That doesn’t pass the sniff test. 50 Hiroshima-sized airbusts cause massive climate change, yet 528 above-ground nuclear tests, some with 1000 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb, and many being ground bursts, had no observable effect?
Nuclear tests conducted in a desert or on an isolated island aren’t going to start massive, out-of-control wildfires the way nuclear explosions in a city, grassland, forest or jungle will.
Guess where most of those nuclear tests were conducted?
For the US: The Pacific Proving Grounds, isolated locations in the Marshall Islands. Or the deserts of the American Southwest (both the Nevada test site and Nellis AFB. The tests in Amchitka, Alaska were all after the Partial Test Ban Treaty proscribed above-ground detonations in nuclear testing; hence they were conducted underground and not able to so easily spread wildfires.
For the USSR: Semiplatynsk in northeast Kazakhstan, Novaya Zemyla (a glaciated, remote island).
For the PRC: The Lop Desert.
France: Sahara Desert.
UK: Remote Australian desert sites; remote islands in the Pacific.
India and Pakistan have only conducted underground tests. I don’t know about North Korea.
All of these tests were conducted to minimize the odds of setting huge swathes of the entire testing country on fire. That’s not going to be the case in an actual nuclear war; cities burn, non-marginal ecosystems burn, and they can touch off lots of fires in the surrounding areas—that is the mechanism being proposed for climate damage (individual, localized fires don’t have the same effect—you need serious, wide-area blazes like the kind one should expect to see if a bunch of major metropolises and areas surrounded by surrounded fertile countryside go up all at once).
The 2004 wildfire season in Alaska is recorded as consuming 6,600,000 acres, which is over 10,000 square miles. The New York metropolitan area is around 6000mi^2, and it’s near the morphological top of the top 20 big cities. We could naively expect less than 20x the climate disruption the Alaska wildfires caused, if we nuked the world’s 20 largest cities. Unfortunately, the only articles I can find are about how climate change affected the Alaska wildfires, not the reverse.
That doesn’t pass the sniff test. 50 Hiroshima-sized airbusts cause massive climate change, yet 528 above-ground nuclear tests, some with 1000 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb, and many being ground bursts, had no observable effect?
Nuclear tests conducted in a desert or on an isolated island aren’t going to start massive, out-of-control wildfires the way nuclear explosions in a city, grassland, forest or jungle will.
Guess where most of those nuclear tests were conducted?
For the US: The Pacific Proving Grounds, isolated locations in the Marshall Islands. Or the deserts of the American Southwest (both the Nevada test site and Nellis AFB. The tests in Amchitka, Alaska were all after the Partial Test Ban Treaty proscribed above-ground detonations in nuclear testing; hence they were conducted underground and not able to so easily spread wildfires.
For the USSR: Semiplatynsk in northeast Kazakhstan, Novaya Zemyla (a glaciated, remote island).
For the PRC: The Lop Desert.
France: Sahara Desert.
UK: Remote Australian desert sites; remote islands in the Pacific.
India and Pakistan have only conducted underground tests. I don’t know about North Korea.
All of these tests were conducted to minimize the odds of setting huge swathes of the entire testing country on fire. That’s not going to be the case in an actual nuclear war; cities burn, non-marginal ecosystems burn, and they can touch off lots of fires in the surrounding areas—that is the mechanism being proposed for climate damage (individual, localized fires don’t have the same effect—you need serious, wide-area blazes like the kind one should expect to see if a bunch of major metropolises and areas surrounded by surrounded fertile countryside go up all at once).
The 2004 wildfire season in Alaska is recorded as consuming 6,600,000 acres, which is over 10,000 square miles. The New York metropolitan area is around 6000mi^2, and it’s near the morphological top of the top 20 big cities. We could naively expect less than 20x the climate disruption the Alaska wildfires caused, if we nuked the world’s 20 largest cities. Unfortunately, the only articles I can find are about how climate change affected the Alaska wildfires, not the reverse.