Quote from: StormBringer;593394will put a radioactive cloud up that will block the sun for months, possibly years; aka "nuclear winter".

Nuclear winter was based on a mistaken computer model. The revised model showed a far less dramatic effect. Severe, with a significant impact, but not planet-killing. It was labeled "nuclear autumn".

The problem with the original model was that it treated dust particles as perfect, featureless spheres. In actuality, they're fractal structures. Being fractal, there's a lot of ridges, meaning they clump together in the atmosphere and the large clumps precipitate out faster than the perfect spheres.

Dust eliminated faster = less severe problems with reflecting sunlight = warmer temperatures, quicker.

I'm not saying that a full-scale nuclear war would be a small thing. It wouldn't. It would kill (probably) millions (or tens or hundreds of) directly, and severely disrupt climate patterns, which would have a great impact on agriculture (killing millions more).

Just pointing out that the nuclear winter model has been superseded by more accurate models. (As is not unusual in science.)

Quote from: S'mon;593279Chernobyl caused elevated levels of radiation, but away from the reactor core there's no evidence that it actually harmed anyone, certainly not anyone hundreds of miles away. Similar with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's no reason to think that a nuclear war would cause lethal radiation levels globally.

Maybe not in terms of acute or subacute radiation poisoning, but cancer incidences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were above the national, Japanese average well into the 1980s at least, and are still on the rise in the vicinity of Chernobyl and Pripyat; especially leukemia/lymphoma and thyroid cancer, some of the most notoriously radiation-associated cancers out there. I can dig up some links if you're interested.

Of course, these are very late-onset conditions (rise in cancer rates often isn't registered until 10-20 years after exposure). But I don't even want to imagine what happens to PA survivors who develop cancer in a world without hospitals.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;593420Nuclear winter was based on a mistaken computer model. The revised model showed a far less dramatic effect. Severe, with a significant impact, but not planet-killing. It was labeled "nuclear autumn".

The problem with the original model was that it treated dust particles as perfect, featureless spheres. In actuality, they're fractal structures. Being fractal, there's a lot of ridges, meaning they clump together in the atmosphere and the large clumps precipitate out faster than the perfect spheres.

Dust eliminated faster = less severe problems with reflecting sunlight = warmer temperatures, quicker.

I'm not saying that a full-scale nuclear war would be a small thing. It wouldn't. It would kill (probably) millions (or tens or hundreds of) directly, and severely disrupt climate patterns, which would have a great impact on agriculture (killing millions more).

Just pointing out that the nuclear winter model has been superseded by more accurate models. (As is not unusual in science.)

I'm not a physicist, nor am I a scientific ethicist but I have heard tell that Sagan et al deliberately overplayed the Nuclear Winter scenario to try and scare the hell out of anyone considering nuclear war as a viable war-fighting strategy.  Basically (so I've heard it go) the model they used was "Okay what if every nuclear weapon was used all at once on every continent evenly distributed in as close to a grid pattern as possible and still hit everything that could be called a city, and the megatonnages averaged out rather than given per-weapon oh and also a simplified weather model where the wind just blows in a big circle around the world as opposed to upper and lower air currents, the jetstream, etc."

Note: I am not advocating the notion that nuclear war would've been a-OK, and honestly any further discussion beyond the realm of the T2k game I'm really not interested.

Quote from: The Butcher;593434Maybe not in terms of acute or subacute radiation poisoning, but cancer incidences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were above the national, Japanese average well into the 1980s at least, and are still on the rise in the vicinity of Chernobyl and Pripyat; especially leukemia/lymphoma and thyroid cancer, some of the most notoriously radiation-associated cancers out there. I can dig up some links if you're interested.

Of course, these are very late-onset conditions (rise in cancer rates often isn't registered until 10-20 years after exposure). But I don't even want to imagine what happens to PA survivors who develop cancer in a world without hospitals.

Yes but Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale, Chelyabinsk, and Fukashima are very different events than nuclear explosions.

To briefly take this out of the hands of discussing the real-world ramifications of nuclear war, for an upcoming T2k game I wrote up a military command trying to keep things together in Central Florida.  Note it ignores a lot of Howling Wilderness, but does take a nod to some of it.  If anyone would care to read it...

Quote from: StormBringer;593394the concentrated blasts of hundreds of nuclear missiles will put a radioactive cloud up that will block the sun for months, possibly years; aka "nuclear winter".  

It's not the radiation that blocks the sun, it's the particulates kicked up by ground burst explosions (the particulates will include some radioactive matter from the bomb but this has no effect on blocking the sun). This is the same way a meteor strike works, where it's the impact that kicks up the particles. Note that air bursts don't have this effect, and nuclear missiles are normally designed to air-burst since this increases the blast radius. Hydrogen bomb air bursts also don't cause a lot of radioactive fallout, apparently.

