Nuclear winter

Nuclear winter is a hypothetical global climate condition that was predicted to be a possible outcome of a large-scale nuclear war. It was thought that severely cold weather would be caused by detonating large numbers of nuclear weapons, especially over flammable targets such as cities, where large amounts

Related Topics:
Climate - Nuclear war - Nuclear weapons - Flammable - Cities

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of smoke and soot would be injected into the Earth's stratosphere.

Related Topics:
Smoke - Soot - Earth - Stratosphere

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This layer of particles would significantly

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reduce the amount of sunlight that reached the surface, and could potentially remain in the stratosphere for weeks or even years (smoke and soot arising from the burning petroleum fuels and plastics absorbs sunlight much more effectively than smoke from burning wood). The ash would be carried by the midlatitude west-to-east winds, forming a uniform belt of particles encircling the northern hemisphere from 30° to 60° latitude. These thick black clouds could block out much of the sun's light for a period as long as several weeks, causing surface temperatures to drop by as much as 20°C (35°F) during the occlusion.

Related Topics:
Sunlight - Petroleum - Plastic - Wood - Latitude

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The

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combination of darkness and killing frosts, combined with high doses of radiation from nuclear fallout, would severely damage plant life in the region. The extreme cold, high radiation levels, and the widespread destruction of

Related Topics:
Frost - Radiation - Nuclear fallout - Plant

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industrial, medical, and transportation infrastructures along with food supplies and crops would trigger a massive death toll from starvation, exposure, and disease. It was also thought that nitrogen oxides generated by the blasts would degrade the ozone layer, as had been observed in the first thermonuclear blasts. Secondary effects from ozone depletion (and concomitant increases in ultraviolet radiation) would be significant, with impacts on the viability of most human staple agricultural crops as well as disruption of ocean food chains by killing off phytoplankton.

Related Topics:
Nitrogen oxide - Ozone layer - Thermonuclear - Phytoplankton

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One effort to predict the meteorological effects of a large-scale nuclear war

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was the 1983 "TTAPS" study (from the initials of the last names of its authors, R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan).

Related Topics:
1983 - Carl Sagan

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The authors were inspired to write the paper by cooling effects due to

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dust storms on Mars and to carry out a calculation of the effect they used a simplified

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two dimensional model of the Earth's atmosphere that assumed that conditions at a given

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latitude were constant. The consensus with more sophisticated

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calculations is that the atmospheric model used in TTAPS probably overestimates the

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degree of cooling although the amount of this overestimation remains unclear. Although such nuclear war would undoubtedly be devastating, the degree of damage to life on Earth as a whole remains controversial.

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