Real World Empire Battle Royale

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

The title says it all but we're gonna need to set the conditions:
All empires start at their historical peak in size and population, using the world of today as their battlefield (Overlapping territories unilaterally go to the smaller empire/smallest empires between the overlapping parties so the biggest empires do not automatically and outright stomp the smallest empires).
All empires are not bound by any codes of conduct, and can choose to do whatever they want to their fellow empires.
There is only one win condition: All other empires must surrender or be fully defeated and conquered by the winning empire.
And when I say all empires I mean ALL REAL WORLD HISTORICAL empires (at least as listed in Wikipedia)

List of largest empires - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

bump

 

[H3110l12345I20]

The title says it all but we're gonna need to set the conditions:
All empires start at their historical peak in size and population, using the world of today as their battlefield (Overlapping territories unilaterally go to the smaller empire/smallest empires between the overlapping parties so the biggest empires do not automatically and outright stomp the smallest empires).
All empires are not bound by any codes of conduct, and can choose to do whatever they want to their fellow empires.
There is only one win condition: All other empires must surrender or be fully defeated and conquered by the winning empire.
And when I say all empires I mean ALL REAL WORLD HISTORICAL empires (at least as listed in Wikipedia)

List of largest empires - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I have experience and a bit of knowledge in this area.

There are major factors to winning a war, but they primarily revolve around what the political entity has at it's disposal and how much support it has to a war.

Now, this is practically an SBA-like arena for all empires. The big elephant in the room is nukes, even though they can mess up a city (something no nation is prepared for), nuclear holocaust won't really kill everyone. The big players (United States, Britain, USSR, etc) will pick on other big players and the weak with nukes. But the moderately strong and technologically advanced players that are lucky enough to survive the chaos will be the ones to win.

Now, since your conditions greatly change their borders. I can't really tell who's going to really win this battle royale. But this is my stance on how this will play out.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

I have experience and a bit of knowledge in this area.

There are major factors to winning a war, but they primarily revolve around what the political entity has at it's disposal and how much support it has to a war.

Now, this is practically an SBA-like arena for all empires. The big elephant in the room is nukes, even though they can mess up a city (something no nation is prepared for), nuclear holocaust won't really kill everyone. The big players (United States, Britain, USSR, etc) will pick on other big players and the weak with nukes. But the moderately strong and technologically advanced players that are lucky enough to survive the chaos will be the ones to win.

Now, since your conditions greatly change their borders. I can't really tell who's going to really win this battle royale. But this is my stance on how this will play out.

That is true, but I'm wondering whether current superpowers count as modern day empires, I'm mostly thinking of historical monarchic empires, though I guess if we want to expand the definition and make it empires/regimes + superpowers (again during the peak of their expansion/power, in order from oldest to youngest in historical terms):

List of totalitarian regimes - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Superpower - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Superpower - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Potential superpower - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... though if we DO include them then Russia and USA by virtue of their EXTREMELY large nuclear arsenals (despite nuclear treaties) would most likely utterly stomp if they prevent other nuclear states from sending retaliatory strikes and ensuring MAD (mutually assured destruction) by sending out a significant enough amount of weapons to prevent any form of fully effective counter (given that under the rules I put of overlapping territories going to the smaller/smallest empire between the overlapping parties, Britain, Mongol and other empires would have to cede land to USA and Russia since both of the latter were colonised by the first two former, and that would essentially mean that USA still retains all of its land from post-Revolutionary and post-Civil Wars, though I'm not sure about Russia since I'd assume for them they'd also only have a small portion of land relative to their current modern size given to the Ottoman Empire or other smaller empires that occupied their land beforehand, and thus Russia and USA would retain most of their arsenal of weapons as well, which, if using their modern superpower version, would far surpass the weapons of any other older historical empire or regime).

 

[H3110l12345I20]

That is true, but I'm wondering whether current superpowers count as modern day empires, I'm mostly thinking of historical monarchic empires, though I guess if we want to expand the definition and make it empires/regimes + superpowers (again during the peak of their expansion/power, in order from oldest to youngest in historical terms):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_totalitarian_regimes

Superpower - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Superpower - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Potential superpower - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... though if we DO include them then Russia and USA by virtue of their EXTREMELY large nuclear arsenals (despite nuclear treaties) would most likely utterly stomp if they prevent other nuclear states from sending retaliatory strikes and ensuring MAD (mutually assured destruction) by sending out a significant enough amount of weapons to prevent any form of fully effective counter (given that under the rules I put of overlapping territories going to the smaller/smallest empire between the overlapping parties, Britain, Mongol and other empires would have to cede land to USA and Russia since both of the latter were colonised by the first two former, and that would essentially mean that USA still retains all of its land from post-Revolutionary and post-Civil Wars, though I'm not sure about Russia since I'd assume for them they'd also only have a small portion of land relative to their current modern size given to the Ottoman Empire or other smaller empires that occupied their land beforehand, and thus Russia and USA would retain most of their arsenal of weapons as well, which, if using their modern superpower version, would far surpass the weapons of any other older historical empire or regime).

"Empire, major political unit in which the metropolis, or single sovereign authority, exercises control over territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples through formal annexations or various forms of informal domination."

• Our current world superpowers are technically empires. So practically most of the focus here is going to be on the modern empires at their peak first since they'll be more technologically advanced and have lots of support from their population.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

"Empire, major political unit in which the metropolis, or single sovereign authority, exercises control over territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples through formal annexations or various forms of informal domination."

• Our current world superpowers are technically empires. So practically most of the focus here is going to be on the modern empires at their peak first since they'll be more technologically advanced and have lots of support from their population.

Yeah in that case it's primarily going to be then basically all the modern empires practically decimating the other historical empires and then having a final showdown/standoff against each other OR choosing to settle for uneasy peace between them but since the winning condition is to be last empire standing the latter is not happening (pretty much WW2 and Cold War all over again but on a larger scale and the Cold War ended up blowing up)

List of totalitarian regimes - Wikipedia​

en.wikipedia.org

That said...terrorist groups and organised crime syndicates do essentially have underground/black market/dark web "empires" (particularly included in regimes regarding terrorists)... Should we include them if they are essentially either undermining the modern empires or making shady deals in the background with the modern empires to keep themselves alive longer (drug trade, arms trade, money trade, etc)?
Either way though it'll still eventually come down to Russia and US (largest nuclear arsenals) and India and China (largest populations and fastest growing economies with their own, admittedly smaller, nuclear arsenals), with the rest of the P5 and G4 falling behind due to being smaller and having less WMDs, but I think in this case, Russia might take it if everyone were to use the entirety of their current nuclear arsenal:

List of countries by level of military equipment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Of course, at that point there's gonna be a lot of burying and rebuilding to do, if humanity and indeed life and the planet themselves are not too far gone to salvage.)

 

[H3110l12345I20]

That said...terrorist groups and organised crime syndicates do essentially have underground/black market/dark web "empires" (particularly included in regimes regarding terrorists)... Should we include them if they are essentially either undermining the modern empires or making shady deals in the background with the modern empires to keep themselves alive longer (drug trade, arms trade, money trade, etc)?

No. They're not empires.

Either way though it'll still eventually come down to Russia and US (largest nuclear arsenals) and India and China (largest populations and fastest growing economies with their own, admittedly smaller, nuclear arsenals), with the rest of the P5 and G4 falling behind due to being smaller and having less WMDs, but I think in this case, Russia might take it if everyone were to use the entirety of their current nuclear arsenal:

List of countries by level of military equipment - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Of course, at that point there's gonna be a lot of burying and rebuilding to do, if humanity and indeed life and the planet themselves are not too far gone to salvage.)

Wouldn't the empires self-collapse though or have their power significantly reduced even if they survive? How would they even administer their territories with all the destroyed infastructure. And how would Russia get their equipment over it's vast territory?

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

No. They're not empires.

Wouldn't the empires self-collapse though or have their power significantly reduced even if they survive? How would they even administer their territories with all the destroyed infastructure. And how would Russia get their equipment over it's vast territory?

Just in advance, I feel like adding a bit more dramatic emphasis and "flair", you'll see with the font and message styling choices hehehe (I'm gonna have fun with the text style essentially and cut loose a bit)
(And alright, thanks for clarifying that terrorist groups or criminal organisations are not empires or even pseudo-empires, but I guess we can both agree that either way the ultimate outcome might not change.)

1: I never said they had to actually continue to last after the battle royale ended.... only that they had to be the last one standing at the end of it.
(even if it's a Pyrrhic victory, even if the last empire only lasts for a second, as long as they can manage to hold themselves together just long enough to outlast all the rest, they win.)

(I will digress here a bit: I hate empires in terms of morality anyway despite ironically admiring their levels of power and military advancement and progress, and it's personal especially cause the British Empire in particular screwed India and Pakistan and Bangladesh over during its rule (and I've had relatives and family friends who lived through that period, quite a few of whom have only passed away from 2017-2023, and one particularly strong example is that my maternal great grandmother had to flee from what is now Bangladesh to what is now Kolkata in West Bengal in India) and let Singapore down by failing to defend it against the Japanese despite the British claiming Singapore to be as impregnable as Gibraltar, in addition to practically razing Africa (which is less personal but still so since Africa is the origin of Homo sapiens) in terms of resources and people through the slave trade (also done to Oceania's indigenous people in addition to using Australia as a land of prisoners as as seen in the last link of the bracketed sentence after this) (which is ironic because the British were one of the biggest participants in the Atlantic slave trade, and they then tried to shut it down, but they still ended up replacing slavery with indentured labour which is not much better at all), as you have seen with the anthropogenic disasters under:

List of anthropogenic disasters by death toll - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... so yeah)

2: ICBMs. (Though yes they can be shot down)

3: Given the sheer quantity of nuclear weapons and the potential resources Russia has especially due to being the largest country in modern history thus having plenty of space to build nuclear weapons and silos or transport platforms this would make it a bit easier for Russia, with only US, India and China being comparable in terms of manpower, economy and land (and out of the 3, US also being the only comparable power in terms of nuclear arsenal), though this would be assuming Russia and all the other empires had time to plan or immediately kickstarted their war engines as soon as the battle royale started, and even then it's hard to consider how fast or slow the construction, transport and deployment of all of their nuclear weapons would be (particularly since the ICBM can be either silo-based or SLBM-based (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) so it depends on both proximity and range, but Russia's main advantage is that they have Sarmat (longest range ICBM) and a few other "super-weapons" (though readiness, effectiveness and morality of usage is debatable)

On a counterpoint though, if US was also similarly unscrupulous, as would be the case with the condition stating no code of honour/conduct which also means no Geneva, no Hague, no START, no SALT, nor any other limiting treatises or conventions.....

