Selects: The Great Nuclear Winter Debate of 1983

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Hi, everybody.

I picked this selection.

This is Chuck, by the way, of Stuff You Should Know, co-host.

September 17th, 2015, we did an episode called the Great Nuclear Winter Debate of 1983.

And I picked this one because I don't remember even recording it.

What in the world were they debating?

in 1983 about the great nuclear winter.

It was probably just nuclear winter and the great refers to the debate now that I see how it's worded.

But you know what I mean.

I guess I'm going to learn right around with you because I'm about to listen to it right now.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant.

Jerry's over there somewhere off in the ether.

But I don't think on ether.

Just in the ether.

Oh, man.

We're trying not to breathe right now.

We had a tank of ether in here.

It would be a much different podcast.

Josh and Chuck's Ether Cats.

Do they put those things in tanks?

Oh, I don't know.

Surely, yeah, right?

No?

Is it like in the bottles still, like the 1800s?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Yeah, I think you just have it in a little milk bottle.

You put it in a rag, you put it in your face.

And then go to Happy Town.

Yeah, exactly.

If there's any pharmacists out there that want to set us straight, let us know how ether comes these days.

It's probably a gas.

Yeah, I imagine.

It's not like Hunter S.

Thompson.

I think we talked about it before in anesthesia.

Probably.

It's like ether gas.

What a weird start.

Yeah, that has nothing to do with what we're about to talk about.

Yeah, I was trying to relate it, but there really is nothing.

One of my favorite, favorite topics of all time, nuclear Holocaust from the Cold War.

Yeah.

What, we did we did one in the Cold War, didn't we?

Oh, we've done several.

Yeah, we've batted around this thing, but we've never done a full nuclear Holocaust podcast, have we?

No.

And nuclear Holocaust is...

That's not quite right.

That's not the right way to put it, because what we're talking about is actually the after effects from a nuclear holocaust.

Isn't that the Holocaust?

If you want to be a purist, the nuclear holocaust is the immediate destruction as a result of exploding nuclear bombs over like population centers and stuff.

Oh, I didn't know that.

I thought it was the whole kit and caboodle.

I should say if you're a purist and you want to say it from my opinion, that's what a nuclear holocaust is.

Okay, I think we know what's going on here.

Got it.

Yeah, Robert Lamb wrote this, Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

Yeah, I have to say, I said, man, way to go on that one.

That was a good one.

You told him that?

I did.

I actually uttered those words.

What did he say?

Thanks, man.

That's nice.

But the thing that gets me about Nuclear Winter, which we will talk about in depth,

what fascinates me about it just as much as the Nuclear Winter itself, Chuck,

is the controversy, the debate that arose from it throughout the 80s.

There was a huge debate.

Debate on the severity.

Debate, yeah.

Debate on whether it was something to worry about or not.

Yeah, well, I looked up because I was like, does anyone think that this is a myth?

An outright myth?

And from what I saw in my research is that no, this is fact.

It's just a dispute.

What's a dispute is the scenario and the severity of what would happen.

But no one says like, no, there would be no nuclear winter.

There would be no problems after a nuclear bomb.

So there used to be.

Like back in

the early 80s when this was a huge new thing,

there was a group of scientists who were hawkish, very much in favor of the U.S.

building up its nuclear arsenal as much as possible, and

started basically a PR letter-writing campaign to discredit the science behind this.

And they're like, These guys don't know what they're talking about.

So, what did they think?

That the bomb would drop, and then like the next day, the birds would be out?

They said

initially, yeah, that was kind of their position, was just to poke holes in this, and that it

wasn't legitimate science, right?

Yeah, it didn't sound like it.

And then

they, ultimately, the whole point was that this came from an argument over whether the U.S.

should engage in the SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, which is the lasers that shoot nukes from space, right?

They shoot down nukes from space.

We did a show on that, didn't we?

We did.

That was another one.

But that's what the whole thing was.

It's the context of it.

It was an argument over either nuclear disarmament, which Carl Sagan and his friends were in favor of, hippies, or

nuclear proliferation and the Star Wars program.

Warmongers.

Right.

The hippies versus the warmongers.

But the weird thing is, this debate, Chuck, took place in the pages of academic journals.

And it ended up being a fight between science and science deniers.

Yeah, it sounds like the scientists that you mentioned might have

had their coffers full from the U.S.

government.

So potentially, or private industry, or something like that.

Yeah.

And the thing is, is they use this old chestnut where,

so if you're a scientist, there's no certainty in anything you say.

It can always be disproven.

Remember, we talked about this in the scientific method episode.

Yeah.

All your stuff can be disproven ultimately, which is why it's just a theory.

Yeah.

So no science is going to be like, this is 100% certain.

Right.

Well, these other scientists who are are poking holes in it would point out, these guys aren't even certain, which means that

there's disagreement over whether we'll have a nuclear winner or not.

So they were being very disingenuous in poking holes in it by saying, these scientists aren't even certain in their findings.

Well, no scientist is certain in their findings.

That's so dangerous.

But to the public,

you think, oh, well, these scientists can't say that they're certain, so they must not know what they're talking about.

That's dangerous.

That's why we're at three minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock.

That's exactly right.

Because some people might say, well, you're not certain, so let's just not act fast enough.

Yeah.

Man.

