It’s important to understand that nuclear winter would not be a direct consequences of the nuclear explosions, but of the burning of our cities in the wake of the war (given enough heat, even roads and pavements will burn), generating clouds of very black smoke that rise into the stratosphere
I know. But how this compares to big wildfires, yearly coal and oil burnings and a volcano or two?
We are told, that the Giga tones of burnt coal and oil per year, warms the planet. About the same amount of plastics, wood and so on would trigger the so called Nuclear Winter?
Their model used 100 Hiroshima-size bombs (less than 0.03% of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal), detonated on cities in close proximity. Because of the closeness, and the effect of the sun on the black smoke particles, enough would rise up to cause a mini nuclear winter lasting about decade.
The proximity of the bombs in time and place matters significantly. Even if you are skeptical of this, you’d have to be not updating enough based on expert opinions to view this as less than 10% likely.
Your comparison between the problems from greenhouse gasses and the particulate matter from a nuclear war is absurd.
Energy release by the bomb probably isn’t the right metric here. A multimegaton bomb spends a lot of that energy heating plasma into hotter plasma. This has minimal climate impact.
The scenario the nuclear winter researchers had in mind was that those 100 bombs each start catastrophic fires that burn down major cities. Those fires can produce lots of soot and ash that have climactic effects, and then lift the particulates into the stratosphere.
I don’t have enough of a background to comment on whether and why those fires would be worse than a large brushfire or forest fire, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t about megajoules of energy.
If it isn’t about MJ, then it is about the amount of dust and soot?
Pinatubo ejected about 10 cubic kilometers of dust into high altitudes. The potential energy of this dust was far greater than the energy of all atom bombs. Ignite them all and you will get just enough energy to get 1 cubic kilometer of rocks a few kilometers high.
The atomic bombs are merely the ignition devices—their energy does not go into projecting particles upwards (or very little). The burning cities are the sources of smoke, the close proximity prevents easy dilution of the smoke, and solar heating gets the particles up the last few kilometers before the clouds have time to disperse (incidentally, smoke from forest fires isn’t as black, thus the solar heating effect isn’t prominent for them).
A volcano ash is often black. The mass of already mentioned Pinatubo’s dust, exceeds the mass of all human artifacts on the planet. If everything we have, go in smoke, it has less mass than the said dust, airborne in 1991.
Now you’re just making stuff up. According to this http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Mt.+Pinatubo’s+cloud+shades+global+climate.-a012467057 , there were 20 million tons of SO2 ejected into the atmosphere. The number of cars in the world is about 800 million cars on the road http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile, mass about 1.5 tons, so we’re ahead on those alone. Even if we’re generous, and include the “10 billion metric tonnes (10 cubic kilometres) of magma” in Pinatubo (most of which is not relevant for the current discussion), I haven’t started counting the trucks and trains and the 300 000 tons super tankers, all the smaller ships, the roads and the railways, etc… We’ll reach 10 billion tons long before we have to start counting the largest mass in human artifacts: the buildings.
1 tone of (combustible) artifacts per every person in on Earth—went up in smoke—would be the same mass. A very unrealistic assertion—but still nothing like “decade of nuclear winter”.
5 cubic kilometres of material is very vague measure. What matters is the mass of tiny particles that stay airborne for significant length of time and get significantly high in atmosphere, and those are small fraction of the total ejected material (almost all of which falls out nearby).
Also, even though you personally don’t own a lot of (combustible) asphalt, your city does. And even though you don’t keep tons of gasoline, coal, etc. your car does, over its lifetime. There is a lot of combustible stuff per person, it’s just that we delegate it’s storage to other people. You have electricity powering your pc, that means there is a big powerplant out there that you got to count, and rest of infrastructure.
Novaya Zemlya is tundra (ie, “lichen, sedge, sometimes grass, and if you’re lucky, scattered dwarf shrubs sitting on permafrost”) and glaciers. The Tsar Bomba went off in October. That’s October in the Arctic Circle, by the way.
We shouldn’t be surprised at this vast asymmetry between “models of nuclear warfare targeting cities in populated areas” and “one very large nuclear bomb, set off as a test, in the Arctic during the beginning of local winter.”
you doubt that 10 to 100 times more over a 1000..10000 times shorter interval - ~ 100 000 larger intensity than ‘no really bad consequences’ - can cause nuclear winter?
