What happens when two nations battle with nukes?
More than 20 years ago, it was theorized that “a nuclear winter” would occur in the event of a superpower war using nuclear weapons. Now new computers, better climate-modeling techniques, and comparisons to natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, shows that even a regional conflict would throw the planet into turmoil. Global climate and the environment would be drastically altered for decades by two nations hitting each other with a total of just 100 Hiroshima-sized (15 kilotonnes) nuclear bombs, according to an analysis of such a conflict. Millions of tonnes of soot would be blasted at least 12 kilometres high, circulating and completely covering the globe within a month. “The global climate change would be unprecedented in the record of human history,” says Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. And that’s using less than 0.03% of the explosive yield of the planet’s current total nuclear arsenal. “Instantaneously, it would be colder than the
