Nuclear winter facts for kids

Nuclear winter is a theory stating the possible effects of the use of nuclear weapons during a nuclear war; which could include reduced sunlight, extreme cold, and the presence of large amounts of smoke and soot in the Earth's atmosphere.

Images for kids

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  Picture of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud taken from a commercial airliner cruising at about 10 km. In 2002, various sensing instruments detected 17 distinct pyrocumulonimbus cloud events in North America alone.

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  Smoke rising in Lochcarron, Scotland, is stopped by an overlying natural low-level inversion layer of warmer air (2006).

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  Diagram obtained by the CIA from the International Seminar on Nuclear War in Italy 1984. It depicts the findings of Soviet 3-D computer model research on nuclear winter from 1983, and although containing similar errors as earlier Western models, it was the first 3-D model of nuclear winter. (The three dimensions in the model are longitude, latitude and altitude.) The diagram shows the models predictions of global temperature changes after a global nuclear exchange. The top image shows effects after 40 days, the bottom after 243 days. A co-author was nuclear winter modelling pioneer Vladimir Alexandrov. Alexsandrov disappeared in 1985. As of 2016, there remains ongoing speculation by friend, Andrew Revkin, of foul play relating to his work.

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  The mushroom cloud height as a function of explosive yield detonated as surface bursts. As charted, yields at least in the megaton range are required to lift dust/fallout into the stratosphere. Ozone reaches its maximum concentration at about 25 km (c. 82,000 ft) in altitude. Another means of stratospheric entry is from high altitude nuclear detonations, one example of which includes the 10.5 kiloton Soviet test no.#88 of 1961, detonated at 22.7 km. US high-yield upper atmospheric tests, Teak and Orange were also assessed for their ozone destruction potential. 0 = Approx altitude commercial aircraft operate 1 = Fat Man 2 = Castle Bravo

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  The Kuwaiti oil fires were not just limited to burning oil wells, one of which is seen here in the background, but burning "oil lakes", seen in the foreground, also contributed to the smoke plumes, particularly the sootiest/blackest of them.

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  Smoke plumes from a few of the Kuwaiti Oil Fires on April 7, 1991. The maximum assumed extent of the combined plumes from over six hundred fires during the period of February 15 – May 30, 1991, are available. Only about 10% of all the fires, mostly corresponding with those that originated from "oil lakes" produced pure black soot filled plumes, 25% of the fires emitted white to grey plumes, while the remaining emitted plumes with colors between grey and black.

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  This satellite photo of the south of Britain shows black smoke from the 2005 Buncefield fire, a series of fires and explosions involving approximately 250,000,000 litres of fossil fuels. The plume is seen spreading in two main streams from the explosion site at the apex of the inverted 'v'. By the time the fire had been extinguished the smoke had reached the English Channel. The orange dot is a marker, not the actual fire. Although the smoke plume was from a single source, and larger in size than the individual oil well fire plumes in Kuwait 1991, the Buncefield smoke cloud remained out of the stratosphere.

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  During the Operation Meeting House firebombing of Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945, 1,665 tons (1.66 kilotons) of incendiary and high-explosive bombs in the form of bomblets were dropped on the city, causing the destruction of over 10,000 acres of buildings – 16 square miles (41 km²), the most destructive and deadliest bombing operation in history.

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  The first nuclear bombing in history used a 16-kiloton nuclear bomb, approximately 10 times as much energy as delivered onto Tokyo, yet due in part to the comparative inefficiency of larger bombs, a much smaller area of building destruction occurred when contrasted with the results from Tokyo. Only 4.5 square miles (12 km²) of Hiroshima was destroyed by blast, fire, and firestorm effects. Similarly, Major Cortez F. Enloe, a surgeon in the USAAF who worked with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), noted that the even more energetic 22-kiloton nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki did not result in a firestorm and thus did not do as much fire damage as the conventional airstrikes on Hamburg which did generate a firestorm. Thus, whether a city will firestorm depends primarily not on the size or type of bomb dropped, but rather on the density of fuel present in the city. Moreover, it has been observed that firestorms are not likely in areas where modern buildings (constructed of bricks and concrete) have totally collapsed. By comparison, Hiroshima, and Japanese cities in general in 1945, had consisted of mostly densely-packed wooden houses along with the common use of shoji paper sliding walls. The fire hazard construction practices present in cities that have historically firestormed are now illegal in most countries for general safety reasons, and therefore cities with firestorm potential are far rarer than was common at the time of WWII.

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  An animation depicting a massive asteroid–Earth impact and subsequent impact crater formation. The asteroid connected with the extinction of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event released an estimated energy of 100 teratonnes of TNT (420 ZJ). corresponding to 100,000,000 Mt of energy, roughly 10,000 times the maximum combined arsenals of the US and Soviet Union in the Cold War. This is hypothesized to have produced sufficient ground-energy coupling to have caused severe mantle plume (volcanism) at the antipodal point (the opposite side of the world).

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  Depending on the size of the meteor, it will either burn up high in the atmosphere or reach lower levels and explode in an air burst akin to the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013, which approximated the thermal effects of a nuclear explosion.

See also

In Spanish: Invierno nuclear para niños