How so? If you doubt that kind of stuff because 5 orders of magnitude are never enough to get from ‘not really bad consequences’ to ‘really bad consequences’, then i don’t know what you wouldn’t doubt.
As I’ve said. All the atom bombs we have, have combined less energy than a big wildfire. So the energy is not a problem.
Then, the amount of “black smoke”, which would those bombs emits, compared to a volcano is small. There is nowhere one ton of a black smoke emitting plastics per person alive, not to mention that everything will not be burned.
I don’t see where they are getting their numbers. One of those scenarist was Carl Sagan. He made quite a panic when Saddam Hussein ignited those Kuwait oil pumps. He was wrong.
Look it now either from the energy point of view, either from the soot lifting point of view—it is not such a big event in the geological terms at all.
Billion of people may die, maybe more, maybe less. An unspeakable evil, it would be, yes.
But a nuclear winter from an event comparable with no such a big wildfire? One million square kilometers of the Australian bush burnt. One trillion square meters. One kilogram of grass and wood per square meter burnt. One million J of energy released. This is a very conservative calculation, but it gives you 10 times more energy than the combined nuclear stock pile would. And the biggest wild fire covered 5 times more land. So, maybe 50 times more energy released—caused no nuclear winter.
Every year we have enough wildfires to release more energy than there is in those bombs.
1 megaton of TNT = 4 * 10^15 joules. Thousand megatons = 4 10^18 joules. 500 megatons = 2 10^18 joules , 2x your fire already. Multiply by your 10..100 (the arsenal vs testing quoted from yourself), you get 20 .. 200x the wildfire, that’s just the yield, not the fires in cities.
And while we are on energy calculating, why not calculate how much solar energy Earth receives in a day and say how many zillion times its more than energy of bombs combined, lol.
Note: you just might by dumb luck be factually correct, but your argument is motivated cognition. Nukes are scary, and hence very motivational. Goes both ways.
You are saying, that the total energy amount of all the nuclear weapons is 4*10^18 J. Not 40 times less as I have said.
Even in that case, the wildfire which has covered 5 million square kilometers and consumed 1 kg of dry grass and wood was a bigger event. Especially since I gave 10 times smaller energy per kilogram of wood or dry grass as it is. It’s 10^7 J/kg not 10^6 as I have calculated. Not to mention, 1 kg per square meter is a very low number.
But it matters only a little. This calculation is not very exact, but quite enough to see the main point.
I still don’t see the main point. Wildfires don’t put stuff into stratosphere very well, its not very concentrated, and it ignores burnable stuff in the cities.
For the calculations, just do them carefully one time ok? I don’t know full yield, the 1000mt is just example. Your own estimate for yield of arsenal, vs yield of testing, was arsenal = 10..100x the testing. You need to pick your numbers, and stick to them all the way through without fitting them after you arrive at something you don’t like. That is just math. If you can’t do that why you think your opinion on nuke war results is at all coupled to the actual results in any way?
5 million square kilometers of bush burnt. That’s 5*10^12 m2. Every year you can expect at least 1 kg of wood growth per square meter. That’s 10^7 J accumulated per year on every square meter. But let say, it is all that it’s there.
This gives you 5*10^19 J released by the biggest Australian bush fire. Many times more than your estimation for the atom bombs aggregate energy release.
you picked one set of numbers, calculated something, then didn’t like it, changed from 1 to 10 megajoules per square metre, that’s not how you do it if you are thinking straight.
Regarding ‘my estimate’, once again: 500 megatons is total testing, 10 … 100x the figure you picked, total 5000 .. 50 000 megaton , the 1 megaton of tnt is 4E15 j , times 5E3 = 2E19 , times 5E4 , 2E20 .
Top it off by the smoke not going into stratosphere from a bush fire because there’s too little intensity, it doesn’t even burn all at once, so there’s nothing whatsoever even comparable about those numbers in the first place?
What part do you not understand about “you have been conclusively demonstrated that you are not thinking straight about existential risks” ? People have two reactions to existential risks: be sure that it exists, be sure that it does not, proceed to not thinking straight one way or another. Sagan demonstrably screwed up with oil well fires, yes. You are demonstrably screwing up right now. Nobody’s safe from it. I’m only reasonably sure i’m not screwing up because i haven’t been called on bad math, and haven’t got very strong belief about nuke winter.
Americans have 10000 atomic weapons currently. Russians also. Others are negligible in this sense.
