To be fair, radiation is honestly largely irrelevant on the global scale. The nature of physics means the more radioactive the shorter lived. Cancer in your 60s yes, dying of radiation poisoning no, at least at a global scale. The actual killer remains collapse of gobal logistics and fertilizer.

Most of the world by population would see the primary impact in loss of Western fertilizer, requiring either rationing and expanding new sources, or falling back to the population supported by alternative fertilizers.
Horrific yes, but end of civilization no.

I mean, a lot of entre nations would come through it with the major impact being a single bad harvest and some refugees. Which means civilization would largely survive and rebuild.

There were models decades ago that claimed a prolonged major nuclear winter was possible based on the idea that the secondary firestorms could carry dust into the upper atmosphere where it could linger, but better climate models and real world observations conclusively disproved it.

Except even at the height of the cold war we had nowhere near the yield to end human civilization. Destroy a bunch of western nations and kill billions of people through famine yes, make the world uninhabitable no.

www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-lef...

"There is no republican caused atrocity so horrific that numbskulls will not immediately and loudly blame the democrats (for whom many were too morally pure to vote) for not preventing it."

whereofonecanspeak.com/2023/03/02/y...

The difference is, we the audience only see this after that war has ended, a new armistice line has been drawn in the sand, but while the smaller power is happy to give up some of its land for an offical boarder, the Federation settlers don’t want to give their inch for peace.

To me at least, while not a true allegory, this feels a lot more like Israeli settlers going into some desert the Palestinians don’t have the water to farm, building a neighborhood, then saying look at what we’ve done with this “barren” land, our military must now fight a long war to hold it

Counter argument, the fact that both sides gave up systems and we’re told they knew the systems were disputed before they arrived indicates that they saw the Cardasian colonies and went past them, which does change the context of Starfleet deciding it no longer wants to fight a war to maintain them

That being said, for all I love DS9, when it comes to the Maquis and settler colonialism it really seems like they decided to pull the punch at the last moment. The hero’s oppose them, but are never allowed to really articulate why.

The Maquis are interesting because between being told that they knew the area was contested before settling and both sides giving up settlements to make straight boarders, it seems like the Federation was trying to pull a West Bank, but then chickened out after it took a major war to hold on to them

To be fair as an Olympia resident, it would require either rerouting Cascades to add a not insignificant reverseing detour, a rail shuttle, or termanating a service like the Sounder (which they really should do).

in fairness I think that debate takes a backseat to the most pressing one we face, which is "who was president in 2020?"

Also we did have a long-standing set way to bail out farmers in the first Trump admin, it was called USAID. A lot of the less online and polically savy people didn’t expect Trump II to be and different than Trump I.

The question is did they choose to nuke their own business, or like most statistics and anadotes around farmers ConAgra employees (who are all at will and have to respond like the boss says they should) and the family of some multimillionaires with media ties make up the bulk of “farmers”.

Counterpoint, the small family owned farms the industry likes to market only make up 14% of the industry. The large corporate farms who with media contacts knew exactly what they wanted when they lobbied for Trump, and that was a few bad years to remove anyone without billions in the war chest.

Everybody got their "Shooter Demographic BINGO" cards ready?