In a classified document approved in March, the president ordered U.S. forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea.
This one cites a lot of the recent literature on soot injection but I haven’t read much in terms of counterarguments
Even if the estimated soot is 10x less than predicted, a large scale nuclear war and the resulting nuclear winter would still be expected to cause a billion deaths from famine as forecast here
One of the reasons those cities were chosen for testing the bombs is because they had city centers with reinforced concrete structures / industrial areas as well as traditional wooden structures outside the center.
Hiroshima was already on the list when the Targetting Committee requested details on the construction of Japanese building at the proposed bombing locations (Nagasaki was not on the list at this point). At the next meeting of the Targetting Committee, there was no discussion of preferred sites except that to note that “efficient targets” had already been destroyed and that a blast wave of 3 PSI was probably sufficient to destroy most buildings.
They had a handful of reinforced concrete buildings, but nothing in comparison to the last 70 years of construction
The center of the city [Hiroshima] contained a number of reinforced concrete buildings as well as lighter structures. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small wooden workshops set among Japanese houses; a few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were of wooden construction with tile roofs. Many of the industrial buildings also were of wood frame construction. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage.
In contrast to many modern aspects of Nagasaki, the residences almost without exception were of flimsy, typical Japanese construction, consisting of wood or wood-frame buildings, with wood walls with or without plaster, and tile roofs. Many of the smaller industries and business establishments were also housed in wooden buildings or flimsily built masonry buildings. Nagasaki had been permitted to grow for many years without conforming to any definite city zoning plan and therefore residences were constructed adjacent to factory buildings and to each other almost as close as it was possible to build them throughout the entire industrial valley.
The tallest building in the entity of Japan until the 60s was only about 60 metres tall.
We have volcanic winter as an example of how nuclear winter will look. Good thing is it would last at most a couple of year. Bad thing is that a lot of people would starve in those couple of years. Radiation damage would be pretty limited and localized compared to agriculture disruption due to nuclear winter.
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Citation please?
This one cites a lot of the recent literature on soot injection but I haven’t read much in terms of counterarguments
Even if the estimated soot is 10x less than predicted, a large scale nuclear war and the resulting nuclear winter would still be expected to cause a billion deaths from famine as forecast here
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All good, I mean no one has nuked a modern city so it’s largely fancy guesswork
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were modern cities
A city that primary uses steel, concrete and stone-based (including bricks) construction
One of the reasons those cities were chosen for testing the bombs is because they had city centers with reinforced concrete structures / industrial areas as well as traditional wooden structures outside the center.
Hiroshima was already on the list when the Targetting Committee requested details on the construction of Japanese building at the proposed bombing locations (Nagasaki was not on the list at this point). At the next meeting of the Targetting Committee, there was no discussion of preferred sites except that to note that “efficient targets” had already been destroyed and that a blast wave of 3 PSI was probably sufficient to destroy most buildings.
They had a handful of reinforced concrete buildings, but nothing in comparison to the last 70 years of construction
The tallest building in the entity of Japan until the 60s was only about 60 metres tall.
We have volcanic winter as an example of how nuclear winter will look. Good thing is it would last at most a couple of year. Bad thing is that a lot of people would starve in those couple of years. Radiation damage would be pretty limited and localized compared to agriculture disruption due to nuclear winter.
More than a couple years at most
a–f, Changes in surface temperature (a), solar radiation © and precipitation (e) averaged over global crop regions of 2000 (Supplementary Fig. 1) and sea surface temperature (b), solar radiation (d) and net primary productivity (f) over the oceans following the six stratospheric soot-loading scenarios studied here for 15 years following a nuclear war, derived from simulations in ref. 18. These variables are the direct climate forcing for the crop and fishery models. The left y axes are the anomalies of monthly climate variables from simulated nuclear war minus the climatology of the control simulation, which is the average of 45 years of simulation. The right y axes are the percentage change relative to the control simulation. The wars take place on 15 May of Year 1, and the year labels are on 1 January of each year. For comparison, during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, global average surface temperatures were about 5 °C cooler than present. Ocean temperatures decline less than for crops because of the ocean’s large heat capacity. Ocean solar radiation loss is less than for crops because most ocean is in the Southern Hemisphere, where slightly less smoke is present.
From Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection