the biggest threat to civlization, is not global warming. it is not even limited nuclear war. it is an all out war where nuclear power plants are all attacked with the deliberate goal of creating nuclear disasters in countries that are vulnerable by virtue of possession of these ticking time bombs.

in particular, those nations with the most nuclear power plants are most vulnerable to this attack.
all the fail safes and shielding and bunkering won't work at all. it just won't. our systems are too complex and interdependent. all older nuclear plants,and in particular all plants with large fuel pools for cooling large amounts of waste, are simply the largest ticking time bombs in the world and thus primary targets for attack in a major war.

the reason this is the only real and major threat to civlization is that if you took a nuclear bomb and used it to directly explode a set of cooling pools storing large amounts of 'spent fuel' , you would wind up aersolizing ungodly amounts of radioactive matter. and this would irradiate the planet. the oceans, the surface, the air, pretty much all of it.

nuclear weapons aren't even really that bad. it is the vast quantities of radionisotopes released by aerosolizing entire fuel pools. orders of magnitutde more massive than the small dozens of kilograms found in each of thousands of nucleear weapons in the entire world of nations nuclear stockpiles.

the waste is the weaponized threat to humanity; a ticking time bomb set of targets.

if you want to look at the obvious and interesting points about this.....you need to examine nuclear plant density relative to population density. also, you can do all the research you want on hardening of nuclear power plants, but none of them are going to withstand repeated attack by bunker busting bombs or nuclear weapons. they might not even withstand far lesser attacks.

france is essentially a county waiting for near total irradiation.

the eastern seabord of the united states is going to be a zombie land.

but more than this.........the irradiation will spread globally. the nuclear winter will not be a winter, it will simply be fukushima x the entire planet .

there will be no opportunity to encase all of these bombed reactors in concrete like chernobyl. chernobyl was a great example of success in containing radiation. fukushima is the pardimatic example of what awaits humanity. a open gash on the planet's civilization sustaining activity that cannot be closed.

now------consider that germany is phasing out the very last of their power plants ( an interesting political choice by the greens and pacifists who seem to ignore the strategic value of having a cover for producing one's own enriched weapons grade uranium).

the great irony here is that due to political concerns most nations that want nuclear weapons will pursue nuclear power as a cover for it.

the truth is that it is far safer to simply and openly pursue nuclear weapons directly, but suffer the consequences of political embarrassment, than take the suicidal path that will be realized through the next world war, which is not totally guaranteed but more than likely.

it is remarkable how few people consider this scenario at all , let alone, with seriousness . it is a major possible outcome of a major nuclear war that could happen at any time.

the ONLY long term strategy for countries that want to aggressively pursue nuclear war and become dominant superpowers will and capable to engage in massively destructive full scale war, ---is to moth ball fission style plutonium nuclear reactors as they currently exist and to deal with the massive nuclear waste problem.

i am not scared of the u.s. or russia engaging in nuclear war because i believe the generals are rational enough to understand this threat, and would solve this problem before taking practical steps towards engaging in a real doomsday scenario. that said, perhaps i give them too much credit, and the existing nuclear infrastructure really isn't indicative of the lack of seriousness and dedication of the u.s or russian militaries for engaging in real nuclear war against one another..........