Hi, everybody. I picked this selection. This is Chuck by the Way of Stuff You Should Know, co host September seventeenth, twenty fifteen. We did an episode called the Great Nuclear Winter Debate of nineteen eighty three, and I picked this one because I don't remember even recording it. What in the world were they debating in nineteen eighty three about the Great Nuclear Winter? It was probably just nuclear winter, and the great refers to the debate now that I
see how it's worded. But you know what I mean. I guess I'm going to learn right around with you because I'm about to listen to it right now. 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, and Jerry's over there somewhere off in the ether. But I don't think on ether. Just in the ether.
Oh man, we try not to breathe. Now we had a tank of ether in here.
It would be a much different podcasts.
Josh and Chuck's ether cats.
Do they put those things in tanks?
Oh? I don't know, surely, yeah right? No? Does it look like in the bottle still like the eighteen hundreds.
I don't know. I don't know.
Yeah, I think you just have it 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, what we did? We did want a Cold war, didn't we.
Oh we've done several.
Uh yeah, we batted around this thing, but we've never done a full nuclear holocaust podcast.
Have we?
No?
And nuclear holocaust is that's not quite right. That's not the right way to put it, because what we're talking about is actually that after effects from a nuclear holocaust.
Isn't that the holocaust? Mm?
If you want to be a purist, the nuclear holocaust is the immediate destruction as a result of exploding nuclear bombs over like population centers.
And oh, I didn't know that. I thought it was the whole kitten kaboodle.
I should say, if you're a purist and you want to say it, from my opinion, that's sort of nuclear holocaust.
Okay, I think we know what's going on here.
I got it.
Um.
Yeah, Robert Lamb wrote this of 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 do you say?
Thanks?
Man? That's nice.
But the thing that gets me about nuclear winner, which we will talk about in depth, what fascinates me about it just as much as the nuclear winter itself, chuck, Yeah, is the controversy debate that arose from it. Throughout the eighties. There was a huge debate.
Debate on the severity debate.
Yeah, debate on whether it's something to worry about or not.
Yeah. Well, I looked up because I was like, does anyone think that this is a myth? Out and outright myth? And from what I saw on 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 the early eighties when this was a huge new thing, there was a group of scientists who were hawkish, very much in favor of the US building up its nuclear arsenal as much as possible, and started a basically a pr letter writing campaign to discredit the science behind this. And they like, these guys don't know what they're talking about.
So what they think that the bomb would drop and then in like the next day the birds would be out.
They they said, initially, yeah, that was kind of their position, was just to poke holes in this and that it wasn't it wasn't a a it wasn't legitimate science, right, Yeah, it didn't sound like and then 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, which is the lasers that shoot nukes from space, right, they shoot down nukes from space.
We did a showing that didn't we they did.
That was another one. But that's what the whole thing was. It's the context of it. It was an argument over what over either nuclear disarmament which Carl Sagan and his friends were in favor of hip or nuclear proliferation and Star Wars program.
Warmongers, right, these versus the warmont.
But the weird thing is is this debate, Chuck took place in 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 or remember we talked about this in the Scientific Method episode. Yeah, all your stuff can be disproven ultimately, which is why
it's just a theory. Yeah, so no science is going to be like this is one hundred percent certain, right, Well, these other scientists who were poking holes in it would point out these guys aren't even certain, which means that there's 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 scientists are certain in their findings.
It's so dangerous.
But to the public that you think, oh, well, these scientists can't say that they're certain, so that they must not know what they're talking about for it.
That's dangerous. That's why we're at three minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock. It'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 check, we should prepare for a lot of listener mail because this is a conservative flash point. Nuclear winner is long standing one.
Oh yeah, great, sounds good.
Let's talk about this all right.
Well, Robert starts where most people should start when talking about nuclear winner, 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. Too much sun, even by a little bit, could be catastrophic, and too little sun, but even by a little bit, could be catastrophic. So thanks to humans, we've struck a great balance here with the sun, a great deal made.
You can shine to unshine 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 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 the smoke, right that goes on.
Yes, it's true. I mean you you you shouldn't negate the idea that, like 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 fires exactly from the bomb that happened, right.
So this whole thing, the context of it again comes from the seventies, right, chuck uh yeah. In eighties, yeah, and back in I think that nineteen seventy five 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 that the first two group is the National Academy of Scientists. 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 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 eighteen eighty three at the time, then the dust Dutch East Indies now Indonesia, Krakatoa. That volcano was massive, to the tune of thirty six thousand deaths just from the volcano. And this is in Krakatoa in eighteen eighty three.
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 two point two degrees fahrenheit.
I think it. No, it lowered it, yeah, lowered.
Sorry. Yeah, it took five years 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, it's in La in southern California.
So that was the Krakatoa blast from eighteen eighty three.
Right, yeah, and that it literally changed the color of the sky for like years afterwards. The sky was red such that they think, you know, the scream, the painting the screen, yeah, munch, Yeah, the red sky. They think that's this guy looked was because of this volcano.
That is so neat.
Yeahn't' crazy that guy was like that volcano is crazy.
Maybe what the man is saying.
And that's just one of them.
What was the other one in Mount Tambora.
Yeah, Indonesia once again.
Yeah, Indonesia's got bad luck with the volcanos back in the nineteenth century.
And this was actually earlier in eighteen fifteen.
Yeah. I remember learning about this when I was a kid, because Ohio got it really bad. A volcano went off in Indonesia in eighteen fifteen, 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, so well yeah, oh yeah, there was like snow on the ground in the middle of July.
Do you learn that in state history class?
I did?
I remember that? Yeah? 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 and ours.
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, that's right. So that was Mount Timboro the year without summer. There have been other events, like when the oil fields burned during the during the war in the early nineties.
Yeah, apparently Carl Sagan predicted basically a nuclear winner from that. Yeah, that's pan out.
Yeah, that's where they take some flak. Was it was not nearly as bad the fallout from nut smoke as Sagan predicted.
No, but.
What can you do but predict you're going to be wrong.
Yeah, occasionally, surely you're gonna be wrong.
It doesn't mean you should be like, oh, well, let's 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. Yeacause it's like, what are you arguing in favor for If you're arguing against the idea of what precisely are you arguing.
For yeah, like it won't be that bad.
We'll talk a little bit more about it, like 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.
Well not even just that, but using them won't be as bad as you say, right, not just have them, but well the fallout wouldn't be as bad as they'll 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 a 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.
Winner Stoffy the jowshh, stoff.
I said nuclear and jest.
But I know I heard the break. That was good stuff, all right.
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 k 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 there like verb.
I thought, remember last try, you could use like 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 all dinosaur, just.
A stupid, laughing dinosaur. Speaking of dinosaurs. Yeah, well, I guess we should talk about the k T boundary extinction event, which was some people, some in science, have theorized that that's what happened to the dinosaurs. Was 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.
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 there's no definitive answer. Again, though we're talking science.
No one found a journal.
Diary. Today. Something is streaking through the sky and it's making everyone nervous.
It's very hot now. But I noticed that dinosaurs are dying, so that's good.
Oh, this is a dinosaur writing in my opinion. Oh oh so that's bad, right, right, Okay, so let's talk Nuclear Winner, right. You kind of said it earlier, But the whole idea behind nuclear Winner 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 seventy thousand nuclear warheads, like many, many times more nuclear warheads in existence in like the early eighties than there were today.
And when they started debating them, they really took up this cause because the Reagan administration was saying, we need this Star Wars program because we can prevent almost with you know, ninety percent certainty, a Soviet nuclear.
Attack right with laser guns exactly.
And so these 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 ninety percent effective, then we need to build up our nuclear arsenal so that when we shoot everything we got at them still that ten percent will totally annihilate the United States that the presence of the star Wars program was going to put the nuclear arms
rates into even higher gear than it already was. 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, particular 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 at a lot a lot of nuclear bombs which could totally go off as far as the 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, which is basically what Carl Sagan and his buddy Richard Turco divided the different types of nuclear winter into.
That's right, mister Sagan and mister Turko are they doctors. Let's just call everyone a doctor.
Well, yeah he was. Carl Sagan was a doctor of astro chemistry, I believe, and Richard Turco is a veterinarian. I can't remember what he was.
They wrote a book called it Path Where No Man Thought, A Path where No Man Thought, and that 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. In 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, which we'll talk about those. 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, but the world itself would not have big consequences right atmospherically, So if.
You are talking a nuclear war, especially old war nuclear war, that was a fairly unlikely scenario. By the time the early nineteen eighties rolled around and people started talking about the concept of a nuclear winner, those like Hiroshima and Nagasaki level nuclear bombs were like attached the average fighter jet. Yeah, they were considered like just tactical, 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. Yeah, it was, but they would be nice. That's the best case scenario. They're trying to cover all avenues here.
Yes, number two was 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, but it would not Oh black rain, of course, who wants that? Did happen in Hiroshima? Yes, they drank it, you and died.
From hacking it 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, as like a teaching lesson for everyone. Yeah, it's really moving.
We should have one of those here.
We should. Instead people are like, yeah, Japan forced the US 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 anytime you tackle nuclear war it's going to be divisive. Yeah, because some people think.
It's awesome nuke, the whales got a nuke something.
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. So if there's a nuclear fallout in North America that affects our crop yields dramatically and causes famine in the US, 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 gonna climatologically speaking, be unaffected or largely unaffected because the wind goes down to the equator and then back up like the equator separates the hemispheres as far as the atmosphere is concerned.
Yeah, totally. There would still be global troubles, yes, But in reading on these scenarios, it made me really want to move to Australia.
Well that's another thing too. How many people would be like I needed to get out of the United States, so I moved 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 is just frozen ice sheet.
Yeah, but I just mean as far as you'd have to go pretty far south, further south in 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 or in the southern hemisphere? Yeah, probably not half.
Yeah, so the northern hemisphere would show up at the Southern hemisphere's doorstep. I'd 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. Yea nido, And.
I know Christmas doesn't fall in July. It was a metaphorical statement everyone, Yeah, I get you.
Nominal nuclear winners number three. That is what they consider the low end full scale nuclear war, right, but still full scale six thousand to twelve thousand nuclear weapons. That's all just six to twelve thousand nuclear bombs.
Right, and we're talking a megaton or more bombs and a mega ton was I think fifty Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, So twelve thousand times fifty of those for this kind of nominal nuclear war.
Yeah, it's a lot of zeros.
Yeah.
They predicted noon sunlight would be about a third of what it was global temperature drops of eighteen 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.
To cut to the Southern hemisphere, they're all at the beach. There's like topical music playing.
But they have no wheat.
Who needs wheat when you got wrong drinks?
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 one percent of the sunlight getting through for months and months on end, global temperature dropping, no photosynthesis happening, 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 chili confines of this black atmospheric tomb.
Yeah, he's got a little love Craft in him, does.
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.
Stoff with the jaw shot.
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, but maybe it wouldn't be my city. I live in Schenectady, New York. No one's gonna bomb s Connective, so I'm probably gonna be Okay.
These guys said, Hey, Western civilization, not just in the US, but also the USSR, that's not necessarily the case, You too will be affected. There's gonna be big problems after a nuclear war, so much so that let's make sure that our leaders never do this right. Wake up basically is what they were doing. And so Sagan and his friends created a paper and it's now called the tas Paper after all of their names.
Right, Turco, Tune, Ackerman, Polk, and Sagan.
Okay, And they wrote this paper and had it published in Science, the pre eminent scientific journal in the United States. It was a big deal. 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. Yeah, to make sure that every dick
and Jane in the US knew about this. It was like a three page article about the nuclear winner, which is a new term at the time, complete with illustrations where like the earth was like this dead, lifeless what's called like a gray chalk billiard ball, basically just really scary stuff. 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 nineteen eighties.
And yes, it was nineteen eighty three, and you this was before all the science was in. This is from the first paper, before the first papers conference was even held, right, And a lot of people, including people who were on his side about this issue, were really mad at them because it opened up this group and the whole idea of nuclear Winner to allegations that they were fear mongering and that they were basically trying to sell the public
on science, which is, you know, that's not what science does. 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, in fact is fact. 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. But again Segon going off and dow this it really opened up for a lot of allegations and debate that took place afterward.
Yeah, but some say that their work and 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 they're 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 nineteen ninety 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 good autumn all the time. They'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 like, let's say a major city like New York, they're like, what would be there to burn? Like, we just don't know.
Well, that's that's yeah. So if you dropped it on a city, is it an old city that's that isn't super modern, sure, and therefore isn't built out of like lots of plasts 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. Or maybe you're not shooting nuclear bombs two cities, but to other nuclear installations that are out in the middle of like nowhere in Nebraska.
Right, because we have I mean we've there's been like two thousand nuclear bombs detonated, but they only two on a cities, right, exactly. Everything else has been out of the ocean or out in the middle of nowhere, and there's been no fire.
Right. The assumption is that though if you shot a nuclear bomb at an at a modern city, a lot of really toxic smoke would be produced. That's probably the worst case scenario in both the immediate nuclear holocaust and the fallout the nuclear winner as a result, because of all the smoke that would be created.
