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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

The concept of "nuclear winter" is a great example of science gone wrong. As it turns out, the original 1980s report vastly overestimated the amount of combustible fuel in cities and inaccurately estimated both modern nuclear weapon yield and blast size. Nuclear war would not create firestorms capable of injecting soot into the stratosphere and would not cause years-long crop failures. Nuclear war is, in fact, quite survivable.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4244

https://www.nature.com/articles/475037b

https://www.quora.com/How-many-nukes-would-it-take-to-cause-...

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> Nuclear war is, in fact, quite survivable.

Nuclear winter may be less plausible than people believe but I'm not sure a nuclear war can be described as "quite survivable". The potential disruption to transportation networks that are essential for food distribution and delivery of medical supplies etc would be catastrophic in a nuclear war. I have no doubt that a nuclear exchange would be accompanied by electronic warfare - disruption/destruction of the power grid in the north could kill millions in the winter, especially if the petroleum supplies required to evacuate were also disrupted.

I think my main worry is how well the economic system would hold up in even a fairly minor attack - given how worried politicians were at the time of the banking crisis (e.g. here in the UK having to put troops on the streets to control public order was considered likely if any of the major banks had gone under) I suspect the answer is "not very well".

I think "survivable" is to be understood on a civilization scale, not for individuals. It would definitely be a calamitous event with massive loss of life - but if you survive the attack itself and can feed yourself and otherwise survive for a few months perhaps, you would have decent odds. I think.

It depends on what exactly is meant by "quite survivable."

Does that mean you'll have a 99% chance to survive even if you do any special preparation? If so, nuclear war definitely does not qualify.

Does it mean you'll have a greater than 50% chance to survive with good preparation? Nuclear war probably qualifies.

Or does it just mean that nuclear war won't result in human extinction? Nuclear war definitely qualifies.

An all-out nuclear war would definitely kill tens of millions immediately, and tens if not hundreds of millions with the after-effects. You may not see years-long crop failures due to nuclear winter, but you'll get the same ultimate effect from lack of fertilizer, machinery, and distribution infrastructure. And fallout. A good chunk of the US's productive agricultural land is downwind from ICBM sites which would be targeted for extremely dirty ground burst attacks.

There's no reasonable interpretation of a 50%-ish survival rate that can be described as 'quite survivable'. Toxicologists say LD50, for instance, not QS50.

You have a quibble with that one but not with defining it as "humanity doesn't go extinct"?

On an individual scale? Sure. On a civilization or species scale? Survival of the larger group is almost certain if each individual has "only" a 50% chance of death.

The Black Death, after all, killed about half of Europe's population. European civilization survived.

Well, a subset of the population persisted. The order of society changed radically, as it became impossible to enforce enserfment.

Was it really half? I have seen figures around 30%. Are there any accurate records in every country at the time?

Mad Max survival is still survival.

The Quora link you put says the reason the 1980s report is no longer relevant is the drawdown from Cold War nuke levels.

The Nature letter was written by Russell Seitz, who is also skeptical against the harm cigarette smoking can do, that climate change has, and so on. I don't know of any scientific views not aligning with profits of military contractors and big business that he is not skeptical of. He is associated with the Marshall Insitute, founded by his cousin Fred Seitz, who himself was skeptical of cigarette's harm, global warming, deterioration of the ozone layer etc.

The Skeptoid link references the same thing as the Quora link - that nuclear stockpiles have decreased to where a full-scale war would be less than in the 1980s, when the stockpiles were much higher.

For political reasons, it was necessary from the 1940s to 1980s to minimize fears of the impact of a full-scale nuclear war. I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report which said that if the US and USSR had a full nuclear exchange, the US would get back to current GNP levels - in five years!

I don't know how this is science gone wrong - two of the links you put say this is no longer applicable due to post-Cold War drawdowns, and the other one is by someone who is skeptical not only of this, but that cigarettes are harmful, that climate change is happening and on and on.

The simplistic 1D climate model and the incorrect fuel loading assumptions are also relevant. And I think we owe it to ourselves to evaluate scientific arguments on their merits instead of trying to imply guilt through association.

Nuclear war certainly isn't desirable, but it doesn't do any good to exaggerate its likely effects.

>evaluate scientific arguments on their merits

Provided such merits exist and arguments are indeed scientific.

Thank you for the links. I'll have to read your articles very closely later, but recent climate simulations by Alan Robock at Rutgers and analysis by Ira Helfand at IPPNW and others show that a nuclear autumn, created by 100 15-kT (Hiroshima sized) nukes could cause a famine that affects up to 2B people.

I wrote to Dr. Robock and asked him about his model (explicitly on the record, so I'm not disclosing a private conversation). I asked specifically why did the Iraq oil well fires from the Gulf War not inject soot into the stratosphere and cause climatic effects. He wrote back that the difference lies in the formation of firestorms. I draw from this by implication that he believes there remains enough combustable material to start a firestorm in enough places to matter. It's worth noting that while cities have changed a lot, a firestorm did develop in one of the two Japanese cities bombed. I'll have more to say about this in a month or so once I do more research and review your materials.

Here's a link to some of their work: http://ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html

> affects up to 2B people

"Affects." Saying it affects 2B people without saying how much means very little. The tailpipe emissions from my single car family affect 7B+ people, just very slightly.

I think we should start with lives lost as an easy to understand measure.

Thanks for linking the source.

I agree with your criticism. We'll have to read the paper to find out what that means. ;)

I dug up the correspondence. Here's what Dr. Robock said. Again, I explicitly asked permission to quote him. Here's the relevant excerpt.

Me: "I understand that you've conducted 100 Hiroshima simulations that describe a nuclear autumn that could lead to mass starvation. Is it known where the crossover point is located between deaths due to direct effects and incidental effects of nuclear war? Furthermore, is this even a useful question to ask?"

Dr. Robock: "We simulated one case of an India-Pakistan nuclear war. We estimated 20,000,000 direct casualties, and Ira estimated 1,000,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 indirect deaths. We have a new project to do much better jobs of investigating more credible scenarios and quantifying the impacts on agriculture and food availability."

I'd recommend digging into the paper for more info. Probably in a month or two, I'll have an article that explores this question based on available credible sources in more depth.

He has a TEDx talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrEk1oZ-54

EDIT: added TEDx link

Thanks!

These estimates look only cities and their fuel loading.

It would be interesting to see how California would manage during dry 'fire season' if nuclear bombardment caused massive forest fires all over the place. If large fires create massive combined updraft it could be a global catastrophe.

We already know that large-area wildfires sometimes cause firestorms that throw soot into the stratosphere.

> I draw from this by implication that he believes there remains enough combustable material to start a firestorm in enough places to matter

Well recently the world has learned just how combustible many buildings are (Grenfell Towers) because they are covered in flammable cladding. We might not have a lot of wood construction anymore, but we've moved on from the concrete jungle as well.

Science is a process, not a single event or fact. The fact that the nuclear winter research was inaccurate was exposed by the scientific process as much as it was put forward by it.

Additionally, the absence of nuclear winter does not imply that "nuclear war is quite survivable". Nuclear war is almost certainly survivable, with or without nuclear winter. The question is though: what survives? Even without nuclear winter, crop yields are going to plummet drastically immediately, due to the collapse of world trade, industry, and commerce. And that's a positive feedback loop due to population effects. Our current state of industry and agriculture results in nuclear war causing an initial death-toll followed by a delayed death toll as things settle into a drastically different economic/industrial/agricultural equilibrium. Or, to make things clearer: the sustainable population level of a post-nuclear war scenario is vastly lower than the initial surviving population. What happens after that is still, somewhat thankfully, an open question. The human race may survive, but how long it takes civilization to recover to the same level of technology is unknown. It might take years, decades, centuries, or millenia. Indeed it might never happen, for various reasons. Nuclear war is more than likely going to result in everyone currently alive never seeing this level of technological sophistication, affluence, comfort, etc. in their lifetimes.

This is a very strong claim, and based on what I've read I do not believe it is accurate to say nuclear winter research was so off the mark as to be "inaccurate". Please see my comments further up the thread. Please cite the arguments you are basing this claim on.

My understanding is that the major source of confusion was the headline of a 1990 NYT article that made it look like nuclear winter was wrong, but the actual contents were much more moderate.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-the...

> Nuclear war is, in fact, quite survivable.

That's highly debatable. I'm 1/2 way through Command and Control (the book) and one criticism I have throughout for both history (the military and politicos), as well as the author, is no mention of the massive refugee crisis that would emerge as a result of a nuclear war. It makes Mad Max look more realistic, not so much the widespread wasteland, as much as the total breakdown of civil society.

If "civil" society, modern governments, do this thing, they forfeit moral high ground. They've failed. So why wouldn't they be immediately dismantled? Why trust anyone? I think it would be such high order betrayal people would take up a new religion that commands them murder is a gift from god, do it as often as possible in order to survive.

John McClane: Come on. Government's gonna have dozens of departments dedicated to that shit!

Matt Farrell: It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome.

>Nuclear war is, in fact, quite survivable.

Short term, or long term? In the long term, that's a lot of hungry people with no org chart above them. Short term, a lot of people will die, be gravely injured, and probably haunted.

Your definition of survival is pretty opaque.

