Selects: The Great Nuclear Winter Debate of 1983
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or visit rocket.com today. Rocket Mortgage LLC, licensed in 50 states. NMLSconsumeraccess.org, number 3030. 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?

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. She's trying not to breathe right now. We had a tank of ether in here. It'd 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.

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. We did one on the Cold War, didn't we? 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...

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 of

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? 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, in the early eighties when this was a huge new thing. Yeah. Um, there was a group of scientists who, uh, were hawkish, uh, very much in favor of the U S building up its nuclear arsenal as much as possible. And, uh,

started basically a PR letter-writing campaign to discredit the science behind this. And they thought, these guys don't know what they're talking about. So what, they think that the bomb would drop and then 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...

They ultimately the whole point was that this came from an argument over whether the US should engage in the SDI the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars right which is the lasers that shoot nukes yeah from space right yeah They shoot down nukes from space. We did a show on that didn't we no did that was another one yeah and

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—

the pages of like academic journals and it ended up being a fight between science and science deniers Yeah, it sounds like these scientists that you mentioned might have been had their coffers full from the US 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. All your stuff can be disproven ultimately, which is why it's just a theory. Yeah.

So no scientist is going to be like, this is 100% certain. Right. Well, these other scientists who 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 for sure. 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.

And I should say also, Chuck, we should prepare for a lot of listener mail because this is a conservative flashpoint. Nuclear winter is a longstanding 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, right? too much Sun even by a little bit could be catastrophic and Too little Sun but even by a little bit could be catastrophic right 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 right that 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 right that goes on yes, and

It's true. I mean, you shouldn't negate the idea that nuclear radiation poisoning is going to kill a lot of people 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, and 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 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. Sure. 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 based 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 effect

influence on the global climate is past history from volcanic eruptions. Yes, most noted, 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 ten people there somehow It's not like it was super populated right 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. Yeah, it took five years for

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 LA 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 and

Such that they think, you know, the scream, the painting, the scream. Yeah. Munch. Yeah. The red sky, they think that's... No way. The way the sky looked was because of this volcano. That is so neat. Yeah, 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 Tambora. Yeah, Indonesia once again. Yeah. Indonesia's got bad luck with the volcanoes back in the 19th century. 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, there was like snow on the ground in the middle of July. Did you learn that in state history class? Yes, I did. I remember that. Yeah, Georgia State History. 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 in 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. Uh-huh. And then there's some, like, 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.

Um, there have been other events like when, um, the oil fields burned during the, uh, during the war in the early 90s. Yeah, apparently Carl Sagan predicted, uh, basically a nuclear winter from that. Yeah, that's... It didn't pan out. Yeah, that's where they take some flack was, um, it was not nearly as bad, the fallout from that smoke as, uh, Sagan predicted. No. But...

What can you do? But predict. You're going to be wrong occasionally. Yeah, 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. It's like what are you arguing in favor for? If you're arguing against the idea of nuclear war, 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 wrongheaded by definition to me. 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 winter.

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I said nuclear and jest before the break. I know, I heard. It was good stuff. I just want to point that out because some people might think I was serious. No. And now that you said it was in jest, 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. I thought in the 21st century you could use 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 today's world. You're a relic. You're an old dinosaur. Just a stupid laughing dinosaur. Speaking of dinosaurs. Yeah, what? Well, I guess we should talk about the KT boundary extinction event.

which was some people, some in science, have theorized that that's what happened to the dinosaurs. 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. Dear 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 it, in my opinion. Oh, oh. So that's bad. Right. Right. Okay. So let's talk nuclear winter, right? 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 yeah many many times more nuclear warheads in existence in Like the early 80s than there were today. Yeah, 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 we can prevent almost with you know 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 of the Star Wars program was going to...

put the nuclear arms race into even higher gear than it already was. Yeah. 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 tackled 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 a 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. Right. Which is basically what Carl Sagan and his buddy Richard Turco divided the different types of nuclear winter into. Yeah.

That's right, Mr. Sagan and Mr. Turco. Are they doctors? Let's just call everyone a doctor. Well, yeah, 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 it 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.

Yeah, okay. We'll talk about those were like 20 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. Oh

But the world itself would not have big consequences. Right. Atmospherically. So if you are talking a nuclear war, especially a Cold War nuclear war, that was a fairly unlikely scenario. Yeah.

By the time 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 weapons.

Like, you just could shoot them off on a battlefield if you needed to. Yeah. So the idea that it would just amount to that is... Unlikely. It was. But... They're being nice. 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 in 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 have 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. Oh, I'm sure. As like a teaching lesson for everyone. Yeah. It's really moving. We should have one of those here. Yeah.

