The Great Nuclear Winter Debate of 1983

still like that? I don't know. I don't. Yeah, I think you're just having a little butt 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 Wis Thompson. I think we talked about it before in anesthesia. Probably

it's a ether asks what a weird start? Yeah, that has nothing to do with what we're about to talk about. And 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 one in the Cold War, didn't we We've done several h Yeah, we we batted around this thing, but we've never done a full nuclear holocaust podcast, have we?

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 the after effects from a nuclear holocaust. Isn't that the holocaust? I mean, 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 suff Oh I didn't know that. I thought it was the whole kitten cabboodle. I should say, if you're a purist and you want to say it, from

my opinion, that's what a nuclear holiday. Okay, I think we know what's going on here. Um. Yeah, Robert Lamb wrote this, uh stuff to blow your mind. Yeah. I have to say. I said, man, way to go on now, And I was a good one told him that I did. I actually uttered those words. What do you say? Thanks man? That's nice. Uh. But the thing that gets me about

nuclear winner which we will talk about in depth. Um, what fascinates me about it, just as much as the nuclear winner itself, Chuck, is the controversy debate that that arose from it throughout the eighties. There's 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, is does anyone think that this is a myth? Out 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 survey already of what would happen, But no one says, like, no, there would be no nuclear winter, there would be no problems after nuclear bombs.

So there used to be like back in in the early eighties when this was a huge new thing, Um, there was a group of scientists who were hawkish, very much in favor of the U S building up it's nuclear arsenal as much as possible and started a basically a pr letter writing campaign to discredit the science behind this and the like, these guys don't know what they're talking about, so what they think that the bomb would drop and then like the next day the birds would

be out. They they they said, initially, yeah, there was kind of their position was just a poke holes in this and that it wasn't wasn't a it wasn't legitimate science, right, it doesn't sound like and then um they Ultimately the whole point was that this came from an argument over whether the U s should engage in the SDI, the t Jeek Defense Initiative or star Wars, which is the lasers that shoot nukes from space. Right, they shoot down nukes from space? They did? That was another one, Um,

But that's what the whole thing was. It's the context of it. It It was an argument over what over either nuclear disarmament, which Carl Sagan and his friends were in favor of, or um nuclear proliferation and the star wars um program warmongers, the popiece versus the warm But the weird thing is that 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 the scientists that you mentioned might have been had their coffers full from the US government, So potentially or private industry or something like that. Um. And the thing is is they used this old chestnut where um, 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. So no scientist is going to be like, this is certain. Well, these other scientists who are 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 is certain in their finals.

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, that's dangerous. That's why we're at the 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 winter 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 winter, and that's in the atmosphere. Uh. It's a very finely tuned system we have. I want to say it's like homeostasis, but um, it's not. People, So I guess it's like

an ecostasis where the sun. Uh, 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. Uh. 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 we've, thanks to humans, we've struck a great balance here with the sun. A great deal may and you can shine

to unshine too much sun. Yeah, and it's working out awesome. Uh. 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 of the smoke from the resulting fires that would cause the blacking out of the sky and the sun not getting through it. Yeah, but everything I read across the board said it's almost the smoke that goes on.

It's true. Yeah, 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 fire, 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, the yeah and and back. And I think that 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 groups, 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, um, there will be something, but our models are too um primitive to say for certain what the fallout would be a few years after that, Carl Sagan and his crew get together and said, um, 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 will have a negative um influence on the global climate. Is past history from volcanic eruptions. Yes, uh, most noted. Well, there are a few over the years, but one of the notable ones in 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 three Yeah, there's only people there somehow, It's not like it was super populated. And two thirds of Krakatoa collapsed. Uh. The smoke rose up and warmed the global temperature global by two point two degrees fahrenheit. I think, No, it lowered it, yeah, lowered. Sorry, it took five years uh

