive fallout isn't too bad: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are both populated today, and nuclear winter is not a thing that could realistically happen.

Give Middle Eastern countries short ranged nukes and let Akbars do the rest.

There's a few books that might be worth looking at for inspiration. "War Day" is the journal of a writer who travels America after a very limited nuclear war (if memory serves, only Houston was destroyed. NYC was damaged. But lots of ground strikes in the midwest intended to knock out the Minuteman silos.). Upside is that it isn't nearly as bleak as it could be, downside is that it doesn't really have much that lends itself to a game setting.

"One Second After" is about EMP strikes blanketing the US, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Becomes pretty grim, particularly near the one-year-later mark when the town is fending off cannibals. Maybe not the most interesting setting, though.

It's not really what you're asking for, but if you want a fun setting for a game with some nuclear war, I recommend the WorldWar books by Turtledove. Moronic aliens with 1980's technology invade in the middle of WW2.

>town surrounded by cannibals
This plot, just why. Beside obvious bias, that it. During any famine overpopulated towns have no way to replenish food beside import or raiding countryside. Dedicated cannibals will appear inside city limits in first place.

It'd probably take a year for urban cannibals to run out of local game and start looking for new small town hunting grounds. .

And now I wonder how many people must be eaten per cannibal during 1 year so they remain fit for combat. Thanks, Veeky Forums.

I do wonder how long people in a major city would last before resorting to cannibalism. There were (presumably completely unfounded) rumors of it happening in New Orleans only a week after Katrina hit.

Well, we can look at Nigeria as an example. They went through the local food supplies first, then zoos, pets, and vermin but they still maintained a semi-functional society. Cannibalism is relatively hidden and the police arrest the ones they find practicing it.

It might be different if there was no foreign aid though.

Afghanistan is secretly sent a nuke by North Korea, who hopes they will use it and start/worsen a war between USA+Russia and the Middle East. But Afghanistan wasn't told how to use the nuke properly, and they end up setting it off at a peace talk with a bunch of world leaders attending (in Afghanistan). All the major powers flip their shit and start carpet bombing Afghanistan (more so than they were). Meanwhile, North Korea has been making threatening noises towards America for years, only to not be taken seriously by anyone and generally ridiculed. Thus, when US (with no President, mind you) goes full force in Afghanistan, nobody was ready for NK to (A. send a submarine to Russian waters and nuke China from there, and (B. Invading America.

The players are all playing British SAS troopers in a squad sent to investigate the top brass in Afghanistan, and start unravelling the knot from there.

>missile defense systems

How many missiles can those stop? Because I'm pretty sure russia could send more than that number anyway. What's the state of the system as of now? It's been talked about for years and it was seen as a major waste of money for little gain exactly because you can't cover all the country from all the missiles that can be thrown at you.

Is this the usual wanking of military hardware with no real consideration of how things actually work?

Fug meant to say that Afghanistan set off the nuke accidentally, they were storing it at the peace conference intending to use it later, on Iraq

Cities have hight food turnover. If rationing enforced, it can last from 1 week to full month. Rumors will flourish in any case, as fear (and temptation) grows with each passing day.
Now, consider siege of Leningrad. It began in September, with 1 month of grain supply. By snowfall rations shrank to mere 150 grams of mostly bread (only 20% sawdust), twice so for laborers, but then you had to walk all the way to your workplace and back because of total transport collapse. Obviously, many died from exposure. Imagine streets littered with well-preserved bodies for hours before orderlies can clean it up. Even during such winter per each month there was about 300 acts of cannibalism per 30 000 deaths. Only 15% of those cannibals were murderers. Cons, theft and murder for food cards, on other hand, can easily outnumber cannibalism.

No, all NATO analysis pointed out that any "limited nuclear interchange" will always ended up with massive retaliations from both sides

The US has no missile defense systems since the decommissioning of the Nike Zeus in the 70's

The "nuclear winter" scenario was a full exchange using numbers that assumed every target was comprised of wood and paper houses ala Hiroshima. Modern cities and fire code actually severely limits the threat of major fires, the primary contributor to fallout.

Between 10-50%. It's an unknown variable but even 10% forces you to send more warheads to a target to ensure a kill. That means fewer warheads can be spread around

This is untrue.

Current doctrine is centered around limited counter-force escalation.

World War 2 was just that.

You're welcome.

Rolled 6 (1d20)

>how many missiles can those stop?

Quite apocalyptic (for the northern hemisphere), but not humanity-extinction level for the rest of the planet.

johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html

The ability for nuclear forces to survive a full-scale nuclear attack and be able to launch a devastating counter-attack. In practice for the Americans and Soviets, this involves SSBNs and backup command centres, as well as having very large stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Standard thinking was that in a worst-case out-of-left-field all-out nuclear first-strike, 90% of one's stockpile might be lost. If your 10% that survive was numericaly big enough to annihilate your would-be attacker, that might be enough to dissuade the other side from striking first. This concept would become known as Mutually Assured Destruction.

This is the basis of why American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles were as large as they were during the Cold War. On the American side, war planners in the 1960s estimated that there were about 300 potential targets in the Soviet Union (arriving at that number by adding up all the industrial centers, military targets, and cities with at least 100,000 residents). Nuclear strikes at the time weren't guaranteed to be accurate; missiles could land as many as twenty miles off-target, or bombers might miss because of navigation errors, poor visibility, or being chased by enemy anti-air. Planners compensated by stacking three nukes per potential target. A rough calculation gets you to 9,000 nukesnote for Mutually Assured Destruction — at a minimum. Given the weirdness of Cold War politics, actual American and Soviet stockpiles topped out at 32,000 and 45,000 respectively.

