Hacker News Reader

Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

It's not a strange question: many falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet and here on HN.

The conversation around nuclear winter focused on burning petroleum storage tanks because (in contrast to burning houses and burning trees) those kinds of fires produce the darkest smoke with a particle size small enough to get high in the atmosphere and to stay in the atmosphere for a long time. "100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter," said one prominent paper.

Then Saddam lit 700 oil wells on fire (and deployed land mines to slow down firefighters with the result that it took 7 months to put the fires out), and although there was some slight cooling effect, you really had to go looking for it with precision instruments to detect it at all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...

View on HN

Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks? The conversation around nuclear winter in relation to nukes is because it's an understood consequence of 100-some Hiroshima-sized warheads being detonated between two major city centers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Climatic_effect...

>Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks?

Repeating myself: before the 700 Kuwaiti oil fires, the most influential scientists warning about nuclear winter, like Carl Sagan, relied heavily on petroleum fires to make their argument.

As a completely serious question, what about the non-influencer scientists, the ones doing actual detailed physical modelling, what were they saying?

As I recall from the time there were three camps on this:

* pro MAD cold war political scientists who stressed that world ending Mutualy Assurred Destruction scenarios were essential to peace keeping,

* antinuclear horrified scientists, Carl Sagan, Betrand Russell, et al who wanted disarmament and peace through understanding and stressed the world ending horror of nuclear weapons and nuclear winter and wrote a lot of papers light on detail.

* actual working geophysicists modelling the world who seemed largely undecided about the actual threat of nuclear winter .. very much in the maybe | maybe not camp.

ADDED: I just read through the wikipedia Nuclear Winter article and seems (by my recollection) to have been culled in the decade since I last read it when (by my recollection) it referenced a great many more papers that fell on the probably not catastrophic side. It now appears to emphasis only papers that agree with the nuclear winter hypothesis.

I can't speak to the actual research but after reading various declassified documents from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, I can say truthfully that they did not believe the world would end with a nuclear exchange. Both countries had 1st strike scenarios - both believed some aspect of their government and country would survive.

Mao was particularly disconcerting, to paraphrase, "Nuclear war doesn't scare me, we've got more than enough people and cities, we can rebuild"

Upon further looking into it, I fear MAD may have been at the time an overexaggeration to prevent what would be the most devastating war. Could be true now tho - things have leveled up

If you have any links handy for the documents from China and the USSR, I’d love to read that.

I don't recall petroleum fires being a huge part of the dialog, back when nuclear winter was a big public topic, such that I'd bring it up first thing and to the exclusion of other concerns.

It was part of it, for sure. There was at least one apocalyptic science fiction story about the Soviets testing a bomb underground and accidentally setting a massive oil field on fire. (it was called Anvil? Or written by Christopher Anvil? jeez, it's been a while...) But it's strange to see it commented on as the main concern.

I saw 9/11 cloud on TV. That was one building.

If Earth's megacities get nuked I refuse to believe that it would not have consequences for the climate.

When Canada was on fire last year, we had smoke all down the east coast. I don't know if it affected the temperature, but it sure affected the environment. it doesn't need to go full ashen-winter to fuck up plant growth cycles for farms and whatnot, I'm sure.

I never claimed it wouldn't have consequences for the climate, but there is a big difference between that and the assertion I am replying to, namely, "our reserve count [our current inventory of nukes] is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization".

Since when is Carl Sagan a climatologist?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com