Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
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The v1/v2 canon attack wasn't large enough.
Aside from hotspots created via runoff, fallout would be well attenuated to safe levels in most areas by 2001 from Nov/Dec 1997 nuclear strikes. Using the 7/10 rule (every 7-fold factor in time results in a 10-fold reduction in radioactivity), if an area was in a 3000 rem/hr fallout region (which is intense fallout), after 7 hours it would be 300 rem/hr, 49 hours, 30 rem/hr, 14 days, 3 rem/hr, 100 days, 0.3 rem/hr, and 2 years, 0.03 rem/hr. At 0.03 rem/hr, you are looking at 1 month of unshielded exposure to accumulate 1 rem.
This is an exaggerated fallout map (in that I modeled airbursts creating fallout) for the T2K target list in North America:
The burgundy red is basically the 3000 rem footprint, the red the 1000 rem footprint, and the light red the 100 rem footprint.
Now, if the attack followed NAPB-90, you would get a dramatically different result:
(I didn't model fallout for this yet, but use your imagination, most of those black dots are ground bursts).
So anyway, timeline bit.
Immediate T2K attack kills around ~9 million + maybe another 9 million die from injuries & fallout over the next 60 days, so around 8% of the population. That means most of the population of the country is still alive, largely unemployed and unproductive, and needs food.
You have 12-18 months worth of grain on hand, but...you also have a world war, and some of that grain would likely be sent overseas to help keep our allies from starving.
But technically you have enough food stored on hand to see you through 2 more harvests, so it's a distribution problem. It's too bad the national transportation network completely collapses around August 1998, which forces the mass urban exodus in search of food. IMHO, this is when the real die off should occur. The North East, for example, produces about 1 calorie in food output for every 10 calories consumed. Ergo, a 80-90% die off is not hard to imagine or justify.
Rolling into 1999, farmers in the Midwest suffer from a lack of fuel, which means little to no mechanization for planting or harvesting. So, in 1997 a single farmer might be able to plant and harvest 2000 acres with a combine. In 1999, that farmer would be able to plant and harvest ~3 acres by hand, maybe as many as 40 acres with draft animals, and more than that if they had farm hand labor.
So you go from 1 farmer feeding >10,000 people to 1 farmer feeding 9 people (low side) to ~100 people (high side, with draft animals). Factor of 2 decrease in productivity. Actually, net fed amount would be less because instead of buying seed, you would need to hold grain back for seeding (and with declining yields, about 20% of your harvest would need to be retained for next year's seeding).
Starting in fall 1998, transportation/distribution grid collapses, country falls into widespread disorder (especially urban areas), and civil government collapses leaving the military in control.
The country as a whole would need a whole lot more farmers to feed itself than it did in 1997. Luckily, you have a lot more unemployed labor to be farmers. Unluckily, as said above, your transportation grid collapses, and you probably don't have a way to get seeds to all those would be farmers.
Hunting, well, most game animals would be hunted to near extinction in a few months. There would be very little game by 2000. Similar problem with animal agriculture - it's an industrial process; most places that raise animals don't have the pasture to raise their animals to maturity - they depend on other farms / pastures for that. So, 1998 = a large cull of animals. Meatpacking is geographically concentrated in the Midwest, and loss of refrigeration = no way to queue up processing backlog, and most of the animal protein would be wasted and never go to feeding anything but buzzards and crows.
There's your 2000-2001 famine in a nutshell, no drought needed really (never mind the fact that the US basically has 3 independent, reliable large scale continental patterns that deliver water for agriculture vs. most other regions have 0-1, so a continental drought affecting North America is not really a very realistic scenario).