The counterforce itself causes extinction---it’s no different from all-out nuclear war.

The deeper problem with Kroenig’s analysis arises in cases of very large attacks of different sizes. Once the United States suffers tens of nuclear explosions against major cities and critical logistical hubs, and certainly once it suffers hundreds, the differences in outcomes that are implied by differences in the size of the attacks are likely to be illusory. 7 In large part this is because a standard “cookie-cutter” model that estimates the number of people killed promptly by the blast of a nuclear explosion almost certainly severely underestimates the impact of a large nuclear attack. 8 Estimating the number killed by fire and fallout would raise the numbers. Likely more important, however, is the possibility, even likelihood, of societal collapse. Highly integrated modern economies may lack the ability to recover from large nuclear attacks. A nuclear attack that destroyed the United States’ key energy systems, communication and information systems, major ports and other transportation nodes—in addition to immediately killing many tens of millions of people and the cities they live in—could lead to economic and social collapse. 9 In this case, a still larger nuclear attack would not cause significantly greater damage; difference in force size should not then matter for damage and, in turn, bargaining.

There are other possibilities that could reduce or eliminate the difference in damage between large and even larger nuclear attacks. A nuclear-winter type environmental catastrophe would have this effect. Kroenig argues that the early claims about nuclear winter were overstated and therefore that his measures of damage remain adequate (43-44). But current research still finds that the cooling effects of a large nuclear war could greatly increase the number of deaths resulting from a large nuclear attack, and that “modern climate models not only show that the nuclear winter theory is correct, but also that the effects would last for more than a decade.”10 In addition, even if more people would survive a large nuclear attack than a still larger one, we need to consider the quality of life of the surviving. These millions of survivors could be fated to lives of misery, famine, and disease, struggling for mere survival in a “smoking radiating ruin.”11 Saving those lives would have value, but far less than is implied by simply comparing the difference in survivors for large attacks. For all of these reasons—including the failure to address the possibility of societal collapse, of environmental catastrophe, and of exceedingly poor quality of life following massive nuclear war—Kroenig’s measures of the damage from large nuclear attacks are inadequate and exaggerate the difference in outcomes.