Well... I'll give you the articles, maybe you can corroborate and cross-refer with any other trustworthy sources since obviously there might be biased sources here and there due to propaganda.

On the Russian Hammer-And-Sickle-Wielding Bear's side:

Russian super weapons - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Particularly:

RS-28 Sarmat - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Avangard (hypersonic glide vehicle) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

9M730 Burevestnik - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Longest range ICBM, Sarmat, speed not stated (but possibly re-entry Mach 25+ speeds considering the ballistic trajectory) capable of flying 18,000km (or 35,000km if doing Fractional Orbital Bombardment) carrying 10-15 750kt (7500-11250kt = 7.5-11.25MT) warheads, 15-16 lighter (possibly 350kt each according to the articles cited, but unsure) MIRV warheads (5250-5600kt = 5.25-5.6MT), or 3 hypersonic gliding MIRVs (6MT) or any combination of these 3 layouts as well as countermeasures against anti-ballistic missiles, Avangard, being the name of the MIRVs themselves which fly at Mach 20-27 and have 2 MT+ warheads + 21 t of TNT energy through kinetic energy alone, as well as Burevestnik, a nuclear-fission-powered AND nuclear-armed cruise missile.... you'll see why this is insane later.)
They also have this:

R-29RMU2 Layner - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Longest range SLBM, equal in range to UK's and US's Trident at 11,000km (could be higher at 12,000km cause the main page about ICBMs and SLBMs states that, carrying at most 4x500kt (2000kt = 2MT) or 12x100kt (1200kt = 1.2MT) nuclear warheads, speed unstated in Wikipedia, perhaps in other sources)
And of course in their past:

Tsar Bomba - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(The most powerful nuke ever designed and built (key here being actually designed and built, you'll understand what I mean later), originally made to be 100MT but eventually limited to 50MT to allow the bomber plane to fly to safety with a 50% chance of making it out intact as well as limit long term radioactive fallout.)

On the American Starry-Eyed and Striped-Winged Eagle's side:

LGM-25C Titan II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

B53 nuclear bomb - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Supersonic Low Altitude Missile - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(US's own longest range ICBM at 16,000 km with a single 9MT warhead, the W-53, as well as the SLAM, their own nuclear-powered-ramjet and nuclear-armed cruise missile that actually came BEFORE Burevestnik and was cancelled, cause unlike Russia they thought this was too insane since if these sorts of missiles malfunctioned, there'd be radiation all over the place, since, well, THEY'RE LITERALLY SPEWING NUCLEAR-FISSION-PRODUCED RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT AS EXHAUST FROM THE RAMJET ENGINE)

As for US's submarines (cause they still have the biggest navy since the British Empire welp):

UGM-133 Trident II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(as mentioned, shared between UK and US, also more or less longest range SLBM on par with or beyond the R-29RMU2 Layner at 12,000km or more with a speed of Mach 24 (since it's also acting similar to an ICBM) and 1–8x475kt Mk-5 RV/W88 (3800kt = 3.8MT) or 1–12x100kt Mk-4 RV/W76-0 (1200kt = 1.2MT) or 1–14x90kt Mk-4A RV/W-76-1 (1260kt = 1.26MT) or single or multiple 5-7kt each W76-2)

And in their past:

Castle Bravo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(US's own largest nuke at 15 MT, which unfortunately for them is 3 times (and an additional 5MT) less than the Tsar Bomba... but while they stopped with the designing and building here, Edward Teller, the guy who was half of the reason the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design exists, was not done.)

So here's the real irony: While the US thought the SLAM was too insane (then again, maybe Teller may not have objected, who the heck knows),
US scientists, particularly Teller, were planning to surpass the Tsar Bomba even before Tsar Bomba was detonated.

By how much?

Nuclear weapon design - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"During the mid-1950s through early 1960s, scientists working in the weapons laboratories of the United States investigated weapons concepts as large as 1,000 megatons, and Edward Teller reported work on a 10,000 megaton weapon code-named SUNDIAL at a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission."

For the record, Tsar Bomba was originally meant to be 100MT. Krakatoa's eruption in 1883 was 200MT. (And yes, both are included already, in the Real World Page. < Two links in this bracketed portion in the first sentence, separated by the second comma.) SUNDIAL was planned to be 10,000MT, aka 10 GT (gigatonnes), 100 times stronger than Tsar Bomba's original maximum yield and 50 times stronger than Krakatoa.

Let me put this into another perspective based on the effects (gonna try to summarise and restructure the quotations, just bear with me cause the quotations are damn long):

Tsar Bomba:
"The 8-kilometre-wide (5.0 mi) fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane (10.5 km)...

When detonation occurred, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km (71 mi)... The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely.

Flare (aka the fireball ^) was visible at a distance of more than 1,000 km (620 mi). It was observed in Norway, Greenland and Alaska.
Explosion's mushroom cloud rose to a height of 67 km (42 mi)... The cloud was observed 800 km (500 mi) from the explosion site.
The blast wave circled the globe three times...

A seismic wave in the Earth's crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times.

The atmospheric pressure wave resulting from the explosion was recorded three times in New Zealand... with amplitudes of 0.6 mbar (0.60 hPa), 0.4 mbar (0.40 hPa), and 0.2 mbar (0.20 hPa). Respectively, the average wave speed is estimated at 303 m/s (990 ft/s), or 9.9 degrees of the great circle per hour.

Glass shattered in windows 780 km (480 mi) from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.

Odd exception: The sound wave generated by the explosion reached Dikson Island, but there are no reports of destruction or damage to structures even in the urban-type settlement of Amderma, which is much closer (280 km (170 mi)) to the landfall. (could be due to focusing and narrowing of the pressure wave perhaps)

Ionization of the atmosphere caused interference to radio communications even hundreds of kilometers from the test site for about 40 minutes.

Another odd exception: Radioactive contamination of the experimental field with a radius of 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 mi) in the hypocenter area was no more than 1 milliroentgen / hour. The testers appeared at the explosion site 2 hours later; radioactive contamination posed practically no danger to the test participants. (because they replaced the uranium tamper for the original 100MT design with the lead tamper for the tested 50MT design)

In the Norwegian border village of Kiberg, fishermen reported injured cods, and border guards reported having contracted cancer in large amounts over the following years, though the latter was never confirmed as being as a result of the bomb.

(I removed the repeated parts from above in this paragraph) All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometres from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed; stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors...

One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 km (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero...

Windowpanes were partially broken for distances up to 900 kilometres (560 mi). Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. Despite being detonated 4.2 km (3 mi) above ground, its seismic body wave magnitude was estimated at 5.0–5.25." (To put this part into perspective, this is more than half the magnitude, in terms of the logarithmic scale units, of the MOST POWERFUL EARTHQUAKE EVER RECORDED.) (Too much time to actually convert the logarithmic difference into actual difference in energy, cause it's already in here, and I added the total energy of the world's nuclear arsenal, 2.86 GT, in the link to highlight, which, as can be seen, is 3 TIMES, AND AN ADDITIONAL 1.42GT, LESS THAN SUNDIAL's 10GT ALONE.)

Krakatoa:
"The third and largest explosion, at 10:02 am, was so violent that it was heard 3,110 km (1,930 mi) away in Perth, Western Australia, and the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,800 km (3,000 mi) away, where the blast was thought to have been cannon fire from a nearby ship.

The third explosion has been reported as the loudest sound in history. The loudness of the blast heard 160 km (100 mi) from the volcano has been calculated to have been 180 dB, loud enough to be heard 5,000 kilometres (3,100 mi) away.
It was so powerful that it ruptured the eardrums of sailors on RMS Norham Castle of the Castle Line which was hove to off Sumatra, and caused a spike of more than 8.5 kilopascals (2.5 inHg) in the pressure gauge attached to a gasometer in the Batavia (correspondent to modern day Jakarta) gasworks 160 km (100 miles) away, sending it off the scale.
At Batavia, the air waves burst windows and cracked walls.

Each explosion was accompanied by tsunamis estimated to have been over 30 metres (98 feet) high in places... Material shot out of the volcano at 2,575 kilometres per hour (715 metres per second) (THAT'S LITERALLY JUST ABOVE MACH 2). The energy released from the explosion has been estimated to be equal to about 200 megatonnes of TNT (840 petajoules), roughly four times as powerful as the Tsar Bomba (the 50MT detonated version), the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. This makes it one of the most powerful explosions in recorded history. At 10:41 am, a landslide tore off half of Rakata volcano, along with the remainder of the island to the north of Rakata, causing the final explosion.

The pressure wave generated by the colossal third explosion radiated out from Krakatoa at 1,086 km/h (675 mph)... was recorded on barographs worldwide. Several barographs recorded the wave seven times over five days: four times with the wave travelling away from the volcano to its antipodal point and three times travelling back to the volcano. Hence, the wave rounded the globe three and a half times.

Massive tsunamis struck the coastlines of the Sunda Strait, entirely submerging some islands and destroying all signs of human settlement.

(Odd exception) The Loudon, which at the time was anchored near the village of Telok Betong, survived the waves. (The Loudon ship apparently managed to manoeuvre itself to sail head on into the waves and reduce the likelihood of capsizing, but the aftermath regarding what they saw the wave do to the village it was anchored near is pretty terrifying.)

Ships as far away as South Africa rocked as tsunamis hit them, and the victims' bodies were found floating in the ocean for months after the event. The tsunamis which accompanied the eruption were believed to have been caused by gigantic pyroclastic flows entering the sea; each of the four great explosions was accompanied by large pyroclastic flows resulting from the gravitational collapse of the eruption columns. This caused several cubic kilometres of material to enter the sea, displacing an equal volume of seawater. The town of Merak was destroyed by a tsunami that was 46 metres high.

