That doesn't apply here. Nuclear war & nuclear winter wouldn't necessarily be an extinction event. It would result in millions of deaths and a regression in quality of life for those who remain, but they most people would be alive and experience that possible universe.
We came uncomfortably close sometimes. Like the Russian submarine commander who defied his "party supervisor" when ordered to launch his nuclear weapons during the Cuban missile crises. It was not an isolated incident either. We've been lucky so far.
In the short period of time we have had access to nuclear weapons, we have come very close to nuclear war between superpowers:
* Cuban Missile Crisis - Vasili Arkhipov Prevents launching of nuclear torpedo while his Soviet submarine flotilla is being bombarded by depth charges (happened to be signaling depth charges). Turns out the US warships above them just wanted the submarines to surface so they could communicate the end of hostilities.
* Computer Malfunction - Stanislav Petrov Holds off alerting officials of multiple incoming nuclear ICBMs because he "suspected" they were a glitch, preventing a likely nuclear counter-attack.
* Science experiment looks like nuclear attack - Boris Yeltsin correctly decides to wait launching a counter-attack based on an incoming rocket. All the while sitting in front of an activated nuclear briefcase and being pressured by aids to launch within the 12 minute response window. The rocket was meant for atmospheric testing.
There are many, many more.
Proliferation means more and more nation states have access to nuclear weapons. Balancing peace amongst all those nations can be difficult (look at India and Pakistan). Countries with existing nuclear stockpiles can undergo dramatic shifts in leadership and policy (US politics anyone?).
We also have 7.5+ billion people on the planet, consuming more resources than ever, on a planet with a finite amount of things.
Now throw in the further ramifications of climate change like political instability, infrastructure strain, resource scarcity, and refugee migrations into the mix. Or a truly mad guy with a nuke.
There are way too many people out there that are crazy optimistic that we aren't going to have a nuclear war...ever. We have always had warfare, and when the shit hits the fan, armies have always used the biggest weapons they have had.
Nuclear weapons may very well be our great filter.
We haven't had a global pandemic in over 100 years and yet here we are.
Countries have nuclear weapons and the global community has to get it right every single day to avoid nuclear war.
I'm hoping it doesn't happen, but the lack of precedent doesn't mean nuclear war cannot happen. If we needed precedent for something to occur, we never would have a "first" of anything, and history is littered with firsts.
But here's hoping. Did I mention I'm great at parties?
> In the short period of time we have had access to nuclear weapons, we have come very close to nuclear war between superpowers:
And yet virtually every scenario is resolved in the same way: there's no reason that the other side would declare a surprise nuclear war, so the evidence I have of this fact is probably misinterpreted. That's not exactly luck, but people interpreting (and making) policy rationally. Which is why irrational political leaders are so god-damn terrifying.
If you're an optimist, there is the view that neither side of the Cold War wanted to die. Excluding the truly religious people who believe that dying and going to heaven is better than being alive, most people want to avoid their own deaths. When politicians believed they could send soldiers off to kill without risking their own lives, they started wars. But since ICBMs meant than starting a ground war against a nuclear power put the leaders at risk, the leaders chose relative peace and deescalated when possible.
If it had happened we wouldn't be here. This is one thing that takes me an inch closer to believing the quantum suicide hypothesis and maybe even higher powers. We rolled the dice so many times and they kept coming up 7 over and over again.
Huh, the fact that we have not discovered (or they discover us) any advanced civilizations or even evidence of any in our galaxy makes me believe it extremely likely that civilizations wipe themselves out before very long. Right now, Global Thermonuclear War and Climate Destruction top my list as likely causes.
"The biggest consequence of the nuclear-winter debate, though, has had to do not with nuclear-weapons policy but with the environmental movement. In the short term, the idea of a nuclear winter defeated the idea of deterrence. In the long term, Sagan’s haste and exuberance undermined environmental science. More important, the political campaign waged against nuclear winter—against science, and against the press—included erecting a set of structures, arguments, and institutions that have since been repurposed to challenge the science of global warming."
Ann Druyan, Sagan’s wife, responded to this article with the following:
> Lepore has done history and science, your readers, and my late husband, Carl Sagan, a great disservice. Her article’s central thesis demeans Carl’s scientific acumen and his character, wrongly asserting that, in his “grandiosity,” he harmed the environmental movement by advancing an exaggerated theory of the long-term consequences of nuclear war.