Say that the average bomb has 1 MT. This means 8*10^19 J of energy. What is a big overestimation, but for the sake of the discussion, would you accept this number first?
I don’t accept the idea that the climate effect of the fire is in any way comparable to nukes in the first place, because fire doesn’t get smoke high up in the atmosphere. I think its a very screwed up assumption. I’ve only been criticizing the numbers because the point is that people don’t think straight about existential risks. Humans don’t think about risks, they evaluate risks rapidly with some feeling & particular really simple strategy that they picked up, then rationalize verbosely.
I don’t have a good estimate of energy stored in the nuclear aresnal, and I care about this assertion just about as much as I care about comparison between energy of nuclear arsenal and energy of sunlight that hits the earth in a day.
But yes, I would say it is somewhere within similar order of magnitude, for the yield vs forest fire, ignoring the combustion of items in the cities.
BTW, nukes are incendiary weapons, there’s not enough appreciation of this basic fact by public. Don’t imagine your house being blown away, imagine all interior catching on fire first, then being blown off. Ditto for all asphalt.
Important for what exactly? Why is it more important than ‘total yield << sunlight in a day’ fact? edit: Because forest fires and nukes are both nasty?
Seriously man, there’s a giant ton of really wrong stuff out there. People starting idiotic wars, and so on and so forth. Daylight savings time wasting the energy (fun thing to calculate: find estimation of the energy wasted by daylight savings time, compare to all nukes in the world). The extremely ineffective allocation of taxes. The wasting of immense money making, and maintaining, those nukes.
Want to campaign against scaremongering? There is a lot of that going on as well. Consider the man-lifetimes wasted waiting in airports, and money spent on anti-terrorism, vs the risk allegedly prevented, and compare that to how many lives the money could have saved in the healthcare. Easy stuff that you (and anyone with any math skills) can actually prove wrong beyond all doubt without being a climatologist or something, and then actual human lives may get saved! You’ll be saving expected human lives. That matters, man.
Now, you have some crusade against the notion of nuke winter, against which BTW you don’t actually have any solid argument of any kind, nor means of having one, due to lack of expertise in climatology. And what exactly for? Okay you just might correct the ‘public misunderstanding’ of the nukes energy vs forest fires, the misunderstanding that public probably doesn’t even think about ever. What’s next? Which exactly actions should the public update on? Where’s the payoff of any kind? Sleeping more soundly at night? Thank you very much, if the profoundly irrational public is now comparing the forest fires to nuke war, and is less afraid of nuke war, that will totally make me feel safer.
Ohh you just are against it because it is wrong? Well, there’s a lot of stuff that is way more wrong with large negative consequences to the wrongness. And guess what, I don’t even really care if the nuke winter is certain, or most likely. All I care for, is that there’s chance it can happen. (And for the Sagan, he shouldn’t have gone around telling stuff about the oil wells, what ever, the dude’s dead, want to pick on someone, choose someone alive, like, hmm, Michio Kaku or Dawkins or something). And even if I had a proof that nuke winter is impossible, which I don’t, I would definitely keep it to myself because public is stupid and irrational, and selective explaining (without correcting all other wrong things first) would most certainly not be a good thing.
how’s about continuing the thought a little bit more and thanking the ‘civilization failure’ or ‘extinction’ possibility as well? The nuclear winter? That’s the only thing which is fundamentally different between nuclear arsenal and WW2 type war. The assured destruction. Not assured losses.
AFAIK, they have popped about 1000 atom bombs so far. Do we see any really bad consequences?
But from 10 to 100 times more in a shorter time interval, there would be a Nuclear Winter?
I doubt it.
From the article:
I know. But how this compares to big wildfires, yearly coal and oil burnings and a volcano or two?
We are told, that the Giga tones of burnt coal and oil per year, warms the planet. About the same amount of plastics, wood and so on would trigger the so called Nuclear Winter?
I am a NW skeptic.
The Parable of the Pawnbroker.
Also from the article:
The proximity of the bombs in time and place matters significantly. Even if you are skeptical of this, you’d have to be not updating enough based on expert opinions to view this as less than 10% likely.
Your comparison between the problems from greenhouse gasses and the particulate matter from a nuclear war is absurd.
2 Mt. 1.5% of the Tzar bomb, which exploded at Novaya Zemlya one day. Nothing much.
Enough to make as much fire as in Black Thursday bush fire? Which didn’t caused a decade long “nuclear winter”?