And I should say also, Chuck, we should prepare for a lot of listener mail because this is a conservative flashpoint.

Nuclear winner is.

Long-standing one.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

Great.

Sounds good.

Let's talk about this.

All right.

Well, Robert starts where most people should start when talking about nuclear winter, and that's in the atmosphere.

It's a very finely tuned system we have.

I want to say it's like homeostasis, but it's not people, so I guess it's like an ecostasis where the sun

just enough sun gets through to make things make the earth habitable and proliferate with plants and water and humans and animals and all kinds of great stuff.

Too much sun, even by a little bit, could be catastrophic.

And too little sun, even by a little bit, could be catastrophic.

So we've,

thanks to humans, we've struck a great balance here with the sun.

A great deal was made.

And you can shine.

Just don't shine too much, sun.

Yeah, and it's working out awesome.

The idea of nuclear winter is that there would be

enough ash from and smoke.

It's really not the fallout from the nuclear bombs themselves, from what I understand.

It's more the smoke from the resulting fires that would would cause the blacking out of the sky and the sun not getting through it's actually all of it yeah but everything I read across the board said it's almost 100% the smoke that goes on yes

it's true I mean you you you shouldn't negate the idea that like nuclear radiation poisoning is going to kill a lot of people oh yeah as a result but the blacking out of the skies is due to the smoke from fire exactly from the bomb that happened.

Right.

So this whole thing, the context of it, again, comes from the 70s, right, Chuck?

Yeah, in the 80s.

Yeah, and back in, I think, 1975,

a group issued a statement that said, you know, there probably wouldn't be that big of a fallout from nuclear explosions.

A few years after that, another group, I think that the first group was the National Academy of Sciences.

Another group said, you know what, we don't think that's exactly true.

We think that there probably is some sort of,

there will be something, but our models are too

primitive to say for certain what the fallout would be.

A few years after that, Carl Sagan and his crew got together and said,

no, there's going to be serious consequences, and here's what they are.

Billions of lives lost.

Billions and billions, right.

And one of the things they base this on, this idea on, that if you spew a bunch of smoke or particulate matter into the atmosphere, that it'll have a negative

influence on the global climate is past history from volcanic eruptions.

Yes,

most notable, well, there are a few over the years, but one of the notable ones in 1883

at the time, then the

Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, Krakatoa, that volcano was massive to the tune of 36,000 deaths just from the volcano.

And this is in Krakatoa in 1883.

Yeah, there's only like 10 people there somehow.

It's not like it was superpopulated.

And two-thirds of Krakatoa collapsed.

The smoke rose up and warmed the global temperature, global by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit.

I think it no, it lowered it.

Yeah, lowered, sorry.

It took took five years for temperatures to return to normal, and it affected, this was in Indonesia, and it actually, they think, increased the rainfall in Los Angeles by more than double that next year.

Wow.

That's in L.A., in Southern California.

So that was the Krakatoa blast from 1883, right?

Yeah, and that it literally changed the color of the sky for like years afterward.

The sky was red,

such that they think, you know, the scream, the painting, the scream, yeah, munch, yeah, the red sky, they think that's

like the way the sky looked was because of this volcano.

That is so neat.

Isn't that crazy?

That guy was like, that volcano is crazy.

That's what the man is saying.

And that's just one of them.

What was the other one?

Mount Tembura.

Yeah, Indonesia, once again.

Yeah.

Indonesia's got bad luck with the volcanoes back in the 19th century.

Man, and this was actually earlier in 1815.

Yeah, I remember learning about this when I was a kid because Ohio got it really bad.

A volcano went off in Indonesia in 1815.

And the following year, much of the United States did not have a summer.

It was actually called the Year Without a Summer.

And Ohio was affected?

Yes.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

There was like snow on the ground in the middle of July.

Did you learn that in state history class?

I did.

I remember that.

Yeah.

Yeah, Georgia State History.

That that was like a full course at our school.

Yeah.

Half of it was just sitting around with the teacher like staring off into the distance.

Right.

I remember ours was just like a lot of talk about Crawford Long and the Civil War.

Yeah,

we didn't talk about Crawford Long and ours.

No, because he wasn't from Georgia.

We talked about Anthony Wayne.

Yeah.

The Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Yeah.

Well, that summer without a winter, Year Without a Summer, I mean.

And then there's some canals and locks that donkeys used to pull barges on.

Yeah, I just remember Crawford Long and a lot of racism.

Yeah.

Basically.

Yeah.

Georgia history.

That's right.

So

that was Mount Tambora, the year without summer.

There have been other events like when

the oil fields burned

during the war in the early 90s.

Yeah, apparently Carl Sagan predicted basically a nuclear winter from that.

Yeah, that's

pan out.

Yeah, that's where they take some flack.

It was not nearly as bad the fallout from that smoke as Sagan predicted.

No.

But

what can you do?

But predict.

You're going to be wrong.

Yeah, you are.

Occasionally.

Surely you're going to be wrong.

It doesn't mean you should be like, oh, well, that smoke didn't do much, so let's start building nuclear bombs again.

Yeah.

Well, that's the whole thing, Chuck.

I am so glad you said that because that's the whole mad thing to this argument.

Because it's like,

what are you arguing in favor for?

If you're arguing against the idea of nuclear winter bombs, what precisely are you arguing for?

Yeah, like it won't be that bad.