Smaller waves were recorded on tidal gauges as far away as the English Channel. These occurred too soon to be remnants of the initial tsunamis and may have been caused by concussive air waves from the eruption.

About 10% of the eruption fatalities were from hot pyroclastic flows and falling tephra. The pyroclastic flows travelled 40 km (25 mi) across the Sunda Strait. Once they hit Southern Sumatra, they incinerated entire villages and burned all vegetation. 2,000 of the corpses in Southern Sumatra appear to have been scorched to death, presumably by the pyroclastic flows.

The Loudon and the W.H. Besse, at ~65km north-northeast and ~80km east-northeast of Krakatau respectively, were hit by strong winds and tephra. They were farther away than the scorched victims of the hot flows in Sumatra, so the ships and crew survived. (Oh this is another reason why)

The flows moved faster than 100 km/h (62 mph) (pretty consistent with avalanches and landslides as well, but far more painful from my assumption since it's a combo of ground and lava and ash) and travelled over the sea up to 80 km (50 mi) from the source, affecting an area constrained to a minimum of 4,000 km2 (1,500 sq mi).
Pyroclastic deposits thought to be from the flows have been found on Southeast Sumatra, and northwest of the volcano on the islands of Sebesi, Sebuku and Lagoendi, while on Southwest Sumatra the flows burnt victims. The flows had moved across the water on a cushion of superheated steam.
There are also indications of submarine pyroclastic flows reaching 15 km (9.3 mi) from the volcano. An estimated 20 cubic kilometres of tephra was deposited, some of which fell 2,500 km away. Huge fields of floating pumice were reported for months after the event.
Ash was propelled to an estimated height of 80 km (50 mi) (Oh, yeah, this means the ash was shot 20km HIGHER THAN THE MUSHROOM CLOUD OF TSAR BOMBA).

Around noon on 27 August 1883, a rain of hot ash fell around Ketimbang (now Katibung in Lampung Province) in Sumatra. Approximately 1,000 people were killed in Sumatra; there were no survivors from the 3,000 people on the island of Sebesi. There are numerous reports of groups of human skeletons floating across the Indian Ocean on rafts of volcanic pumice and washing up on the east coast of Africa up to a year after the eruption."

So all that is for Tsar Bomba and Krakatoa, and we established that SUNDIAL is 100 times stronger than the Tsar Bomba's full potential yield and 50 times stronger than Krakatoa. So what was the expected destruction this doomsday device would bring?

In Search of a Bigger Boom

What drove Edward Teller to push for a 10,000 megaton hydrogen bomb?

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

According to Alex Wellerstein ^: "A 10,000 megaton (aka 10 gigaton) weapon, by my estimation, would be powerful enough to set all of New England on fire. Or most of California. Or all of the UK and Ireland. Or all of France. Or all of Germany. Or both North and South Korea. And so on."

This proposed nuke would've destroyed a continent

Soon after America set off its largest-ever nuclear blast on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, one scientist behind the weapon aimed for a blast that would've been 670,000 times as powerful as Hiroshima.

www.wearethemighty.com

And according to this article ^, "...(What Alex said) only accounts for the immediate overpressure wave and fireball. The lethal nuclear fallout would have immediately lethal levels of radiation across multiple countries, and likely would have poisoned the earth.
We would show you what this looks like on NUKEMAP (nuke effect simulator), but Wellerstein programmed it to “only” work with blasts up to 100 megatons, the largest bomb ever constructed. (aka the Tsar Bomba's max yield)"

(Caption for image from Mighty article: The NUKEMAP application shows the damage from a 100-megaton blast on Moscow. The orange and yellow ovals going northeast are the fallout from the blast. While this may look safe for America, Teller’s proposed design would’ve been 100 times larger.)


Luckily the US government said "Nope" to that since 1: it would have been too heavy, 2: it'd essentially kill millions or even billions of innocents and combatants alike, and even detonating it WITHIN the US would have possibly destroyed part of Europe's population with the radiation alone. (From secrecy article: "The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.”")

(Ironically enough, here's another part from the secrecy article: "In 1949, Rabi had, along with Enrico Fermi, written up a Minority Annex to the GAC’s report recommending against the creation of the hydrogen bomb.
The crux of their argument was thus: "Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb. The reason for developing such super bombs would be to have the capacity to devastate a vast area with a single bomb. Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians. (Damningly this did not stop them with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) We are alarmed as to the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by the explosion of a few super bombs of conceivable magnitude. If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide."

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one half of the irony. I highlighted Fermi because of this:

Trinity (nuclear test) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(last paragraph of the section linked from the Wikipedia article ^) "Enrico Fermi offered to take wagers among the top physicists and military present on whether the atmosphere would ignite, and if so whether it would destroy just the state, or incinerate the entire planet. This last result had been previously calculated by Bethe to be almost impossible, although for a while it had caused some of the scientists some anxiety.")
(So the person who took bets on whether an atomic bomb test would blow the entire planet up later then co-writes a letter condemning hydrogen bombs, 4 YEARS AFTER THEY DETONATED ATOMIC BOMBS ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI)

(and perhaps more terrifyingly from the Secrecy article, which is reminiscent of the ending of the Oppenheimer film:
"Both the US and the USSR looked into designing 100 megaton (Tsar-Bomba-max-yield power) warheads that would fit onto ICBMs. The fact that the Tsar Bomba was so large doesn’t mean that such a design had to be so large. (Or that being large necessarily would keep it from being put on the tip of a giant missile.) Neither went forward with these." (Thankfully.)

The aftermath would really be, to borrow an acronym from survivalists and doomsday preppers...
TEOTWAWKI: The End Of The World As We Know It.

 

[H3110l12345I20]

Just in advance, I feel like adding a bit more dramatic emphasis and "flair", you'll see with the font and message styling choices hehehe (I'm gonna have fun with the text style essentially and cut loose a bit)
(And alright, thanks for clarifying that terrorist groups or criminal organisations are not empires or even pseudo-empires, but I guess we can both agree that either way the ultimate outcome might not change.)

1: I never said they had to actually continue to last after the battle royale ended.... only that they had to be the last one standing at the end of it.
(even if it's a Pyrrhic victory, even if the last empire only lasts for a second, as long as they can manage to hold themselves together just long enough to outlast all the rest, they win.)

(I will digress here a bit: I hate empires in terms of morality anyway despite ironically admiring their levels of power and military advancement and progress, and it's personal especially cause the British Empire in particular screwed India and Pakistan and Bangladesh over during its rule (and I've had relatives and family friends who lived through that period, quite a few of whom have only passed away from 2017-2023, and one particularly strong example is that my maternal great grandmother had to flee from what is now Bangladesh to what is now Kolkata in West Bengal in India) and let Singapore down by failing to defend it against the Japanese despite the British claiming Singapore to be as impregnable as Gibraltar, in addition to practically razing Africa (which is less personal but still so since Africa is the origin of Homo sapiens) in terms of resources and people through the slave trade (also done to Oceania's indigenous people in addition to using Australia as a land of prisoners as as seen in the last link of the bracketed sentence after this) (which is ironic because the British were one of the biggest participants in the Atlantic slave trade, and they then tried to shut it down, but they still ended up replacing slavery with indentured labour which is not much better at all), as you have seen with the anthropogenic disasters under:

List of anthropogenic disasters by death toll - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... so yeah)

2: ICBMs. (Though yes they can be shot down)

3: Given the sheer quantity of nuclear weapons and the potential resources Russia has especially due to being the largest country in modern history thus having plenty of space to build nuclear weapons and silos or transport platforms this would make it a bit easier for Russia, with only US, India and China being comparable in terms of manpower, economy and land (and out of the 3, US also being the only comparable power in terms of nuclear arsenal), though this would be assuming Russia and all the other empires had time to plan or immediately kickstarted their war engines as soon as the battle royale started, and even then it's hard to consider how fast or slow the construction, transport and deployment of all of their nuclear weapons would be (particularly since the ICBM can be either silo-based or SLBM-based (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) so it depends on both proximity and range, but Russia's main advantage is that they have Sarmat (longest range ICBM) and a few other "super-weapons" (though readiness, effectiveness and morality of usage is debatable)

On a counterpoint though, if US was also similarly unscrupulous, as would be the case with the condition stating no code of honour/conduct which also means no Geneva, no Hague, no START, no SALT, nor any other limiting treatises or conventions.....

Well... I'll give you the articles, maybe you can corroborate and cross-refer with any other trustworthy sources since obviously there might be biased sources here and there due to propaganda.

On the Russian Hammer-And-Sickle-Wielding Bear's side:

Russian super weapons - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Particularly:

RS-28 Sarmat - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Avangard (hypersonic glide vehicle) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

9M730 Burevestnik - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Longest range ICBM, Sarmat, speed not stated (but possibly re-entry Mach 25+ speeds considering the ballistic trajectory) capable of flying 18,000km (or 35,000km if doing Fractional Orbital Bombardment) carrying 10-15 750kt (7500-11250kt = 7.5-11.25MT) warheads, 15-16 lighter (possibly 350kt each according to the articles cited, but unsure) MIRV warheads (5250-5600kt = 5.25-5.6MT), or 3 hypersonic gliding MIRVs (6MT) or any combination of these 3 layouts as well as countermeasures against anti-ballistic missiles, Avangard, being the name of the MIRVs themselves which fly at Mach 20-27 and have 2 MT+ warheads + 21 t of TNT energy through kinetic energy alone, as well as Burevestnik, a nuclear-fission-powered AND nuclear-armed cruise missile.... you'll see why this is insane later.)
They also have this:

R-29RMU2 Layner - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Longest range SLBM, equal in range to UK's and US's Trident at 11,000km (could be higher at 12,000km cause the main page about ICBMs and SLBMs states that, carrying at most 4x500kt (2000kt = 2MT) or 12x100kt (1200kt = 1.2MT) nuclear warheads, speed unstated in Wikipedia, perhaps in other sources)
And of course in their past:

Tsar Bomba - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(The most powerful nuke ever designed and built (key here being actually designed and built, you'll understand what I mean later), originally made to be 100MT but eventually limited to 50MT to allow the bomber plane to fly to safety with a 50% chance of making it out intact as well as limit long term radioactive fallout.)

