Egy atomháború kipusztítaná az emberiséget?

Is. Az emberiséget IS. És még számtalan egyéb fajt IS.

Persze függ attól is hogy mennyi sugárszennyezés érné a Földet, milyen bombákat robbantanának (vagyis mennyi a sugárzó anyag felezési ideje), sikerülne-e az emberek egy részét óvóhelyekre menekíteni, ott kitartana-e az élelem, a víz és a levegő addig, míg kijöhetnek az óvóhelyről, maradna-e túlélő növényzet, állatok, amelyeket (akár sugármentesítés után) elfogyaszthatnának, stb, stb...

Vagyis itt annyi feltétel és kétséges kimenetelű kérdés van, hogy gyakorlatilag inkább NEM a válasz...

De az alacsonyabb rendű élőlények egy része egész jól védett a sugárzás ellen. Példának szokták hozni, hogy a rovarok jó része nagy valószínűséggel túlélne egy olyan sugárszennyezettséget, ami az emlősöket gyakorlatilag néhány nap alatt alpusztítaná. Tehát az atomháború utáni legfejlettebb faj a csótány lenne. :-D

Kis olvasnivaló:

[link]

Az ide tartozó lények az utolsó bekezdés (idemásoltam), de azért a többi is érdekes.

'Overkill: the ability to exterminate a population more than once. "Both the US and the Soviet Union now possess nuclear stockpiles large enough to exterminate mankind three or four - some say ten - times over" (Philip Noel-Baker, Nobel Peace Prize winner, 1971) .'[49]

Many people believe that the capacity of nuclear weapons for 'overkill' means that all or most of the people on earth would die in a major nuclear war. In spite of the prevalence of this idea, there is little scientific evidence to support it.

Many calculations of 'overkill' appear to be made using the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a baseline. Estimates of the number of people killed at Hiroshima from a 13kt bomb range from 63,000 to over 200,000. Adopting a figure of 130,000 for illustrative purposes gives ten people killed for each tonne of nuclear explosive. By linear extrapolation, explosion of a third of a million times as much explosive power, 4000Mt, would kill a third of a million times as many people, namely 40,000 million, or nearly ten times the present world population.

But this factor of ten is misleading, since linear extrapolation does not apply. Suppose the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been 1000 times as powerful, 13Mt. It could not have killed 1000 times as many people, but at most the entire population of Hiroshima perhaps 250,000. Re-doing the 'overkill' calculation using these figures gives not a figure of ten but of only 0.02. This example shows that crude linear extrapolations of this sort are unlikely to provide any useful information about the effects of nuclear war.

'Overkill' can be meaningful if applied to specific targets which will be attacked by several nuclear weapons.[50] But applied to the entire world population the concept of 'overkill' is misleading. By the same logic it might be said that there is enough water in the oceans to drown everyone ten times.

It has been argued[51] that if the megatonnage in nuclear arsenals were increased by ten or 100 times and used in war, the fallout would be sufficient to threaten the life of most people on earth. Since total megatonnage has been decreasing in recent years, this particular possibility remains hypothetical, at least at the moment.