> From Lepore’s account, readers would conclude that Carl’s interest in the greenhouse effect on Venus was something that he picked up from a bright grad student. In fact, five years earlier, Carl had published his own dissertation, viewed as the beginning of our modern understanding of Venus, which included his groundbreaking greenhouse model.
> Lepore also gives the impression that the theory of nuclear winter has been debunked. If anything, more recent scientific research indicates that Carl and his colleagues were conservative in their estimates. Tellingly, she makes no reference to the findings—in peer-reviewed, refereed publications—that fully support, and expand on, the models created by Carl and the other nuclear-winter scientists.
> Carl is also faulted for “partisanship,” in part for declining an invitation to dine with the Reagans in the White House—a choice that I made, in response to the El Mozote massacre and other crimes in Central America for which I believed Reagan bore some responsibility. Does Lepore find those public figures and celebrities who refuse to be co-opted by the Trump White House to be partisan? Or is that an unwillingness to lend your cachet to policies that you abhor?
> According to Lepore, Sagan “made some poor decisions” and “undermined environmental science.” She leaves the reader to wonder what those bad decisions were. Fighting for the reduction of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons? Sounding the alarm on global warming decades before others started paying attention to it? Mounting the world’s most successful campaign for public scientific literacy? Attracting multitudes to science and reason? Turning the camera on Voyager 1, which was out by Neptune, to point homeward, to make us see our true circumstances in the vastness? What better decisions have other people made?
Same, well not winter, I assumed I'd die in initial strike living near major targets.
I, and many people of similar age I've talked with since, did not believe they would live into adulthood. Believing nuclear war was imminent and inevitable.
I as a teen in the 80s, I never believed nuclear war was inevitable, but it was a constant background fear. In the suburbs of Houston, any nighttime lightning-strike waking me up would trigger the thought: "was that a nuclear detonation over the city?"
Those seeking to learn more about the mindset could check out ABC's 'The Day After' miniseries (1983) or the movie 'Miracle Mile' (1988) – which I'd suggest viewing with no other pre-reading other than this recommendation.
The threat of nuclear war doesn't seem to occupy people's minds the way it used to. It tends to still scare me and keep me awake more than the threat of climate change (although both give me pretty regular existential crises).
There was even an earthquake where I live a few months ago (first I've experienced). It woke me up, and the first thing my mind thought was "nukes" for some reason (despite not living somewhere that would be a likely target). It only took a split second to realize what was really happening, but it was interesting that it was the first thing my mind went to.
By far the most terrifying movie I've seen on nuclear war has been Threads.
If you can find a good copy of it, watch it.
Also, many people these days act like the threat of nuclear war went away with the end of the Cold War. But the threat is still very real, and there are still thousands of nuclear weapons that the US and Russia continue to aim at each other, not to mention the rest of the world's nuclear powers, some of which have been at war with each other before and stand a good chance of going to war again.
> Also, many people these days act like the threat of nuclear war went away with the end of the Cold War
Lots of people seem to be convinced that MAD is a sufficient deterrent for nuclear war. Which may be true if your safeguards are perfect and your actors are always rational. But in reality, all it takes is a mistake or a madman to set off nuclear armageddon.
That was certainly true during the Cold War, with two implacably opposes factions that have no dependencies on each other and no real understanding of each other either. It was terrifying, and mistakes were made that brought us extremely close to catastrophe.
I think that less of an existential threat now. The works us a lot more interconnected and interdependent. What would Russia be without the west to export its oil and gas to? What would China be without foreign markets? We all need each other. Proliferation means the risk of nuclear terrorise or limited conflict us still significant, but not at the globe killing level we had 40 years ago. A limited or regional nuclear exchange would be catastrophic, but not species killing.
>> But in reality, all it takes is a mistake or a madman to set off nuclear armageddon.
> The works us a lot more interconnected and interdependent. What would Russia be without the west to export its oil and gas to? What would China be without foreign markets? We all need each other.
The argument was "all it takes is a mistake or a madman." Neither cares about the fact that "we all need each other."
If you worked anywhere in tech long enough, you should be aware how much unexpected errors are indeed possible even in "old and tested" workflows.
And some madman is always somewhere where "everybody thought he's so nice."