I'm sceptical of 'nuclear winter' predictions; the amount of gunk kicked into the atmosphere by a big volcanic eruption seems a lot more than what a nuclear war would produce, given that most explosions would be air bursts.
Volcanic eruptions do affect the weather though, and have caused significant cooling, so it's certainly theoretically possible.

Quote from: GameDaddy;593406I think it would go way higher than that in the years following...

Consider the farms. If the fuel stops flowing, the farms stop producing. Absolutely no way to get even close to the same yields as in the pre-war years farming manually. Once the food runs out (1-2 years based on available reserves) real food shortages begin. The food will run out first in the larger cities that were not struck, and this will create an additional problem as the folks will move out of the cities and beginning forcibly stripping the farmland and wilderness around the cities, accelerating the food shortages.

I would guesstimate 70-80% fatalities, perhaps even up to 90+%.

I would expect:
1) A nation under martial law, the exact opposite of the 'Mad Max' post-apocalypse anarchy. Surviving urban areas in particular would be under tight control. And people in the aftermath of disaster tend to be relatively docile and obedient to authority.
2) Severe rationing of food & fuel, both of which the US can produce a lot of, especially food. Roads are repaired.
3) People are not permitted to move around. Not much forcible stripping of farmland & wilderness occurs. As well as the military stopping it, rural areas in the US tend to have well-armed populations, much better armed than city dwellers.
4) People go hungry, some die, but most don't die.

An all out nuclear war would have been an incredible disaster, the worst catastrophe in history. It's possible that plague, cold weather, incompetence etc could cause massive postwar deaths. But 95% civilian fatalities is the kind of figure I might expect to see in areas of heavy ground fighting on the West German plain, not in the USA. The UK might lose 60-75% - much heavier bombardment into a smaller area, less food, and almost no on-shore oil production. The US and France probably more like 30-40%, with the majority being direct fatalities in urban areas.

Quote from: S'mon;593460An all out nuclear war would have been an incredible disaster, the worst catastrophe in history. It's possible that plague, cold weather, incompetence etc could cause massive postwar deaths. But 95% civilian fatalities is the kind of figure I might expect to see in areas of heavy ground fighting on the West German plain, not in the USA. The UK might lose 60-75% - much heavier bombardment into a smaller area, less food, and almost no on-shore oil production. The US and France probably more like 30-40%, with the majority being direct fatalities in urban areas.

As I recall, the timeline states that the nuclear strikes occur after a fairly intense ground war.  The casualties they cite could be in addition to those losses.  95% is still pretty damn high, though; there would only be 15mil Americans left.  So, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Quote from: The Butcher;593434Maybe not in terms of acute or subacute radiation poisoning, but cancer incidences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were above the national, Japanese average well into the 1980s at least, and are still on the rise in the vicinity of Chernobyl and Pripyat; especially leukemia/lymphoma and thyroid cancer, some of the most notoriously radiation-associated cancers out there. I can dig up some links if you're interested.

Of course, these are very late-onset conditions (rise in cancer rates often isn't registered until 10-20 years after exposure). But I don't even want to imagine what happens to PA survivors who develop cancer in a world without hospitals.

There's more. In ancient Egypt, cancer was virtually unheard of as a cause of death, that was until one of the Pharoahs in the Middle Kingdoms was diagnosed with it, and shortly thereafter died. After that, the Egyptians started keeping records on it. They recorded a very slow rise in cancer cases and attributed it to contamination in the environment, i.e. pollutants from oils, smoke, and foundries.

Worldwide, cancer rates have been historically extremely low up until the about the Christian era. Then they started rising. Part of this was due to the fact there were more scientists and doctors around objectively looking for causes of death instead of attributing it to "Evil Spirits" or "The Gods", or whatever, but part of it was an actual increase in cancer cases.

We have seen a tremendous spike in cancer cases, starting around 18th century, with more cases per capita cropping up every year. The last hundred years has been a disaster, approaching almost epidemic proportions, and the last fifty (the nuclear age) has seen an increase more than in all of pre-recorded history. Notice the newest spike in the mortality rate charts of the second reference after the dawn of the Nuclear age.

The amount of free-floating radiation in small particles is a long tail, reaching out and biting us with every airborne and surface leak, or test detonation. I think other chemicals and pollutants from the Industrialized modern era are having an increased impact as well.

Reference:

How the Ancient World Dealt with Cancer
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2010/10/14/how-the-ancient-world-dealt-with-cancer/

Historic Growth Rates of Cancer
http://www.jonbarron.org/alternative-cancer/historic-growth-rates-of-cancer

CDC's paper on cancer from 1900 until now... You have 3x more chances of getting cancer than your Great Grandfather did. Cancer went from being 9th on the leading cause of death charts to 2nd.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/lead1900_98.pdf

Unearthing Prehistoric Tumors, Debate
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28cancer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Quote from: S'mon;593460I would expect:
1) A nation under martial law...