We'll talk a little bit more about it later on in the show, what some people have argued about.

But it seems like what you say, ultimately, you're arguing in favor of more nuclear weapons.

That seems wrong-headed by definition.

Well, not even just that, but using them won't be as bad as you say.

Right.

Like, not just have them, but, well, the fallout wouldn't be as bad as they all predict.

So use them.

You almost get the impression like they're just like, well, let's just find out.

Let's just shoot a couple off and find out what happens.

Come on, you'll see them, right?

And then as they die from smoke inhalation, they say, I was wrong.

What have I done?

Oh, goodness.

Let's take a break.

All right.

Let's do.

And we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about the nuclear winner.

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Burning stuffed with Joshua

Chars,

stuff

you should

do.

I said nuclear ingest, but I know I heard the break.

That was good stuff.

All right.

I just want to point that out because some people might think it was serious.

No.

And now that you said it was ingest, some people are like, what a jerk.

Maybe.

That man was my hero.

I posted something on Facebook the other day that said, you're sciencing wrong as a joke.

And people called me out.

They were like, you can't use science as a verb.

Like, man.

I thought in the last century, remember last century you could use like everything as a verb.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, people have gotten extremely serious.

Extremely self-serious.

I'm a not self-serious person, so I don't fit in in today's world.

You're a relic.

You're an old dinosaur.

Just a stupid laughing dinosaur.

Speaking of dinosaurs,

well, I guess we should talk about the K-T boundary extinction event,

which was

some people, some in science, have theorized that that's what happened to the dinosaurs, was there was an impact winter, not quite the same as a nuclear winter, but the same effect as a nuclear winter due to the impact of

an asteroid.

That's right.

And that would have happened at the border of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, again, when the dinosaurs all died off.

Still inexplicably.

There's no definitive answer.

Again, though, we're talking science.

No one found a journal?

Right.

Very dear.

Near your diary.

Today, something is streaking through the sky, and it's making everyone nervous.

It's very hot now but I noticed the dinosaurs are dying so that's good.

Oh this is a dinosaur writing in my opinion.

Oh oh so that's bad.

Right.

Right.

Okay.

So let's talk nuclear winter, right?

You you

kind of said it earlier, but the whole idea behind nuclear winter is that if you shoot off nuclear bombs, especially a bunch of them, and you have to understand at the time that

these scientists were really starting to debate this, there were like 70,000 nuclear warheads.

Like many, many times more nuclear warheads in existence in like the early 80s than there were today.

And when they started debating them, they really took up this cause because

the Reagan administration was saying we need the Star Wars program because

we can prevent almost with

90%

certainty

a Soviet nuclear attack.

Right, with laser guns.

Exactly.

And so the scientists, who were concerned scientists, basically anti-nuke scientists, said, wait a minute, there's something that you guys aren't thinking through here.

If you do that, the Soviets are going to say, well, wait a minute, if this thing is 90% effective, then we need to build up our nuclear arsenal so that when we shoot everything we got at them,

still that 10% will totally annihilate the United States.

That the presence presence of the Star Wars program was going to

put the nuclear arms race into even higher gear than it already was.

So they very much took it upon themselves to tackle this with science, but also publicize it and sell it to the public.

And it's that that's stuck in the craw of a lot of

other scientists, but particularly scientists who were in favor of nuclear proliferation as a matter of national defense.

That's right.

The point of it is, when they tackle this, they said,

here's the big problem with it.

If you shoot off a bunch of nuclear bombs, a lot, a lot, a lot of nuclear bombs, which could totally go off as far as the nuclear war is concerned,

it's going to cause a lot of smoke to enter the atmosphere.

And that is where this domino effect is going to create this global catastrophe.

And the whole outcome of it is based on the number of nukes that you shoot off, which is basically what Carl Sagan and his buddy Richard Turco divided the different types of nuclear winter into.

That's right.

Mr.

Sagan and Mr.

Turco, are they doctors?

Let's just call everyone a doctor.

Well, yeah, he was Carl Sagan was a doctor of astrochemistry, I believe.

And Richard Turco is

a veterinarian.

I can't remember what he was.

They wrote a book called A Path Where No Man Thought.

A Path Where No Man Thought.

Right.

And

that seemed like there would be one more word there.

And they have one, two, three, four, five, six scenarios for what a nuclear winter might look like, ranging from minimal to extreme.

And minimal, best case scenario, which is

just a little bit of a nuclear attack.

Not many bombs going off.

Maybe like, let's say, Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Which we'll talk about.

Those were like 21 kilotons.

Yeah.

That means that there would be minimal cloud cover, not much environmental impact globally, and

the targeted areas would be wiped out, of course.

But the world itself would not have big consequences.

Right.

Atmospherically.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So, if you are talking a nuclear war, especially a Cold War nuclear war, that was a fairly unlikely scenario.

By the time

the the early 1980s rolled around and people started talking about the concept of a nuclear winter, those Hiroshima and Nagasaki-level nuclear bombs were attached to the average fighter jet.

They were considered just tactical.

You just could shoot them off on a battlefield if you needed to.

So the idea that it would just amount to that is.

But

that's the best case scenario.

They're trying to cover all avenues here.

Yes.

Number two is marginal, and that's a few detonations,

again, in the northern hemisphere.

And they said it would lower the temperature by a few degrees, and there would be some crops and some agriculture that suffered and probably some famine.

