1

While a nuclear war will obviously cause significant environmental harm to the earth, after doing some research on the subject I'm starting to find facts that make me question whether it would actually be a doomsday scenario like the media depicts it. For example I have found out that since 1945 over 2,000 nuclear weapons have been detonated.http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/6/japanese-artist-nuclear-weapons I have also found out that the a lot of the fallout in the Bikini Atoll disappeared from the soil because all the coconut trees absorbed it and deposited in it's coconuts. (Which they obviously made a warning not to eat the coconuts there) http://www.bikiniatoll.com/history.html Also the fact that Carl Sagan claimed that the environmental effects of Iraq burning all their oil reserves during the Iraq Kuwait war would have effects worse than nuclear winter makes me the magnitude of danger from nuclear winter is exaggerated. Obviously a nuclear winter is not something we want to happen and would obviously cause severe harm to the environment, but is it really an end of the world scenario like the media tends to depict it? Or is it just an environmental disaster that will require a lot of cleanup but can be recovered from?

Sklivvz
  • 78,578
  • 29
  • 321
  • 428
DrinkJavaCodeJava
  • 331
  • 1
  • 3
  • 1
    One point here: Nuclear winter doesn't come from the bombs themselves and thus the number that have been previously detonated is irrelevant. Rather, nuclear winter comes from smoke drawn up from burning cities that were hit with nuclear weapons. Sagan got it wrong--the effect is only devastating when the trigger is a nuclear weapon that sets up a column of air rising into the stratosphere. Fire without the nuclear trigger produces low-lying smoke that quickly rains out, nukes without a city underneath don't have enough smoke to pull up to be a problem. – Loren Pechtel Jun 24 '14 at 22:55

0 Answers0