> A limited or regional nuclear exchange would be catastrophic, but not species killing.
Note: "species" and "civilization" aren't the same.
OK, what is the scenario where a single madman causes a complete simultaneous nuclear conflagration by the USA and USSR, the only countries with enough bombs to cause a global nuclear holocaust?
Russia and the USA have no interest in destroying each other. All the other nuclear powers are too small fry to cause more than regional damage.
There is certainly less of a threat. But imagine what a small fraction, say a few dozen thermonuclear bombs, a couple SLBM's worth, would do to major population centers and the economies they power. That and the after effects would be enough to call the continued viability of modern civilization into question.
Nuclear weapons remain the surest way to end civilization on this planet, and the chances of that happening are far higher than, for example, a meteor strike.
There have been so many accidents. Does anyone else remember when a satellite launch in the 90's from Scandinavia followed exactly the trajectory of a "blinding" shot to Russian radar and only their willingness to wait and see prevented retaliation?
If America was not a military empire, we could try downsizing our nuclear forces to a so called minimal deterrent of a few hundred nukes and then negotiate with other countries to progressively downsize. We won't though because nuclear diplomacy is how we convince other countries to submit. It's not outright threats, but the quiet knowledge that we could incinerate them if we wanted. Plans were laid for doing so during the Vietnam War. To our planners, the non-offensive use of nuclear weapons is not absolute like we would like to imagine it is. America still has a first strike policy.
Threads is a very good movie. Potential viewers should know that it's old and the special effects have not held up well, but it very much captures the terror of nuclear conflict quite well.
I had a high school teacher show us Threads during a breakout portion of 10th grade history where, for 9 weeks, you learned all about nuclear war. It has stuck with me my entire life. Somewhere about 2/3 of the way through the course we watched the film. It singlehandedly hammered into me what weeks of still imagery, theory, and historical facts could not.
What you learn most importantly from it is, while the initial hyper-violent effects of a proper nuclear war are so much more horrendous than anything humanity can imagine based on anything ever seen prior, it's the slowly diminishing quality of life that spirals out from it that reminds you of the futility and pointlessness of it all. When, ten years later, you see life is operating at medieval (or worse) levels, it's a truly crushing feeling.
The film is available on Amazon (for purchase only), I believe. Everyone should watch it, but I cannot emphasize enough that for some people it can be a real stressor. It has no happy ending.
>President Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening, on Columbus Day, October 10, 1983.[28] He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed,"[29][25] and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".[30] The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer's, told him "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."[citation needed] Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.
I went to several of Professor Brian Toon's presentations when I was a student at CU Boulder. The article briefly mentions his current research but if anyone is interested in the effect a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would have on the world, this is a sobering read: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191002144251.h...
> This article marked the public’s introduction to a concept that would drastically change the debate over nuclear war: “nuclear winter.” The story detailed the previously unexpected consequences of nuclear war: prolonged dust and smoke, a precipitous drop in Earth's temperatures and widespread failure of crops, leading to deadly famine. "In a nuclear 'exchange,' more than a billion people would instantly be killed,” read the cover. “But the long-term consequences could be much worse..."
> According to the article, it wouldn’t take both major nuclear powers firing all their weapons to create a nuclear winter. Even a smaller-scale war could destroy humanity as we know it.
What's the current consensus on the idea of a nuclear winter? I vaguely recall reading that the early papers like these overestimated the effects, and it would take a far larger nuclear exchange than has ever been possible to cause that kind of effect on the climate.
> According to the article, it wouldn’t take both major nuclear powers firing all their weapons to create a nuclear winter. Even a smaller-scale war could destroy humanity as we know it.
I'm skeptical of this; in the 20th century there were more than 500 atmospheric nuclear tests. Given that, it seems unlikely that a ""small"" nuclear war would necessarily cause such dramatic effects as humanity-destroying nuclear winter. This said, cities getting nuked would probably launch more soot into the atmosphere than the desert or ocean getting nuked, so... maybe?
But I think we should try to avoid finding out for sure. ;)
The theory is that the incineration of so many cities, and the subsequent firestorms would put vast amounts of smoke and particulates into the upper atmosphere. It’s this rather than the bombs themselves that has the main climatic effect. The fact that all these particulates would be radioactive is an extra dimension to it all.