Yeah.

But it would not.

Oh, black rain, of course.

Yeah, who wants that?

Did happen in Hiroshima.

Yes.

They drank it.

You.

And died from drinking it.

To go.

Yes, because it was radioactive rain.

Yeah, but they drank it because they were thirsty because they had no water.

Yes.

It's devastating.

You and everyone should have to go to the city of Hiroshima.

Like, it is amazing what they've done to preserve what happened there as a teaching lesson for everyone.

Yeah.

It's really moving.

We should have one of those here.

We should.

Instead, people are like, yeah, Japan forced the U.S.

to drop the bomb.

It's fact.

Right.

Which is not correct.

Right.

So Black Rain would happen in that marginal scenario.

Man, this is a really political episode, isn't it?

I think anytime you tackle nuclear war, it's going to be divisive.

Yeah.

Because some people think it's awesome.

Nuke the whales.

Got to nuke something.

Things below the equator in that scenario in the southern hemisphere would be just fine.

So here's something that I found really interesting and wrong in this analysis of it.

Sagan, I guess he was strictly talking about atmospheric atmospheric effects.

Yeah.

But he mentions like famine and stuff like that.

The thing is.

That would have a global effect, for sure.

Yeah, the rest of the world depends in large part on North American wheat and corn.

So if there's a nuclear fallout in North America that affects our crop yields dramatically and causes famine in the U.S., it's going to cause famine elsewhere, too.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I think what he's saying is, as far as climatologically speaking,

what he and Turco are saying is: as long as you're not shooting off nuclear bombs in the southern hemisphere, it's going to,

climatologically speaking, be unaffected

or largely unaffected because the wind goes down to the equator and then back up.

Like the equator separates the hemispheres as far as the atmosphere is concerned.

Yeah, totally.

There would still be global troubles.

Yes.

But in reading all these scenarios, it made me really want to move to Australia.

Well, that's another thing, too.

How many people would be like, I need to get out of the United States, States, so I moved down to Mexico, or I'm moving down to Brazil, or I'm moving down to Australia.

And then the infrastructure in those countries are just super

stressed because the northern hemisphere that survived is suddenly moving down to the southern hemisphere.

Yeah, that's another widespread effect.

Mexico would help you too much, though.

Well, weren't they like super helpful in Independence Day?

Was it Independence Day or the morning?

Or no, the...

Day after tomorrow?

Everybody starts having to move south because North America is just frozen ice sheet?

Yeah, but I just mean as far as you'd have to go pretty far south, further south than Mexico if you want to escape the atmospheric fallout.

Oh, you're right.

So Ecuador.

Yeah, like what is it, like half of Africa and South America are in the southern hemisphere?

Yeah.

Probably not half.

Yeah, right.

So the northern hemisphere would show up at the southern hemisphere's doorstep and be like, Christmas in July?

We'll get used to it.

That's right.

Your drain goes the other way when you release the water from the tub?

Yeah.

Needo.

And I know Christmas doesn't fall in July.

It was a metaphorical statement, everyone.

Yeah, I get you.

Nominal nuclear winners, number three,

that is what they consider the low-end full-scale nuclear war.

Right.

But still full-scale.

6,000 to 12,000 nuclear weapons.

That's all.

Just 6,000 to 12,000 nuclear bombs.

Right.

And we're talking a megaton or more bombs.

And a megaton was I think 50

Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined.

Wow.

So 12,000 times 50

of those for this kind of nominal nuclear war.

Yeah, that's a lot of zeros.

Yeah.

They predicted noon sunlight would be about a third of what it was.

Global temperature drops of 18 degrees.

That's bad news, my friend.

It would destroy a lot of the ozone layer.

And again, the southern hemisphere wouldn't experience major climactic change.

Just cut to the southern hemisphere.

They're all at the beach.

There's like tropical music playing.

But they have no wheat.

Who needs wheat when you got rum drinks?

Ooh, that's a t-shirt.

Josh Clark said that one.

Yeah.

Number four, substantial.

That is full-scale nuclear war.

Freezing temperatures, big-time fallout.

The whole day would be like it's overcast.

Billions of humans dead.

Billions?

Billions and billions.

Species going extinct.

And finally, possible damage to the southern hemisphere.

Finally.

Possibly.

And then the last two, we can just bunch together, I think, severe and extreme.

Less than 1% of the sunlight.

getting through

for months and months on end.

Global temperature dropping, no photosynthesis happening.

Right.

Every crop dying, all life perishing.

Let's just go ahead and wrap it up right there.

Yeah.

As Robert puts it,

most of the planet's life would perish within the chilly confines of this black atmospheric tomb.

Yeah, he's got a little Lovecraft in him, doesn't he?

He does.

This unnameable tomb.

Chuckers, let's take another break and then we will come back and talk about

the fallout from nuclear winter theory.

So, like we said, Carl Sagan and his friends got together and basically took it upon themselves to educate the public about the potential catastrophe that could happen as a result of nuclear war.

Everybody before was like, yeah, that would really suck to be in a city that a nuclear bomb went off on.

But maybe it wouldn't be my city.

I live in Schenectady, New York.

No one's going to bomb Schenectady.

So I'm probably going to be okay.

These guys said, hey, Western civilization, not just in the U.S., but also the USSR, that's not necessarily the case.