On the American Starry-Eyed and Striped-Winged Eagle's side:

LGM-25C Titan II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

B53 nuclear bomb - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Supersonic Low Altitude Missile - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(US's own longest range ICBM at 16,000 km with a single 9MT warhead, the W-53, as well as the SLAM, their own nuclear-powered-ramjet and nuclear-armed cruise missile that actually came BEFORE Burevestnik and was cancelled, cause unlike Russia they thought this was too insane since if these sorts of missiles malfunctioned, there'd be radiation all over the place, since, well, THEY'RE LITERALLY SPEWING NUCLEAR-FISSION-PRODUCED RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT AS EXHAUST FROM THE RAMJET ENGINE)

As for US's submarines (cause they still have the biggest navy since the British Empire welp):

UGM-133 Trident II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(as mentioned, shared between UK and US, also more or less longest range SLBM on par with or beyond the R-29RMU2 Layner at 12,000km or more with a speed of Mach 24 (since it's also acting similar to an ICBM) and 1–8x475kt Mk-5 RV/W88 (3800kt = 3.8MT) or 1–12x100kt Mk-4 RV/W76-0 (1200kt = 1.2MT) or 1–14x90kt Mk-4A RV/W-76-1 (1260kt = 1.26MT) or single or multiple 5-7kt each W76-2)

And in their past:

Castle Bravo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(US's own largest nuke at 15 MT, which unfortunately for them is 3 times (and an additional 5MT) less than the Tsar Bomba... but while they stopped with the designing and building here, Edward Teller, the guy who was half of the reason the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design exists, was not done.)

So here's the real irony: While the US thought the SLAM was too insane (then again, maybe Teller may not have objected, who the heck knows),
US scientists, particularly Teller, were planning to surpass the Tsar Bomba even before Tsar Bomba was detonated.

By how much?

Nuclear weapon design - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"During the mid-1950s through early 1960s, scientists working in the weapons laboratories of the United States investigated weapons concepts as large as 1,000 megatons, and Edward Teller reported work on a 10,000 megaton weapon code-named SUNDIAL at a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission."

For the record, Tsar Bomba was originally meant to be 100MT. Krakatoa's eruption in 1883 was 200MT. (And yes, both are included already, in the Real World Page. < Two links in this bracketed portion in the first sentence, separated by the second comma.) SUNDIAL was planned to be 10,000MT, aka 10 GT (gigatonnes), 100 times stronger than Tsar Bomba's original maximum yield and 50 times stronger than Krakatoa.

Let me put this into another perspective based on the effects (gonna try to summarise and restructure the quotations, just bear with me cause the quotations are damn long):

Tsar Bomba:
"The 8-kilometre-wide (5.0 mi) fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane (10.5 km)...

When detonation occurred, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km (71 mi)... The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely.

Flare (aka the fireball ^) was visible at a distance of more than 1,000 km (620 mi). It was observed in Norway, Greenland and Alaska.
Explosion's mushroom cloud rose to a height of 67 km (42 mi)... The cloud was observed 800 km (500 mi) from the explosion site.
The blast wave circled the globe three times...

A seismic wave in the Earth's crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times.

The atmospheric pressure wave resulting from the explosion was recorded three times in New Zealand... with amplitudes of 0.6 mbar (0.60 hPa), 0.4 mbar (0.40 hPa), and 0.2 mbar (0.20 hPa). Respectively, the average wave speed is estimated at 303 m/s (990 ft/s), or 9.9 degrees of the great circle per hour.

Glass shattered in windows 780 km (480 mi) from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.

Odd exception: The sound wave generated by the explosion reached Dikson Island, but there are no reports of destruction or damage to structures even in the urban-type settlement of Amderma, which is much closer (280 km (170 mi)) to the landfall. (could be due to focusing and narrowing of the pressure wave perhaps)

Ionization of the atmosphere caused interference to radio communications even hundreds of kilometers from the test site for about 40 minutes.

Another odd exception: Radioactive contamination of the experimental field with a radius of 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 mi) in the hypocenter area was no more than 1 milliroentgen / hour. The testers appeared at the explosion site 2 hours later; radioactive contamination posed practically no danger to the test participants. (because they replaced the uranium tamper for the original 100MT design with the lead tamper for the tested 50MT design)

In the Norwegian border village of Kiberg, fishermen reported injured cods, and border guards reported having contracted cancer in large amounts over the following years, though the latter was never confirmed as being as a result of the bomb.

(I removed the repeated parts from above in this paragraph) All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometres from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed; stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors...

One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 km (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero...

Windowpanes were partially broken for distances up to 900 kilometres (560 mi). Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. Despite being detonated 4.2 km (3 mi) above ground, its seismic body wave magnitude was estimated at 5.0–5.25." (To put this part into perspective, this is more than half the magnitude, in terms of the logarithmic scale units, of the MOST POWERFUL EARTHQUAKE EVER RECORDED.) (Too much time to actually convert the logarithmic difference into actual difference in energy, cause it's already in here, and I added the total energy of the world's nuclear arsenal, 2.86 GT, in the link to highlight, which, as can be seen, is 3 TIMES, AND AN ADDITIONAL 1.42GT, LESS THAN SUNDIAL's 10GT ALONE.)

Krakatoa:
"The third and largest explosion, at 10:02 am, was so violent that it was heard 3,110 km (1,930 mi) away in Perth, Western Australia, and the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,800 km (3,000 mi) away, where the blast was thought to have been cannon fire from a nearby ship.

The third explosion has been reported as the loudest sound in history. The loudness of the blast heard 160 km (100 mi) from the volcano has been calculated to have been 180 dB, loud enough to be heard 5,000 kilometres (3,100 mi) away.
It was so powerful that it ruptured the eardrums of sailors on RMS Norham Castle of the Castle Line which was hove to off Sumatra, and caused a spike of more than 8.5 kilopascals (2.5 inHg) in the pressure gauge attached to a gasometer in the Batavia (correspondent to modern day Jakarta) gasworks 160 km (100 miles) away, sending it off the scale.
At Batavia, the air waves burst windows and cracked walls.

Each explosion was accompanied by tsunamis estimated to have been over 30 metres (98 feet) high in places... Material shot out of the volcano at 2,575 kilometres per hour (715 metres per second) (THAT'S LITERALLY JUST ABOVE MACH 2). The energy released from the explosion has been estimated to be equal to about 200 megatonnes of TNT (840 petajoules), roughly four times as powerful as the Tsar Bomba (the 50MT detonated version), the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. This makes it one of the most powerful explosions in recorded history. At 10:41 am, a landslide tore off half of Rakata volcano, along with the remainder of the island to the north of Rakata, causing the final explosion.

The pressure wave generated by the colossal third explosion radiated out from Krakatoa at 1,086 km/h (675 mph)... was recorded on barographs worldwide. Several barographs recorded the wave seven times over five days: four times with the wave travelling away from the volcano to its antipodal point and three times travelling back to the volcano. Hence, the wave rounded the globe three and a half times.

Massive tsunamis struck the coastlines of the Sunda Strait, entirely submerging some islands and destroying all signs of human settlement.

(Odd exception) The Loudon, which at the time was anchored near the village of Telok Betong, survived the waves. (The Loudon ship apparently managed to manoeuvre itself to sail head on into the waves and reduce the likelihood of capsizing, but the aftermath regarding what they saw the wave do to the village it was anchored near is pretty terrifying.)

Ships as far away as South Africa rocked as tsunamis hit them, and the victims' bodies were found floating in the ocean for months after the event. The tsunamis which accompanied the eruption were believed to have been caused by gigantic pyroclastic flows entering the sea; each of the four great explosions was accompanied by large pyroclastic flows resulting from the gravitational collapse of the eruption columns. This caused several cubic kilometres of material to enter the sea, displacing an equal volume of seawater. The town of Merak was destroyed by a tsunami that was 46 metres high.

Smaller waves were recorded on tidal gauges as far away as the English Channel. These occurred too soon to be remnants of the initial tsunamis and may have been caused by concussive air waves from the eruption.

About 10% of the eruption fatalities were from hot pyroclastic flows and falling tephra. The pyroclastic flows travelled 40 km (25 mi) across the Sunda Strait. Once they hit Southern Sumatra, they incinerated entire villages and burned all vegetation. 2,000 of the corpses in Southern Sumatra appear to have been scorched to death, presumably by the pyroclastic flows.

The Loudon and the W.H. Besse, at ~65km north-northeast and ~80km east-northeast of Krakatau respectively, were hit by strong winds and tephra. They were farther away than the scorched victims of the hot flows in Sumatra, so the ships and crew survived. (Oh this is another reason why)

The flows moved faster than 100 km/h (62 mph) (pretty consistent with avalanches and landslides as well, but far more painful from my assumption since it's a combo of ground and lava and ash) and travelled over the sea up to 80 km (50 mi) from the source, affecting an area constrained to a minimum of 4,000 km2 (1,500 sq mi).
Pyroclastic deposits thought to be from the flows have been found on Southeast Sumatra, and northwest of the volcano on the islands of Sebesi, Sebuku and Lagoendi, while on Southwest Sumatra the flows burnt victims. The flows had moved across the water on a cushion of superheated steam.
There are also indications of submarine pyroclastic flows reaching 15 km (9.3 mi) from the volcano. An estimated 20 cubic kilometres of tephra was deposited, some of which fell 2,500 km away. Huge fields of floating pumice were reported for months after the event.
Ash was propelled to an estimated height of 80 km (50 mi) (Oh, yeah, this means the ash was shot 20km HIGHER THAN THE MUSHROOM CLOUD OF TSAR BOMBA).

Around noon on 27 August 1883, a rain of hot ash fell around Ketimbang (now Katibung in Lampung Province) in Sumatra. Approximately 1,000 people were killed in Sumatra; there were no survivors from the 3,000 people on the island of Sebesi. There are numerous reports of groups of human skeletons floating across the Indian Ocean on rafts of volcanic pumice and washing up on the east coast of Africa up to a year after the eruption."

So all that is for Tsar Bomba and Krakatoa, and we established that SUNDIAL is 100 times stronger than the Tsar Bomba's full potential yield and 50 times stronger than Krakatoa. So what was the expected destruction this doomsday device would bring?

In Search of a Bigger Boom

What drove Edward Teller to push for a 10,000 megaton hydrogen bomb?

