Global food insecurity due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection | Hacker News Reader

Global food insecurity due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection

nature.com

48 pointsLuc20 comments

I think I remember reading somewhere that the US government hired firms during the Cold War - maybe RAND - to do game theoretic analyses of strategic nuclear defense. I'd be curious if there are any summaries of this historical research or new game theoretic analyses happening with today's events and the advent of hypersonic capabilities.

Terrifying stuff.

No not really. They don't make a difference.

What could make a difference is whether or not the old Soviet nukes have actually been maintained and actually work. Not something one wants to test but it would make for some great sci fi to imagine the missiles launch, everyone clenches their butthole, and when everything's over, Russia is a crater in the ground and the west is fine.

edit: for reference hypersonic missiles tend to refer to the shorter range stuff. All the ICBMs of old were already hypersonic.

It is actually very likely that Russia's nuclear weapons are fine. CIA thinks [1] that they are conducting hydronuclear tests, i.e. nuclear tests where the yield is small enough to not turn the bomb into a plasma or a gas, but just to liquefy the plutonium pit.

[1] https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2019/08/08/yes_the...

That's a very interesting article, I'm surprised it doesn't seem to be more widely known.

In the movie "Dr Strangelove", it's never mentioned, but General Buck Turgidson is seen carrying around a binder with the title "World Targets in Megadeaths". I assume that's a reference to those kinds of studies. It's a really great movie and a good distillation of how absurd the whole Cold War was.

I forgot where I heard it but one analysis of a "successful" US defense (only thing hit by enemy nukes are our own nuclear assets) still had US deaths somewhere in the hundred millions from the resulting famine

>>> advent of hypersonic

I think it's advanced cyber capabilities in the context of loose nuclear proliferation that results in near 100% probability of general exchange in simulations ;)

Wargaming War Games: How Likely is Thermonuclear Cyber War?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_0mm8UkVOc

Fires have to generate a massive updraft to punch into the stratosphere, and this is well-known in major volcanic eruptions like Pinatubo, but it looks like recent evidence shows this is entirely plausible:

> "Recent catastrophic forest fires in Canada in 2017 and Australia in 2019 and 2020 produced 0.3–1 Tg of smoke (0.006–0.02 Tg soot), which was subsequently heated by sunlight and lofted high in the stratosphere. The smoke was transported around the world and lasted for many months. This adds confidence to our simulations that predict the same process would occur after nuclear war."

Also, if the world's major nuclear reactors, spent fuel rods pods, and dry cask waste storage were targeted with nuclear weapons, there'd be massive radioactive fallout on top of everything else.

> massive radioactive fallout on top of everything else.

You get plenty of fallout with the weapons themselves unless they're exclusively air-bursts.

By the time the primary targets like air fields, military command centres, missile silos , and the cities and other infrastructure have all been hit, enough nuclear weapons have been detonated to kill more or less everyone on the planet.

The SIOP contained tens of thousands of targets.

I don't understand, honestly, why this is a new study. I thought the fallout (hah!) from a nuclear war was known to be catastrophic to the planet. That's why everyone is so hesitant to use them (on top of MAD).

What about this study is new? Is it the scientific detailing and modeling?

There has recently been people disputing the scale or probability of nuclear winter, so this is relevant and useful.

There's mixed scientific consensus on the full impact of nuclear winter. This paper shows evidence that it would be really bad (in the sense of several billion dead).

As I understand it, the contention with the nuclear winter hypothesis is not whether a ton of soot in the atmosphere would wreck the climate, but rather whether a nuclear war would actually loft that amount of soot into the stratosphere.

And this study suggests it would, in fact, loft a lot of soot into the stratosphere.

To my reading, no. That's not the question the study is addressing. The study is examining the climate impact of six soot-injection scenarios, not the premise of soot injection itself. It cites other papers (some modern, some from the 80s) to justify the six soot-injection scenarios considered, but this study is about applying climate models to those scenarios.

Owen B. Toon is famously one of the T's in the groundbreaking TTAPS paper. It's credited with bringing the idea of nuclear winter into the public consciousness, alongside co-author Carl Sagan's article in Parade which made the topic more accessible.

oh jeez guess that's one reason out of many why they call it mutually assured destruction

Next they find out that capitalism exploits the masses and the planet and only benefit the few.

with the current crop of neoliberals, I wouldn't hold by breath

how is this point relevant to the current discussion and topic of the thread?

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