Cali-Texas and big florida fighting the feds over who gets to be the true Heir of Hitler while the northwest has a Maoist Insurgency lol 
Cali-Texas and big florida fighting the feds over who gets to be the true Heir of Hitler while the northwest has a Maoist Insurgency lol
The only upside to another American civil war is that its capacity for imperialism would be decimated. The entire capitalist world order would fall apart.
The real downside for the rest of the world is without a doubt a second US civil war will result in minimum a few hundred nuclear weapons being detonated. Civil wars are one of the most brutal and nasty forms of warfare where some of the worst crimes against humanity regularly are played out.
Due to the nature of the US nuclear triad all sides of a second US civil war will end up with hundreds of nuclear warheads. Washington state has the US Navy nuclear weapons for the Pacific and Virginia state has the nuclear weapons for the Atlantic. States in the middle of the nation like Montana and the Dakotas have the ICBM nuclear weapons. California and Nebraska have large numbers of US Air Force nuclear weapons with the rest of the Air Force nuclear weapons being kept at dozens of US Air Force bases around the globe. All of the officially inactive but still functional nuclear warheads, numbering in the thousands, are stored in underground vaults at the PanTex facility in Texas.
I was going to say that there could be some theoretical match up that would be unlikely to use nukes... But the only reasonable ones are:
And being a civil war where the other side has access nuclear weapons, it will result in nuclear retaliation. When a crime on the scale of nuclear weapon deployment is committed, it has to be responded to with nuclear retaliation against the parties responsible. It's the problem with weapons like nuclear warheads that can wipe entire cities off the map in an instance, in that instance a million plus innocent people die and create ten million plus grief filled loved ones demanding swift revenge.
So if the CHUDs nuke the liberal cities, it will result in a nuclear carpet bombing of key rural areas and most of the southern United States. If it is the feds using nukes to put down some kind of successful left-wing uprising, it will result in at minimum Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas being wiped off the map in retaliation with a hundred or so nuclear weapons.
For the rest of the world, assuming the targets are the former states, the downside is similar to the open air nuclear testing done in the Pacific. There have been over 500 atmospheric nuclear detonations already.
Not that it's good, but it is comparable and lesser than the global violence of capitalism.
no it isn't. they specifically did it in the pacific because the consequences are different. a nuclear detonation in a major city is kicking up way more dirt & starting fires. there's enough kindling in the US to cool the entire planet.
Conventional warfare and firebombing has the same risks. The only unique things about nukes is radiation/fallout and the speed with which you can destroy many large targets at once rather than requiring a larger mobilization.
wow the only thing different from conventional weapons are the characteristics that make them non-conventional 🙄. shockingly its actually very different when hundreds of kilometers of shit go up at once than over months and years
With how fires work it's really not different. One firebombing is the same as a several nukes in that regard, which is the (condescending) yet misguided point I'm responding to.
i'm not saying nuclear weapons make special magic fire, i'm telling you a big concentrated fire has different effects on the environment than smaller, spread out (geographically or chronologically) ones. because two processes work the same on a micro level does not mean you can conflate them. campfires over a long enough period might produce the same amount of smoke and particulates as a volcanic eruption, but only one of those is blocking out the sun
Firebombing is what makes a big concentrated fire. When Tokyo was firebombed it continued burning for days and had significant impacts on the weather. Same for Dresden.
Nukes actually don't make a big concentrated fire. The examples we have of them used in cities show that they make a large number of small fires. In [edit: Hiroshima], those fires then merged into much larger ones as they caught on through a very flammable city (mostly wooden structures). The fire risk is lesser than with firebombings, which intentionally use incendiary devices to ensure a given target lights on fire, usually in clusters to ensure the fires are past a critical point to be self-maintaining.
Nukes are not dangerous because they cause fires. They're dangerous because they leave behind radioactivity and because you can blow up a lot of things at once. This was and is considered a significant tactical advantage, as you can disable "the enemy" in one round, but if they also have nukes they'll try to do the same, and in the process you'll destroy so many population centers and possibly leave them uninhabitable for decades depending on the exact kind of bomb used.
you're being incredibly myopic, this isn't about comparing the damage to individual cities based on munitions. if we went to the trouble of hand-placing a firebomb in every structure of a city we could ensure 100% damage! that's the most dangerous form of warfare right there! MIRVs can target 10 cities, there's hundreds of these missiles. the smoke of 100 cities in the same day causes crop failures and temperature changes, the year (optimistic estimate) it would take to do that with a normal air campaign would limit those effects.
this is why they're different. if all 500 nuclear tests that have ever been done in 80 years all happened tomorrow, the effects on our climate would be substantially different from the same spaced out over 80 years.
I'm not being myopic, I'm just addressing items as they are presented to me and trying to do them one at a time. I'll try doing multiple at a time, maybe it will be more constructive.