I don't know the science enough to judge which side of this argument is more likely to be correct. But I do know I felt more comfortable about the approach our leaders took towards nuclear war when everyone was terrified of it vs. the attitude of "Hmm, maybe it isn't so bad... maybe we could win a nuclear war?"

I understand the sentiment, but in the long run, I don't think it does us good to promote fiction over the truth, even in instances where we think the fiction will do more immediate good. We can't make sense of the world unless we understand it, and it's hard to predict what new insights we can gain from truth.

Nuclear Winter won’t matter when spent nuclear fuel pools in those nations undergo meltdowns following sustained losses of offsite power caused by catastrophic damage to the national electrical distribution system. The fuel in a nuclear reactor is marginal relative to SFP loading.

A nuclear meltdown is a localized concern. It's small potatoes compared to an all out nuclear exchange.

An SFP fire is not a reactor meltdown, and the distribution of fission products from a SFP and a weapon are also very dissimilar. SFP fires will result in long-lived contamination over plumes of >100km that would result in exclusion zones.

For example, failure to restore cooling to the Fukushima pools could have necessitated the evacuation of 35MM people.

http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs24vonhippel.p...

Even in a pure-counterforce exchange that avoided targeting population centers, the resulting damage to infrastructure could result in the denial of current urban centers to habitation for many decades.

Freeman Dyson wrote about this and his feeling was that it would be similar to the London smog after the war. Which was warm - so his conclusion was it wouldn't be a nuclear winter.

Counterpoint

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2017.13...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2017/08/12/even-a-...

Those are both just repeating the Sagan scare scenario and rhetoric, handwaving about levels of smoke and tar generation that we know is wrong given previous nuclear test explosions, and smoke generating events like the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires.

“Handwaving”

No that’s pretty much your game I think, unless you just didn’t read the paper.

> Even Dr. Richard P. Turco, the physicist who coined the phrase ''nuclear winter,'' discounts the idea.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-the...

Ignoring modern Studies in favor of a 27-year-old New York Times article? Right, something smells here.

> The concept of "nuclear winter" is a great example of science gone wrong.

It's not science gone wrong. It's an example of politics co-opting and exploiting science because science has the credibility that politics doesn't. The elites wanted to scale back nuclear spending and needed a cover to convince the masses and the soviets to support "denuclearization".

History is full of "science" being exploited to advance a political agenda. One of the most poignant examples is nazi germany using social darwinism to justify their political agenda. Modern global warming scaremongering industry is the newest example of "science" being co-opted for a political agenda.

Certainly, human activity is affecting the environment, but the doomsday nonsense peddled by al gore, dicaprio and the media isn't science, it's a politically driven scaremongering tactic to get the world under one "system" ( carbon tax, trade, etc ).

It's a shame that you're being down voted. You're right about the political cooptioon of science. In my original message, I was trying to be minimally divisive.

I think you're wrong on climate change, but for understandable reasons. We're been peddling lies under the name of science for so long now (see the role of sugar in nutrition) that science has lost much of the credibility it needs to drive the changes we need to address climate change. I don't blame people for distrusting counter-intuitive science generally these days.

Maybe that's why we keep talking about ineffective emissions regulations instead of prototyping effective geoengineering remedies for the carbon forcing and ocean acidification.

This comment is probably being downvoted for good reason. It has a valid core idea. Politicians often cherrypick science that agrees with their ideology to further their agenda. But this statement smacks of conspiracy, crankery and sloppy thinking.

"It's not science gone wrong. It's an example of politics co-opting and exploiting science because science has the credibility that politics doesn't. The elites wanted to scale back nuclear spending and needed a cover to convince the masses and the soviets to support "denuclearization"."

Who are 'the elites.' The Illuminati? Carl Sagan and company? Ronald Reagan who began the START treaty process? So Carl Sagan and other scientists entered into a conspiracy with Ronald Reagan to defraud the public with a poorly crafted scientific paper to boilster nuclear disarmament.

I don't think the OP was talking about the kind of conspiracy you describe. Or maybe he was: it doesn't matter, because there's a subtler point. Scientists are not somehow exempt from confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, and political biases can creep into research without anyone cackling in a smoke-filled room.

Look, for example, at the current sorry state of social science research, much of which does not reproduce. Ego depletion, stereotype threat, the IAT: all "scientific" ideas that are politically convenient but fiction, and which went unquestioned for a long time because, deep down, most researchers didn't want these ideas to be wrong. That doesn't make these researchers conspirators.

And I completely agree. That's why I said the post"...has a valid core idea. Politicians often cherrypick science that agrees with their ideology to further their agenda."

But I'm sorry the sentence I quoted isn't blatant crankery but it is loaded with conspiracy innuendo.

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