You too will be affected.

There's going to be big problems after this, after a nuclear war.

So much so that let's make sure that our leaders never do this, right?

Wake up, basically, is what they were doing.

And so Sagan and his friends created a paper, and it's now called the T-Taps paper, after all of their names, right?

Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollock, and Sagan.

Okay, and they wrote this paper and had it published in Science, the preeminent scientific journal in the United States.

It was a big deal.

They also held a very well-publicized conference.

And Carl Sagan, apparently, without the group's knowledge or blessing, went off and also wrote a piece in Parade magazine.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

To make sure that every

dick and Jane in the U.S.

knew about this.

It was like a three-page article about the nuclear winner, which is a new term at the time, complete with illustrations where the earth was like this dead, lifeless, what's called like a gray chalk billiard ball, basically.

Yeah.

Just really scary stuff.

Sure.

And then he also simultaneously wrote another longer piece that was in foreign affairs that's a little more wonky.

So Sagan went off after writing this scientific paper and publicized it to policymakers and to the American public.

Yeah, this is the early 1980s.

And yes, it's 1983.

And

this was before all the science was in.

This is from the first paper.

Before the first papers conference was even held, right?

Yeah.

And a lot of people, including people who were on his side about this issue, were really mad at him because it opened up this group and the whole idea of nuclear winter to allegations that they were fear-mongering and that they were basically trying to sell the public on science, which is, you know, that's not what science does.

Right.

Yes, pure science is about research and coming up with facts and whether they're popular or unpopular, it doesn't matter.

Science is science and fact is fact, right?

Yeah.

A good theory is a good theory.

But these guys, again, were concerned that something really, really bad could happen and they went to the trouble of taking it upon themselves to advertise it to the public.

But again, Sagan going off and doing this, it really opened them up for a lot of allegations and debate that took place afterward.

Yeah, but some say that

their work in the TTAPS report actually did help cool things down in the Cold War a little bit.

Yeah, and I mean, it wasn't just these American scientists, they worked with Soviet scientists as well.

And apparently, sometimes it went good, sometimes it didn't go so well, but both sides were working on this issue.

And the fact that it got so much publicity actually created a firestorm of back and forth in the scientific community.

And this issue ended up getting really well studied.

Yeah, it did.

And seven years later, they revised the report in 1990, and it had new, more modernized data, and it wasn't quite as dire, which some critics were like, all right, this is a little more reasonable.

Yes, they revised it to call it the nuclear autumn.

Yeah.

And everyone loves autumn.

Yeah, autumn's good.

Autumn all the time?

That'd be wonderful.

Oh, man, that would be wonderful.

That'd be Chuck's world.

And there are disagreements over that still.

And they basically, there's a few four variables that are always the factors that are the unknowns.

And it's really,

they're all, to me, kind of one,

four versions of the same variable, which is we don't know how much smoke there would be.

Yes.

We just don't know.

And number one is how much material is there to burn.

So the idea is you drop a bomb on a city,

a nuclear bomb, and

everything catches on fire.

and that creates tremendous amounts of smoke.

But since these are all theoretical, and you don't know what would happen if you dropped something the size on, like, let's say, a major city like New York,

what would be there to burn?

Like, we just don't know.

Well, that's that's yeah.

So, if you dropped it on a city, is it an old city that isn't super modern?

Sure.

And therefore isn't built out of like lots of plastic that can get into the atmosphere and really mess things up?

Yeah, like the really bad stuff.

Yeah, if it's an old city, maybe the burning wouldn't be so bad, even after a nuclear holocaust.

Or maybe you're not shooting nuclear bombs to cities, but to other nuclear installations that are out in the middle of like nowhere in Nebraska.

Right.

Because we have, I mean, we've, there's been like 2,000 nuclear bombs detonated, but they, only two on a cities.

Right, exactly.

Everything else has been out over the ocean or out in the middle of nowhere, and there's been no fire.

Right.

The assumption is that, though, if you shot a nuclear bomb at an at a modern city, a lot of really toxic smoke would be produced.

Oh yeah.

That's probably the worst case scenario in both the immediate nuclear holocaust and the fallout, the nuclear winter as a result because of all the smoke that would be created.

I mean look at the fallout from 9-11 and that was two buildings.

Right.

You know?

Yeah.

The second variable is how much would remain in the atmosphere and then how much goes back to the Earth.

Yeah, no one really knows that at all.

How much sunlight would be deflected?

Again, just theorizing.

And you can go back and plug in these numbers.

The problem is, if you're a detractor of nuclear winter theory, you would say, that's a guess.

Where'd you get that number?

Yeah.

And you could take every number and come up with a different model for each one.

They usually don't do that.

But even still, it's like, which one's going to be?

the one.

And again, it goes back to how much smoke would there be to begin with.

And then finally, when did it happen?

If it was actually in winter, perhaps it's not so bad.

Yeah, nuclear winter in winter, ironically, is the best case scenario.

The best case scenario of the bad scenarios.

Right.

So they did initially back off of their findings.

They said that

there could initially be like a 35 to 40 degree drop in global temperatures

at Celsius.

Yeah.

So we're talking like 70 degrees, 72 degrees Fahrenheit drop in temperatures.

So

that's a full-on nuclear war.

Yeah.

Yes.

