well i'm told that 7 were targeted at NZ during the cold war and another 15 at australia.

both have deepsea ports, uranium mines, military facilities etc. during the cold war we three (australia, NZ and the US ) were part of a mutual defence pact...ANZUS,now fallen through because we won't allow nuclear armed or powered vessels in our waters.

Also if I recall we are getting rid of some nuclear weapons. However getting rid of,in the military, means replacing with bigger and better ones.

i forgot we NZ guys on this forum. What i meant is that these days why would you hit new zealand, like chewie says there's no real alliance anymore. But in the cold war anyone that was more or less a US ally would receive nukes, but not now.

Originally Posted by WarMachine

You cannot wipe out the planet with nuclear weapons, there just aren't enough. You can do significant damage if you send enough in one area, but consider how large the surface of the planet is and how many nukes we have now, it wouldn't work out. Take the cold war scenario where if the soviets and nato were to nuke each other. All the beligerent countries involved would collapse as well as any country they supported. With all the UN security council members nuked, the dictators of the world are free to go crazy on each other. There would be a huge impact on the global economy with mass famine virtually everywhere. And all those volatile areas of the world like pakistan and the mid east would fall into anarchy. You see, the threat isn't so much the damage of the weapons which would kill over a half a billion at least if this occured, but the resulting vacuum of power that would leave much of the developing world in chaos. Why would anyone target a nuke at new zealand, the weapons were meant to be used on the other nuclear
powers, not nuclear free states.

Don't forget the Nuclear Winter theory. I'm not sure I buy it but some scientists are convinced that it would happen.

I doubt that it would last for more than a few months at most. In heavily hit areas you would get a lot of soot and debris in the air for awhile, but that would eventually clear up. A lot of nukes going off at once can do some damage to the atmosphere, but a sustained nuclear winter effect wouldn't be realistic either, i think we're just overestimating the destructiveness of these weapons on a global scale and should remember that they were meant to do damage to wide areas like cities, not change the atmosphere. We've had thousands of nuke tests above ground and that alone had a minimal effect. I'm not saying nuclear weapons aren't powerful, they are extremely powerful where they hit. It just doesn't make sense that they were to adversely effect the atmosphere beyond where they were targeted.

Thermonuclear testing and an all out nuclear war are two different things. Testing is done under controlled conditions whereas a total war has no predictable model.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/n1/nuclwint.asp

Yea, the areas that are covered with debris and smoke would notice a large drop in temeperature. But i don't think it would be so bad as to send the planet into a cooling trend. The skies would have to be filled with debris to have a global effect, i think something like nuclear winter would happen to areas that were hit with powerful weapons. But megaton bombs wouldn't use yields of more than 50 mtons in a war. I think 100 mtons has only been done during tests because of the size of the bomb would make it difficult to deploy. For it to have a global impact you would have to hit cities all over the world in places like africa, south america, and south asia and the other continents. With even the more profilific cold war nukes you'd be hard pressed to start a huge nuclear winter by deploying all your nukes everywhere, there is just too much sky and not enough bombs. But it would definitely affect the areas that were hit in varying severity depending on the direction of the wind and climate.

Personally I see no point in having a nuclear bomb, (poof) you explode one, fallout travels on teh upeer wind currents to teh next few countries or states in line, millions of people are killed.
( the following is a bit extreme but it makes a point)

(poof) you just exploded the biggest and best nuclear bomb in history,(1) the atmosphere rips off the planet, (2) the crust of the earth cracks, (3) all life as we know it ends.
(4) the aliens watching us think how stupid we were as a species.

The fallout from one nuclear warhead is minimal. People often assume that missiles have the same effect as Chernobyl. This is incorrect simply due to the amount of radioactive material involved. That's not to say that those in the immediate area won't recieve a harmful or lethal dose of radiation. Most often fatal within the month. But unless you're talking about a full scale nuclear war, radiation is limited. Even in the event of a nuclear war, 99% of all radioactive material would decay within the first month.

As for nuclear winter, in a full scale nuclear war it's going to happen. 7,000 missiles with anywhere from 3 to 12 nuclear warheads each. Putting that much dust in the air is going to cause something akin to a very large volcanic explosion. As happened in medieval Europe, you would have a year with no summer. Or possibly even multiple years.

Lastly, part of the reason for having so many nuclear missiles in the cold war was because of failure rates and to make sure that you had enough to retaliate in the event that the other side caught you with your pants down. For the Soviets the missile reliability was horrible, at one point the Soviets estimated that in the event of a nuclear war, no more then 25% of their weapons would deploy correctly.

OK I can aggree with that, but why did we have enough on ecah side to blow up the entire world?
Was it politics? or the fact that one guy had to have more toys than the other guy?