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. That's in l A in southern California. So that was the Krakatoa blast from eight three, right, yeah, and that it literally changed the color of the sky for like years afterwards. The sky was red um such that they think,

you know, the scream, the painting the screen. Yeah, yeah, the red sky they think that's the way this guy looked was because of this volcano. It's so neat that crazy. That guy was like, that volcano was crazy. Let's 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 volcanoes 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 volcano and 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. In Ohio was affected so well yeah, well 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? Uh yeah, Georgia State History. That that

was like a full course at our school. Half of it was just sitting around with the teacher, like staring off into the distance. I remember ours was just like a lot of talk about Crawford Long and the Civil War. Yeah, we've even talking about Crawford Long in ours because he wasn't from Georgia. Anthony Wayne. Yeah, the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Yeah. Uh, well that summer without a winter, year without a summer. Im 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, uh that's right. So that was Mount Timboro, the year without summer. Um. There have been other events like when, um, 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 um, it was not nearly as bad to fall out from nut smoke as

Sagan predicted. But what can you do but predict. You're gonna be wrong. Yeah, occasionally, 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. Well that's the whole thing, Chuck. I am so glad you said that, because that's the whole mad thing to this argument, because it's like, what are you arguing in favor for If you're arguing against the idea of what

precisely are you arguing four? 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 all predict, so use them. You almost get the impression like they're just like, well, let's just find out. Let's just shake a couple off and find out what happens. Come on, you'll see him, right, And then as they die from smoke inhalation, they say it 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. I said nuclear ingest, but I know I heard the

break good stuff, all right. I just want to point that out because some people might think it was serious, and now that you said it was ingest, some people are like, 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. Look, I thought the century you could use like everything is

a verb. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, people have gotten extremely serious, extremely self serious, and I'm a not self serious person. So I don't fit in in today's world. You're a relic all dinosaur. It just a stupid, laughing dinosaur. Speaking of dinosaurs, well, I guess we should talk about the KT boundary extinction event, which was some people, some in science if theorize 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 asteroids, right, and that would have happened at the border of the Cretaceous in 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 the dinosaurs are dying, so that's good. Oh this is a dinosaur writing in my opinion, so that's bad. Right, Uh okay, So let's talk nuclear winner, right, you you 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 um 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 the star Wars program because we can we can prevent almost with you know, certainty, a

Soviet nuclear attack 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 gonna say, well, wait a minute, if this thing is 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 to to put the nuclear arms race into even higher gear than it already was. So they very much took it upon themselves to 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, particularly scientists who were in favor of nuclear proliferation as

a matter of national defense. The point of it is, when they tackled this, they said, Um, 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 the nuclear war is concerned, Um, 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, Mr Sagan and Mr 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, Um, he's a veterinarian. I can't remember what he was. Uh. They wrote a book called A Path Where No Man Thought, A Path Where No Man Thought, and uh, that seemed like there would be one more word there. Um. And they have one to three, four or five six scenarios for what a nuclear winter might look like, ranging from

minimal to extreme. Uh 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

not Kazaking. We'll talk about those were like, yeah, that means that there would be minimal cloud cover, uh, not much environmental impact globally, and um, 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 nuclear war, especially a cold war nuclear war, that

was a fairly unlikely scenario. By the time this the early nighties rolls around and people started talking about the concept of a nuclear winner, those like Hiroshima Nagasaki level nuclear bombs were like attached the average fighter jet. They were considered like just tactical, like you just could shoot them off on the battlefield if you needed to. So the idea that it would just amount to that is unlikely. It was, but that's the best case scenario they're trying

to cover. All. Yes, Number two was marginal all uh And that's a few detonations uh 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 uh. Oh black rain, of course, but who wants that did happen in Hiroshima? Uh? They drank it and died from packing it to go. Yes, because it was radioactive rain. Yeah, but they drank it because they were

thirsty because they had no water. It's devastating you and everyone should have to go to the city of Hiroshima, Like, it is amazing what they've done to to preserve what happened there 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, which is not correct, right. Uh so black rain would happen in that marginal scenario. Man,

this is a really political episode, isn't. I think anytime you tackle nuclear war it's going to be divisive because some people think it's awesome nuke the Wales 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 um analysis of it. Sagan. I guess he was strictly talking about atmospheric effects, 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. It 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 famin in the US, it's gonna cause famine elsewhere to I think what he's saying is as far as climatologically speaking, what he in Turco or 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 inaffective 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, Uh, but in reading all these scenarios that 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, 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 of the northern hemisphere that survived, and suddenly moving down to the southern hemisphere with another widespread effect Mexico would help you too much? Though, Well, what weren't