I mean, look at the fallout from nine to eleven, 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. 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 and 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 it was there could initially be like a thirty five to forty degree drop in global temperatures celsius. So we're talking like seventy degrees seventy two degrees farentheight drop in temperatures.
So that's about full on nuclear war.
Yes, later on as they revised their findings and more 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 fifteen degrees celsius drop in global temperatures, which would be substantial and could still have widespread effects. Right, So this from this debate,
nuclear winner 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 problems as well because one of the things one of the great casualties of detonating nuclear bombs is the ozone layer. The fire ball from the blast burns up nitrogen, converting it to nitrogen oxide, and 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 particular matter falls back to Earth and is radioactive. By the way, now the sunlight that does come through is way hotter 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's surface. Well, that is the keystone species for the ocean aquatic environments. The ecosystems all start with phytoplankton, and zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, Little fish feed on zooplankton, Larger fish feed on little fish, and so on and so on until so if you get rid of the
phyto plankton, you're in 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 links 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 two thousand and three speech, and he his whole thing. He was very famously a climate denier. He was a climate skeptic
until his death as far as I know. As he did, yeah, and he wrote some great books, but it was also like 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. 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 to two sucker punch. So the initial scientists that challenged Nuclear
Winner 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, Yeah, 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 climate models compared to the stuff they were
using back in the eighties and even the nineties. Yeah, the stuff they're using now says, actually, we think nuclear winner 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 Indian Pakistan drop a couple of nuclear bombs.
So 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 was it had a substantial effect.
Yeah, they said ten years of smoke clouds and a three year temperature drop of about two point twenty five 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 ten to twenty days, and that lasts ten to twenty 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 fifty bombs at one another in a regional war. Yeah, 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 twenty one kill a ton bomb.
Yeah, exactly, we're talking.
Fifty of those going off in the same area.
But that report that you mentioned on just like if Indian Pakistan, well how much was it ten mega.
Tons fifty fifty or no, it was one megaton, So fifty of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
Well, it was enough to cause the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board to move the dooms to clock two minutes closer to midnight. And the Doom's day clock is some people say it's good science, some people say they're fear mongering, But what it is is 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 cybertechnology, but the main two are obviously nuclear weapons and climate change are the two main things that factor into where the Doom's day clock sits. And I think in the nineteen fifties they've only changed it how many times? Eighteen times since it was created nineteen forty seven. Have they
changed the hands on the clock? In the nineteen fifties it was at two minutes till midnight in the early nineteen fifties. The best I think it's been in the early nine nineties was seventeen minutes till midnight. Oh nice, Yeah, doesn't feel good.
Yeah, that's a.
Lot of time.
What are we right now?
Right now, we are the closest we've been since nineteen eighty three. And on January twenty second of this year, it was changed to three minutes till midnight. Is where they sit, and they have a big had a big press release. I'll just read the opening and closing paragraphs.
The opening paragraph in twenty fifteen, 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 twenty fifteen, with the clockhand move forward to three minutes to midnight. The board feels compelled to add, with the 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 that 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 two thousand and nine to twenty thirteen, Obama cut only three hundred and nine warheads from the stockpile. And they're basically saying, we're not doing this as fast as we need to. Yeah, 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 twenty twenty to twenty thirty.
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 we outs. 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 winner debate, because he's such a revered figure, 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 obtuse, so like it's kind of fun to read.
But it's called nuclear war and climactic catastrophe colon some policy implications, and he says like, we don't know, you know, what the what the right answer is, We don't know if it's entirely possible that nuclear winner. Maybe our ideas are overblown or whatever. But he said, I'm not willing to take the chance, right, Why should we take the chance.
That's his whole thing, like why risk it? Right?
So his solution is, how about this US and USSR. How about you de escalate the arms race, deproliferate until you get down to a threshold that science has said. Okay, nuclear winner probably couldn't happen beyond this payload, right. Yeah, So even if all of 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
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 the economics play 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 US 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, if it's fascinating to me, this whole like basically secret publicity war that's been going, that went on throughout the twentieth then it's well into the twenty first centuries. Yeah, there's a book again,
I think I mentioned it called Merchants of Doubt. Everybody should read.
Yeah, 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 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 Winner, you can read this fine article written by Robert Lamb by typing Nuclear Winner in the search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mega.
Oh no, my friend, it's time for and D. 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 non administrative details.
Oh okay, ready, no, no, that's okay.
Because administrative details is such a weird name.
This is long, 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. Demona calin Tine and Grandma calling Tine.
I think we always say her name wrong.
