Are there any books or short stories/novellas about how a fullscale nuclear war would be conducted and play out, in the near future, in an accurately speculative way? Any sort of situation, I don't care...Iran v. Israel, China v. US over Taiwan, rogue actors with stolen nukes from Russia, India v. Pakistan, etc.I'm taking this International Security class at college, and I think it would be really fascinating to contemplate. We all know it would be bad, sure, but how bad, for whom, and within what ranges?
I think Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy was about something like that but I'm not sure; haven't read it.
Nobody actually uses nukes in Red Storm Rising, which is about a conventional war between the Soviet Union and NATO in the 1980s; the possibility of using them is brought up near the end, but it never happens.Novels about a full-blown nuclear war (especially one set after the 20th century) are hard to find, simply because the odds of survivability are so low; you'd be building up your characters just to kill them all off. Personally, I always liked WarGames, although no nukes are actually launched in that one either.If you want the real nitty-gritty stuff, I'd recommend watching the film "The Day After", which deals with a Soviet/US nuclear war and the immediate aftermath, or the novel "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute; the latter, however, was written in 1957, and so a lot of geopolitical information will be out of date.
>>4111>Nobody actually uses nukes in Red Storm Rising, which is about a conventional war between the Soviet Union and NATO in the 1980s; the possibility of using them is brought up near the end, but it never happens. And still, that's just an outdated "superpower vs. superpower" nuclear war. What about the more modern "superpower vs. rogue state," "superpower vs. non-state actor," or "newly developing state vs. newly developing state" (like India and Pakistan) scenarios?
>>4112That's kinda the thing. The Cold War's over now. The "Threat" of nuclear annihilation no longer really stands, as it's been p much recognized as a "no win" scenario. Sure one of these small-time chumps could get their hands on a stockpile and cause a very shitty day for everyone, but the recommended retaliation for a nuclear attack is not another nuclear attack.
What about nuclear warfare in space?(Stross's "Singularity Sky" has an interesting treatment of this topic, with nuclear weapons as the primary armaments for spaceship-to-spaceship engagements)
>>4118idk. The main thing about nukes aside from the wonderfully large hole they leave is the fallout after the fact. The fallout is basically radiation, which is why a full blown nuke attack is a bad idea; whatever the nukes don't get, if there were enough detonations, the radiation will get the rest.In a vacuum, I couldn't say how it would go, but I would imagine it would be no less of a general biohazard.
>>4118>What about nuclear warfare in space?I haven't read the book you mentioned, but I would guess that the only efficient use of nuclear weapons in space would be the generation of EM bursts.
>in an accurately speculative way>rogue actors with stolen nukes from Russia