Energy release by the bomb probably isn’t the right metric here. A multimegaton bomb spends a lot of that energy heating plasma into hotter plasma. This has minimal climate impact.
The scenario the nuclear winter researchers had in mind was that those 100 bombs each start catastrophic fires that burn down major cities. Those fires can produce lots of soot and ash that have climactic effects, and then lift the particulates into the stratosphere.
I don’t have enough of a background to comment on whether and why those fires would be worse than a large brushfire or forest fire, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t about megajoules of energy.
If it isn’t about MJ, then it is about the amount of dust and soot?
Pinatubo ejected about 10 cubic kilometers of dust into high altitudes. The potential energy of this dust was far greater than the energy of all atom bombs. Ignite them all and you will get just enough energy to get 1 cubic kilometer of rocks a few kilometers high.
It was no nuclear winter, again, from Pinatubo.
The atomic bombs are merely the ignition devices—their energy does not go into projecting particles upwards (or very little). The burning cities are the sources of smoke, the close proximity prevents easy dilution of the smoke, and solar heating gets the particles up the last few kilometers before the clouds have time to disperse (incidentally, smoke from forest fires isn’t as black, thus the solar heating effect isn’t prominent for them).
A volcano ash is often black. The mass of already mentioned Pinatubo’s dust, exceeds the mass of all human artifacts on the planet. If everything we have, go in smoke, it has less mass than the said dust, airborne in 1991.
Now you’re just making stuff up. According to this http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Mt.+Pinatubo’s+cloud+shades+global+climate.-a012467057 , there were 20 million tons of SO2 ejected into the atmosphere. The number of cars in the world is about 800 million cars on the road http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile, mass about 1.5 tons, so we’re ahead on those alone. Even if we’re generous, and include the “10 billion metric tonnes (10 cubic kilometres) of magma” in Pinatubo (most of which is not relevant for the current discussion), I haven’t started counting the trucks and trains and the 300 000 tons super tankers, all the smaller ships, the roads and the railways, etc… We’ll reach 10 billion tons long before we have to start counting the largest mass in human artifacts: the buildings.
Here http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs113-97/ they say, the Pinatubo ejected 5 cubic kilometers of ash into the air.
1 tone of (combustible) artifacts per every person in on Earth—went up in smoke—would be the same mass. A very unrealistic assertion—but still nothing like “decade of nuclear winter”.
5 cubic kilometres of material is very vague measure. What matters is the mass of tiny particles that stay airborne for significant length of time and get significantly high in atmosphere, and those are small fraction of the total ejected material (almost all of which falls out nearby).
Also, even though you personally don’t own a lot of (combustible) asphalt, your city does. And even though you don’t keep tons of gasoline, coal, etc. your car does, over its lifetime. There is a lot of combustible stuff per person, it’s just that we delegate it’s storage to other people. You have electricity powering your pc, that means there is a big powerplant out there that you got to count, and rest of infrastructure.
What does the amount of truth have to do with it?
Edit: Oh, soot, nevermind.
Novaya Zemlya is tundra (ie, “lichen, sedge, sometimes grass, and if you’re lucky, scattered dwarf shrubs sitting on permafrost”) and glaciers. The Tsar Bomba went off in October. That’s October in the Arctic Circle, by the way.
We shouldn’t be surprised at this vast asymmetry between “models of nuclear warfare targeting cities in populated areas” and “one very large nuclear bomb, set off as a test, in the Arctic during the beginning of local winter.”
The total energy released by the said Black Thursday Bush Fire was in the same range as the energy stored inside all world’s nuclear bombs. 10^17 J.
Take that one out of context a sec… ;)
Never take it out of context.
you doubt that 10 to 100 times more over a 1000..10000 times shorter interval - ~ 100 000 larger intensity than ‘no really bad consequences’ - can cause nuclear winter?
How so? If you doubt that kind of stuff because 5 orders of magnitude are never enough to get from ‘not really bad consequences’ to ‘really bad consequences’, then i don’t know what you wouldn’t doubt.
As I’ve said. All the atom bombs we have, have combined less energy than a big wildfire. So the energy is not a problem.
Then, the amount of “black smoke”, which would those bombs emits, compared to a volcano is small. There is nowhere one ton of a black smoke emitting plastics per person alive, not to mention that everything will not be burned.