> The theory is that the incineration of so many cities, and the subsequent firestorms would put vast amounts of smoke and particulates into the upper atmosphere. It’s this rather than the bombs themselves that has the main climatic effect. The fact that all these particulates would be radioactive is an extra dimension to it all.
Some later Googling of mine found some stuff about how the nuclear winter theorists's models made predictions that oil well fires would result in a small scale global winter, but the Kuwaiti oil files did not confirm that prediction.
> One of the major results of TTAPS' 1990 paper was the re-iteration of the team's 1983 model that 100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter.[109]...
> In articles printed in the Wilmington Morning Star and the Baltimore Sun newspapers in January 1991, prominent authors of nuclear winter papers – Richard P. Turco, John W. Birks, Carl Sagan, Alan Robock and Paul Crutzen – collectively stated that they expected catastrophic nuclear winter like effects with continental-sized effects of sub-freezing temperatures as a result of the Iraqis going through with their threats of igniting 300 to 500 pressurized oil wells that could subsequently burn for several months.[110][111][112]
> As threatened, the wells were set on fire by the retreating Iraqis in March 1991, and the 600 or so burning oil wells were not fully extinguished until November 6, 1991, eight months after the end of the war,[113] and they consumed an estimated six million barrels of oil per day at their peak intensity....
> The atmospheric scientist tasked with studying the atmospheric effect of the Kuwaiti fires by the National Science Foundation, Peter Hobbs, stated that the fires' modest impact suggested that "some numbers [used to support the Nuclear Winter hypothesis]... were probably a little overblown."[119]
> Hobbs found that at the peak of the fires, the smoke absorbed 75 to 80% of the sun's radiation. The particles rose to a maximum of 20,000 feet (6,100 m), and when combined with scavenging by clouds the smoke had a short residency time of a maximum of a few days in the atmosphere.[120][121]
> Pre-war claims of wide scale, long-lasting, and significant global environmental effects were thus not borne out, and found to be significantly exaggerated by the media and speculators,[122] with climate models by those not supporting the nuclear winter hypothesis at the time of the fires predicting only more localized effects such as a daytime temperature drop of ~10 °C within 200 km of the source.[123]
The current consensus of nuclear winter is probably summed up as "if nuclear weapons turns cities into giant stratospheric soot pumps, we're screwed; if they don't, we've just reversed global warming for a few years."
Looking for recent research, there seems to only be one group modelling nuclear winter scenarios, and those papers seem to be using the 1980s-era numbers for soot generation without commentary on how valid those assumptions are (other than to say that it's contentious) [1]. I don't see any papers directly discussing soot generation in relation to nuclear winter, and I suspect our large-scale fire modelling is not yet capable of answering the question of what the resulting fire from a nuclear warhead strike on NYC would look like.
I'm personally on the side that thinks the stratospheric injection of large-scale metropolitan fires is wildly overestimated (the Kuwaiti oil fires failing to reach that level being evidence of that point), which means that the risks of nuclear winter
[1] And the paper itself has a section on implications for nuclear policy, which sets off motivated-to-reach-a-conclusion research alarm bells for me.
I remember the ham-fisted "The Day After" miniseries when I was in highschool. It was the biggest TV event since the miniseries "Roots" in the late 70's (watch that and you'll never look at "Reading Rainbow" or Geordi La Forge the same way again). It was a super cheesy depiction of nuclear war and the days that follow.
I was too young for the "duck and cover" drills of the 50's, but my generation (X) knew that global thermonuclear war (heh) had no chance of survival.
Toward the end of the 80's and early 90's, fear of nuclear war tapered off after The Wall came down. In fact, Sagan was harassed by the GOP and Right-wing pundits for claiming that if Saddam burned the oil fields, we would experience a nuclear-winter around the equator.
The 80's were nuts tho: Reagan & Gorby's nuclear standoff was pretty fucking insane in hindsight: mutually assured destruction is in the DNA of the modern right-wing movement.
Jeez, even Sting wrote a #1 hit about it in 1985 using a melodic theme by Prokofiev.
This article should mention that the original conception of, & strongest warnings about, a global 'nuclear winter' effect haven't really held up with better models & better understanding of how ground fires/explosions might affect the upper atmosphere.
