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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

So it appears that nature can actually recover quite well from severe nuclear explosions and contamination (viz research from the Atolls and Chernobyl etc.). At least upon surface level examination. Deformities in new born living creatures seems to revert back to near normal levels within 2 or 3 generations. Trees and vegetation manage to eke out an existence and grow again.

Hollywood producers who rely on the post armageddon 'nuclear winter wasteland' will have to go back to the drawing boards.

Yet, I wonder what other long term genetic corruption will have occurred even in the surviving and supposedly thriving flora and fauna. Are we subtly developing life forms that will be able to better withstand any sort of nuclear holocaust and thrive once we are long gone?

EDIT: I am thinking the downvoters are reading the first paragraph of my post and not really getting to the last bit and getting the gist of what I am saying... ;)

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I was distracted by the middle. It's not really the bomb, it's the fires. Setting a hundred cities on fire in an afternoon, each one pushes soot up into the upper atmosphere. sunlight gets absorbed there rather than down on the surface. It's really all about scale.

The wiki article is interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

Interesting point. I assume they chose these atolls because the prevailing winds wouldn't blow any radioactive waste or ash clouds over populated lands. I've seen plenty of pre and 'during' photos of the test explosions, but rarely seen ones that are a few minutes after the fact.

I wonder just how much fire, smoke and debris was ejected into the atmosphere? I assume not much given the extent of water around the place, but if indeed 23 Skyscrapers worth of matter was moved, you would assume that most of it would have been scattered into the upper atmosphere as fine dust amongst the water vapour etc.

I wonder how that affected the weather and climate around the area over the next few days. They must have studied that, but I don't see very much available in terms of their findings.

That's not true. People said the same thing about the potential Kuwaiti Oil Fires in the first gulf war, and yet hundreds of wells and lakes of oil burned for months and caused no winter scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...

Nuclear Winter is a case of scientists running personal social activism and using their cover as scientists to implant a false narrative.

> Even Dr. Richard P. Turco, the physicist who coined the phrase ''nuclear winter,'' discounts the idea.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-the...

yup, that one event didn't make it up to 10k feet. But as pointed out, it was like twilight, and the temperature dropped 5C. Asia was spared.

But if you continue on, you'll find more recent research, both pro an con. I think it's still a completely reasonable foundation for a dystopian fantasy story.

In spite of the specific events in Kuwait, I'd be willing to wager that if humans launch, say, 500 nuclear weapons there will be climate consequences resembling nuclear winter.

We probably won't agree on this point. I think we can agree, let's not find out.

But volcanos can cause a volcanic winter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter

So why not a nuclear exchange?

The models justifying the "nuclear winter" scenario are wrong, and "nuclear winter" relies on politically motivated rhetoric to push a social agenda that is at odds with similar events in magnitude. The Kuwaiti Oil fires are a great example, as are events where forests the size of nation-states have burned, and caused no signifiacant cooling.

It's hyped exaggeration using rhetoric for political effect.

I don’t know why you are getting downvotes. Odds are you are right. People are getting emotionally attached to nuclear winter I guess.

I provided a link from the NYTimes with the scientists from the original 1983 Nuclear Winter paper retracting their original prediction as well.

Well done, HN.

I suspect its your use of the phrase "social agenda", as if nuclear war might be a thing that it was unreasonable to be against.

It is unreasonable to make up fake models and rhetoric, and then push it in the media under the auspices of science. How can you be trusted in the future?

> … as if nuclear war might be a thing that it was unreasonable to be against.

When a nuclear war is less bad than the alternatives, then it is unreasonable to be against it.

A lot of Western anti-nuclear sentiment was simply manufactured by KGB manipulation of useful idiots. It's sad: if not for fifty years of anti-nuclear propaganda, we might be off of coal and safely generating energy for the next couple of centuries while we work on environmentally-friendly ways to produce solar cells. Instead, we're belching forth pollution — to include radioactive pollution — at an unprecedented rate, decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, whose security the anti-nuclear propaganda was intended to ensure.

> Deformities in new born living creatures seems to revert back to near normal levels within 2 or 3 generations.

Except for micro-organisms. The Chernobyl area apparently has issues with dead matter not decaying. See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around...

Nature seems like it would do just fine, and I don’t think that humanity would go instinct but obviously after all the infrastructure is destroyed, we won’t be able to support nearly the population of people that we did before.

We live on a radioactive planet and it's not that surprising that life here is adapted to it.

The normal background radiation to Chernobyl is like comparing a middle european summer with the danakil desert.

You can't expect people to read more than 140 characters.

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