I don’t see where they are getting their numbers. One of those scenarist was Carl Sagan. He made quite a panic when Saddam Hussein ignited those Kuwait oil pumps. He was wrong.
Look it now either from the energy point of view, either from the soot lifting point of view—it is not such a big event in the geological terms at all.
Billion of people may die, maybe more, maybe less. An unspeakable evil, it would be, yes.
But a nuclear winter from an event comparable with no such a big wildfire? One million square kilometers of the Australian bush burnt. One trillion square meters. One kilogram of grass and wood per square meter burnt. One million J of energy released. This is a very conservative calculation, but it gives you 10 times more energy than the combined nuclear stock pile would. And the biggest wild fire covered 5 times more land. So, maybe 50 times more energy released—caused no nuclear winter.
Every year we have enough wildfires to release more energy than there is in those bombs.
You have to put everything in a perspective.
I don’t see the total arsenal yield figure, but i have total yield from testing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield
which is slightly above 500 megatons
For the wildfire:
10^12 m^2 * 10^6 j/m^2 = 10^18 j
1 megaton of TNT = 4 * 10^15 joules. Thousand megatons = 4 10^18 joules. 500 megatons = 2 10^18 joules , 2x your fire already. Multiply by your 10..100 (the arsenal vs testing quoted from yourself), you get 20 .. 200x the wildfire, that’s just the yield, not the fires in cities.
And while we are on energy calculating, why not calculate how much solar energy Earth receives in a day and say how many zillion times its more than energy of bombs combined, lol.
Note: you just might by dumb luck be factually correct, but your argument is motivated cognition. Nukes are scary, and hence very motivational. Goes both ways.
You are saying, that the total energy amount of all the nuclear weapons is 4*10^18 J. Not 40 times less as I have said.
Even in that case, the wildfire which has covered 5 million square kilometers and consumed 1 kg of dry grass and wood was a bigger event. Especially since I gave 10 times smaller energy per kilogram of wood or dry grass as it is. It’s 10^7 J/kg not 10^6 as I have calculated. Not to mention, 1 kg per square meter is a very low number.
But it matters only a little. This calculation is not very exact, but quite enough to see the main point.
I still don’t see the main point. Wildfires don’t put stuff into stratosphere very well, its not very concentrated, and it ignores burnable stuff in the cities.
For the calculations, just do them carefully one time ok? I don’t know full yield, the 1000mt is just example. Your own estimate for yield of arsenal, vs yield of testing, was arsenal = 10..100x the testing. You need to pick your numbers, and stick to them all the way through without fitting them after you arrive at something you don’t like. That is just math. If you can’t do that why you think your opinion on nuke war results is at all coupled to the actual results in any way?
Very clear numbers:
5 million square kilometers of bush burnt. That’s 5*10^12 m2. Every year you can expect at least 1 kg of wood growth per square meter. That’s 10^7 J accumulated per year on every square meter. But let say, it is all that it’s there.
This gives you 5*10^19 J released by the biggest Australian bush fire. Many times more than your estimation for the atom bombs aggregate energy release.
Pure and simple, do you object this numbers?
you picked one set of numbers, calculated something, then didn’t like it, changed from 1 to 10 megajoules per square metre, that’s not how you do it if you are thinking straight.
Regarding ‘my estimate’, once again: 500 megatons is total testing, 10 … 100x the figure you picked, total 5000 .. 50 000 megaton , the 1 megaton of tnt is 4E15 j , times 5E3 = 2E19 , times 5E4 , 2E20 .
Top it off by the smoke not going into stratosphere from a bush fire because there’s too little intensity, it doesn’t even burn all at once, so there’s nothing whatsoever even comparable about those numbers in the first place?
What part do you not understand about “you have been conclusively demonstrated that you are not thinking straight about existential risks” ? People have two reactions to existential risks: be sure that it exists, be sure that it does not, proceed to not thinking straight one way or another. Sagan demonstrably screwed up with oil well fires, yes. You are demonstrably screwing up right now. Nobody’s safe from it. I’m only reasonably sure i’m not screwing up because i haven’t been called on bad math, and haven’t got very strong belief about nuke winter.
Americans have 10000 atomic weapons currently. Russians also. Others are negligible in this sense.
Say that the average bomb has 1 MT. This means 8*10^19 J of energy. What is a big overestimation, but for the sake of the discussion, would you accept this number first?