they like super helpful in uh Independence Day? Was the Independence day or the morning or No, the day after tomorrow, everybody starts having to move south because North America is just frozen n 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 and

the hemisphere half. Yeah, 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 needo, and I know Christmas doesn't fall in July. It was a metaphorical statement everyone. Nominal nuclear winners number three, uh, that is what they consider the low end full scale nuclear war, but still full scale

six thousand to twelve thousand nuclear weapons. That's all just six to twelve thousand nuclear bombs, and we're talking um a megaton or more bombs and a good time was um I think fifty Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, So twelve thousand times fifty of those for this kind of nominal nuclear war. That's a lot of zeros. Uh. 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. Um, it would destroy a lot of the ozone layer. Uh. And again the Southern hemisphere wouldn't experience major climactic change. Just cut to the Southern hemisphere. They're all at the beach. There's like topical music playing, but they have no wheat, right, who needs wheat? When you got wrong drinks? Dude, that's a tea shirt. Josh Clark said that one uh number four substantial, that is full scale nuclear war, UM, freezing temperatures, big time fallout. The

whole day would be like it's we cast um. Billions of humans dead, billions, billions and billions species going extinct um. And finally possible damage to the Southern hemisphere finally possibly uh. And then the last two we can just bunch together. I think severe and extreme um 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. As Robert puts it um, most of the planet's life would perish within the chili comfines of this black atmospheric tomb. Yeah, he's got a little love craft in him. Done this unnamable tomb. Um, chuckers. Let's take another break and then we will come back and talk

about um the fallout from nuclear winner theory. So Um, 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's going to bomb connected,

so I'm probably gonna be Okay. These guys said, Hey, Western civilism nation, not just in the US but also the USSR. That's not necessarily the case. You two will be affected. There's gonna be big problems after this 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 Um Sagan and his friends created a paper and it's now called the t Taps paper after all of their names, right Ackerman, 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 that they also held a very well publicized conference, and Carl Sagan, apparently without the the group's knowledge or blessing, went off and also wrote a piece of 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 the dead, lifeless, what's called like a gray chalk billiard ball basically, um, just really scary stuff. And then he also simultaneously wrote another longer piece that was in Foreign Affairs. Um, that's

a little more wonky. So Sagan went off after writing this this scientific paper and publicized it to policymakers and

to the American public. This is the early and yes, and you this was before all the sciences and 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 him because it opened up the this group and the whole idea of nuclear winner to allegations that they were fearmongering 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. Sciences science and fact is fact, right. 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 second going off and do this, it really opened them up for a lot of allegations and debate that took place afterwards. But some say that the uh, their work and the te Taps report actually did help cool things down, uh in the Cold War a little bit. Yeah, And I

mean it wasn't just these American scientists. They worked with Soviet scienceists as well, and apparently, um, 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 it and uh.

Seven years later they revised the report and uh it had new, more modernized data and it um wasn't quite as dire, which some critics are like, all right, that this is a little more reasonable. Yes, they revised it to call it the nuclear Autumn. Yeah, and everyone loves autumn. Yeah, autumn all the time. They'd be wonderful. Oh man, that

would be wonderful Chuck's world. Uh, and they there are disagreements over that still, and they basically there's um 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, uh. 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 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 supermodern and therefore isn't built out of like 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. Um. Or maybe you're not shooting nuclear bombs to cities but to other nuclear installations that are out in the middle of like

nowhere in Nebraska. Um, because we have I mean we've there's been like two thousand nuclear bombs detonated, but they only two on the city's exactly. Everything else has been out of the ocean or out in the middle of nowhere and there's been no fire. Right. Um. The assumption is 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, and 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 eleven and that was two buildings. Uh. 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. The problem is, if you're a detractor of nuclear winner theory, you would say,

where'd you get that number? 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 is going to be the one? And again it goes back to how much smoke would there be to begin? And then finally when did it happen? Um, 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. 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. Um, it's celsius, So we're talking like seventy degrees seventy two degrees fahrenheight drop in temperature. So that's a full on nuclear war, yes. Um. Later on, as they revised their findings and more again, more, 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 degree celsius drop in um 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 UM there'll be huge problems inland, there would be ocean oceanic problems as well because one of the things one of the great casualties of detonating nuclear bombs is the ozone layer. UM. The fireball from the blast burns up nitrogen converting into 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 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. We had our little delicate balance that's disrupted exactly. The problem with that for the oceans is that that you V 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 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 until if so, if you get rid of the phytoplankton, 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 flash point among conservatives as a great example of the links that hippie h environmental scientists will go to to to dupe the American public into being scared about

