What is nuclear winter?
Smoke injected high into the atmosphere cools the planet. This has been repeatedly demonstrated after many volcanic eruptions. The massive smoke pails generated by huge forest fires in British Columbia in 1982 cooled temperatures in the United States by 4°F to 7°F. In 1983, scientist Richard Turco investigated what the effect would be of massive nuclear exchange between the superpowers. By the late 1980s there were 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Their total explosive power was 15,000 megatons of TNT—or 3 tons of TNT for every person living on Earth. If a Hiroshima-sized bomb were dropped every hour from 1945 on, only one-third of the global nuclear arsenal would ever have been used!
If a full-scale nuclear war were to take place, with each nuclear detonation huge amounts of black sooty smoke would be lofted high into the stratosphere. Though much would be rained out over several months’ time, it was estimated that the remaining smoke pall would cause a nuclear winter in which the planet’s temperature would drop precipitously. Crop failures would cause worldwide starvation (of those not killed by the radiation). Many believe that the fear of nuclear winter, in which no nation would survive, finally hit home to the world’s political leaders and helped the easing of the arms race in the 1980s. Yet the remaining stockpile of weapons is still sufficient to cause global nuclear winters 10 to 100 times over.