After the explosions of nuclear bombs in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the threat of nuclear war became absolutely real. Scientists have studied in detail the possible consequences of more powerful explosions: how radiation will spread, what biological damage will be, climate effects.
Nuclear War - How It Happens
A nuclear explosion is a huge ball of fire that completely burns or carbonizes objects of animate and inanimate nature even at a great distance from the epicenter. A third of the energy of the explosion is released in the form of a light pulse, which is thousands of times greater than the brightness of the sun. This will ignite all flammable materials such as paper and fabric. People form third-degree burns.
Primary fires do not have time to flare up - they are partially extinguished by a powerful air blast wave. But due to flying sparks and burning debris, short circuits, explosions of domestic gas, burning oil products, long and extensive secondary fires are formed.
Many individual fires are combined into a deadly fire tornado, which can destroy any metropolis. Similar fiery tornadoes destroyed Hamburg and Dresden during World War II.
In the center of such a tornado, intense heat is generated, due to which enormous masses of air rise up, hurricanes form at the earth's surface, which support the fire element with new portions of oxygen. Smoke, dust and soot rise to the stratosphere, and a cloud forms, which almost completely obscures the sunlight. As a result, a deadly nuclear winter begins.
Nuclear war leads to long nuclear winter
Due to gigantic fires, a huge amount of aerosol will be released into the atmosphere, which will cause a "nuclear night". According to calculations, even a small local nuclear war and the bombings of London and New York will lead to a complete absence of sunlight over the Northern Hemisphere for several weeks.
For the first time, the devastating consequences of massive fires that provoke a further cascade of irreversible changes in the climate and biosphere, pointed out by Paul Krutzen, a prominent German scientist.
The fact that nuclear war inevitably leads to a nuclear winter was not yet known in the middle of the last century. Tests with nuclear explosions were conducted single and isolated. And even a “soft” nuclear conflict involves explosions in many cities. In addition, the tests were carried out in such a way that large fires were not provoked. And just not so long ago, with the joint work of biologists, mathematicians, climatologists, physicists, it was possible to put together a general picture of the consequences of a nuclear conflict. The world community has studied in detail what the world can become after a nuclear war.
If the conflict uses only 1% of the nuclear weapons produced to date, the effect will be 8,200 “Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”
Even so, a nuclear war will entail the climatic effect of a nuclear winter. Due to the fact that the sun's rays can not reach the Earth, there will come a long cooling of the air. All wildlife that will not burn in fires will be doomed to freezing.
Significant temperature contrasts will occur between land and the ocean, since large accumulations of water have significant thermal inertia, so the air will cool much slower there. Changes in the atmosphere will suppress the water cycle, and severe continual droughts will begin on continents sunk into the night and shackled by absolute cold.
If a nuclear war had occurred in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, then within two weeks the temperature there would have dropped below zero, and the sunlight would have disappeared altogether. Moreover, in the Northern Hemisphere, all vegetation would die completely, and in the Southern Hemisphere - partially. The tropics and subtropics would die out almost instantly, since the flora there can exist in a very narrow temperature range and a certain amount of light.
Lack of food will lead to the extinction of animals. Birds will have virtually no chance of survival. Only reptiles can survive.
Dead forests that form in vast territories will become the material for new fires, and the decomposition of dead flora and fauna will cause the release of a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Thus, the global carbon content and exchange are disrupted. The disappearance of vegetation will cause global soil erosion.
There will be almost complete destruction of those ecosystems that currently exist on the planet. All agricultural plants and animals will die, however, seeds may remain. A sharp increase in ionizing radiation will cause serious radiation sickness and lead to the death of vegetation, mammals and birds.
Emissions of nitrogen and sulfur oxides into the atmosphere will cause fatal acid rain.
Any one of the above factors would be enough to destroy many ecosystems. The worst part is that after a nuclear war they will begin to act all together, fueling and enhancing each other's actions.
To pass the critical point, after which catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate and biosphere begin, a relatively small nuclear explosion - 100 MT is enough. For irreparable disaster, it will be enough to bring into action only 1% of the existing arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Even those countries on the territory of which not a single nuclear bomb explodes will be completely destroyed.
Nuclear war in any form constitutes a real threat to the existence of humanity and life on the planet in general.