Transcription
A few months ago, the Japanese organization Nihon Hin Danko received the Nobel Peace Prize. In our Eurocentrism, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their descendants, the main goal of Nihon Hin Danko is to remind the world that nuclear war is a hell in which there will be no winners and losers. Civilization, as we know it, will end.
I think I don't need to explain why this topic has become relevant again. One of the main dangers of such a global confrontation is a nuclear winter, when radioactive ash from nuclear explosions rises into the atmosphere and covers the sun for several years. Our planet will plunge into night; photosynthesis will stop, and that's it. Those who survived a nuclear blast will be doomed to death from hunger and cold.
I think you yourself have heard more than once about the earth. On this topic, there are a lot of games, films, and books, from Fallout to Metro. For my generation, it is somehow automatically ingrained in the subcortex that after a nuclear war, there will be a nuclear winter and the death of humanity.
By the way, the Nobel Prize for Nihon Hin Danko is not the first award for the same topic. Back in 2017, the Nobel Prize for similar research was received by ICAN, an association of nuclear scientists who fight for nuclear disarmament. But around the same time, talk began that maybe this is all [ __ ]. Maybe it's time to stop being afraid and take a normal attitude towards nuclear war because opinions began to appear that the concept of nuclear winter is pseudoscience.
Physicists from the Cold War era simply falsified data for political purposes. In the Russian-speaking world, an article from the magazine Popular Mechanics made a lot of noise, where nuclear winter was directly called an element of urban folklore. It has now been removed from the magazine's website, but since then, it has managed to spread.
According to modern data, soot from the troposphere with precipitation will fall down in a matter of weeks and will not be able to prevent sunlight from reaching the surface of the planet for a long time. There is no need to expect a universal famine because only city dwellers will die, that is, consumers, but not food producers. Well, don't worry, only the freeloaders from the capital will die. Peasants, the salt of the earth, will not even suffer.
So if you are afraid of turning into nuclear ash, just move to the village. So what? The concept of nuclear winter is really outdated. Let's figure it out.
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There is such a website, ResearchGate. It is a kind of social network for scientists. So if you type in the search "nuclear winter," you will find a lot of research, including recent ones. The authors of these articles proceed from the fact that nuclear winter is a visible reality.
That is, for most scientists, this hypothesis is far from outdated. But how did it even arise? What is it based on, and why are there skeptics today who doubt its plausibility? We need to start with what the concept of nuclear winter looks like in its so-called basic form.
In this, I will rely on the article by Academician Alexander Tarko, who at one time participated in calculations for simulating a nuclear winter. So, a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR of the 1980s occurs. The basic conditions are as follows: half of the world's nuclear arsenal is used. This is approximately 5,500 megatons.
All of Europe, Russia, North America, and Japan will be under attack. Cities are burning with nuclear flames, just like in the second Terminator. I'm not joking now; Meron really tried to depict the consequences of a nuclear explosion as accurately as possible. A lot of heat is released, which raises huge masses of air at the surface. Hurricane winds are born that blow into the epicenter of the fire, bringing more and more oxygen, smoke, dust, and soot.
All this flies up into the stratosphere. The power of the fire is calculated from the fact that in cities, approximately 4 grams of combustible materials per square centimeter. Although in New York, for example, this figure is 10 times higher. But even by the most conservative estimates, when all this air rises, 200 million tons of small solid particles in the atmosphere will create a black cloud in the Northern Hemisphere, from the thirtieth to the sixtieth parallel, that is, approximately from Egypt to St. Petersburg.
Night will come; for several weeks, the sun will not be visible at all. Then air currents will spread the cloud throughout the atmosphere. The sun will appear, but it will shine very dimly, and the soot will remain in the atmosphere for about another year. But nuclear night is only the first strike.
Everything will only get worse. When the soot covers the sun, the temperature all over the planet will start to fall rapidly. In 40 days, in Europe, it will be down to -42°C, in the north up to -72°C. Even at the Equator, the thermometer will drop to zero. Then a slow rise will begin, and everything will return to normal, the norm in about a year.
It sounds scary for now, but it seems like it only takes a year to endure. Well, then everything will somehow work out on its own. The problem is that this year is enough for the entire biosphere of the Earth to completely perish. If the war happens in July, then that's the end of it all.
Plants that suddenly find themselves without sunlight and with temperatures below zero will simply freeze. That's the death of all plants in the Northern Hemisphere and most of the plants in the Southern Hemisphere. If the war happens in December, then everything depends on the temperatures of the tropics.