The answers here include a fair summary of the updated case against:
Except that the current consensus on nuclear winter hypothesis is that it was largely politically (as opposed to scientifically) motivated. So comparing it to climate change is rather controversial in its own regard.
The valid criticisms of the accuracy of these studies are missing the forest for the trees. A major exchange would utterly cripple the global economy, destroy much of our electrical generation and distribution infrastructure, along with our information storage and processing systems, and our manufacturing capability to rebuild it.
49 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadWhat is so effective preventing it?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KNtKKmcd9DsP7WuZ3/the-anthro...
In the short period of time we have had access to nuclear weapons, we have come very close to nuclear war between superpowers:
* Cuban Missile Crisis - Vasili Arkhipov Prevents launching of nuclear torpedo while his Soviet submarine flotilla is being bombarded by depth charges (happened to be signaling depth charges). Turns out the US warships above them just wanted the submarines to surface so they could communicate the end of hostilities.
* Computer Malfunction - Stanislav Petrov Holds off alerting officials of multiple incoming nuclear ICBMs because he "suspected" they were a glitch, preventing a likely nuclear counter-attack.
* Science experiment looks like nuclear attack - Boris Yeltsin correctly decides to wait launching a counter-attack based on an incoming rocket. All the while sitting in front of an activated nuclear briefcase and being pressured by aids to launch within the 12 minute response window. The rocket was meant for atmospheric testing.
There are many, many more.
Proliferation means more and more nation states have access to nuclear weapons. Balancing peace amongst all those nations can be difficult (look at India and Pakistan). Countries with existing nuclear stockpiles can undergo dramatic shifts in leadership and policy (US politics anyone?).
We also have 7.5+ billion people on the planet, consuming more resources than ever, on a planet with a finite amount of things.
Now throw in the further ramifications of climate change like political instability, infrastructure strain, resource scarcity, and refugee migrations into the mix. Or a truly mad guy with a nuke.
There are way too many people out there that are crazy optimistic that we aren't going to have a nuclear war...ever. We have always had warfare, and when the shit hits the fan, armies have always used the biggest weapons they have had.
Nuclear weapons may very well be our great filter.
But what is making me less inclined is the fact it didn't happen within the last ca. 70 years.
Countries have nuclear weapons and the global community has to get it right every single day to avoid nuclear war.
I'm hoping it doesn't happen, but the lack of precedent doesn't mean nuclear war cannot happen. If we needed precedent for something to occur, we never would have a "first" of anything, and history is littered with firsts.
But here's hoping. Did I mention I'm great at parties?
And yet virtually every scenario is resolved in the same way: there's no reason that the other side would declare a surprise nuclear war, so the evidence I have of this fact is probably misinterpreted. That's not exactly luck, but people interpreting (and making) policy rationally. Which is why irrational political leaders are so god-damn terrifying.
I mean, a depressed and suffering leader might care way less about a nuclear war...
Such an absurd situation.
"The biggest consequence of the nuclear-winter debate, though, has had to do not with nuclear-weapons policy but with the environmental movement. In the short term, the idea of a nuclear winter defeated the idea of deterrence. In the long term, Sagan’s haste and exuberance undermined environmental science. More important, the political campaign waged against nuclear winter—against science, and against the press—included erecting a set of structures, arguments, and institutions that have since been repurposed to challenge the science of global warming."
> Lepore has done history and science, your readers, and my late husband, Carl Sagan, a great disservice. Her article’s central thesis demeans Carl’s scientific acumen and his character, wrongly asserting that, in his “grandiosity,” he harmed the environmental movement by advancing an exaggerated theory of the long-term consequences of nuclear war.
> From Lepore’s account, readers would conclude that Carl’s interest in the greenhouse effect on Venus was something that he picked up from a bright grad student. In fact, five years earlier, Carl had published his own dissertation, viewed as the beginning of our modern understanding of Venus, which included his groundbreaking greenhouse model.
> Lepore also gives the impression that the theory of nuclear winter has been debunked. If anything, more recent scientific research indicates that Carl and his colleagues were conservative in their estimates. Tellingly, she makes no reference to the findings—in peer-reviewed, refereed publications—that fully support, and expand on, the models created by Carl and the other nuclear-winter scientists.