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

According to Alex Wellerstein ^: "A 10,000 megaton (aka 10 gigaton) weapon, by my estimation, would be powerful enough to set all of New England on fire. Or most of California. Or all of the UK and Ireland. Or all of France. Or all of Germany. Or both North and South Korea. And so on."

This proposed nuke would've destroyed a continent

Soon after America set off its largest-ever nuclear blast on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, one scientist behind the weapon aimed for a blast that would've been 670,000 times as powerful as Hiroshima.

www.wearethemighty.com

And according to this article ^, "...(What Alex said) only accounts for the immediate overpressure wave and fireball. The lethal nuclear fallout would have immediately lethal levels of radiation across multiple countries, and likely would have poisoned the earth.
We would show you what this looks like on NUKEMAP (nuke effect simulator), but Wellerstein programmed it to “only” work with blasts up to 100 megatons, the largest bomb ever constructed. (aka the Tsar Bomba's max yield)"

(Caption for image from Mighty article: The NUKEMAP application shows the damage from a 100-megaton blast on Moscow. The orange and yellow ovals going northeast are the fallout from the blast. While this may look safe for America, Teller’s proposed design would’ve been 100 times larger.)


Luckily the US government said "Nope" to that since 1: it would have been too heavy, 2: it'd essentially kill millions or even billions of innocents and combatants alike, and even detonating it WITHIN the US would have possibly destroyed part of Europe's population with the radiation alone. (From secrecy article: "The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.”")

(Ironically enough, here's another part from the secrecy article: "In 1949, Rabi had, along with Enrico Fermi, written up a Minority Annex to the GAC’s report recommending against the creation of the hydrogen bomb.
The crux of their argument was thus: "Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb. The reason for developing such super bombs would be to have the capacity to devastate a vast area with a single bomb. Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians. (Damningly this did not stop them with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) We are alarmed as to the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by the explosion of a few super bombs of conceivable magnitude. If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide."

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one half of the irony. I highlighted Fermi because of this:

Trinity (nuclear test) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(last paragraph of the section linked from the Wikipedia article ^) "Enrico Fermi offered to take wagers among the top physicists and military present on whether the atmosphere would ignite, and if so whether it would destroy just the state, or incinerate the entire planet. This last result had been previously calculated by Bethe to be almost impossible, although for a while it had caused some of the scientists some anxiety.")
(So the person who took bets on whether an atomic bomb test would blow the entire planet up later then co-writes a letter condemning hydrogen bombs, 4 YEARS AFTER THEY DETONATED ATOMIC BOMBS ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI)

(and perhaps more terrifyingly from the Secrecy article, which is reminiscent of the ending of the Oppenheimer film:
"Both the US and the USSR looked into designing 100 megaton (Tsar-Bomba-max-yield power) warheads that would fit onto ICBMs. The fact that the Tsar Bomba was so large doesn’t mean that such a design had to be so large. (Or that being large necessarily would keep it from being put on the tip of a giant missile.) Neither went forward with these." (Thankfully.)

The aftermath would really be, to borrow an acronym from survivalists and doomsday preppers...
TEOTWAWKI: The End Of The World As We Know It.

You kinda remind me on the wiki during my first-second year. Also my dad who ran away and ignored me for 17 years. This is in the sense that you're quite talkitive and chatty.

While I do large text walls, I prefer to have more relevent points shortened and in-front, and I prefer to get straight to them rather than write an essay. (I'm saying this since you're effectively 21 years old, you have a life at this point, and we all need time management).

For now, I'll try to simplify some stuff so my brain isn't too overwhelmed. Correct me if I'm wrong.

(I will digress here a bit: I hate empires in terms of morality anyway despite ironically admiring their levels of power and military advancement and progress, and it's personal especially cause the British Empire in particular screwed India and Pakistan and Bangladesh over during its rule (and I've had relatives and family friends who lived through that period, quite a few of whom have only passed away from 2017-2023, and one particularly strong example is that my maternal great grandmother had to flee from what is now Bangladesh to what is now Kolkata in West Bengal in India) and let Singapore down by failing to defend it against the Japanese despite the British claiming Singapore to be as impregnable as Gibraltar, in addition to practically razing Africa (which is less personal but still so since Africa is the origin of Homo sapiens) in terms of resources and people through the slave trade (also done to Oceania's indigenous people in addition to using Australia as a land of prisoners as as seen in the last link of the bracketed sentence after this) (which is ironic because the British were one of the biggest participants in the Atlantic slave trade, and they then tried to shut it down, but they still ended up replacing slavery with indentured labour which is not much better at all), as you have seen with the anthropogenic disasters under:

List of anthropogenic disasters by death toll - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... so yeah)

You hate empires because of the immoral stuff they do to get and maintain power. At this point, they deserved to fall and have parodies on them anyways. Even Bill Wurtz roasted Japan when they did the rape of Nanking.

Your family members that lived during that time should have stories better than anime lol. Do you know how to do private messages on-forum?

3: Given the sheer quantity of nuclear weapons and the potential resources Russia has especially due to being the largest country in modern history thus having plenty of space to build nuclear weapons and silos or transport platforms this would make it a bit easier for Russia, with only US, India and China being comparable in terms of manpower, economy and land (and out of the 3, US also being the only comparable power in terms of nuclear arsenal), though this would be assuming Russia and all the other empires had time to plan or immediately kickstarted their war engines as soon as the battle royale started, and even then it's hard to consider how fast or slow the construction, transport and deployment of all of their nuclear weapons would be (particularly since the ICBM can be either silo-based or SLBM-based (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) so it depends on both proximity and range, but Russia's main advantage is that they have Sarmat (longest range ICBM) and a few other "super-weapons" (though readiness, effectiveness and morality of usage is debatable)

On a counterpoint though, if US was also similarly unscrupulous, as would be the case with the condition stating no code of honour/conduct which also means no Geneva, no Hague, no START, no SALT, nor any other limiting treatises or conventions.....

Well... I'll give you the articles, maybe you can corroborate and cross-refer with any other trustworthy sources since obviously there might be biased sources here and there due to propaganda.

Your point here is that Russia has lots of potential resources, land, manpower, etc. You assume that everyone has prep time, and you're about to introduce points for the US's nukes.

The US' military personnel rose to 12 million+ by the end of WW2, and they do have few weaknesses if any. Plus...
"Tilford cites a litany of sobering statistics showing just how profligate Americans have been in using and abusing natural resources. For example, between 1900 and 1989 U.S. population tripled while its use of raw materials grew by a factor of 17. “With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper,” he reports."

The US also has lots of resources and manpower, but has less land.

Russian super weapons - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Particularly:

RS-28 Sarmat - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Avangard (hypersonic glide vehicle) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

9M730 Burevestnik - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Longest range ICBM, Sarmat, speed not stated (but possibly re-entry Mach 25+ speeds considering the ballistic trajectory) capable of flying 18,000km (or 35,000km if doing Fractional Orbital Bombardment) carrying 10-15 750kt (7500-11250kt = 7.5-11.25MT) warheads, 15-16 lighter (possibly 350kt each according to the articles cited, but unsure) MIRV warheads (5250-5600kt = 5.25-5.6MT), or 3 hypersonic gliding MIRVs (6MT) or any combination of these 3 layouts as well as countermeasures against anti-ballistic missiles, Avangard, being the name of the MIRVs themselves which fly at Mach 20-27 and have 2 MT+ warheads + 21 t of TNT energy through kinetic energy alone, as well as Burevestnik, a nuclear-fission-powered AND nuclear-armed cruise missile.... you'll see why this is insane later.)
They also have this:

R-29RMU2 Layner - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Longest range SLBM, equal in range to UK's and US's Trident at 11,000km (could be higher at 12,000km cause the main page about ICBMs and SLBMs states that, carrying at most 4x500kt (2000kt = 2MT) or 12x100kt (1200kt = 1.2MT) nuclear warheads, speed unstated in Wikipedia, perhaps in other sources)
And of course in their past:

Tsar Bomba - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(The most powerful nuke ever designed and built (key here being actually designed and built, you'll understand what I mean later), originally made to be 100MT but eventually limited to 50MT to allow the bomber plane to fly to safety with a 50% chance of making it out intact as well as limit long term radioactive fallout.)

On the American Starry-Eyed and Striped-Winged Eagle's side:

LGM-25C Titan II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

B53 nuclear bomb - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Supersonic Low Altitude Missile - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(US's own longest range ICBM at 16,000 km with a single 9MT warhead, the W-53, as well as the SLAM, their own nuclear-powered-ramjet and nuclear-armed cruise missile that actually came BEFORE Burevestnik and was cancelled, cause unlike Russia they thought this was too insane since if these sorts of missiles malfunctioned, there'd be radiation all over the place, since, well, THEY'RE LITERALLY SPEWING NUCLEAR-FISSION-PRODUCED RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT AS EXHAUST FROM THE RAMJET ENGINE)

As for US's submarines (cause they still have the biggest navy since the British Empire welp):

UGM-133 Trident II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(as mentioned, shared between UK and US, also more or less longest range SLBM on par with or beyond the R-29RMU2 Layner at 12,000km or more with a speed of Mach 24 (since it's also acting similar to an ICBM) and 1–8x475kt Mk-5 RV/W88 (3800kt = 3.8MT) or 1–12x100kt Mk-4 RV/W76-0 (1200kt = 1.2MT) or 1–14x90kt Mk-4A RV/W-76-1 (1260kt = 1.26MT) or single or multiple 5-7kt each W76-2)

And in their past:

Castle Bravo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(US's own largest nuke at 15 MT, which unfortunately for them is 3 times (and an additional 5MT) less than the Tsar Bomba... but while they stopped with the designing and building here, Edward Teller, the guy who was half of the reason the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design exists, was not done.)

So here's the real irony: While the US thought the SLAM was too insane (then again, maybe Teller may not have objected, who the heck knows),
US scientists, particularly Teller, were planning to surpass the Tsar Bomba even before Tsar Bomba was detonated.

By how much?

Nuclear weapon design - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"During the mid-1950s through early 1960s, scientists working in the weapons laboratories of the United States investigated weapons concepts as large as 1,000 megatons, and Edward Teller reported work on a 10,000 megaton weapon code-named SUNDIAL at a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission."