It is clear that the entire coniferous forests of Siberia will die out; they can withstand temperatures down to minus 40°C. But if it is lower, then the end of the steppe will freeze. Ninety percent of the mountains will die, and 75% of plants will perish.
This does not mean that the biosphere will die out completely; only 10-20 species of plants will disappear entirely. The rest will be seeds that will survive the frost and germinate the following year. The situation with animals is worse; all birds will die, and most mammals and reptiles will most likely hibernate and survive.
With the fish, it is not entirely clear, but it is clear that the ocean will suffer to a lesser extent than the land. I repeat that according to calculations, all this horror with the nuclear winter will last about a year. Then there will be other separate problems associated with the rotting of dead plants and animals. The climate will change and become worse on average, but life as a whole will somehow survive, which cannot be said about man.
The problem for humanity is not even in the cold but in food. From everything that a person grows, only planted winter crops, that is, rye and wheat, will be able to survive a nuclear winter. Fruit trees, vegetables, potatoes, and other garden plants will immediately perish. Even Asimov will survive only 10 percent.
Note that it will be necessary to survive not one year but as many as 2-3 years. Because the first year simply goes to zero; it will be impossible to plant anything. In the second year, it will be necessary to restore agriculture and wait for the harvest. That is, the surviving people will face mass starvation.
In 2022, when the risk of a third world war began to be discussed seriously again, the American ecology expert Lily considered that even if in that year when war happens, half of the harvest will be saved, still 2 billion people will die. In Europe, only four countries can survive a nuclear winter: France, Spain, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.
In Russia and Belarus, according to estimates, up to 95% of the population will die. In the US, about half, and this is still an optimistic scenario. If the harvest fails, then in three years, the Northern Hemisphere will die out completely, and only people in Australia will be able to survive. But you know, I watched Mad Max, and it won't be easy for Australia either.
In short, all this sounds simply awful, but don't forget that I have now roughly retold the essence of the hypothesis that was born only in the 1980s at the end of the Cold War. Before that, nuclear bombs were also imagined as weapons of Armageddon, but the main fear was that such a bomb, in one go, can destroy an entire city.
And many bombs will destroy the infrastructure of an entire country. That is, we were talking simply about a large-scale explosion with many victims, but not about the fact that it is capable of somehow globally destroying civilization. For example, the British film War Game from 1965, where all the consequences of a nuclear war are simulated for Great Britain, and there is no nuclear winter here, just horrors like Hiroshima, only the size of the whole country.
Although the concept that such powerful explosions can raise clouds of dust in the air developed since the fifties. In 1957, the British physicist Samuel Glasn compared the effect of the explosion of an atomic bomb to 1% of the eruption of a volcano, Rokota, in the 19th century. The comparison with a volcano was not just like that; by that time, such a concept as a volcanic winter was already known.
This is when, as a result of a large eruption, a pile of ash rises into the atmosphere and covers the sun. The most famous such episode is the volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815. It was so strong that it gave rise to the so-called year without a summer, when the temperature on the entire planet dropped by several degrees, causing an abnormally cold winter and crop failure.
The nuclear winter hypothesis was born precisely under the influence of this factor. It was based on the Dutch physicist Paul Kroon. In 1981, he drew attention to the fact that in the Second World War, as a result of carpet bombing of German cities, firestorms arose. This is when the fire was of such a scale that streams of hot air rise high into the atmosphere.
Then there was even a story that British bomber pilots recalled feeling the heat from the burning city. If anything, now it is officially considered that this is all [ __ ] and false. Memories of this could not have happened. But firestorms are a reality. Kroon suggested that as a result of nuclear bombings of large cities, the fires would be much bigger because everything that can burn would burn.
And then it would be like a volcanic eruption; high, gigantic masses of smoke and soot will fly into the atmosphere, which will spread over huge distances, block out sunlight, and the temperature of the atmosphere will decrease significantly. The ash will reach the upper layers of the atmosphere, where it can remain for a very long time. This effect was called a nuclear winter.
Kroon put forward such a hypothesis, but he did not draw any global conclusions from it. Other scientists did. In the USA, physicist Richard Tuth and the well-known physicist Carl Sagan did it. In the Soviet Union, such calculations were also carried out. They were done by mathematician Vladimir Aleksandrov and Georgy Stennikov, the authors of the mathematical model of atmospheric circulation.
They were more likely programmers with a bias in climatology. This is an important point: both Sagan, Tuth, and Aleksandrov with Stennikov calculated their models on computers. There were not just simple discussions on the topic; both groups of researchers tried to find out how many combustion products would crumble and what the particle sizes would be.
