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Does this prove/disprove the idea of nuclear winter? I know these bombs were blown up at different times, but it seems an event like nuclear winter would probab

Does this prove/disprove the idea of nuclear winter? I know these bombs were blown up at different times, but it seems an event like nuclear winter would probably not happen.

Rover222 1y ago
Yeah I think the nuclear winter idea came from if the US and Soviets both launched their full arsenals in a MAD exchange, and society now associates nuclear winter with just a few nuclear explosions.
- dylan604 1y ago
  Is that what society thinks, or just some random people on the interwebs? Does society think the earth is flat, or just some random people on the interwebs? It's easy to find oneself in a bubble and think everyone else thinks the same way, when stepping out of the bubble for a moment brings reality crashing back
  - Rover222 1y ago
    weird take
- lazide 1y ago
  Nuclear winter is kind of like ‘AGI will take all our jobs and is ANY DAY NOW’. Aka a combination of unrealistic extrapolation + fearmongering. We’ve had volcanic eruptions orders of magntitude larger than both countries nuclear arsenals combined, and we’re all still here.
bobmcnamara 1y ago
No, either way. Presumably the operational devices are more consistent and higher yield than the early pre-fusion cores. There are outliers on both sides in the test data. Much of the soot generated from a nuclear blast comes from the surrounding environment, cities presumably, which seems to be less flammable than in the past(armchairing here). Time of year will always be a factor. I'm sure there are things I'm not thinking of off the cuff.
cjensen 1y ago
No. Most tests were underground after the first decade or so once the effects of fallout were better understood. Plus underground testing reduces the affected radius and conserves area for additional testing. Also note that most tests were "small" yield weapons rather than the really big hydrogen bombs. It's easy to forget how large the range of power there is among different nuclear weapons. E.g. Tsar Bomba was 4000 times more energetic than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
- lazide 1y ago
  Except Castle Bravo. Talk about ‘ooops’.
hopelite 1y ago
Most of these nuclear tests were underground and undersea. In a nuclear exchange, most devices would detonate above the target surface level to maximize destruction through the shockwave. There is also the secondary impacts that would start immense uncontrolled wildfires all over the planet that would produce much of the nuclear winter effect that is assumed, due to the amount of soot and ash it would produce. But most people would not live long enough to experience the nuclear winter anyways after the explosions, the fireball, the uncontrollable wildfire, the marauding, and the starvation and disease. If you lived long enough to make it to nuclear winter, you would probably just wish you had died long ago. If you had anyone at all with you, you might have to even make hard decisions about who you can take with you and who to leave behind, and if you managed to somehow get to somewhere where you might be able to feed yourself and survive near the equator, you would only really be living a primitive subsistence life. If you happened to have a female with you, you may try to rebuild the human population, whether she wants to or not. Yes, it’s very grim; but maybe even optimistic. But even if that is pessimistic, at best you will find yourself in a world where there is nothing left that you could rely on for contemporary existence. No communications, no electronics, nothing but manual transportation once any surviving fuel is used up on any surviving carbureted engines, no running water, and you would have to fight off savage roaming marauders, who want all your things and will have thrust everyone into a hellish version of Madmax, etc. See any of the actual first hand accounts of what happened in the New Orleans and the Superdome after hurricane Katrina for a tiny little taste of what you would be facing. The nuclear winter would be the least of your problems.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- OkayPhysicist 1y ago
  Nuclear armageddon would not spell human extinction. Not even close. Most of the southern hemisphere would be basically untouched: No one's wasting their nukes hitting most of South America or Africa, and frankly even Australia's a stretch. Even in the United States, in a worse case scenario, large swathes would be untouched by the direct blast effects of all-out nuclear war. There's basically nothing in Idaho worth nuking, for example. It would spell civilizational collapse, sure, since the major economic, industrial, and administrative hubs would now be smoking holes in the ground. But for people living in the agricultural interior of the US, most problems would be economic rather than desperate survival. The effects of EMP are grossly overblown. Most electronic devices would still work fine, once you have a generator or access to the parts of the grid that would not be targets (again, even when you're firing a couple thousand nukes, the windfarms of Iowa are going to be faaaaaar down the list of targets). The refuge crisis of people migrating from places not completely annihilated but still no longer safe for habitation (think Merced or Gileroy, California) would be straining. Such desperation would breed banditry, sure, but not to the level of a Mad Max hellscape. Most people do not have the stomach for such violence, which is why even in the most apocalyptic conditions (look at say, Syria during its civil war, or Gaza today) you only see a moderate increase in criminality. Nuclear war can be very bad without making up silly scenarios.
LorenPechtel 1y ago
Nuclear winter requires two things. 1) Big bomb. The mushroom cloud must go up to above the maximum altitude for rain. 2) Soot. You need a city or the like underneath the bomb to produce a bunch of soot to get lifted into the sky. Either one by itself (we've seen really big bombs, but they're not dropped on places that will make a bunch of soot, Saddam's oil fires created enough soot but nothing lifted it above the rain, the bombs on Japan weren't big enough to lift the crud above the rain) has little effect.

