Episode 43: Nuclear winter

The UK has a new Prime Minister, and one of his first acts will have been to write letters to the captains of our nuclear missile submarines, telling them what to do in the event that the UK gets obliterated by a nuclear strike.

But what else might happen after a full-scale nuclear war? Many scientists—most notably Carl Sagan—have theorised that nuclear war would block out the sun, destroy crops, and maybe lead to human extinction. But it turns out this is a very controversial theory. In this rather grim episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart try and work out who’s right, and if nuclear winter really would be the end of the world.

Another thing the new Prime Minister should be doing is reading Works in Progress magazine, the sponsor of The Studies Show. If he does, he’ll find a wealth of ideas that he and his government could use to spark progress and growth in the UK - and in particular, he should be reading the classic essay “The Housing Theory of Everything”. You can find that and much more at worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* Putin warning the West that Russia is “ready” for nuclear war

* Ned Donovan’s article on the UK Prime Minister’s “Letters of Last Resort”

* The 2024 test where the UK’s nuclear deterrent went “plop”

* Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario

* A podcast episode and a Reddit thread criticising the book

* Wikipedia on the Moscow-Washington and Beijing-Washington phone lines

* The terrifying stories of Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov

* Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control, about nuclear near-misses

* The 11-ton “Mother Of All Bombs” (MOAB) vs. the 9-megaton B53 thermonuclear warhead

* Neil Halloran’s YouTube video on deaths during and after a nuclear explosion

* His later video discussing how he overstated nuclear winter effects

* The “Nuke Map”, where you can see how much of a given city would be in the blast radius of a variety of different warheads

* The two original 1983 nuclear winter papers in Science: the slightly more circumspect one; the one that mentions human extinction

* Long Effective Altruism forum post by Michael Hinge on the evidence for and against nuclear winter effects

* Even more detailed post on the same subject by Vasco Grilo

* Three papers from three different teams on a regional nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan:

* The Rutgers team’s original paper in 2014

* The follow-up by the Los Alamos team in 2018 (response from Rutgers; response from Los Alamos)

* The follow-up by the Lawrence Livermore team in 2020

* Carl Sagan’s prediction of severe climate effects from Iraq’s burning of the Kuwaiti oil wells in 1990/1991

* Discussion of why that didn’t happen

* The extremely sceptical Naval Gazing blog post on nuclear winter

* Paper from nuclear winter theorists accusing the US of genocide in Japan

* Toby Ord’s book The Precipice, on existential risk

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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