Climate scientist Michael Mills describes the devastation of a nuclear detonation
Bryan Dyne: What would happen to a city in a nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea? [ This interview was conducted in mid-April 2017, when the Trump administration was ratcheting up tensions with North Korea ]
Michael Mills: Our work is based on the idea that if a nuclear bomb exploded over a large modern city, the explosion would cause fires that would ignite over the entire area, eventually becoming what is known as a firestorm. This means that the fires have become so hot that the city itself becomes fuel for the fire, which releases much more energy than the nuclear weapon itself. This is what happened during the incendiary bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.
Essentially, if a city is ignited on this scale, the fires produce millions of tons of black smoke, also called soot, from the burning buildings and other materials. Heat from the fires causes the soot-filled air to rise, and the soot absorbs sunlight, further heating the air so that it rises into the stratosphere, 10 to 30 miles above Earth’s surface. These particles are so high that they don’t get rained out, since there is no weather in the stratosphere. So it can take decades for the soot to settle back down to the surface.
The main effect from all this soot being trapped in the stratosphere is that it continuously absorbs sunlight. In our models, which are based off of the detonation of 100 small nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan, global temperatures become the coldest they’ve been in the past 1,000 years. In a big exchange between major powers, you basically get ice age temperatures.
The second problem is that heating up the stratosphere destroys up to 50 percent the ozone layer by producing changes in the chemical reaction rates that produce ozone. While this happens today in Antarctica, that is a seasonal effect that occurs in the Antarctic spring and early summer. The loss of ozone from stratospheric heating is constant and worldwide. As a result, crops and ecosystems face not only freezing temperatures, but also intense ultraviolet light from the Sun as a result of a diminished ozone layer.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/20...9VHs8e35L1K3ArYD-WLxMCsTZb4tgLRS2raDsdyp096MA
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