Later on, as they revised their findings and more, again, more and more scientists got involved and studied this issue, they came upon what seemed to be a consensus that you could probably count on something like a 15-degree Celsius drop in global temperatures, which would be substantial and could still have widespread effects, right?

Yeah.

So this, from this debate, nuclear winter kind of got settled on.

There was a scientific consensus that came about.

And there was also consensus that not only would there be huge problems inland, there would be oceanic problems as well.

Yeah.

Because one of the things, one of the great casualties of detonating nuclear bombs is the ozone layer.

The fireball from the blast burns up nitrogen, converting it to nitrogen oxide.

Nitrogen oxide just punches holes, basically chemically burns the ozone layer.

So then when all that smoke that's acting as like an umbrella that's blocking out the sunlight falls back to Earth, all that particulate matter falls back to Earth and is radioactive, by the way.

Yeah, now the sunlight that does come through is way hotter and has way more UV light than it had before the nuclear bombs went off.

Because we had our little delicate balance that's now disruptive.

Exactly.

The problem with that for the oceans is that that UV light would likely be too intense for phytoplankton at the ocean surface.

Well that is the keystone species for the ocean aquatic environments, the ecosystems, all start with phytoplankton.

Zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, little fish feed on zooplankton, larger fish feed on little fish and so on and so on.

So if you get rid of the phytoplankton, you're in big trouble.

Big trouble.

So there would be huge ramifications and science came to a consensus on this.

But again, it was attacked very early on by nuclear proliferation hawks

as basically being against the interests of United States national security.

Right.

And then later on, it continued to be attacked.

It became a customary traditional flashpoint among conservatives as a great example of the lengths that hippie

environmental scientists will go to to dupe the American public into being scared about nuclear bombs and just nuclear stuff in general.

Like Michael Crichton famously attacked it in a 2003 speech.

And he,

his whole thing, he was very famously a climate denier.

He was a climate skeptic until his death, as far as I know.

Was he dead?

Yeah.

And he wrote some great books.

But he was also like contrarian by nature, is what he said as well.

But I get the impression that he tended to land on the more conservative, anti-environmental side.

Oh, yeah.

And on this case, he also attacked the nuclear winner as well.

And what he accused these guys of doing is

creating science by consensus, right?

That, to me, is that's just like a one-two sucker punch.

So the initial scientist that challenged nuclear winner said, you guys can't even agree.

There's no consensus.

Like, you can't be certain in what you're saying.

So, therefore, we don't need to take you seriously.

So, they said, okay, you know what?

We're going to get all these scientists around the world together to study this issue, and we're going to come to a consensus.

And when they did, years later, guys like Michael Crichton said, You guys are practicing science by consensus and politicizing science.

It's not real science.

So, it was like they were very much damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

And ultimately, you just have to kind of decide, is it worth the risk?

Maybe we can't say for certain.

Yeah.

And at the time, you couldn't say for certain.

What's cool is that some of these same climate scientists are still at work, and they have come up with fairly recent models using very sophisticated climate models compared to the stuff they were using back in the 80s and even the 90s.

The stuff they're using now says, actually, we think nuclear winter might be worse than was initially predicted.

Yeah, and even if it's not a full-scale nuclear war, I think the worry, there's not as much worry these days for something like that.

What the worry is now is that some rogue nation gets a hold of one, or maybe even not a rogue nation, just

India and Pakistan drop a couple of nuclear bombs.

Well, that's the model.

And like that is entirely possible.

I think a one-megaton detonation is what they did this model on, and it had a substantial effect.

Yeah, they said 10 years of smoke clouds and a three-year temperature drop of about 2.25 degrees Fahrenheit.

Which doesn't sound like much, but if you go back and you read that scientist's study, his executive summary of the study,

he points out that that kind of drop ultimately equals a shortened growing season by 10 to 20 days.

And that last 10 to 20 days makes or breaks a crop.

Like that means you can either harvest it or it dies before it matures and can be harvested.

And so even just a couple of degrees can lead to widespread crop failure.

But this is just if India and Pakistan shoot 50 bombs at one another in a regional war, it could have that effect around the world.

So we mentioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those are the only places we can look.

But like we pointed out, the bombs were so different back then.

It's not the best comparison.

But as far as looking at what kind of fires could happen,

you can't tell a whole lot.

In Hiroshima, there were more fires than in Nagasaki just because of the way the geography is in the two cities.

But

in neither case did they see a ton of

secondary fires, like it wasn't blacking out the sky.

There was black rain, but apparently, you know, like a week later,

most of that stuff had cleared up.

But again, that is

you can't even really compare the two.

No, it's a single 21-kiloton bomb.

Yeah, exactly.

We're talking

50 of those going off in the same area.

But that report that you mentioned on just like if India and Pakistan,

well, how much was it, 10 megatons?

50.

50?

Or no, it was one megaton.

So 50 of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Well, it was enough to cause the Atomic Scientists, Science, and Security Board to move the doomsday clock two minutes closer to midnight.

Yeah.

And the doomsday clock is

some people say it's good science.

Some people say they're fear-mongering.

But what it is, is it is it's a design that basically says, here's how close we are to destroying ourselves as a civilization.

And

there are a lot of factors that go into it, like biotechnology or cyber technology, but the main two are obviously nuclear weapons and climate change are the two main things that factor into where the doomsday clock sits.

And

I think in the 1950s, they've only changed it

how many times?

