A lot of conventional weapons had and have since done massively more damage than the two nukes used in WWII. just a lot of junk sci-fi in the interceding years to make them out like this “will make Fallout Video Game” world if used once or twice.
The whole idea of the Cold War mutually assured distruction is that if one entity fires a nuke, everyone else fires all the nukes (which WOULD destroy the current biosphere without a doubt).
In the magical realm of one singular nuclear weapon being used, and in the aftermath cooler heads prevailing, the damage and loss of life would be not much more than your average IDF Monday Morning Rape and Pillage Fest.
The 5 world owners and their retainers will continue to eat human children meat before dissolving their corpses in acid and then complaining no one likes their great ideas on their personally owned social media platforms.
Big pickup truck drivers will continue to ride everyone’s ass while slurping their giant Dunkin coffee and posting instagram videos about the woke while traveling to their job to not make any money to cover the cost of their big truck and ball cap and sunglasses and frustrations about the slutty daughter/son they’re mad they can’t fuck.
Everyone else will scramble in their own way to go to the place to make the money that doesn’t cover the cost of traveling to the place to make the money while slowly melting into atomic scrap.
One or two people might be snarky on Bluesky that the T’s orange line is running shuttle service between oak grove and north station as the sky burns.
One singulary stupid, sad, scared and ultimately brain-dead New American (neé New Mexican) will say to himself “At least I warned my brother about the FEMA SUPER HIGHWAY Obama was planning to (and totally successfully) build to disappear dissidents back in 2010! I Always had his back!”
The entire habitable world will perish probably within a month.
I left Reddit and ran a script that was supposed to remove all my posts (don’t know if it worked or not).
It was ironic as it happened literally a week after I had bought the premium version of Apollo because I had used it for years and figured I’d finally throw the dev some money. He offered refunds to people but I declined.
Never felt guilty relying on my parents becuase I didn’t choose to exist. Definitely felt pissed they didn’t help me out. Just kinda floundered up till now. Get a job, look for a better one, look for a better one, don’t get or cause pregnant until it makes sense (it doesn’t ever need to be the goal). Accept you will never be above the water line because 10 assholes own all the worlds’ money.
Gibson talks about this in his prologue, and other anachronisms in Neuromancer (specifically his lack of imagination regarding phones)—he was envisioning the dull grey of a dead tv signal of his childhood, not the crazy black and white static of the late 20th and early 21st century; but the sentiment tracks even though he probably wasn’t event thinking that about any of the implications, given his displeasure of even being lumped in with cyberpunk as a genre (which I think is really confoundedly stupid on his part).
A lot of conventional weapons had and have since done massively more damage than the two nukes used in WWII. just a lot of junk sci-fi in the interceding years to make them out like this “will make Fallout Video Game” world if used once or twice.
The whole idea of the Cold War mutually assured distruction is that if one entity fires a nuke, everyone else fires all the nukes (which WOULD destroy the current biosphere without a doubt).
In the magical realm of one singular nuclear weapon being used, and in the aftermath cooler heads prevailing, the damage and loss of life would be not much more than your average IDF Monday Morning Rape and Pillage Fest.