China! Remember the 60's Communist policy - Have lots of children. In the event of a nuclear war, we will overwhelm the thousands of Americans with millions of Chinese.
Exactly. China has something like 7 major population centers. America has somewhere around 17-32 (depending on what you term 'major' as). If it was a non-nuclear war, China could defeat probably any three nations on the planet. If it came to nuclear war, China would be screwed.
I'm pretty sure that if a couple nukes come crashing down on 400 zlings who then have to fight 50 zlots, the 50 zlots would win.
I don't know if you've taken a look at China's military tech lately. It's not like it's friggin Ethiopa. It's some fairly decent stuff. Lots vs Hellions maybe. Course, as the US, we'd have to be carriers, right? ;D
I saw the shortened title and was expecting "so nuclear war seems to turn on women" for some reason...
The problem is that most nuclear weapons do not have the strength to completely destroy cities. And after a quick tally, China has at least 30 major cities with population totaling over 1 million within the urban area of the city proper. ~20 of them have over 2 million. The USA has slightly over 20. And especially in the scenario depicted, China and the Soviet Union have had long-term pacts based on Communism. The majority of the nuclear weapons would likely be target towards the States and other Western nations (or possibly all, dependent on the years).
I read this thing for like an hour while at work. Lost productivity. LOL very interesting. Sucks that the U.S. would be as devastated as it appears to have been in this scenario. Although I kind of doubt the accuracy of that, I feel like the U.S. would take a lot more with it and didn't we have a missile defense system in 1988? We sure do now!
Our main land based ICBM does. Each warhead has a variable payload of up to 1.2 MT. For reference, Fat Man (the Nagasaki bomb) had a payload of 21kT. This puts each warhead at roughly 57 times the amount of raw explosive energy as FM. Factor in the fact that you can have three separate warheads in each delivery vehicle, that adds to (if my math is correct) the Minuteman III missile having around 171 times the energy release as Fat Man. Obviously, it doesn't mean that it's almost 200 times more destructive, but it's an immensely powerful weapon. And that's not all. They're deactivated now (but still intact I believe), one of the most famous MIRV's in existence, the LGM-118... The Peacekeeper. One delivery device with up to 10, yes, 10 warheads, with yields up to 300Kt of power. Less overall explosive capacity, but holy crap, it's 10 nukes for the price of one. And those are just ICBM MIRV's. If we want to get into actual dropped-from-a-plane bombs, we got that covered too. But those are boring. Last, but not least, a fun infographic I found researching this that shows relative power of various nuclear devices. Link
America doesn't really aim at cities though, so, they probably won't use their nukes on max power (except those near places where military commands could be stationed underground)
What we'd probably do is detonate a nuke above each city to act as an EMP style weapon, knocking out their tech systems, then go to town on their military.
This reminds me of a accidental conversation I had with a buddy awhile back. Instead of talking about China is was if North Korea split in two, what would they be called... Yep... I so want this conversation translated into Korean. XD
I'd think they both be called north korea, only add a different prefix. like peoples republic and citizens government