18 times since it was created in 1947.

Have they changed the hands on the clock?

In the 1950s, it was at two minutes till midnight.

In the early 1950s,

the best I think it's been in the early 90s was 17 minutes till midnight.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, doesn't that feel good?

Yeah.

That's a lot of time.

What are we at right now?

Right now, we are the closest we've been since 1983,

and on January 22nd of this year, it was changed to

three minutes till midnight is where they sit.

And they had a big press release.

I'll just read the opening and closing paragraphs.

The opening paragraph.

In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapon modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity.

And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.

These failures of political leadership endanger every person on earth.

And then the final paragraph, and there's lots of fun stuff in between.

Yeah.

Just like fart jokes and stuff.

And then they close with, in 2015, with the clock hand moved forward to three minutes to midnight, the board feels compelled to add with a sense of great urgency, the probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risk of disaster must be taken very soon.

They don't mess around.

No.

And even though

we had been doing a good job of reducing the amount of warheads between the United States and Russia, but things have slowed to a snail's pace now.

From 2009 to 2013, Obama cut only 309 warheads from the stockpile.

And they're basically saying, we're not doing this as fast as we need to.

Like, we need to act now.

Yeah.

Well, there's other people who are saying we need to rebuild our nuclear arsenal because it's aging and rotting and will be useless by 2020 to 2030.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: How are we going to drop nuclear bombs on people in the future?

Right.

It's weird.

Like, some people are trying to reignite the Cold War.

Well,

trust me,

I don't agree with it, but I know that most of those people aren't saying, hey, so we can bomb people, it's so we can keep each other in check.

Yes.

Which was the Cold War.

We could also

get rid of nuclear bombs entirely.

We could do that.

And, you know, Sagan's whole thing, I should say, and it's funny that he's kind of like the villain of this whole thing, of the whole nuclear winter debate, because he's such a revered figure.

Sure.

Such a great guy.

But he really...

I purposefully made some serious missteps as far as publicizing the results went before they were fully in.

But his whole thing was, and if you read his foreign policy thing, his article, it's really, really good.

It's not too obtuse.

So

it's kind of fun to read.

But it's called Nuclear War and Climactic Catastrophe, colon, some policy implications.

And he says, like, we don't know, you know,

what the right answer is.

We don't know if it's entirely possible that nuclear winter, maybe our ideas are overblown or whatever.

But he says,

I'm not willing to take the chance.

Right.

Why should we take the chance?

That's his solution.

That's my thing.

It's like, why risk it?

Right.

So his solution is: how about this, U.S.

and USSR?

How about you de-escalate the arms race, deproliferate until you get down to a threshold that science has said, okay, nuclear winter probably couldn't happen beyond this payload, right?

Yeah.

So

even if all the nuclear bombs in the world at this lower number were set off, we still wouldn't go into nuclear winter.

Right.

But you guys can take out all of your major city centers and still fight your nuclear war, but the rest of the world won't be destroyed by it.

Yeah.

That was his solution.

And no one took him up on it.

I've never understood, I don't know, man.

We'll do one on climate change at some point too, but I've never understood why people,

and I get the economics play a factor, but why risking the future of mankind

for your ancestors to follow is worth it.

Aaron Powell, a lot of it is fear.

Like a lot of these people who have over the last decades, you know, pushed for that kind of thing, like fear that, you know, the U.S.

will be caught with his pants down, like genuinely feared the Soviet Union.

And like their heart was in it like that.

But I mean, it's fascinating to me, this whole like basically secret publicity war that's been going, that went on throughout the 20th and it's well into the 21st centuries.

Yeah.

There's a book, again, I think I mentioned it, called Merchants of Doubt.

Everybody should read.

Yeah.

And you know what?

Save your emails to me because you can still think what you want to think.

Yeah.

I just personally don't get it.

I'm not going to throw stones at you and say you're wrong.

I probably should.

But I won't.

Because it's not nice to throw stones.

It isn't, Chuck.

Are you good?

I'm great.

If you want to know more about Nuclear Winter, you can read this fine article written by Robert Lamb by typing Nuclear Winter in the search bar at howstuffworks.com.

Since I said search bar, it's time for listener menu.

Oh no, my friend, it's time for administrative

details.

All right, this is the time that we all know and love when Josh and I read out and say thanks.

We give thanks.

We should call this Thanksgiving and not administrative details.

Oh, okay.

You ready?

No, no, that's okay.

Because administrative details is such a weird name.

This is long ago it's meant to be.

So this is when we thank people for the very kind gifts that they have sent us over the months.

And dude, I think this goes back all the way to January for me.

Oh, man.

I've got one for Christmas cookies to Mona Collantine and Grandma Collantine.

I think we always say her name wrong, by the way.

No, I think she corrected us and said it was like Valentine.

Oh, right.

So I think I'm saying it right.

Man, Mona's going to be so mad at me.

Colentine.

All right.

Is the administrative detail music playing?

It sounds like it.

Great.

Can't you hear that?

I'll get it started with

Richard sent us a guide to the round things of the solar system.

Very fun.

Very nice.

I remember that, yes.

Blair sent us a plug-in key holder.

You come home, plug your keychain in, and you never forget it.

It's pretty awesome, actually.

You can get them on Amazon.

Electric Socket Unplug Chain Holder.

Search for that.

