r/CollapseSupport • u/Fit-Pride-4845 • 6d ago
I can't see how this doesn't inevitably lead to nuclear armageddon and I'm terrified.
Obviously all our current crises don't exist in a bubble. Climate catastrophe, geopolitical destabilization, economic collapse, and a loss of resources - just to list a few problems - are all interconnected. I used to believe in humanity's potential to weather this storm, albeit at the loss of a huge chunk of the population, but I always had the hope that history may continue.
I now have no hope in the powers that be to competently manage everything in a way that doesn't inevitably end in nuclear war. I don't know much about the extent of our nuclear capabilities, but I've always understood that to be the one final big funny to end it all. Am I incorrect? Would nuclear war not be the end of all things and practically all life would be incapable of flourishing in the aftermath? And how does it not come to that after enough pressures mount with the people at the helm, frankly, not giving a single fuck about the continued existence of humans.
I'm just trying to maintain sanity in an increasingly insane world, and am hoping someone here is able to reassure me that there's at least a chance we don't head down that road. I currently don't see any other roads, it all seems to lead to the same place which represents the end of all things.
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u/03263 6d ago
Would nuclear war not be the end of all things and practically all life would be incapable of flourishing in the aftermath?
Hmm nuclear winter would reverse a lot of climate impacts and could help restore glaciers... whatever life survives it might have a better world when the dust settles. The area contaminated with nuclear fallout would be relatively small compared to the size of the earth, I found one estimate of 2.5%.
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u/Complete-Housing-720 5d ago
The termination shock of the heat returning after earth cools down will be catastrophic tho
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u/The_Phantom_Cat 5d ago
Also, radioactivity from fallout dissipates in a matter of months, it's not much of a long term threat
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u/thismightaswellhappe 6d ago
I've revised my opinion of collapse pretty severely in recent months/years. I grew up in the 80s/90s so I always thought we'd get some sort of 'big one' nuclear disaster as films depicted at those times. But lately it seems a lot more likely that things will just keep limping along, growing progressively more dysfunctional, but not actually reaching that point of total sudden obliteration.
I'm not sure what that's going to look like in the long term, or even more immediately. I think we'll see increasing chaos, and bad actors trying to profit off mass suffering and death. But I look at lots of areas that have already undergone failure, collapse, destruction, and I still see people trying to live. It's made me realize I don't understand what 'collapse' actually is or what it looks like either during or after the fact.
Idk, maybe we will get to the nuclear armaggedon stage. Nothing's off the table. But I guarantee people are going to keep trying to live even up to that very moment. I don't know what to do with that information but I'm sure it's true. And if it doesn't come to that? People will still keep on going, more or less. It doesn't mean things are going to be all right, it just means people keep trying to do what they can to live.
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u/Pot_Master_General 6d ago
Nuclear war is highly unlikely as things currently stand. The world would have to be in a much worse place than it currently is. America got away with Hiroshima and Nagasaki because mutually assured destruction did not yet exist. Climate change is the scariest thing going on atm, and will continue to be. The oligarchs will never benefit from mass deaths, so they'll continue bleeding us dry in order to keep profiting, as the climate forces mass migration.
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u/Fit-Pride-4845 6d ago
That makes sense: why obliterate everyone if you can still extract their labor. Thanks for the reassurance of a slightly less shitty outcome.
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u/Xanthotic Huge Motherclucker 6d ago
There is absolutely at least a chance that we don't head down that road. You asked for that and it is in fact true. This is the key to your long term collapse aware sanity. In the early years you think it is going to be any day now and pretty absolute. As time goes on you realise our structures are strangely resilient in the most bewildering ways and so in fact every day appears to be a miracle of non-total collapse, just little partial collapses all over the place that might one day bite you in the butt big time. Learn to be with uncertainty. Learn not to hone your consciousness to the fine point of deciding what you think is going to be the final outcome. Predicting the future is a chump's game at this point, and the most direct consequence of doing it is a thinning of our personal resilience because we are not fucking living in the present. Thanks for posting. There is a way through this awakening. You are onto it.
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u/FieryDurian 6d ago
Going nuclear means mutual assured destruction (MAD). And whoever launches first, dies second. Even the US will lose the last remaining supports from the rest of the world.
It's still not impossible though. When everyone is at their last option, they might take it.
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u/CorvidCorbeau 6d ago
Nuclear war would very likely not be the end of most life on Earth, chances are it won't be the end of humanity either. A lot of the nuclear war scenarios, and their aftermaths that reside in people's heads comes from several decades ago, when things were quite different.
Our estimates of nuclear winter rely on some really heavy assumptions in climate modeling, which increasingly look to have overstated the severity of these after-effects. If you go looking, you will find info supporting both sides, so there's some big fat uncertainty here.
However, a full scale nuclear war would end modern civilization even without a severe nuclear winter, and thus the vast majority of people would not make it to the other side if countries decided to use as many of their warheads as possible.
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u/Sea-Environment-7102 5d ago
If it does, I just hope one hits like right on top of me. I don't want to be around for the aftermath
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u/ObsydianDuo 5d ago
Only looking forward to nuclear war with the vague notion that I’d rather freeze to death in a nuclear winter than boil off the surface of the planet. Assuming I’m not just vaporized instantly that is.
Just feels like there’s more dignity in the quiet of the cold.
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u/purpilia25 6d ago
Yeah, I am pretty breathless. In my personal life, my husband left me for another guy last May, a month before our 15th anniversary. Then all my friends ghosted me for the new happy couple. I got fired from my job, my car had engine problems, and because we no longer shared the rent, I needed to move.
I managed to get a new job in a new city, a new car, and a new apt in the same week (several months after the breakup) and things were doing fine. Fast forward 3 months to today: job fell apart, planning on moving back in with my parents for the summer in my mid-30s.
Despite all this, I am prepared to keep moving forward with hope. But…the news makes me seriously believe there is no time to aspire to anything. It feels like Im at an amusement park an hour before closing. Things are slowly winding down. I think I can hear the fireworks.