Other nations, like Britain and France, had neither the money nor the warheads to maintain an arsenal like that, and their relative proximity to the Soviet Union meant they also didn't have the time to confirm an attack and launch a counter-attack. As such, they developed other means to secure second-strike capability, such as submarine-launched platforms and other command-and-control schemes (see below sections).

Why is humanity so fascinated by its own possible destruction, especially at its own hand?

>Can anyone come up with a plausible scenario where nuclear war could occur without total apocalypse?
World War 3. The only country that had any intentions of a strategic nuclear exchange during the Cold War was France and even then it was only meant to happen if the Soviets actually crossed the border (IIRC they intended to fire "warning shots" by nuking German towns as the Soviets approached the French border).

Both sides during the Cold War intended to use themselves and expected the other side to make widespread use of tactical nuclear weapons. Both sides during the Cold War differentiated between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. The former were a last resort and a means to stop the other side from using strategic nuclear weapons. The latter were seen as really big bombs. As long as both sides stuck to military targets (bridges, docks, troop movements, defensive positions, etc.) using short range weapons neither side had any intention of escalating to usage of strategic nuclear weapons.

That was the idea behind Twilight 2000, I believe. Pretty cool setting.

Yes. 80% of US military traffic goes over civilian networks.

Wet firecracker war scenario. Near future proliferation of TMD renders the majority of nuclear exchange ineffective. Neither side after the scare wants to escallate, and declares cease-fire immediately.

Possibly caused by false alarm, or rogue launch.

USA USA USA !!!
At least you're not shitposting on /k/ while you're here, I guess.

>I don't know what MIRVs are and think you can reliably take down missles on a ballistic trajectory: the post

The missile defence systems can stop fuck all the and russia has more, more powerful, and more up to date nukes than america.
That said, even if both countries unleashed their whole nuclear arsenal there would still be sections of countryside where it's safe to live. Contingency plans only target military bases and major cities.

Literally thousands of nukes have been tested all over the world.
The world is a lot bigger, and the explosion from a nuke is a lot smaller than you realise.

Israel enacts its Samsonian nuclear policy and kills whatever percentage of the world's population happens to live in the 50 largest cities of the world.

The rest of the world does something, I don't know.

>The "whole" northern hemisphere blows itself up with nukes but the southern hemisphere is left mostly untouched because they were not important.
Ever read 'On The Beach'?

French Canadian seperatists steal a shipment of radioactive material from Russia on the way to Bruce nuclear plant. The shipment is diverted into Toronto and blown up truck bomb style at Yorkdale mall killing hundreds and spreading radiological material across a 2 km + radius. Toronto is shut down and the Canadian economy crashes. America is alarmed, and steps in crossing the border into Quebec to aid in the search/containment of the terrorist threat. Quebecers are outraged at the overbearing American presence and several bloody confrontations occur. Go from there.

>Thus, when US (with no President, mind you)
You know when the president dies somebody else takes over, right

I told you the Frogs couldn't be trusted!

>Why is humanity so fascinated by its own possible destruction, especially at its own hand?
Because the total annihilation of the human race has only been in the realm of possibility for the last eighty years and we as a species haven't gotten bored with the concept of our own extinction yet.

Most of those are underground. The above-ground tests are still causing cancer in nearby cities.

Realistically, even if the US was "all in" combating some other nation, the only two countries in the world that could invade America are Mexico and Canada.

The US Navy is literally larger than the entire rest of the world's navies combined, twice over.

It would make more sense for N.Korea to try invading S.Korea or Japan, which would drag America into war anyway.

Several years ago I read a very well researched time line at alternatehistory dot com about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis going hot.

At the time the USSR didn't have a lot of weapons would could reach the US. Some bombers get through, the IRBMs in Cuba launch, some sub launches occur, but the US gets off relatively lightly although DC gets slagged and JFK dies.

The USSR's weapons can reach the UK and western Europe however. With warheads coming in, the UK and France launch in retaliation but Europe is basically fucked. South Korea and Japan get damaged too.

With LBJ busy trying to keep the government going, the US military basically follows it's SIOP on autopilot for several days. SAC, USAF, and the USN nuke the USSR until there's nothing left worth nuking.

The US is damaged but working, the UK is a disaster, Europe is heavily damaged, and the USSR is simply gone. There's a rise by the global south, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, etc. and China reclaims great power status sooner.

Sauce?

>Veeky Forums doesn't spout outdated MAD nonsense

Not that user, but fuck me that was a sad movie.

The old men in the wine cellar drinking brought a tear to my eye.

I'd take a look at Fallout by Harry Turtledove. The concept of MAD never really develops, and the use of nuclear weapons is similar to the strategic bombings of WWII (Which the book is set shortly after. One could argue that the war never really ended, just morphed in the setting). There is significant public backlash to using them in the US, and the USSR and Chinese don't really care because they're a dictatorship that cares little for public opinion. Something I found interesting was how all of the various characters are used to show different aspects of the war, while vaguely connected (if only through hear-say or being on different sides of a battle). Also takes a look at what an unsustainable war looks like when it's been taken much too far.

alternatehistory dot com
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