It will bring it up.

That's right.

I got a postcard, very nice postcard from jean-pierre bonasco and stephanie crick from port loughroy antarctica nice and it's worth saying again thank you to mona collentyne and grandma callentine for our christmas cookies we look forward to them again this year yes we certainly do uh oh we've gotten nougat homeman nougat from kristen ferguson again it's so delicious i am hooked on that stuff it's great it is uh she uh you can find her at solace sweets man it is so good yeah kristen's been sending us this homemade nougat for years, and I was always like, homemade nougat, I don't know about that.

And then I put it in my mouth.

It's amazing stuff.

It's really good.

I know.

And then we also got some sweets from Dude Sweet Chocolate out of Texas.

I think they might be out of Dallas.

They made a, like, they sent us really great chocolates, but they also make these incredible marshmallows, too.

They made a sweet potato marshmallow.

Wow.

And dudes at Dude Sweet Chocolate, thank you for those.

They were amazing.

Yumi was crazy for those marshmallows.

Like I am for the nougat.

That was quite the bounty.

I remember that.

As always, every Christmas, our buddy Aaron Cooper in Kansas sends us great printouts of these great photoshops that he does of us that he puts online.

Yeah, you can see them on Internet Roundup.

Yeah, we even got t-shirts this year of Shea Guevara, Josh, and Chuck.

So, Coop, you're the best.

That is true, Coop.

Mark Allen and the Trade Monkey team sent us some beautiful jewelry made by female artisans in Southeast Asia and traded fairly.

Awesome.

That's a key.

Our buddy Van Nostrin sent us a book.

Which book?

Well, he's always sending us stuff, so I honestly can't even remember which book, but we have like boxes full of things that he sent.

He sent us a CD of the Shags Philosophy of the World.

You know, what's known as the worst album ever recorded?

Yeah.

I've got it in my desk.

That's just in the pyramid.

The problem is, my computer doesn't have a CD drive any longer.

Have you noticed that's gone?

No.

Yeah, computers don't have those any longer.

Try to find it on my computer.

I defy you.

I was like, what's that little slot?

And you're like, that's where the tissues come out.

It's the coffee cup holder.

Our buddies from Venice is sinking, a band,

sent us LP, sand, and lines, and a CD.

What we do is secret.

And there are our friends from Athens.

Yep.

Georgia.

Huge, huge thanks to Hilary Lozar, who has sent us a lot of cheese over the last year.

Some of the best cheese, Flathead Lake cheese.

Yeah, Montana.

Which, like, they make a hoppy Gouda that's to die for.

It is very Gouda.

Flathead Lake cheese.

And she sent us some awesome t-shirts that say mouthfeel on them.

Yeah, those on our bar episode.

She's the best.

She and her husband Mike have been big-time fans.

They're

very active on our Facebook page, and they like drove to Seattle for our show from Montana.

From Montana.

Yeah.

She's a teacher.

Yep.

And they sent Yumi and Emily earrings.

So thanks for that from all of us.

That's right.

Jerry got nothing uh tommy lucrick uh tommy luckrich lucrick luttrich

he sent us a nice letter the man whose last name you say four times well he's the guy he's walking from seattle to new york city and if you want to follow this i don't he might be there by now uh tommywalks.tumbler.com you can check that out okay um

Huge, huge thanks from me personally to Laura Snow, who I don't know if you remember when we did the Hot Wheels episode.

Boy, do I.

I said that the Hot Wheels I would love to have was this

station wagon camper that said good time camper on it.

Oh, I remember.

She mailed it to me.

That's pretty remarkable.

Yeah, so thank you very much, Laura Snow.

That was very nice of you.

Yeah, if anyone's listening, my favorite Hot Wheel was the one that had $1,000 stuffed into the body of the car.

That was a good one.

Stefan Brom, he sent us some currency banknotes.

Yeah.

Which I've never collected money, but he sent a 1953 dollar certificate, a 1957 series $2 bill, and an 1874 fractional currency 10-cent note.

Yeah, that was pretty neat.

I think you got the 10-cent note, didn't you?

Because we spent it up.

I spent it on candy.

No.

What's this?

It's 10 cents, sir.

It's a fraction of a note.

Meteorologist Michael Erb, who also moonlights as a young adult murder mystery author, sent us a book of one of his murder mysteries, Kevin McLeod and the Seaside Storm.

It's about a little weather detective.

It's pretty cute.

Jeff Payton sent us a book, Darwin's Black Box.

And Bethany at the base element, the.base.element at gmail.com.

If you want any of the fleur-de-cell caramel she sent us, we can highly recommend them.

And I got one more from both of us, Chuck.

All right.

Dan Kent, name ring a bell?

It does.

He sent us the pint of Pliny the Elder.

Ew.

Yes, thank you, Dan.

That's why it rings a bell.

You're a top-notch human being.

I think we met him in San Francisco at our show.

Yes.

Thanks, Lou.

So,

the famous, world-renowned Pliny the Elder beer.

Yes.

Which I finally tried, and it was delicious.

It is delish.

Yep.

Thank you very much to everybody.

We have more.

If you didn't hear your name, hang tight.

We've got probably a couple more episodes worth of administrative details.

That's right.

Or Thanksgiving is what we're calling it now.

And

in the meantime, you can get in touch with us.

Send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyushouldknow.com.

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