For the record, Tsar Bomba was originally meant to be 100MT. Krakatoa's eruption in 1883 was 200MT. (And yes, both are included already, in the Real World Page. < Two links in this bracketed portion in the first sentence, separated by the second comma.) SUNDIAL was planned to be 10,000MT, aka 10 GT (gigatonnes), 100 times stronger than Tsar Bomba's original maximum yield and 50 times stronger than Krakatoa.

Let me put this into another perspective based on the effects (gonna try to summarise and restructure the quotations, just bear with me cause the quotations are damn long):

Tsar Bomba:
"The 8-kilometre-wide (5.0 mi) fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane (10.5 km)...

When detonation occurred, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km (71 mi)... The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely.

Flare (aka the fireball ^) was visible at a distance of more than 1,000 km (620 mi). It was observed in Norway, Greenland and Alaska.
Explosion's mushroom cloud rose to a height of 67 km (42 mi)... The cloud was observed 800 km (500 mi) from the explosion site.
The blast wave circled the globe three times...

A seismic wave in the Earth's crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times.

The atmospheric pressure wave resulting from the explosion was recorded three times in New Zealand... with amplitudes of 0.6 mbar (0.60 hPa), 0.4 mbar (0.40 hPa), and 0.2 mbar (0.20 hPa). Respectively, the average wave speed is estimated at 303 m/s (990 ft/s), or 9.9 degrees of the great circle per hour.

Glass shattered in windows 780 km (480 mi) from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.

Odd exception: The sound wave generated by the explosion reached Dikson Island, but there are no reports of destruction or damage to structures even in the urban-type settlement of Amderma, which is much closer (280 km (170 mi)) to the landfall. (could be due to focusing and narrowing of the pressure wave perhaps)

Ionization of the atmosphere caused interference to radio communications even hundreds of kilometers from the test site for about 40 minutes.

Another odd exception: Radioactive contamination of the experimental field with a radius of 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 mi) in the hypocenter area was no more than 1 milliroentgen / hour. The testers appeared at the explosion site 2 hours later; radioactive contamination posed practically no danger to the test participants. (because they replaced the uranium tamper for the original 100MT design with the lead tamper for the tested 50MT design)

In the Norwegian border village of Kiberg, fishermen reported injured cods, and border guards reported having contracted cancer in large amounts over the following years, though the latter was never confirmed as being as a result of the bomb.

(I removed the repeated parts from above in this paragraph) All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometres from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed; stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors...

One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 km (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero...

Windowpanes were partially broken for distances up to 900 kilometres (560 mi). Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. Despite being detonated 4.2 km (3 mi) above ground, its seismic body wave magnitude was estimated at 5.0–5.25." (To put this part into perspective, this is more than half the magnitude, in terms of the logarithmic scale units, of the MOST POWERFUL EARTHQUAKE EVER RECORDED.) (Too much time to actually convert the logarithmic difference into actual difference in energy, cause it's already in here, and I added the total energy of the world's nuclear arsenal, 2.86 GT, in the link to highlight, which, as can be seen, is 3 TIMES, AND AN ADDITIONAL 1.42GT, LESS THAN SUNDIAL's 10GT ALONE.)

Krakatoa:
"The third and largest explosion, at 10:02 am, was so violent that it was heard 3,110 km (1,930 mi) away in Perth, Western Australia, and the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,800 km (3,000 mi) away, where the blast was thought to have been cannon fire from a nearby ship.

The third explosion has been reported as the loudest sound in history. The loudness of the blast heard 160 km (100 mi) from the volcano has been calculated to have been 180 dB, loud enough to be heard 5,000 kilometres (3,100 mi) away.
It was so powerful that it ruptured the eardrums of sailors on RMS Norham Castle of the Castle Line which was hove to off Sumatra, and caused a spike of more than 8.5 kilopascals (2.5 inHg) in the pressure gauge attached to a gasometer in the Batavia (correspondent to modern day Jakarta) gasworks 160 km (100 miles) away, sending it off the scale.
At Batavia, the air waves burst windows and cracked walls.

Each explosion was accompanied by tsunamis estimated to have been over 30 metres (98 feet) high in places... Material shot out of the volcano at 2,575 kilometres per hour (715 metres per second) (THAT'S LITERALLY JUST ABOVE MACH 2). The energy released from the explosion has been estimated to be equal to about 200 megatonnes of TNT (840 petajoules), roughly four times as powerful as the Tsar Bomba (the 50MT detonated version), the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. This makes it one of the most powerful explosions in recorded history. At 10:41 am, a landslide tore off half of Rakata volcano, along with the remainder of the island to the north of Rakata, causing the final explosion.

The pressure wave generated by the colossal third explosion radiated out from Krakatoa at 1,086 km/h (675 mph)... was recorded on barographs worldwide. Several barographs recorded the wave seven times over five days: four times with the wave travelling away from the volcano to its antipodal point and three times travelling back to the volcano. Hence, the wave rounded the globe three and a half times.

Massive tsunamis struck the coastlines of the Sunda Strait, entirely submerging some islands and destroying all signs of human settlement.

(Odd exception) The Loudon, which at the time was anchored near the village of Telok Betong, survived the waves. (The Loudon ship apparently managed to manoeuvre itself to sail head on into the waves and reduce the likelihood of capsizing, but the aftermath regarding what they saw the wave do to the village it was anchored near is pretty terrifying.)

Ships as far away as South Africa rocked as tsunamis hit them, and the victims' bodies were found floating in the ocean for months after the event. The tsunamis which accompanied the eruption were believed to have been caused by gigantic pyroclastic flows entering the sea; each of the four great explosions was accompanied by large pyroclastic flows resulting from the gravitational collapse of the eruption columns. This caused several cubic kilometres of material to enter the sea, displacing an equal volume of seawater. The town of Merak was destroyed by a tsunami that was 46 metres high.

Smaller waves were recorded on tidal gauges as far away as the English Channel. These occurred too soon to be remnants of the initial tsunamis and may have been caused by concussive air waves from the eruption.

About 10% of the eruption fatalities were from hot pyroclastic flows and falling tephra. The pyroclastic flows travelled 40 km (25 mi) across the Sunda Strait. Once they hit Southern Sumatra, they incinerated entire villages and burned all vegetation. 2,000 of the corpses in Southern Sumatra appear to have been scorched to death, presumably by the pyroclastic flows.

The Loudon and the W.H. Besse, at ~65km north-northeast and ~80km east-northeast of Krakatau respectively, were hit by strong winds and tephra. They were farther away than the scorched victims of the hot flows in Sumatra, so the ships and crew survived. (Oh this is another reason why)

The flows moved faster than 100 km/h (62 mph) (pretty consistent with avalanches and landslides as well, but far more painful from my assumption since it's a combo of ground and lava and ash) and travelled over the sea up to 80 km (50 mi) from the source, affecting an area constrained to a minimum of 4,000 km2 (1,500 sq mi).
Pyroclastic deposits thought to be from the flows have been found on Southeast Sumatra, and northwest of the volcano on the islands of Sebesi, Sebuku and Lagoendi, while on Southwest Sumatra the flows burnt victims. The flows had moved across the water on a cushion of superheated steam.
There are also indications of submarine pyroclastic flows reaching 15 km (9.3 mi) from the volcano. An estimated 20 cubic kilometres of tephra was deposited, some of which fell 2,500 km away. Huge fields of floating pumice were reported for months after the event.
Ash was propelled to an estimated height of 80 km (50 mi) (Oh, yeah, this means the ash was shot 20km HIGHER THAN THE MUSHROOM CLOUD OF TSAR BOMBA).

Around noon on 27 August 1883, a rain of hot ash fell around Ketimbang (now Katibung in Lampung Province) in Sumatra. Approximately 1,000 people were killed in Sumatra; there were no survivors from the 3,000 people on the island of Sebesi. There are numerous reports of groups of human skeletons floating across the Indian Ocean on rafts of volcanic pumice and washing up on the east coast of Africa up to a year after the eruption."

So all that is for Tsar Bomba and Krakatoa, and we established that SUNDIAL is 100 times stronger than the Tsar Bomba's full potential yield and 50 times stronger than Krakatoa. So what was the expected destruction this doomsday device would bring?

In Search of a Bigger Boom

What drove Edward Teller to push for a 10,000 megaton hydrogen bomb?

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

According to Alex Wellerstein ^: "A 10,000 megaton (aka 10 gigaton) weapon, by my estimation, would be powerful enough to set all of New England on fire. Or most of California. Or all of the UK and Ireland. Or all of France. Or all of Germany. Or both North and South Korea. And so on."

This proposed nuke would've destroyed a continent

Soon after America set off its largest-ever nuclear blast on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, one scientist behind the weapon aimed for a blast that would've been 670,000 times as powerful as Hiroshima.

www.wearethemighty.com

And according to this article ^, "...(What Alex said) only accounts for the immediate overpressure wave and fireball. The lethal nuclear fallout would have immediately lethal levels of radiation across multiple countries, and likely would have poisoned the earth.
We would show you what this looks like on NUKEMAP (nuke effect simulator), but Wellerstein programmed it to “only” work with blasts up to 100 megatons, the largest bomb ever constructed. (aka the Tsar Bomba's max yield)"

(Caption for image from Mighty article: The NUKEMAP application shows the damage from a 100-megaton blast on Moscow. The orange and yellow ovals going northeast are the fallout from the blast. While this may look safe for America, Teller’s proposed design would’ve been 100 times larger.)


Luckily the US government said "Nope" to that since 1: it would have been too heavy, 2: it'd essentially kill millions or even billions of innocents and combatants alike, and even detonating it WITHIN the US would have possibly destroyed part of Europe's population with the radiation alone. (From secrecy article: "The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.”")

(Ironically enough, here's another part from the secrecy article: "In 1949, Rabi had, along with Enrico Fermi, written up a Minority Annex to the GAC’s report recommending against the creation of the hydrogen bomb.
The crux of their argument was thus: "Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb. The reason for developing such super bombs would be to have the capacity to devastate a vast area with a single bomb. Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians. (Damningly this did not stop them with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) We are alarmed as to the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by the explosion of a few super bombs of conceivable magnitude. If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide."