Carl Sagan published his report in the spring of 1983 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Six months later, at an international symposium in Helsinki, Academician Vladimir Aleksandrov gave a similar report. The two scientists slightly differed in their figures by 10 percent, but the conclusion was the same: so much soot will get into the atmosphere that the sun will disappear, if not forever, then for a very long time.
As a result, further normal life of people on Earth will be impossible. To understand what effect these reports caused, we need to give a little historical context. We now know that in the 1980s, the Cold War essentially ended. In the 1990s, the Warsaw Pact collapsed, and in 1991, the USSR fell.
But for the residents of 1982, everything looked exactly the opposite, that now everything would begin. There were several exacerbations in the Cold War. There were severe crises in the forties, fifties, and sixties during the late Stalin and Khrushchev eras: the Berlin Blockade, Korean War, and Cuban Missile Crisis. The planet could have blown up several times.
But then in the seventies, there was détente. This is when the leaders of the USSR, Brezhnev and Nixon, agreed to defuse the situation and divide the planet in half. Like, here we have the West, here we have the East, and we don't interfere with each other. At the same time, by the way, the OSCE was created as a platform for negotiations on Europe.
The US left Vietnam, China stopped its confrontation with the West, the GDR and FRG recognized each other, and the Arab countries left Israel. In general, everyone breathed a sigh of relief for several years. But at the end of the decade, everything started spinning again. In 1979, the USSR sent troops into Afghanistan.
In the early eighties, international sanctions were imposed against the USSR for the first time since the Civil War. Half of the world's countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1984. The USSR and the Warsaw Pact boycotted the Olympics in Los Angeles. Ronald Reagan became president of the United States.
Now we know that Reagan turned out to be a good president, but at the time, he had a reputation, much like Trump has now, of being an unpredictable character who can wake up in the morning, get up on the wrong foot, spill coffee on his silk pajamas, and just bang the button. Reagan's first steps in office confirmed these fears because he immediately launched a program for the deployment of nuclear weapons in space.
Parallel to this, the USSR was deploying its missiles on the western borders. In 1983, American missiles appeared in Western European countries. For contemporaries, it was obvious that a nuclear war was just around the corner. In Germany, there were even mass rallies for the withdrawal of American missiles.
In the USSR, Viktor Tsoi composed the song "I will make my home a nuclear-free zone." By the way, at about the same time, the song "Will and Reason" by Aria came out. Yes, at one time, Kipelov called for peace and disarmament from the stage.
In short, I think now you can imagine how powerfully Sagan and Aleksandrov's reports fired in such a situation. In the next few years, scientists were literally torn apart by the media of different countries, mainly, of course, in the West. Because the Western free press had already become accustomed to exploiting headlines in the spirit of "we will all die."
In the Soviet Union, the reaction was more restrained, but still, the topic of nuclear winter was considered in several books and articles. In the West, the authors of the hypothesis had the status of superstars from various ecological conferences. They were invited to the Pope and the US Congress.
And it's not just about Sagan, but also about Soviet mathematicians. It's true; for Vladimir Aleksandrov, glory ended tragically in 1985. He was invited to a conference in Spain, after which Aleksandrov left the hotel in Madrid, and no one saw him again. The scientist was put on the international wanted list but was never found.
Of course, the concept of nuclear winter had its critics. In the US, the main skeptic was the famous physicist Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and adviser to President Reagan. Teller was generally a fan of nuclear weapons; he was pushing the program to place nuclear weapons in space with all his might.
If you watched Oppenheimer, then you know exactly what I mean. He openly called the nuclear war hypothesis a speculative theory that is as harmful to science as it is to politics. Teller believed that the data from the computer analysis was fabricated and that this whole concept is Soviet propaganda, and Carl Sagan is a pseudoscientist.
On the other hand, the Democrats, who were then in the opposition in the United States, latched onto this hypothesis. The younger brother of John and Robert Kennedy invited Soviet physicists to speak in the US Senate. Kennedy said that the research clearly shows that a country that would start a nuclear war would die from it, whether from foreign missiles or from the consequences of an explosion of its own.
In the end, the supporters of the hypothesis won and forced the US Department of Defense in 1986 to conduct their own analysis. In the Pentagon report, it was acknowledged that yes, massive explosions of nuclear charges lead to large-scale climate change.