nuclear bombs and and just nuclear stuff in general. Like Michael Crichton famously attacked it in a two three speech and he his whole thing. He he was very famously a climate denier. He was a climate skeptic until his death as far as I know. Um, yeah, and and he wrote some great books. But it's 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 is creating science by consensus, right, That to me is that's just like a one two sucker punch. So the initial scientists that that challenged, um Nuclear Winner said, you guys can't even agree. There's no consensus, like you can't be certain and what you're saying, so

therefore we don't need to take you seriously. So they said, okay, you know what, We're gonna get all these scientists around the world together to study this issue and we're gonna 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's 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 climate models. Compared to the stuff they were using back in the eighties and even the nineties, 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 work these days for something like that. Uh, what the worry is now is that some rogue nation gets ahold of one or maybe even not a rogue nation, just Indian Pakistan drop a couple of nuclear bombs. Well, that's the model, and like that is entirely possible. I think of 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 in a three year temperature drop of about two point to five degrees fahrenheit, which doesn't sound like much. But if you go back

and you read that scientists 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 last 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 Indian Pakist then shoot fifty bombs at one another in

a regional war, it could have that effect around the world. Uh. So we mentioned Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Um, 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. Um In Hiroshima there were more fires than in Nagasaki, just because of the way the geography is in the two cities.

But um, in neither case did they see a ton of uh secondary fires Like it wasn't blacking out the sky. There was, there was black rain, but um apparently you know, like a week later, uh, most of that stuff had had cleared up. But again that is you can't even really compare the two. Now it's a single kill a ton bomb, yeah exactly, we're talking a fifty of the going off in the same area. But that report that you mentioned on just like if Indian Pakistan, Um, well

how much was it tin megatons? No, it was one megaton, so fifty of the Hiroshima and um Nagasaki mombs, Well it was enough to cause the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board to move the doomsday clock two minutes closer to midnight. Uh. And the doomsday clock is uh. Some people say it's good science, some people say they're fearmongering. But what it is is it is uh. It's a design that basically says, here's how close we are to

destroying ourselves as a civilization. And um, 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 uh, 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? Uh? In the nineteen fifties, it was at two minutes till midnight. In the early nineteen fifties. Um, the best I think it's been in the early nineties was seventeen minutes till midnight. Yeah, then they feel good. That's a lot of time. What do we are right now? Right now, we are the closest we've been since nineteen eighty three. Uh. And on January twenty two of this year, it was changed to UM, 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 Unchecked climate Change, Global nuclear weapon modernizations and outsize nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued to 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

and endanger every person on Earth. And then the final paragraph, and there's lots of fun stuff in between, just like fart jokes and stuff, and then they close with with the clock hand move 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'll mess around, uh And even though that we've um 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 snails pace now. From two thousand nine to two thousand thirteen, Obama cut only three nine warheads from the stockpile. And they're basically saying, we're not doing this as fast as

we need you too, like we need to act now. Yeah. Well, there's other people who are saying we need to rebuild their nuclear arsenal because it's aging and rotting and will be useless. By how are we going to drop nuclear bombs on people in the future. It's it's weird, like some people are trying to reignite the Cold War. Well, 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, which

was the Cold War. We could also over again get rid of nuclear bombs entirely. We could do that. Um. And you know, Sagan's the 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. Um, it's not too of two 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 says, I'm not willing to take the chance. Why should we

take the chances? It's like why risk it? Right? So his solution is, how about this US and USS are, how about you de escalate the arms race, de proliferate until you get down to a threshold that science hasts said. Okay, nuclear winner probably couldn't happen beyond this payload. Right, So even if all the nuclear bombs in the world at this lower number, we're set off, we still wouldn't go

into nuclear winter. Right. 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 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, push 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 what went on throughout the twentie and it's well into the twenty one centuries.

