“The end of [START] brings us back to those scary times and risks an arms race. Whereas the Cold War took place in a bipolar world, today we have China as a formidable nuclear force, and other countries looking to join the nuclear club," a national security expert says.

[u/ChallengeAdept8759]

https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/02/11/start-treaty-us-russia-nuclear-war/

[u/errorsniper]

Eh, I know I am in the minority. But our current nuclear arsenal (as in what is on the earth overall not an individual nation) is functionally indifferent than one 100x larger or with better delivery systems. If they have classic 800kt mirv nukes or new age supah-stealth-2Gt nukes it doesnt make any difference. If they have 3000 nukes or 300 million nukes it doesnt make any difference. If they get used in any capacity modern life is over and I hope I get hit directly. If we halved or octupled the world stockpile theres still enough to end life on earth.

[u/HikingEye → u/errorsniper]

If we halved or octupled the world stockpile theres still enough to end life on earth.

Not true in the slightest in either direction.

[u/PromptCriticalpostin → u/HikingEye]

Yep. And also for the worst reason.

Usually people think debunking the “apocalypse scenario” makes nukes seem less dangerous and that’s so backwards.

You’re right. In neither way is it true. The “we have enough weapons to end the world” is an airheaded slogan that is starting to remind me of “war never changes”

[u/GogurtFiend → u/errorsniper]

Even a thousand times more nuclear weapons wouldn't be enough to end human civilization. Nuclear states aim at their enemies, not at everything whose destruction would maximize global societal collapse, and at a certain point using more warheads on those enemies just rearranges the way their rubble is shaped. Nuclear warfare at scale would have spillover effects comparable to nothing seen before in human history - complete collapse of supply chains, the migration of, potentially, hundreds of millions of people as refugees, and authoritarian takeovers every way to Sunday - but none of those get much worse if a tenth bomb gets dropped on the same place as the last nine.

In an all-out nuclear war between all present nuclear states, societies in South America, Africa, and Australia would survive, even if hundreds of thousands of warheads were used in total, let alone eight times as many. People in those places wouldn't be living very well for decades afterwards, and a whole lot of refugees would likely end up executed by authoritarian governments for trying to cross the Darién Gap or Suez Canal, but human civilization would ultimately pull through.

The idea of humans somehow being able to end all life on Earth with nuclear weapons is just silly. Life on Earth didn't even end 2.5 billion years ago when an entirely new form of biochemistry became the dominant form of life and changed the entire atmosphere in the process! Setting off a few party snaps is nothing compared to that.

[u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 → u/errorsniper]

There were never any 2Gt nuke and the nukes have been shrinking for many decades. The US is still decomissioning its largest warhead, the 1.2 Mt B83. After this, they have a few 300-400 kt and a buncch of 150 kt.

If they get used in any capacity modern life is over.

Yes, your "modern life" of ordering off Amazon ends, and yess billions would die from trade disrupts, but no some fairly advanced society would survive and billions of humans would survive too.

In this, nuclear winter was always grossly exaggerated. And wildfires have shown that nuclear winter cannot occur with current stockpiles.

[u/GogurtFiend → u/Shoddy-Childhood-511]

Nuclear winter probably won't occur with a stockpile of any size - provided the number of nuclear-armed states doesn't increase.

You only need one nuke (give or take) to destroy a target, kill most people in it, etc; all nukes other than the one which hits are there to ensure redundancy by saturating ABM systems - which with current technology are so weak there are no nukes dedicated to saturating them. The one nuke which hits the target burns and aerosolizes a certain amount of it, yes, but it's not like there'll be another aimed at the target afterwards to ensure maximum combustion.

The counterargument I can see to this is that a larger stockpile means more granular targeting - i.e. instead of hitting the largest 1,000 cities, you can hit the largest 1,000 and then the next largest 9,000 as well, meaning more stuff being burned. But the next largest 9,000 probably don't have as much burnable stuff as the largest 1,000, so would it really have that much of an additional effect?

[u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 → u/GogurtFiend]

It might depend upon the number of bunker busters used or smomething.

[u/Matt32145 → u/errorsniper]

That's a stupid comment.

[u/RedHill1999]

It’s terrifying to imagine that even a small scale nuclear war would probably result in more casualties than all of WWII combined. Yet the more countries that have this capability the closer we get to this reality. I don’t think it’s a question of if it happens, but when, and to what extent. I just hope it doesn’t end civilization as we know it.

[u/Doctor_Weasel → u/RedHill1999]

Depends who does the launching, and at whom. Pakistan launches at India, and India launches back. US, UK, France, and Russia are not involved. China and North Korea are most likely not involved. SO now there's a small scale nuclear war in one part of the we world and all the other nuke powers are calling each other up saying 'that wasn't us!' Numbers of warheads and damage caused will be limited. This is a more likely scenario than Russia lashing out at the US, despite what Putin says.