A11 Nuclear winter: failure of the isolated detonation assumption

Topic

The atmospheric effects model has already established that particulate matter injected into the stratosphere can persist for periods ranging from months to years. This anomaly arises when that same mechanism extends beyond the scenario of a single detonation: if a sufficiently large number of detonations occur over urban areas with high combustible fuel loads, the amount of soot injected into the stratosphere can be so vast that the resulting climatic cooling shifts from being local and transient to global and prolonged.

This causes the reduction in surface sunlight to persist for years rather than weeks, resulting in severe impacts on agriculture and food security on a planetary scale—an outcome qualitatively different from the local effect described by the atmospheric effects model for an isolated detonation.

Consequently, this model—which begins with a soot quantity exceeding the threshold for a purely local effect—relies on the same global climate models used to study massive volcanic eruptions; it is central to analyzing the existential risk of a large-scale nuclear conflict, a scale vastly different from the regional damage already described by the urban destruction and fallout dispersal processes in this catalog.

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