I don’t accept the idea that the climate effect of the fire is in any way comparable to nukes in the first place, because fire doesn’t get smoke high up in the atmosphere. I think its a very screwed up assumption. I’ve only been criticizing the numbers because the point is that people don’t think straight about existential risks. Humans don’t think about risks, they evaluate risks rapidly with some feeling & particular really simple strategy that they picked up, then rationalize verbosely.
But you admit, that the energy stored in the nuclear arsenal is hardly as big as the energy released by a really big forest fire?
I don’t have a good estimate of energy stored in the nuclear aresnal, and I care about this assertion just about as much as I care about comparison between energy of nuclear arsenal and energy of sunlight that hits the earth in a day.
But yes, I would say it is somewhere within similar order of magnitude, for the yield vs forest fire, ignoring the combustion of items in the cities.
BTW, nukes are incendiary weapons, there’s not enough appreciation of this basic fact by public. Don’t imagine your house being blown away, imagine all interior catching on fire first, then being blown off. Ditto for all asphalt.
I am glad. It is important to understand this fact. I haven’t seen it mentioned yet, anywhere.
People should update, not follow Carl Sagan blindly. He had “good intentions” when (probably) misinformed the world.
Important for what exactly? Why is it more important than ‘total yield << sunlight in a day’ fact? edit: Because forest fires and nukes are both nasty?
Be cause most would say something like “there is a balance in Sun’s shinning, but atom bombs are highly concentrated events”.
It is important to see, that their energy, as destructive as it is, is not THAT great, at all.
It is not healthy to live with wrong assumptions. Earth is a robust planet, not as delicate as usually heard from certain circles.
Still remember Sagan, the Pope, journalists, some friends of mine even—how they spelled doom in the case of the Kuwait oil fires.
As I said—the Earth is a robust planet and we are robust animals.
Seriously man, there’s a giant ton of really wrong stuff out there. People starting idiotic wars, and so on and so forth. Daylight savings time wasting the energy (fun thing to calculate: find estimation of the energy wasted by daylight savings time, compare to all nukes in the world). The extremely ineffective allocation of taxes. The wasting of immense money making, and maintaining, those nukes.
Want to campaign against scaremongering? There is a lot of that going on as well. Consider the man-lifetimes wasted waiting in airports, and money spent on anti-terrorism, vs the risk allegedly prevented, and compare that to how many lives the money could have saved in the healthcare. Easy stuff that you (and anyone with any math skills) can actually prove wrong beyond all doubt without being a climatologist or something, and then actual human lives may get saved! You’ll be saving expected human lives. That matters, man.
Now, you have some crusade against the notion of nuke winter, against which BTW you don’t actually have any solid argument of any kind, nor means of having one, due to lack of expertise in climatology. And what exactly for? Okay you just might correct the ‘public misunderstanding’ of the nukes energy vs forest fires, the misunderstanding that public probably doesn’t even think about ever. What’s next? Which exactly actions should the public update on? Where’s the payoff of any kind? Sleeping more soundly at night? Thank you very much, if the profoundly irrational public is now comparing the forest fires to nuke war, and is less afraid of nuke war, that will totally make me feel safer.
Ohh you just are against it because it is wrong? Well, there’s a lot of stuff that is way more wrong with large negative consequences to the wrongness. And guess what, I don’t even really care if the nuke winter is certain, or most likely. All I care for, is that there’s chance it can happen. (And for the Sagan, he shouldn’t have gone around telling stuff about the oil wells, what ever, the dude’s dead, want to pick on someone, choose someone alive, like, hmm, Michio Kaku or Dawkins or something). And even if I had a proof that nuke winter is impossible, which I don’t, I would definitely keep it to myself because public is stupid and irrational, and selective explaining (without correcting all other wrong things first) would most certainly not be a good thing.
On the contrary! It was maybe the best allocation of taxes of all times. As Margaret Teacher said—be cause of them, we enjoy the decades of peace.
Everything could also went terribly wrong and a billion would die.
But it looks like we were lucky. No great WW3 and even WW4 on the horizon. Thanks to the nuclear arsenal and MAD, of course.
how’s about continuing the thought a little bit more and thanking the ‘civilization failure’ or ‘extinction’ possibility as well? The nuclear winter? That’s the only thing which is fundamentally different between nuclear arsenal and WW2 type war. The assured destruction. Not assured losses.