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one half of the irony. I highlighted Fermi because of this:

Trinity (nuclear test) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(last paragraph of the section linked from the Wikipedia article ^) "Enrico Fermi offered to take wagers among the top physicists and military present on whether the atmosphere would ignite, and if so whether it would destroy just the state, or incinerate the entire planet. This last result had been previously calculated by Bethe to be almost impossible, although for a while it had caused some of the scientists some anxiety.")
(So the person who took bets on whether an atomic bomb test would blow the entire planet up later then co-writes a letter condemning hydrogen bombs, 4 YEARS AFTER THEY DETONATED ATOMIC BOMBS ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI)

(and perhaps more terrifyingly from the Secrecy article, which is reminiscent of the ending of the Oppenheimer film:
"Both the US and the USSR looked into designing 100 megaton (Tsar-Bomba-max-yield power) warheads that would fit onto ICBMs. The fact that the Tsar Bomba was so large doesn’t mean that such a design had to be so large. (Or that being large necessarily would keep it from being put on the tip of a giant missile.) Neither went forward with these." (Thankfully.)

The aftermath would really be, to borrow an acronym from survivalists and doomsday preppers...
TEOTWAWKI: The End Of The World As We Know It.

Russia has shown to make more power nukes, while the US can potentially make more devastating nukes.

Besides, making and transporting one as shown for the Tsar bomba is hard enough, I don't think they could properly use a 10000 MT something bomb.

 

[H3110l12345I20]

Since this is a nuke war, and the aftermath of one is several natural disasters at once, but worse, shouldn't we consider each country's ability to resist and recover from natural disasters as quickly and efficiently as possible?

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

You kinda remind me on the wiki during my first-second year. Also my dad who ran away and ignored me for 17 years. This is in the sense that you're quite talkitive and chatty.

First of all....
Damn, I'm sorry your dad did that to you, I only know you a few days and I already consider you a friend so knowing your own dad did that to you is very screwed up to hear, you don't deserve that crap.
But I'm also confused with the first sentence, do you mean remind you OF yourself*?
And yeah, I was kinda going with a storytelling sort of style with this long-ass message, did try to use bold and italics to draw attention to the more significant bits but most likely overused them.

While I do large text walls, I prefer to have more relevent points shortened and in-front, and I prefer to get straight to them rather than write an essay. (I'm saying this since you're effectively 21 years old, you have a life at this point, and we all need time management).

Again, sorry, was kinda caught up in trying to present it as a dramatic/terrifying narrative scenario, welp

You hate empires because of the immoral stuff they do to get and maintain power. At this point, they deserved to fall and have parodies on them anyways. Even Bill Wurtz roasted Japan when they did the rape of Nanking.

Yeah pretty much, I admire the levels of their power but abhor their means of obtaining and retaining it.

Your family members that lived during that time should have stories better than anime lol. Do you know how to do private messages on-forum?

Well...
1: a bit weird to compare those stories to anime, though if you're continuing the bit about the roasting of Japan about their war crimes, that would make more sense
2: yeah I do, but ehh, at least now more people know more about me in the sense of what I hate and why I hate it (in this case, colonialism's/empires' inherent and fundamental immorality, since though it can be argued that said immorality could vary since empires did also vary in the treatment of their subjects, the foundation of empires is subjugation of others essentially, AND because of intergenerational resentment as well regarding why I feel even more strongly against particularly the British since they pretty much are responsible for a large portion of the world's problems today to at least some degree (national borders, international conflicts, etc), even though I'm aware Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, USA, Russia, etc (mostly European and North American in terms of both scale and lasting impact but African (Shaka Zulu in particular from the top of my head), Asian (Mongol, Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese, etc empires and regimes in the past as well as China, India, Myanmar/Burma, etc today), and probably Oceanian empires and regimes also have quite a significant amount of blood and dirt on their hands but that's going a bit too near modern politics so best not to go there)

To be fair about the second part, intergenerational hatred can be quite powerful when it comes to colonialism, but that story about my great grandmother is true, though my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandparents were Indian, my maternal grandmother (through my maternal great grandmother) was Bangladeshi, and we're more of a matriarchal family and whenever we went back to India annually every end of year before last year we'd live primarily in our maternal grandparents' and great grandmother's house, so the Bangladeshi influence was ironically a bit stronger when it came to homemade food, but in terms of language there's more of an Indian influence (you can essentially say, ethnicity and culture wise, I'm Singaporean-born of 3/4 Indian Bengali and 1/4 Bangladeshi Bengali descent), and funnily enough my maternal grandparents had a regular marriage and not an arranged one which is unusual for pretty obvious reasons but was very sweet, though the Partition did still shape their lives quite a bit.

I will write more another time, need to sleep.

 

[H3110l12345I20]

But I'm also confused with the first sentence, do you mean remind you OF yourself*?

Yes.

Btw. Have a nice sleep.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

Your point here is that Russia has lots of potential resources, land, manpower, etc. You assume that everyone has prep time, and you're about to introduce points for the US's nukes.

Yeah, I did, + I was comparing the scale of both actual designed and theoretical propositions of weapons both on the Russian and US sides

The US' military personnel rose to 12 million+ by the end of WW2, and they do have few weaknesses if any. Plus...
"Tilford cites a litany of sobering statistics showing just how profligate Americans have been in using and abusing natural resources. For example, between 1900 and 1989 U.S. population tripled while its use of raw materials grew by a factor of 17. “With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper,” he reports."

The US also has lots of resources and manpower, but has less land.

That makes sense, though if I'm not wrong Russia still has larger manpower and more natural resources on its own land ON TOP of having more land in general

List of countries by number of military and paramilitary personnel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Russia has more total, reserve and paramilitary, US has more active.

Besides, making and transporting one as shown for the Tsar bomba is hard enough, I don't think they could properly use a 10000 MT something bomb.

This is fair, and even if they did, either one of them making and using a 1-10GT bomb would destroy one side and significantly damage the other side both in the short and long term, as well as a FRICKTON of collateral damage (which would not exactly be collateral damage since we're counting all other countries outside of Russia and US as parts of either modern or historical empires/powers taking part in the battle royale, but you get the point) to parties outside of the two sides

 

[H3110l12345I20]

That makes sense, though if I'm not wrong Russia still has larger manpower and more natural resources on its own land ON TOP of having more land in general

List of countries by number of military and paramilitary personnel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Russia has more total, reserve and paramilitary, US has more active.

Depends, how good is Russia compared to the US in terms of how good are they able to recover from natural disasters? The US is quite slow and beraucratic to do so.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

Depends, how good is Russia compared to the US in terms of how good are they able to recover from natural disasters? The US is quite slow and beraucratic to do so.

In Russia's case, probably depends on which part of Russia (West or East, European Russia or Asian Siberia) is hit harder.

 

[H3110l12345I20]

In Russia's case, probably depends on which part of Russia (West or East, European Russia or Asian Siberia) is hit harder.

So Russia has better resources and thus, would have an ironically better job near more developed and resource rich areas recovering from a nuke. The rural areas are going to have more slow recovery time from a nuke.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

So Russia has better resources and thus, would have an ironically better job near more developed and resource rich areas recovering from a nuke. The rural areas are going to have more slow recovery time from a nuke.

That, or if the rural regions (mostly in Asian Siberia) are the parts most affected by a nuke, the urban regions (mostly in European Russia) would be more able to respond and retaliate, whereas if the urban regions are the parts most affected by a nuke, the country as a whole would be more screwed over.
With rural regions being affected, factors would be how much of Russia's overall military is stationed there (which is probably less dense) and whether they have nuclear weapon launching/development facilities there (which is less likely unless they wanted secrecy).
With urban regions being affected, factors would also be how much of Russia's overall military is stationed there (which is probably more dense) and whether they have nuclear weapon launching/development facilities there (which is more likely since it would be easier to transport resources), IN ADDITION to how badly urban conditions and populations are affected as well as whether the government chain of command is damaged enough to fall apart or resilient enough to remain cohesive.
Though I do know they had plans for dead man's switches for nuclear weapon launching in the scenario that the government is destroyed.

Dead Hand - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[H3110l12345I20]

That, or if the rural regions (mostly in Asian Siberia) are the parts most affected by a nuke, the urban regions (mostly in European Russia) would be more able to respond and retaliate, whereas if the urban regions are the parts most affected by a nuke, the country as a whole would be more screwed over.
With rural regions being affected, factors would be how much of Russia's overall military is stationed there (which is probably less dense) and whether they have nuclear weapon launching/development facilities there (which is less likely unless they wanted secrecy).
With urban regions being affected, factors would also be how much of Russia's overall military is stationed there (which is probably more dense) and whether they have nuclear weapon launching/development facilities there (which is more likely since it would be easier to transport resources), IN ADDITION to how badly urban conditions and populations are affected as well as whether the government chain of command is damaged enough to fall apart or resilient enough to remain cohesive.
Though I do know they had plans for dead man's switches for nuclear weapon launching in the scenario that the government is destroyed.

Dead Hand - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So that further proves my position, even though it's somewhat debunked. Russia is more resisilient to attacks against nukes.

The US also has plans for a nuke war against Russia too.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

So that further proves my position, even though it's somewhat debunked. Russia is more resisilient to attacks against nukes.

The US also has plans for a nuke war against Russia too.

Well... toot, so both sides essentially had and still have plans to blow each other first either as a pre-emptive or retaliatory strike, AND USA was more thorough in estimating how many people would die from it.
Not sure which is more screwed up, Russia not bothering to consider the aftermath of their own partially autonomous system for launching nuclear weapons (whethe pre-emptive or retaliatory), or USA actually considering the true repercussions/ramifications of their own system for launching nuclear weapons (whethe pre-emptive or retaliatory), but deciding to go through with it anyway despite any objections.
But I guess, in the context of the scenario, it's essentially either a stalemate or a narrow victory for either side? (I'm not sure how many military bases around the world the modern superpowers have each, that might determine as well who is last standing)

 

[H3110l12345I20]

Well... toot, so both sides essentially had and still have plans to blow each other first either as a pre-emptive or retaliatory strike, AND USA was more thorough in estimating how many people would die from it.
Not sure which is more screwed up, Russia not bothering to consider the aftermath of their own partially autonomous system for launching nuclear weapons (whethe pre-emptive or retaliatory), or USA actually considering the true repercussions/ramifications of their own system for launching nuclear weapons (whethe pre-emptive or retaliatory), but deciding to go through with it anyway despite any objections.
But I guess, in the context of the scenario, it's essentially either a stalemate or a narrow victory for either side? (I'm not sure how many military bases around the world the modern superpowers have each, that might determine as well who is last standing)

The US has deployed military in at least 750 bases while Russia has at least 21 major bases.

