Does Nuclear War Cause Global Warming? It’s a question we all ask ourselves – but what does the scientific evidence say? If we did, we would see the ramifications of a nuclear war within a few years. For starters, a full-scale nuclear war would result in an eight-degree drop in the global temperature, a substantial drop compared to the five-degree decrease that occurred during the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago. The knock-on effect on agriculture would be devastating – critical growing areas could experience daily minimum temperatures below freezing for years on end, causing a global famine.
Several scientists, including environmental scientists, have studied the effects of nuclear war on the climate. They have documented the devastating effects of nuclear war on the environment, citing the possibility of global famine and the destruction of food supplies. In addition to global famine, scientists have also found that the use of a few hundred weapons could stop all rain in India and drastically cut worldwide precipitation by fifteen to thirty percent. Furthermore, it would take at least a decade for the world’s rain levels to return to pre-nuclear-war levels.
A recent study in Canada suggests that nuclear war could trigger a large-scale firestorm, generating soot that would be carried up into the upper atmosphere. However, this model is based on assumptions that are not supported by observation. The authors of this study believe that there is no evidence to support their conclusion, but the results show that the effects of nuclear war would be catastrophic. A nuclear war would lead to massive fires that would consume the entire planet, and the smoke from the fires would be a major contributor to global warming.
It is true that limited nuclear detonations might be a short-term stopgap measure to combat global warming, but the costs would be too high to consider. Moreover, nuclear weapons cannot be detonated in an uninhabited area like the ocean. Furthermore, the firestorms generated would be catastrophic for the environment, and trying to recreate this effect on land would not be possible – some areas of forest do not have enough flammable material to create true firestorms.
The impact of nuclear weapons on climate change was first realized during the 1980s when scientists were concerned about the ramifications of a nuclear war. In the years that followed, scientists began to model the effects of a nuclear war on the climate. As they discovered, nuclear war could lead to dramatic changes in weather patterns, a dramatic decrease in food and water supplies, and a large decline in human health. One initiative labeled these damages “nuclear winter,” suggesting that nuclear war could endanger the entire atmosphere.
During the Cold War, nuclear war was on everyone’s mind, but since the war has come to an end, it has been pushed to the backburners’ list. The threat of nuclear war has also become a reality: a nuclear winter may counteract global warming, which would be offset by a “nuclear winter” – a situation where global temperatures plummet by several degrees Celsius.
One nuclear bomb released around a hundred and forty-four megatons of TNT (TNT) equivalent. The amount of energy released is equivalent to the energy in four Hiroshima bombs per second. And the largest bombs ever exploded were more than a thousand times the size of Hiroshima. The World Wide Web estimates that approximately twenty thousand bomb tests were conducted worldwide. But how much energy did these weapons generate?
In a 2003 book titled Whole World on Fire, author Lynn Eden details how U.S. military planners underestimated the effects of atomic weapons. While they underestimated the effects of the bombings’ original explosions, they undercounted the long-term consequences of their firestorms and global warming. Indeed, tens of millions of people would have been killed and injured by the radiation released by just one nuclear weapon.
The United States and Russia have committed to nuclear weapons treaties to limit their use and development. By signing the NPT, the United States and Russia have pledged to reduce their strategic weapons and halt nuclear testing. That’s great news for the world. And a good start toward a peaceful world is a resumption of nuclear weapons negotiations between the two countries. But before we can celebrate this achievement, we need to understand the full effects of these weapons.
The TTAPS team began their 1-dimensional simulations of the atmospheric effects of nuclear war in 1982. The paper was published in Science magazine, and Turco’s phrase “nuclear winter” was coined prior to the article’s publication. The authors used assumption-based estimates of total smoke and dust emissions to analyze the effects of the nuclear war on the atmospheric radiation balance and temperature structure. The results were a clear demonstration that the atmosphere would be damaged by a nuclear war.