In the Pentagon, they did not use expressions like nuclear winter and generally softened the assessments, but in general, they agreed with the Sagan report. In April of the same year, NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington stated that a full-fledged nuclear war would lead to a nuclear winter. Therefore, we need to build NATO's strategy so that the limited use of nuclear weapons does not lead the parties to a valuable exchange of nuclear strikes.
Yes, this is a separate funny moment in this whole story. The American military even here was able to turn the situation to their advantage, saying, "To avoid a nuclear winter, we need more money for missile defense." Sagan, who in fact started all this for the sake of disarmament, was furious.
However, the world agenda won, most likely under the influence of these horrific pictures of a possible war, and Gorbachev agreed to reduce offensive weapons. A message appeared in Soviet propaganda: there will be no winners in a nuclear war.
There were already no winners in the nineties after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The topic continued to be popular. In 1994, for example, there was even a children's book about dinosaurs that said something like this: just as a meteorite once killed the dinosaurs, so humanity can kill itself with an atomic bomb.
Over time, interest in nuclear weapons declined and was almost forgotten until Crimea happened, and the world again began to move towards the doomsday clock. But here, unlike in the eighties, the first violin was played by skeptics who claimed that this whole hypothesis is not scientific.
In fact, as I already said, this hypothesis had opponents even earlier. Back in the year, the journal Nature called for not considering the concept of nuclear winter proven, citing the words of meteorologists who noted that the Sagan and Aleksandrov model completely ignores weather as a factor.
As if during a nuclear war, only winds caused by fires blow over the planet, and all other winds are simply ignored. And how is the weather different in different regions? Then no one seriously discussed this because a nuclear war became something from the realm of fantasy.
But in the 2010s, the discussion started anew. In general, if we discard the frank and talk about political bias, then criticism of the hypothesis of a nuclear winter is adequate. It comes down to the following: first, the hypothesis is based on very old calculations made in the early eighties. The power of computers did not allow for calculating such large-scale consequences.
Secondly, the model itself is initially wrong. On the first point, there is nothing really to say except that the calculations of the eighties were far from the only ones. In 2006, the data was modeled again, and the result was plus or minus the same. In the case of a nuclear conflict between the US and Russia with explosions with a total power of 5,000 megatons, we will get a nuclear winter.
But even with local wars, everything will not be simple. In 2007, scientists modeled a local nuclear war between India and Pakistan and also obtained data with fatal consequences for the climate. The modern origins of doubts about the reality of nuclear winter lie in a 2018 study when physicists from Los Alamos decided to recheck the data from ten years ago.
As a result, an article was published on the influence of regional nuclear war weapons on the climate. They also tried to model a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, but they got different results. The most important point is that 90% of the soot from the fires will not reach the stratosphere; therefore, most of the ash will simply fall back to the ground in a matter of weeks.
And therefore, there will be no nuclear night or nuclear winter. Climate change will happen, but in the region of a couple of degrees. It sounds encouraging. Well, or not quite. Here, strange.
It turns out that the less scary the consequences of a nuclear war sound, the easier it will be to decide to press the button. It was the study by Los Alamos that the authors of the article in Popular Mechanics that I quoted at the beginning referred to. Only there is a nuance, a big nuance.
It is embedded in the title of the study: the impact of regional nuclear weapons on the climate. That is, physicists modeled the mildest version of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan with a limited arsenal of 100 bombs of 15 kilotons each. This is thousands of times weaker than the explosions that were assumed in the models of Sagan and Aleksandrov.
Moreover, in this study, the smoke levels from possible fires were underestimated with the motivation that in India and Pakistan, there is less wood and more stone in the cities, which means there will be less burning. Well, in general, you guys understood very well and clearly read the expected figures.
In the case of a small, local nuclear war, it will do nothing for the global climate. We kind of know this since Hiroshima, but thanks for the reminder. In fact, we have a classic example here: scientist [ __ ], journalist. I mean that this whole study was not originally even intended as a refutation of the concept of nuclear winter, but journalists understood it and promoted it that way.
And now the Internet is full of people who run around various social networks and, with a smart look, make approximately such reasoning. And you will laugh, and then all this will be confirmed. I can also say now that there will be no winter.
Although the basic scenario in which the US and Russia hit each other with half of their arsenal has remained unchanged. Today, there are no studies that would refute the nuclear winter model. Yes, it is not ideal, and of course, it is not considered fully proven.
There are really no weather factors taken into account, which are really very difficult to take into account. It is really just a computer model, which no one has ever tested in practice. But probably this is one of the few cases when we will all agree that probably should not be tested.
Bye everyone. [music]