All that said, you are absolutely right about "spoils". No one is gonna be thinking about "spoils". Probably top of everyone's list of questions will be, "How many warheads are left? And what remnants of NATO or Russia control them?"
We're talking about two groups who would have conclusively shown they are perfectly willing to use their nuclear arsenals to achieve their goals. That, combined with the fact that their goals would become a whole lot less lofty overnight makes me think the world would become a very precarious place.
Nobody is gonna be in a situation to reassert control.
During the cold war, there was a widespread theory that an all-out nuclear war would produce a similar effect; there are, after all, a great many warheads out there. So it was theorised that even countries that didn't participate in a nuclear war would end up with crop failures and mass starvation. The so-called "nuclear winter" or "nuclear holocaust".
Thankfully this theory has not yet been put to the test.
for that matter they're not going to be able to supply much relief effort, either. hopefully they'll pick a side - India or China - and ride out the eventual hegemonic war between those 2.
Also, there is a chance that in the event of a full-blown nuclear exchange Russian leadership would see the showdown as fundamentally civilisational, and seek to take Australia down simply because it is unambiguously an outpost of Anglo-American culture.
2.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoal_Bay_Receiving_Station - Brrzzt!
3.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Defence_Satellite_C... - Sparkle!
when you have 30 000 warheads you might as well sprinkle them around for all allies of NATO for good measure. When you are doing a nuclear exchange that's the strategy anyway.
Maybe the Australians wouldn't allow that?
I guess I always assumed they would. Kind of like North Korea with Russian warships. I don't think we could take the chance that the Russian naval assets harbored in N Korea were harmless. Likewise, I'm assuming Russia wouldn't be able to make the assumption that American warships harbored in Australia were harmless.
I don't know? Maybe everyone's naval ships just surrender or something? I doubt it though. Your nation being destroyed is, in my mind, more reason to fight in those circumstances, not less.
