To put this into perspective, the most deadly American war — the US Civil War — killed 2% of Americans living at the time. Japanese deaths during WWII was around 4%, German around 8%, Soviet deaths around 14%.
Though the question of what the actual dead-to-living ratios would be is a trickier one than those stories make out. They usually imagine something like 90% mortality which is very high, even for full Cold War exchange scenarios. (Even 25% would be catastrophic.)
-
-
-
(And I'm *not* saying that those aren't high numbers. If 1 out of 10 people, chosen at random, you knew suddenly died, that would be more death than you'd know how to cope with — it would be the major tragedy of your life.)
-
(Consider how many Americans have personal connections to 9/11 victims or close survivors; ~3,000 out of 300 million Americans = 0.001%. In a society where people can know hundreds if not thousands of people, something that kills 1/1000th of the population at once is still huge.)
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
I suspect that past a certain point, the main danger to survivors comes not from the exchange or its direct effects, but from other survivors in competition for safe living space, food, water, other scarce resources in a broken-backed economy. Witness post-Katrina Superdome.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.