Wouldn't work. Especially here in America.

During WWII in the U.S. and U.K. they instituted gasoline rationing. Didn't work then either, while they were under "martial law". The poor people and dweebs were left without gasoline, and everyone else scammed the system. This also gave the dying organized crime families (In decline since the end of prohibition in 1927)  immense and broad new power, and in fact rejuvenated them, giving them new life.

It wasn't an open revolt, but the people that got to use the gasoline were the ones that ignored the rationing limits, and gas was still being shipped all over America.

In 2005, a Hurricane disabled just one of the Major refineries here in the U.S. combined with the disaster, gas prices across the country almost doubled. Overnight it seemed, certainly took less than a week.

Imagine if there was only one major refinery left. You honestly don't believe that only the military is targeted in an all-out war do you?

Quote from: GameDaddy;593510We have seen a tremendous spike in cancer cases, starting around 18th century, with more cases per capita cropping up every year. The last hundred years has been a disaster, approaching almost epidemic proportions, and the last fifty (the nuclear age) has seen an increase more than in all of pre-recorded history. Notice the newest spike in the mortality rate charts of the second reference after the dawn of the Nuclear age.

Thanks for the links!

When seeing the historical rise in cancer cases, though, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, our increased and increasing ability to diagnose cancer. Second, our increased and increasing longevity -- a classic autopsy study found asymptomatic prostate cancer in 80% of men over 90 who died of something else. But yes, it's fairly well established that at least a few elements of the modern Western lifestyle (alcohol, tobacco, diet and sedentarism) have a lot to do with the increasing prevalence of cancer.

Environmental factors are very tricky to track down and quantify, and the general popular and political concern is probably, strictly speaking, not compatible with the clinical data (or lack thereof), though usually well supported by in vitro studies.

Aaand that's enough of a threadjack for the day. Feel free to continue via PM, unless you feel we can steer this back into gaming territory.

Quote from: The Butcher;593545Thanks for the links!

When seeing the historical rise in cancer cases, though, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, our increased and increasing ability to diagnose cancer. Second, our increased and increasing longevity -- a classic autopsy study found asymptomatic prostate cancer in 80% of men over 90 who died of something else. But yes, it's fairly well established that at least a few elements of the modern Western lifestyle (alcohol, tobacco, diet and sedentarism) have a lot to do with the increasing prevalence of cancer.

Environmental factors are very tricky to track down and quantify, and the general popular and political concern is probably, strictly speaking, not compatible with the clinical data (or lack thereof), though usually well supported by in vitro studies.

Aaand that's enough of a threadjack for the day. Feel free to continue via PM, unless you feel we can steer this back into gaming territory.

I'm a bit unhappy my post got jacked by the vBulletin software. This never happens on G+ btw. Now again...

In short, life expectancy rates do account to a large degree for the low prevalence of cancer in Egyptian (42) and Roman times when the average life expectancy was about 35 years. What about earlier though, when life expectancy was much longer, spanning more than a century? Meaning really that the cancer rate has increased even more significantly in modern times when you factor all that in, and that's not reflected in any of the data I looked at.

We have better food than ever before. We also have more stuff being sold as food, that was never historically considered food.

Not all alcohol increases cancer risks. Wine in moderation, actually reduces it.

Now with the Octogenarians, Yes they live longer. Yes they have more opportunities to acquire cancer.

It's nowhere close to the increased trend of getting cancer however. Cancer in the last 60 years has doubled per capita. That means across the entire range of the population, not just the range of the population that have increased their average lifespan from 63 to 66 or so. (here in the US, That's increased to 77)... Here in the U.S. If you live to 65, you have a much improved probability of living another 18-20 years or so... Not so for the rest of the World.

So... a 77/63 increase (19%) in mortality age since 1960 and a 100% increase (since 1950 or so) in your odds of getting cancer. Yeah... What accounts for that?

Life Expectancy Data from the World Bank
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&iconSize=0.5&uniSize=0.035#!ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&idim=country:CHN:IND:GAB:USA:JPN:RUS:AFG:ZAF:ISR:BRA&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false

 
And getting back on track, in Twilight:2000 The post apocalypse will see a much lowered life expectancy rate after wars and the radiation, and famine and all, much on par with the data I have already snapshotted for you on the just on the increases of cancer during the nuclear age, I'd expect there to be enough of a spike to include some mechanics on all the new environmental hazards that would pop up as a result, ala Gamma World.

On every level this game should appall me. However when it first came out the session I played in was one of the most engaging sessions I've ever played. Can't remember the details though, don't know if I'd feel the same now though.

Its not my style of Post-apocalypse.

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