Thanks for this thought-provoking post. I found the discussion of how political warfare may have influenced nuclear weapons activism particularly interesting.
Since large yield weapons can loft dust straight to the stratosphere, they don’t even have to produce firestorms to start contributing to nuclear winter: once you get particles that block sunlight to an altitude that heating by the sun can keep them lofted, you’ll block sunlight a very long time and start harming crop yields.
I think it’s true that this could “contribute” to nuclear winter, but I don’t think I’ve seen this mentioned as a substantial concern in the nuclear winter papers I’ve read. E.g., I don’t think I’ve seen any papers suggest that nuclear winter could occur solely due to that effect, without there being any firestorms, or that that effect could make the climate impacts 20% worse than would occur with firestorms alone. Do you have any citations on hand for this claim?
Some of the original papers on nuclear winter reference this effect, e.g. in the abstract here about high yield surface burst weapons (e.g. I think this would include the sort that would have been targeted at silos by the USSR). https://science.sciencemag.org/content/222/4630/1283
A common problem with some modern papers is that they just take soot/dust amounts from these prior papers without adjusting for arsenal changes or changes in fire modeling.
Thanks for this thought-provoking post. I found the discussion of how political warfare may have influenced nuclear weapons activism particularly interesting.
I think it’s true that this could “contribute” to nuclear winter, but I don’t think I’ve seen this mentioned as a substantial concern in the nuclear winter papers I’ve read. E.g., I don’t think I’ve seen any papers suggest that nuclear winter could occur solely due to that effect, without there being any firestorms, or that that effect could make the climate impacts 20% worse than would occur with firestorms alone. Do you have any citations on hand for this claim?
Some of the original papers on nuclear winter reference this effect, e.g. in the abstract here about high yield surface burst weapons (e.g. I think this would include the sort that would have been targeted at silos by the USSR). https://science.sciencemag.org/content/222/4630/1283
A common problem with some modern papers is that they just take soot/dust amounts from these prior papers without adjusting for arsenal changes or changes in fire modeling.