By the way, No, I think she corrected us and said it was Valentine, So I think I'm saying it right.
Mann's gonna be so mad at me.
Calantine.
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. Yeah, Blair, send 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, very nice postcard from Jean Pierre Bonasco and Stephanie Creek from Port Locroy, Antarctica.
Nice. And it's worth saying again thank you to Mona Colintine and Grandma Colin tinme for our Christmas cookies. We look forward to them again this year.
Yes, we certainly do. Uh Oh, we've gotten nugat, homemade nugat from Kristin Ferguson. Okay, it's so delicious.
I am hooked on that stuff.
It's great. It is she you can find her at Solace Sweets.
Man, it is so good.
Yeah, Christian's been sending us as homemade nugat for years and I was always like, I mean nugat, I don't know about that, and then I put it in my mouth.
It's amazing stuff.
It's really good.
And then we also got some sweets from Dude Sweet Chocolate out of Texas. I think they might be out of Dallas. They made like 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. You MEI was crazy for those marshmallows like I am for the nugat.
That was quite the bounty. I remember that.
Yeah.
As always every Christmas, our buddy Aaron Cooper and Kansas sends us great printouts of these great photoshops that he does of us that he puts online and.
Yeah, you can see him on Internet round up.
Yeah, we even got t shirts this year of Shay Gevara, Josh and Chock. So Coop you're the best.
Yeah, that is true, Coop. Mark Allen in the Trade Monkey team sent us some beautiful jewelry made by female artisans in Southeast Asia and traded fairly. The key.
Our buddy van Nostrin send us a book.
One which book.
Well, he's always sending us stuff, so I honestly can't even remember which book, but we have like boxes full of things that he said.
He sent us a CD of the Shags Philosophy of the World. You know, what's known as the worst album ever recorded. Yeah, it's got it in my desk.
That's a since 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 buddy is from Venice Sinking Band send us an LP sand in lines and a CD. What we do is secret and there are our friends from Athens, Yep, Georgia.
Huge, huge thanks to Hillary loaves Are, who has sent us a lot of cheese over the last year, some of the best cheese Flathead Lake Cheese in Montana, which like they make a happy goodha that's to die for. It is very good at Flathead Lake Cheese. And she sent us some awesome t shirts that' say mouthfeel on them. Yeah, loves than our bar episode.
She's the best. She and her husband might have been big time fans. They're very active on our Facebook page and they like drove to Seattle.
For our show from Montana.
Yeah she's a teacher.
Yeah, and they sent you me and Emily Earring. So thanks for that from all of us, right, Jerry got nothing.
Uh, Tommy Lucrick, Tommy Luckrich, Lucrick Lettrich, 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, I don't know, he might be there by now. Tommy Walks dot tumblr dot com, you can check that out.
Okay, huge, huge thanks from me personally. Dolores No who. I don't know if you remember when we did the Hot Wheels episode, ohy do I I said that the hot wheels I would love to have was this like like station wagon camper that said good time camper on it. I remember she mailed it to me.
That's pretty remarkable.
Yeah, so thank you very much, laurs No, that was very nice of you.
Yeah, if anyone's listening, my favorite hot wheel was the one that had one thousand dollars stuffed in the body of the car.
That's the good one.
Stephan Brahm he sent us some currency banknotes, yeah, which I've never collected money, but he sent a nineteen fifty three dollar certificate, a nineteen fifty seven series two dollars bill, and an eighteen seventy four fractional currency ten cent note.
Yeah, that was pretty neat.
I think you got the ten cent note, didn't you, because.
We spied it up. I spent it on candy.
No, what's this it's ten cents or it's.
A fraction of a note. Meteorologist Michael Irb, who also moons moon Lights as a young adult murder mystery author send us a book of one of his murder mysteries, Kevin McLeod in The Seaside Storm. It's about a little weather detective. It's pretty cute.
Jeff Payton sent us a book Darwin's Black Box.
And Bethany at the Base Element the dot Base Dot Element at gmail dot com. If you want any of the flir to sell caramels, she sent us, we can highly recommend them. And I got one more from both of us. Chuff all right, Dan Kent name ring a bell?
It does?
He sent us the pints of Pliny the Elder ew Yes.
Thank you, Dan, that's why it rings a bell.
You're a top not human being. I think we met him in San Francisco to show yes.
Thanks dude, the famous world renowned planning the Elder beer. Yes, which have finally tried it and it was delicious.
It is dealers ship. 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 stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and as always, joined us at our home on the web, Stuff Youshould Know dot com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.