Consider that firebombing causes far more fire than nukes and that forest fires regularly release far more soot. I'm suggesting that we do think of the scale here, and think about the logic at hand, given that nukes' primary impact is actually not starting fires or soot production. Both regular forest fires and volcanic activity produces comparable amounts of this already, and firebombing does way more of it. The number of nukes you're describing would likely produce less cooling materials than Krakatoa.
I haven't gotten to the topic of nuclear winter yet because I thought the other points might settle it first. But nuclear winter is, itself, very poorly evidenced and depends on speculation that flies in the face of what evidence we do have. It assumes that particulates in the stratosphere would hit some turning point where they stop acting like they usually do, with basically no mechanistic basis. It's just a speculative and very very simple linear model from the 80s that got turned into pop science and water cooler chat.
Nukes are still horrible, as are all the weapons we've mentioned, but nuclear winter is not anywhere near the thing to rationally fear from them.
oh so you just have a bizarre bone to pick with nuclear winter theory. here's some homework, why don't you use this overview of modern research and tell me how all these post-2000 studies are based on 80's line graph bunkum
"Deconstruct this paper" is not something I'm particularly interested in given the bad faith with which you've approached this conversation, including summarizing what I've said to you as simply, "a bizarre bone to pick with nuclear winter theory", something so obviously false that it's basically just lying. If you'd like to discuss this further some time a day or more from now in a comradely way I'd be happy to.
the belief that undergirds your arguments is the belief that nuclear weapons do not have climatic effects, you said lots of other things, but they only make sense in the context of that belief. clearly i got nowhere emphasizing scale because it doesn't matter how much smoke or fire ever happens if it cannot cause climate change. therefore you need to look at the modern research and refine your criticism of it or reconsider your assessment of the theory.
Please disengage
hmm, it depends who takes D.C. honestly as iirc that's the only place you can launch america's supply
surely a nuclear bomb is a nuclear bomb, i cant imagine that it's completely impossible to make an alternate way to detonate them. i mean, they can be built in the first place, it's gotta be much easier to detonate them than to build them
Yeah. Washington DC doesn't have some magic key that is the only thing that can launch or detonate US nuclear weapons. All the US executive branch has are codes that the nuclear weapons armed crews of the US military use to confirm orders are legitimate. All of those crews are able to launch or detonate their weapons. This is necessary because when the US military goes to a high defcon level, if the US nuclear command and the executive branch become unresponsive, doctrine calls for local commanders to start launching nuclear weapons without orders on the assumption a decapitation strike has been made against the US. Russia and the UK also have similar fail-deadly nuclear doctrines.
I kind of hope, perhaps naively, that because the US military generally does take self-preservation and safety somewhat seriously, especially in terms of the big stuff like nuclear, that the actual steps to targeting US territory and then actually launching the nuke on US territory, would have several "I'm not launching the first nuke on US citizens" types to stand in the way. There's even already a historical precedent for refusing to launch nukes on US citizens. I'd like to think, in the case of internal political instability, most launch sites and non-national guard bases will focus on keeping civilians away and telling dumbass governors to fuck off.
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This is a great point. Regardless of the outcome, a great deal if the global south would more than likely become a power vacuum and the "new" United States wouldn't have nearly the leverage it did before.
A generation after the end of the first Civil War the American Empire was sailing ships into Tokyo Bay to force trade concessions, 30 years after the Civil War the American Empire was invading the Philippines and Cuba.
If anything, American society rebuilding itself around militarism instead of treat acquisition, would result in a new dark age, where the American Empire emboldened by the defeat of its domestic enemies would seek to oppress everyone in its reach.
The way I see it the singular problem of nuclear weapons is what makes a Second American Civil War unworkable. It would immediately involve half of the world's armies cooperating with the US Army to secure those nukes.
As horrific is the first American Civil War was, the US was flexing its imperial muscle 20 years after hostilities ended.
A Civil war would only militarize American society, it might weaken the Empire in the short term but very soon the rest of the world would feel the consequences of an American society that had been re-oriented for war instead of treats.
The US recovered due to the war being short and there being a full Northern victory for reunification, with the north increasing its industrial capacity in the process. Industrial capacity was leveraged to create systems of unequal exchange in America's new colonies, particularly the Philippines and much of Latin America.
We live under neoliberal capitalism where industrial capacity is already developed in other countries and they wouldn't just wait for the US to reunite, if it ever did. They would construct their own systems at the expense of the US order. The empire would be headless and the entire rest of the planet would act accordingly. Sure, the former US would still make weapons, weapons to kill each other with while they blow through stockpiles and can no longer afford imported materials. But the US isn't going to reindustrialize in five years, it has already lost industrial advantage, it only has financial and military power that would be thrown into internal chaos.
The rest of the world would reel from the collapse of the US, trying to find footing with the loss of the current order. Financial systems, food systems, energy would all change overnight. They'd build their own alternatives out of necessity and that means building alternate power structures. Everything would get worse (for years) but the balance would change.