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 any time 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. Yeah.

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 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. Yeah. 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. 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. So I'm moving 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's 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, that's true. Probably not half.

Yeah, roughly. 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. Neato. And I know Christmas doesn't fall in July. It was a metaphorical statement. Yeah. Thank you, Jeff. Nominal nuclear winners, number three, that is what they consider the low-end, full-scale nuclear war. Right. Yeah.

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 bombs.

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. No.

It's 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? Dude, that's a t-shirt. Josh Clark said that one. 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.

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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. Yeah. 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 a nuclear war. So much so that let's make sure that our leaders never do this. 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. 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. Yeah. It was a big deal. Yeah. 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 winter, 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. Yes, it's 1983. And this was before all the science was in. This is from the first paper. Before the first paper's 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. Yeah. And that they were basically trying to sell the public on science, which is – that's not what science does. Right.

But 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. Right.

But again, Sagan going off and doing this, it really opened him up for a lot of allegations and debate that took place afterward. Yeah, but some say that their work in the T-TAPS 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 great. Autumn all the time? That'd be wonderful. Oh, man, that would be wonderful. That'd be Chuck's world.

And they 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 drop something the size on, let's say, a major city like New York, what would be there to burn? We just don't know. Well, 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 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. Right.

Or maybe you're not shooting nuclear bombs to cities, but to other nuclear installations that are out in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. Right. Because we have... I mean, there's been like 2,000 nuclear bombs detonated, but only two on a city. 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...

nuclear bomb 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.

They have no idea. 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. Yeah. The problem is if you're a detractor of nuclear winter theory, you would say that's a guess. Right. Where'd you get that number? Yeah. You know, 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. Yeah. 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. Right.

Celsius. Yeah. So we're talking like 70 degrees, 72 degrees Fahrenheit drop in temperatures. And that's for a full-on nuclear war. Yeah. Yes. Later on as they revised their findings, and 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. Right.

Which would be substantial and could still have widespread effects, right? Yeah. So 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...

oceanic problems as well 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 than

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 disrupted. 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 overall.

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. 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 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 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 scientists that challenged nuclear winter

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. 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 methods.

climate models compared to the stuff they were using back in the 80s and even the 90s. Yeah. 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 a

India and Pakistan dropped 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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, how much was it, 10 megatons? 50. 50? 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 2 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. Where 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 says,

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've...

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. 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... All over again. 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...

Too obtuse, so it's kind of fun to read. But it's called Nuclear War and Climactic Catastrophe, some policy implications. And he says, we don't 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 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, de-proliferate 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. 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 that economics play a factor, but why risking the future of mankind for your ancestors to follow is worth it? 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 on, that went on throughout the 20th and is well into the 21st century. Yeah. There's a book, again, I think I mentioned it, called Merchants of Doubt. Oh, yeah. Everybody should read. Yeah. So good. 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 Mail. 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. Ready? 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 Colentine and Grandma Colentine. 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. Okay.

All right. Is the administrative detail music playing? 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 key chain in, and you never forget it. It's pretty awesome, actually. You can get them on Amazon. Electric socket unplugged chain holder. Search for that. It will bring it up.

That's right. I got a postcard, a very nice postcard, from Jean-Pierre Bonasco and Stephanie Crick from Port La Croix, Antarctica. Nice. And it's worth saying again, thank you to Mona Kollentine and Grandma Kollentine for our Christmas cookies. We look forward to them again this year. Yes, we certainly do.

Oh, we've got nougat, homemade nougat from Kristen Ferguson again. It's so delicious. I am hooked on that stuff. It's great. 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 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 Photoshop's 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. You know that. 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 the key. Our buddy Van Nostrand sent us a book.

Which book? Well, he's always sending us stuff. He is. I honestly can't even remember which book, but we have boxes full of things that he sent. He sent us a CD of the Shag's Philosophy of the World, what's known as the worst album ever recorded. Yeah. I've got it at my desk. That's his sense of humor. The problem is my computer doesn't have a CD drive any longer. Have you noticed that it'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. Right. It's the coffee cup holder. Our buddies from Venice is Sinking, a band, sent us an 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. Based 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 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. Oh, yeah. That's right. Jerry got nothing. Tommy Lukrich. Tommy Lukrich. Lukrich? Lukrich. 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, he might be there by now. Tommywalks.tumblr.com. You can check that out. Okay. 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. Yep. 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 in the body of the car. That's 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 split 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 MacLeod 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. Whoa.

And Bethany at the base element, the.base.element at gmail.com. If you want any of the Fleur de Sel caramels 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, too. Yes. Thanks, dude. I believe 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, 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, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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