Posted on 03/01/2007 5:22:58 PM PST by blam
'Nuclear winter' may kill more than a nuclear war
19:00 01 March 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Debora MacKenzie
A regional exchange of relatively small nuclear weapons could plunge the world into a decade-long "nuclear winter", destroying agriculture and killing millions, according to a new study.
Weapons experts to consider that small-scale nuclear exchanges are now more likely than the massive US-Soviet exchanges feared during the Cold War.
In the 1980s, scientists calculated that such exchanges would put enough smoke into the atmosphere to shade the Earth from the Sun, causing a nuclear winter.
Now scientists have re-calculated the likelihood of nuclear winter using modern, vastly improved climate models and a more likely modern scenario for small-scale nuclear war. Brian Toon, head of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Jersey, both in the US, predict less cooling than the 1980s modellers. However, they predict the cooling would last longer, with potentially devastating consequences.
Different targets
The pair modelled the impact of 100 explosions in subtropical megacities. They modelled 15-kilotonne explosions, like the Hiroshima bomb. This is also the size of the bombs now possessed by India and Pakistan, among others.
The immediate blast and radiation from the exchange of 100 small nuclear bombs killed between three million and 16 million people, depending on the targets. But the global effect of the resulting one-to-five million tonnes of smoke was much worse. “It is very surprising how few weapons are needed to do so much damage,” says Toon.
(Excerpt) Read more at environment.newscientist.com ...
Hasn't happened in Jericho yet!
Yeah we nuke the ME and kill two birds with one stone, so to speak....
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I heard it all in the 70's and 80's.
The answer is: because they wanted the survivors to look more dead than alive.
and on that one...all I can say is this;
We ALL independently remember Sagan sitting there in the CNN
Studios, pontificating that the world was about to end because Saddam had all those wellheads lit on fire.
Carl Sagan was a bloated gas bag. Cosmos was a great series, beyond Cosmos, Sagan is simply a clueless socialist douche.
Dont these idiots realize that we exploded over 3000 nuclear weapons in the air, on the ground, under the sea, and underground for over 600 megatons from 1949-1992? Guess what? we are still here. Friggin liberals..
Unilateral surrender is the only solution!
Yeah, and as soon as we stopped, Global Warming...
Nuclear Winter. 2012. You gotta go sometime.
So what they are saying is we have an immediate fix for "global warming" if it gets out of control. Therefore we no longer need to worry about "global warming".
They get paid. I get slammed for telling a joke twice.
Of course, the logbooks from Royal Navy vessels gave much broader picture of what was going on.
[sound of crickets]
And did they consider that the best way to kill population centers is with air-bursts, instead of cold-war style ground-bursts? (ground bursts being better at digging out hardened targets like your opponents missile silos) Further, that an air-burst is big on blast effects and radiation, but not so big on ground fires, dust, and fallout in the atmosphere?
Finally, did they look around? Who has 100 warheads? Or even 50 each side to toss at one another? Hmm, only the super-powers. If we start knocking out each other's population centers, it isn't going to stop there. Terrorist states and "limited" nuclear powers are only capable of tossing a hand full of weapons at each other. And that assumes they are willing to commit their entire arsenals, without keeping any strategic reserve... Doubtful at best...
Sounds like more hysteria and fear. Read "State of Fear" - it'll open your eyes.
Perhaps that's the solution to global warming.Any time the climate starts to get too warm, just set off a few atmospheric a-bombs.
Don't waste the good bombs on the 'atmospheric' but try to get two birds with the same stone and use it as an occasion for a bit of housecleaning.
All I can say after seeing it, is "Thank God for Ronald Reagan putting an end to the Cold War."
Incorrect. Anything that could go wrong or anything that does go wrong since January is the fault of Pelosi and Reid. They are in charge now, as they have reminded us often.
Of course this would bring up the most obvious question from the rest of the world and our wasteoids, "how can we blame America for it?"
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