So, I've been thinking about the ending of "Revelations" and I have some comments about ... what they found at the end.


Since I've already seen some commentary in certain circles about the effects of nuclear war, I thought I'd toss out some more accurate information.

The two bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were quite small, relatively speaking, but you can't scale up their fallout effects quite so simply to modern weapons. The Hiroshima bomb, "Little Boy," was a uranium bomb of about 13 kilotons yield, while the Nagasaki bomb, "Fat Man," was a plutonium bomb with a yield of around 20 kilotons. They were fission bombs. Modern warheads are thermonuclear, or fusion, bombs, of much higher yields -- typical ones that are intended for cities are around 0.5 - 1 Megaton -- but they are inherently much "cleaner" radiation-wise, because almost all of the explosion comes from fusion, which doesn't produce as much radioactive debris. Thus, a 1 Megaton thermonuclear bomb does not produce 50 times as much fallout as the Nagasaki bomb, for example. Actually, the main radiation effect is due to gamma rays produced by the explosion itself. The fallout radiation decays rapidly, and while yes, it would be possible to detect the site of a city that had been nuked for a long time afterwards by radiation above the background level, there's a difference between being above the background level and being uninhabitable.

This is not to say that the site of a nuclear explosion would be a fun place to hang around or that a nuclear war would be a good idea. :-)

Nuclear winter has been overhyped, too. The original doomsday scenarios presented in the early 80s had some serious flaws, including rather unrealistic targetting information (to generate the maximum possible amount of debris and smoke carried into the atmosphere) and failing to include global atmospheric circulation. More realistic models demonstrate a clear effect, but it's highly unlikely that there would be years of freezing weather following an all-out nuclear exchange. (Hrm, though: There's a fix for global warming! Just nuke the planet!)

Finally, I'm not sure most people (and that may include the producers of BSG!) realize how hard it is to kill 6 billion people. If you kill 99% of them, you still have 60 million people! To get down to 60,000 -- roughly the number of survivors in BSG right after the attacks -- you have to kill 99.999% of them. (This is why, in the short story I wrote about the cast of BSG surviving an apocalypse, I gave up trying to figure out what caused the apocalypse: I couldn't come up with anything that would kill enough people for my purposes!)

The upshot of this is that an all-out nuclear exchange would kill an awful lot of people, but it wouldn't necessarily wipe out the human race, and the planet would still support life, although parts of it would have radioactivity levels above the background for quite a long time.