> Carl is also faulted for “partisanship,” in part for declining an invitation to dine with the Reagans in the White House—a choice that I made, in response to the El Mozote massacre and other crimes in Central America for which I believed Reagan bore some responsibility. Does Lepore find those public figures and celebrities who refuse to be co-opted by the Trump White House to be partisan? Or is that an unwillingness to lend your cachet to policies that you abhor?
> According to Lepore, Sagan “made some poor decisions” and “undermined environmental science.” She leaves the reader to wonder what those bad decisions were. Fighting for the reduction of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons? Sounding the alarm on global warming decades before others started paying attention to it? Mounting the world’s most successful campaign for public scientific literacy? Attracting multitudes to science and reason? Turning the camera on Voyager 1, which was out by Neptune, to point homeward, to make us see our true circumstances in the vastness? What better decisions have other people made?
> Ann Druyan
> Ithaca, N.Y.
—https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/letters-from-t...
I, and many people of similar age I've talked with since, did not believe they would live into adulthood. Believing nuclear war was imminent and inevitable.
Those seeking to learn more about the mindset could check out ABC's 'The Day After' miniseries (1983) or the movie 'Miracle Mile' (1988) – which I'd suggest viewing with no other pre-reading other than this recommendation.
There was even an earthquake where I live a few months ago (first I've experienced). It woke me up, and the first thing my mind thought was "nukes" for some reason (despite not living somewhere that would be a likely target). It only took a split second to realize what was really happening, but it was interesting that it was the first thing my mind went to.
If you can find a good copy of it, watch it.
Also, many people these days act like the threat of nuclear war went away with the end of the Cold War. But the threat is still very real, and there are still thousands of nuclear weapons that the US and Russia continue to aim at each other, not to mention the rest of the world's nuclear powers, some of which have been at war with each other before and stand a good chance of going to war again.
Lots of people seem to be convinced that MAD is a sufficient deterrent for nuclear war. Which may be true if your safeguards are perfect and your actors are always rational. But in reality, all it takes is a mistake or a madman to set off nuclear armageddon.
I think that less of an existential threat now. The works us a lot more interconnected and interdependent. What would Russia be without the west to export its oil and gas to? What would China be without foreign markets? We all need each other. Proliferation means the risk of nuclear terrorise or limited conflict us still significant, but not at the globe killing level we had 40 years ago. A limited or regional nuclear exchange would be catastrophic, but not species killing.
> The works us a lot more interconnected and interdependent. What would Russia be without the west to export its oil and gas to? What would China be without foreign markets? We all need each other.
The argument was "all it takes is a mistake or a madman." Neither cares about the fact that "we all need each other."
If you worked anywhere in tech long enough, you should be aware how much unexpected errors are indeed possible even in "old and tested" workflows.
And some madman is always somewhere where "everybody thought he's so nice."
> A limited or regional nuclear exchange would be catastrophic, but not species killing.
Note: "species" and "civilization" aren't the same.
Russia and the USA have no interest in destroying each other. All the other nuclear powers are too small fry to cause more than regional damage.
An actual nuclear war planner wrote a whole book about that:
"The Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner"
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-978160819...
P.S. USSR doesn't exist anymore.
Nuclear weapons remain the surest way to end civilization on this planet, and the chances of that happening are far higher than, for example, a meteor strike.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
If America was not a military empire, we could try downsizing our nuclear forces to a so called minimal deterrent of a few hundred nukes and then negotiate with other countries to progressively downsize. We won't though because nuclear diplomacy is how we convince other countries to submit. It's not outright threats, but the quiet knowledge that we could incinerate them if we wanted. Plans were laid for doing so during the Vietnam War. To our planners, the non-offensive use of nuclear weapons is not absolute like we would like to imagine it is. America still has a first strike policy.
What you learn most importantly from it is, while the initial hyper-violent effects of a proper nuclear war are so much more horrendous than anything humanity can imagine based on anything ever seen prior, it's the slowly diminishing quality of life that spirals out from it that reminds you of the futility and pointlessness of it all. When, ten years later, you see life is operating at medieval (or worse) levels, it's a truly crushing feeling.
The film is available on Amazon (for purchase only), I believe. Everyone should watch it, but I cannot emphasize enough that for some people it can be a real stressor. It has no happy ending.
Priorities, eh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...
>President Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening, on Columbus Day, October 10, 1983.[28] He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed,"[29][25] and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".[30] The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer's, told him "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."[citation needed] Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.
