[net.politics] Would the whole world really be destroyed?

dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (12/01/83)

Pardon a rather silly question, but I wonder sometimes about the assumptions
made that a nuclear war would wipe out life on the entire earth.

Certainly the USSR might be expected to obliterate the US, and vice-versa.
And most other countries are sufficiently aligned that they would also get
theirs. But what about, say, Fiji, which is in the middle of nowhere in
the Pacific Ocean? Or the Falklands? Or even New Zealand, which is definitely
a "Western" country but doesn't present much of a threat to anyone?

My understanding is that, for all that the superpowers can wipe out the
world 50 or 100 times over, any one bomb is only sufficient to take out
a relatively limited area. Is the problem really that the total
radiation would be so bad it would quickly spread even to remote areas?

	Thinking about moving to Antarctica,

		Dave Sherman
-- 
 {allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!dave