Does this prove/disprove the idea of nuclear winter? I know these bombs were blown up at different times, but it seems an event like nuclear winter would probably not happen.

Rover222 1y ago

Yeah I think the nuclear winter idea came from if the US and Soviets both launched their full arsenals in a MAD exchange, and society now associates nuclear winter with just a few nuclear explosions.

dylan604 1y ago
Is that what society thinks, or just some random people on the interwebs? Does society think the earth is flat, or just some random people on the interwebs? It's easy to find oneself in a bubble and think everyone else thinks the same way, when stepping out of the bubble for a moment brings reality crashing back
- Rover222 1y ago
  weird take
lazide 1y ago
Nuclear winter is kind of like ‘AGI will take all our jobs and is ANY DAY NOW’. Aka a combination of unrealistic extrapolation + fearmongering. We’ve had volcanic eruptions orders of magntitude larger than both countries nuclear arsenals combined, and we’re all still here.

bobmcnamara 1y ago

No, either way. Presumably the operational devices are more consistent and higher yield than the early pre-fusion cores. There are outliers on both sides in the test data. Much of the soot generated from a nuclear blast comes from the surrounding environment, cities presumably, which seems to be less flammable than in the past(armchairing here). Time of year will always be a factor. I'm sure there are things I'm not thinking of off the cuff.

cjensen 1y ago

No. Most tests were underground after the first decade or so once the effects of fallout were better understood. Plus underground testing reduces the affected radius and conserves area for additional testing. Also note that most tests were "small" yield weapons rather than the really big hydrogen bombs. It's easy to forget how large the range of power there is among different nuclear weapons. E.g. Tsar Bomba was 4000 times more energetic than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

lazide 1y ago
Except Castle Bravo. Talk about ‘ooops’.

hopelite 1y ago

Most of these nuclear tests were underground and undersea. In a nuclear exchange, most devices would detonate above the target surface level to maximize destruction through the shockwave. There is also the secondary impacts that would start immense uncontrolled wildfires all over the planet that would produce much of the nuclear winter effect that is assumed, due to the amount of soot and ash it would produce. But most people would not live long enough to experience the nuclear winter anyways after the explosions, the fireball, the uncontrollable wildfire, the marauding, and the starvation and disease. If you lived long enough to make it to nuclear winter, you would probably just wish you had died long ago. If you had anyone at all with you, you might have to even make hard decisions about who you can take with you and who to leave behind, and if you managed to somehow get to somewhere where you might be able to feed yourself and survive near the equator, you would only really be living a primitive subsistence life. If you happened to have a female with you, you may try to rebuild the human population, whether she wants to or not. Yes, it’s very grim; but maybe even optimistic. But even if that is pessimistic, at best you will find yourself in a world where there is nothing left that you could rely on for contemporary existence. No communications, no electronics, nothing but manual transportation once any surviving fuel is used up on any surviving carbureted engines, no running water, and you would have to fight off savage roaming marauders, who want all your things and will have thrust everyone into a hellish version of Madmax, etc. See any of the actual first hand accounts of what happened in the New Orleans and the Superdome after hurricane Katrina for a tiny little taste of what you would be facing. The nuclear winter would be the least of your problems.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
OkayPhysicist 1y ago
Nuclear armageddon would not spell human extinction. Not even close. Most of the southern hemisphere would be basically untouched: No one's wasting their nukes hitting most of South America or Africa, and frankly even Australia's a stretch. Even in the United States, in a worse case scenario, large swathes would be untouched by the direct blast effects of all-out nuclear war. There's basically nothing in Idaho worth nuking, for example. It would spell civilizational collapse, sure, since the major economic, industrial, and administrative hubs would now be smoking holes in the ground. But for people living in the agricultural interior of the US, most problems would be economic rather than desperate survival. The effects of EMP are grossly overblown. Most electronic devices would still work fine, once you have a generator or access to the parts of the grid that would not be targets (again, even when you're firing a couple thousand nukes, the windfarms of Iowa are going to be faaaaaar down the list of targets). The refuge crisis of people migrating from places not completely annihilated but still no longer safe for habitation (think Merced or Gileroy, California) would be straining. Such desperation would breed banditry, sure, but not to the level of a Mad Max hellscape. Most people do not have the stomach for such violence, which is why even in the most apocalyptic conditions (look at say, Syria during its civil war, or Gaza today) you only see a moderate increase in criminality. Nuclear war can be very bad without making up silly scenarios.

LorenPechtel 1y ago

Nuclear winter requires two things. 1) Big bomb. The mushroom cloud must go up to above the maximum altitude for rain. 2) Soot. You need a city or the like underneath the bomb to produce a bunch of soot to get lifted into the sky. Either one by itself (we've seen really big bombs, but they're not dropped on places that will make a bunch of soot, Saddam's oil fires created enough soot but nothing lifted it above the rain, the bombs on Japan weren't big enough to lift the crud above the rain) has little effect.