I'm not one to promote stuffing the genie back into the bottle. Nukes are a part of reality and we must deal with them.
Well, lets at least compare our facts, shall we?
By 1981, USA had 4,000 planes capable of delivering a nuclear bomb. Russia had 5000.
USA defence spending for 1981 = 178 billion dollars. By 1986, it was 367 billion dollars.
By 1986, it is estimated that throughout the world there were 40,000 nuclear warheads - the equivalent of one million Hiroshima bombs.
British Intelligence estimated that just one medium sized H-bomb on London would essentially destroy anything living up to 30 miles away.
The Nuclear Arms Race
Your facts and conclusions are filled with errors.
Globally there are now approximately 23,000 nuclear warheads.
(Upated as of October 2009)
Russia 13,000
United States 9,400
France 300
China 240
United Kingdom 185
Israel 80
Pakistan 70-90
India 60-80
North Korea <10
Estimated Total: 23,375
This total is from the Federation of American Scientists source:
Federation of American Scientists :: Status of World Nuclear Forces
(FAS data is from the Nuclear Notebook in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
and the nuclear appendix in the SIPRI Yearbook.)
How many nuclear weapons are there in the world?
Many are "tactical grade" .... less than 50kt.
Many are not "operational"... not ready to go. Experts have estimated that the former USSR's nuke missle arsenal would have experienced a 30% or higher failure rate if launched. Maintaining a nuke warhead is difficult and relatively expensive and requires experts.
Most modern "strategic nukes" are less than 300kt yield.
Info on a 100kt warhead:
The W76 is a United States thermonuclear warhead. It was manufactured from 1978-1987, and is still in service as of 2009.
The W-76 is carried inside a Mk-4 re-entry vehicle. U.S. Trident I and Trident II Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles may carry W76 warheads as one warhead option, along with W88 warheads in the Trident II.
The dimensions of the W76 and Mk-4 reentry vehicle which carries it are not known; only the warhead's weight of 362 pounds (164 kg) has been disclosed.
The W76 has a yield of 100 kilotons.
The upgraded W76-1/Mk4A will be used in both American and British submarines.
Extensions to the service lives for 800 of the warheads was approved by the US government in 2000, then later increased to 2,000. The project is scheduled for completion in 2018.
The warhead is currently the most numerous weapon in the US nuclear arsenal
200kt is also a common yield. Let's look at the effects of a 200kt warhead...
The heavy-damage radius is 2.4 miles... this doesn't mean everyone within 2.4 miles is a goner, but lets take that as a rough "circle of destruction".
How many of these would be required to totally destroy Britain?
Britain's area is 88,744 square miles.
One 200kt nuke, with a heavy damage radius of 2.4 miles, has an area of "destruction" of a=pi(r-squared) about 18 square miles.
It would take 88,744 / 18 = 4,930.... that is
4,930 typical strategic nukes to more-or-less totally destroy all of Britain... a large chunk of the world's nukes.
BTW.... most attacks on civilian targets are air-bursts, which typically do not produce much if any fallout.
To destroy the world, whose land surface area is 148,900,000 sq km, compared to bomb destruction area (in km2) of 50 sq km... would require 2,978,000 median-heavy nuclear bombs.
Two million, nine-hundred seventy eight thousand, bombs. We are not anywhere near that number.
Now, people will bring up radiation and fallout and "nuclear winter" and claim it would only take a much smaller number of nukes to eradicate all life on earth. Nonsense. Airbursts do not produce much if any radioactive fallout, and immediate dosage is only of concern to those who are line-of-sight to the blast and moderately close. "Nuclear winter".... well the whole topic is highly debateable and probably would NOT be the end of humanity by any means, especially since airbursts would not be a major factor, but conventional wisdom used to be that 3,000 megatons of nukes could MAYBE cause "nuclear winter"... that would be at least 15,000 of the strategic bombs we're talking about... if there even are that many of strategic yield, and if they are operational as many are not, it is hard to imagine even the worst nuclear exchange using that many warheads.
So there ya have it.... facts.