Overall, Russia has more powerful nukes and resilience to them, and has more resources+land. The US has more bases since they're a superpower. Besides, can't Russia nuke an near by US bases though? I'm slightly favoring Russia since they're at an advantage with resources and nukes.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

The US has deployed military in at least 750 bases while Russia has at least 21 major bases.

Overall, Russia has more powerful nukes and resilience to them, and has more resources+land. The US has more bases since they're a superpower. Besides, can't Russia nuke an near by US bases though? I'm slightly favoring Russia since they're at an advantage with resources and nukes.

I would believe so, but at the same time USA might have a head start in first strike capabilities given the overwhelming advantage in base numbers and naval nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.... but again, yeah it probably depends on whether how easily and quickly they can counter each other's weapons (of which Russia has more, so if they deployed at the same time, Russia would have the advantage then) and where they would attack first (which is most likely each other's military bases and logistics or government headquarters to gain a tactical/strategic advantage, which is where USA has the advantage in military bases)

 

[H3110l12345I20]

I would believe so, but at the same time USA might have a head start in first strike capabilities given the overwhelming advantage in base numbers and naval nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.... but again, yeah it probably depends on whether how easily and quickly they can counter each other's weapons (of which Russia has more, so if they deployed at the same time, Russia would have the advantage then) and where they would attack first (which is most likely each other's military bases and logistics or government headquarters to gain a tactical/strategic advantage, which is where USA has the advantage in military bases)

the US' tech should be superior and should be capable of countering Russia' nukes more quickly.

 

[H3110l12345I20]

bump

 

[H3110l12345I20]

bump

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

the US' tech should be superior and should be capable of countering Russia' nukes more quickly.

Debatable, while US tech and range of territorial and weapon placement areas is better than Russia's tech and range given that US has bases in more parts of the world than Russia and US may have the ability to set up better defence systems or set up such systems faster, Russia has shown considerable ability in cyberattack capabilities which could disrupt such systems, and since Russia has the longest range ICBM as of now (the Sarmat) and has historically proved capable of making 50 MT+ nukes (Tsar Bomba) (though US may be able to surpass that given their own projects on superweapons both in the past and present).... damn it's still up in the air, but I feel like US might hold back intentionally if we're counting public support and need for allies (or try harder to keep their WMDs confidential and stay within international law boundaries publicly) whereas Russia has less qualms about indiscriminately using WMDs or other harmful and illegal weapons

 

[H3110l12345I20]

Debatable, while US tech and range of territorial and weapon placement areas is better than Russia's tech and range given that US has bases in more parts of the world than Russia and US may have the ability to set up better defence systems or set up such systems faster, Russia has shown considerable ability in cyberattack capabilities which could disrupt such systems, and since Russia has the longest range ICBM as of now (the Sarmat) and has historically proved capable of making 50 MT+ nukes (Tsar Bomba) (though US may be able to surpass that given their own projects on superweapons both in the past and present).... damn it's still up in the air, but I feel like US might hold back intentionally if we're counting public support and need for allies (or try harder to keep their WMDs confidential and stay within international law boundaries publicly) whereas Russia has less qualms about indiscriminately using WMDs or other harmful and illegal weapons

Conquering by nukes and invasion lead to an incon since both the US and Russia have MAD if they use them on either side. Even if they didn't use them, both countries would have trouble invading each other due to their respective sizes and geography (Russia has its winter while the US is more isolated geographically)

What about each country's likeliness to surrender via psychological warfare or fear? They're still nations run by and have populations of humans.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

Conquering by nukes and invasion lead to an incon since both the US and Russia have MAD if they use them on either side. Even if they didn't use them, both countries would have trouble invading each other due to their respective sizes and geography (Russia has its winter while the US is more isolated geographically)

What about each country's likeliness to surrender via psychological warfare or fear? They're still nations run by and have populations of humans.

Considering their past conflicts, both direct and proxy... I'd guess any attempt at escalation to potential MAD via nukes by US would lead to US's own civilian population protesting, but not too sure about Russia (I have not seen anyone protest about Russia's proxy wars or annexations from within Russia publicly, but maybe I just did not look that much into it). I agree with your point about MAD and invasion issues though. (Also, does incon mean inconclusive in this context?)

 

[H3110l12345I20]

Considering their past conflicts, both direct and proxy... I'd guess any attempt at escalation to potential MAD via nukes by US would lead to US's own civilian population protesting, but not too sure about Russia (I have not seen anyone protest about Russia's proxy wars or annexations from within Russia publicly, but maybe I just did not look that much into it). I agree with your point about MAD and invasion issues though. (Also, does incon mean inconclusive in this context?)

1: Russia would have no restrictions doing a MAD. and the US would do the same thing if Russia did it first.

2:Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, we should take note of that here.

3: ? Incon is short for inconclusive. I think you haven't been in the official vs threads "bubble" for very long. I thought you'd have at least some knowledge of battle boarding slang by now

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

1: Russia would have no restrictions doing a MAD. and the US would do the same thing if Russia did it first.

2:Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, we should take note of that here.

3: ? Incon is short for inconclusive. I think you haven't been in the official vs threads "bubble" for very long. I thought you'd have at least some knowledge of battle boarding slang by now

Yeah I acknowledge and agree with 1 and 2, for 2 I said that personally my knowledge about the Russian civilian population's views on Russia's conflicts both past and present is limited, and I also personally am not sure if they even publicise it, so of course we would either need to look into this deeper by ourselves or ask for educated input from other people/parties.

As for 3, yeah sorry I was not fully sure about it because incon also seemed like "inconsistent" (I could guess you meant "inconclusive" given the context, but yeah "inconsistent" and "inconclusive" made it seem ambiguous, so I wanted to double check/clarify, sorry).

VS Battles Glossary

This page will focus on providing some insight about commonly used terms here on the Vs Battles Wiki and on the external Vs Battles Wiki Forum. While some of these terms are exclusive to our platform, you may see some of these terms being used in other community-based discussion forums.

vsbattles.fandom.com

might need more expansion as to common contractions/abbreviations and acronyms/initials for battleboarding and VSBW-specific terminology and slang again oof

 

[H3110l12345I20]

What about each country's likeliness to surrender via psychological warfare or fear? They're still nations run by and have populations of humans.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

What about each country's likeliness to surrender via psychological warfare or fear? They're still nations run by and have populations of humans.

I'd guess any attempt at escalation to potential MAD via nukes by US would lead to US's own civilian population protesting, but not too sure about Russia

If we're giving possible answers/outcomes, US, being a democracy, is more likely to back down if public disapproval is too high or approval is too low, whereas Russia is less likely to, so... possible overall Russian victory if MAD threats cause USA to back down, otherwise overall stalemate via MAD between USA and Russia, or possible overall USA victory via limited conventional warfare with Russia considering that USA's logistics are far better than Russia's logistics even with the cyberattacks taken into account, on account of how NATO is helping Ukraine hold off Russia in the ongoing conflict which is currently limited conventional warfare.

 

[H3110l12345I20]

If we're giving possible answers/outcomes, US, being a democracy, is more likely to back down if public disapproval is too high or approval is too low, whereas Russia is less likely to, so... possible overall Russian victory if MAD threats cause USA to back down, otherwise overall stalemate via MAD between USA and Russia, or possible overall USA victory via limited conventional warfare with Russia considering that USA's logistics are far better than Russia's logistics even with the cyberattacks taken into account, on account of how NATO is helping Ukraine hold off Russia in the ongoing conflict which is currently limited conventional warfare.

We go off that Russia will win the battle royale based off of this reasoning I presume?

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

We go off that Russia will win the battle royale based off of this reasoning I presume?

Ehh, yeah, most likely outcome is Russia in this scenario.

The title says it all but we're gonna need to set the conditions:
All empires start at their historical peak in size and population, using the world of today as their battlefield (Overlapping territories unilaterally go to the smaller empire/smallest empires between the overlapping parties so the biggest empires do not automatically and outright stomp the smallest empires).
All empires are not bound by any codes of conduct, and can choose to do whatever they want to their fellow empires.
There is only one win condition: All other empires must surrender or be fully defeated and conquered by the winning empire.
And when I say all empires I mean ALL REAL WORLD HISTORICAL empires (at least as listed in Wikipedia)

List of largest empires - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I could have probably added the extra condition of all empires being automatically shifted to the modern age so therefore having full access to modern technology and knowledge on how to use them but given the territorial concession condition and amount of resources that superpowers today have (including ones that regained land from their old colonial masters), I still think Russia and USA would end up being the victors/last standing here due to having ample experience with past military tactics AND modern technology as well as the large arsenals of WMDs they have so welp.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

We go off that Russia will win the battle royale based off of this reasoning I presume?

So... what do we do with this thread...?
Do we close it? (We're gonna need to call staff again welp)

 

[H3110l12345I20]

So... what do we do with this thread...?
Do we close it? (We're gonna need to call staff again welp)

We continue debating for a winner, then we either abandon the thread, or summon staff to close it.

 

[Mahek_The_Assassin_Silent_Killer]

We continue debating for a winner, then we either abandon the thread, or summon staff to close it.

I have nothing more to add though :|
I think we can basically settle on Russia winning given the larger arsenal and the lower likelihood of heeding public and international backlash so... I guess I can ask Bambu to help close the thread? (I'd rather not leave it open since I'm not sure who else is gonna comment here and I'd rather not risk having alerts from here for no important reason since the main topic is answered already.)

 

[H3110l12345I20]

I have nothing more to add though :|
I think we can basically settle on Russia winning given the larger arsenal and the lower likelihood of heeding public and international backlash so... I guess I can ask Bambu to help close the thread? (I'd rather not leave it open since I'm not sure who else is gonna comment here and I'd rather not risk having alerts from here for no important reason since the main topic is answered already.)

Yes. close the thread