It's terrifying but highly informative.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/daniel-ellsberg-doom...
> According to the article, it wouldn’t take both major nuclear powers firing all their weapons to create a nuclear winter. Even a smaller-scale war could destroy humanity as we know it.
What's the current consensus on the idea of a nuclear winter? I vaguely recall reading that the early papers like these overestimated the effects, and it would take a far larger nuclear exchange than has ever been possible to cause that kind of effect on the climate.
I'm skeptical of this; in the 20th century there were more than 500 atmospheric nuclear tests. Given that, it seems unlikely that a ""small"" nuclear war would necessarily cause such dramatic effects as humanity-destroying nuclear winter. This said, cities getting nuked would probably launch more soot into the atmosphere than the desert or ocean getting nuked, so... maybe?
But I think we should try to avoid finding out for sure. ;)
Some later Googling of mine found some stuff about how the nuclear winter theorists's models made predictions that oil well fires would result in a small scale global winter, but the Kuwaiti oil files did not confirm that prediction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...:
> One of the major results of TTAPS' 1990 paper was the re-iteration of the team's 1983 model that 100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter.[109]...
> In articles printed in the Wilmington Morning Star and the Baltimore Sun newspapers in January 1991, prominent authors of nuclear winter papers – Richard P. Turco, John W. Birks, Carl Sagan, Alan Robock and Paul Crutzen – collectively stated that they expected catastrophic nuclear winter like effects with continental-sized effects of sub-freezing temperatures as a result of the Iraqis going through with their threats of igniting 300 to 500 pressurized oil wells that could subsequently burn for several months.[110][111][112]
> As threatened, the wells were set on fire by the retreating Iraqis in March 1991, and the 600 or so burning oil wells were not fully extinguished until November 6, 1991, eight months after the end of the war,[113] and they consumed an estimated six million barrels of oil per day at their peak intensity....
> The atmospheric scientist tasked with studying the atmospheric effect of the Kuwaiti fires by the National Science Foundation, Peter Hobbs, stated that the fires' modest impact suggested that "some numbers [used to support the Nuclear Winter hypothesis]... were probably a little overblown."[119]
> Hobbs found that at the peak of the fires, the smoke absorbed 75 to 80% of the sun's radiation. The particles rose to a maximum of 20,000 feet (6,100 m), and when combined with scavenging by clouds the smoke had a short residency time of a maximum of a few days in the atmosphere.[120][121]
> Pre-war claims of wide scale, long-lasting, and significant global environmental effects were thus not borne out, and found to be significantly exaggerated by the media and speculators,[122] with climate models by those not supporting the nuclear winter hypothesis at the time of the fires predicting only more localized effects such as a daytime temperature drop of ~10 °C within 200 km of the source.[123]
Looking for recent research, there seems to only be one group modelling nuclear winter scenarios, and those papers seem to be using the 1980s-era numbers for soot generation without commentary on how valid those assumptions are (other than to say that it's contentious) [1]. I don't see any papers directly discussing soot generation in relation to nuclear winter, and I suspect our large-scale fire modelling is not yet capable of answering the question of what the resulting fire from a nuclear warhead strike on NYC would look like.
I'm personally on the side that thinks the stratospheric injection of large-scale metropolitan fires is wildly overestimated (the Kuwaiti oil fires failing to reach that level being evidence of that point), which means that the risks of nuclear winter
[1] And the paper itself has a section on implications for nuclear policy, which sets off motivated-to-reach-a-conclusion research alarm bells for me.
I was too young for the "duck and cover" drills of the 50's, but my generation (X) knew that global thermonuclear war (heh) had no chance of survival.
Toward the end of the 80's and early 90's, fear of nuclear war tapered off after The Wall came down. In fact, Sagan was harassed by the GOP and Right-wing pundits for claiming that if Saddam burned the oil fields, we would experience a nuclear-winter around the equator.
The 80's were nuts tho: Reagan & Gorby's nuclear standoff was pretty fucking insane in hindsight: mutually assured destruction is in the DNA of the modern right-wing movement.
Jeez, even Sting wrote a #1 hit about it in 1985 using a melodic theme by Prokofiev.
Those were the days?
The answers here include a fair summary of the updated case against:
https://www.quora.com/Is-the-nuclear-winter-a-hoax