There's a book again, I think I mentioned it called merch and some doubt everybody should read. Yeah, and you know what, save your emails to me because you can still think what you want to think. Yeah, I just I just personally don't get it. I'm not gonna throw stones at you and say you're wrong. I probably should, but that 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 part how stuff works dot com. Since I said search parts, time for listener mail. Oh no, my friend, it's time for d all right. This is the time that we all know one love. When Josh and I read out and say thanks, we give thanks.

We should call this Thanksgiving and not administrative details. Okay, ready, no, no, that's okay, uh, because administrative details is such a weird name. This is long. It's meant to be. Uh So, this is when we thank people for the 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. The Mona collent Tine and Grandma colling Tine.

I think we always say her name wrong. By the way, No, I think she corrected us in staid it was like Valentine. So I think I'm saying it right. Man, It's gonna be so mad at all. Right, is the administrative detailed music playing? It 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 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, very nice post carred from Jean Pierre Bonasco and Stephanie Crick from Port Lockroy, Antarctica. Nice and it's worth saying again thank you to Mona Colling Tine and Grandma calling time for Christmas cookies. We look forward to them again this year, yes, we certainly do.

Oh we've gotten Newgat, homemade Newgat from christin 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. Kristen has been sending us this homemade Newgat for years and I was always like, I mean, nugat, I don't know about that, and then I put up my mouth. It's amazing stuff. It's really good enough. Uh. 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 chocolate. But they also make these incredible marshmallows too. They made a sweet potato marshmallow, and dudes at Dude Sweet Chocolate, thank you for those. They were amazing. Yumi was crazy for those marshmelloss like I am for the Newgat. That was the bounty. I remember that as

always every Christmas. Our buddy Aaron Cooper in Kansas sends us great pronounce of these great photoshops that he does of us that he puts online and you can see him on Internet round up. Yeah, we even got T shirts this year of Shake Gavara, Josh and Chuck. So Coop you're the best. Yeah, that is true, Coop Uh, Mark Allen and the Trade Monkey team sent us some beautiful jewelry made by female artisans in Southeast Asia and traded fairly key are Buddy band Astrims in this book?

Which one? Which book? Well, he's always sending his stuff, so honestly can't even remember which book, but we have like boxes full of things that he sent. He sent us a CD of The Shags Philosophy of the World, you know, what's known as the worst album ever recorded. Got it in my death here. The problem is my computer doesn't have a CD drive any longer. Have you noticed that's gone? 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. It's a coffee cup holder. Our buddies from Venice's Sinking Band sent us an LP sand and lines and a c D. What we do is secret and there are our friends from Athens, Georgia. Huge, huge thanks to Hillary Lowsar, who has sent us a lot of cheese over the last year, some of the best cheese flathead like cheese in Montana, which like they make a happy gooda that's to die for. It is

very good at flathead like cheese. And she sent us some awesome T shirts that's a mouth feel on them. Yeah, 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 like drove to Seattle for our show for months from Montana. Yeah, she's a teacher. Yeah. And they sent um you me and Emily earrings. So thanks for that from all of us. Terry got nothing. Uh Tommy Luke Rick, Uh, Tommy look Rich, Lucric lut Rich.

He said, it's a nice letter man. His last name you say four times. Well, he's the guy. He's walking from Seattle in New York City. And if you want to follow this, I don't. He might be there by now. Uh. Tommy Walks dot tumbler dot com. You can check that out. Okay, um, huge, huge thanks from me personally to Loris No, 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 like uh

like station wagon camper. That's a good time camper on I remember shemailed it to me. That's pretty remarkable. Yep, So thank you very much, lauris No. That was very nice of you. Yeah, if anyone's listening. Uh, my favorite hot wheel was the one that had a thousand dollars stuffed in the body of the car. Um Stephen, uh,

Stephen Brahm. He sent as some currency bank notes which I've never collected money, but he sent a nineteen fifty three dollar certificate in nineteen fifty seven series two dollar bill in in 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 I spent it on candy. No,

what's this, it's incense, sir, It's a fraction of a note. Uh. Meteor all Just Michael Herb, who also moons Moonlights as a young adult murder mystery author, sent 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 Uh, Bethany at the Base Element d dot base dot element at gmail dot com. If you want any of the fleur to sell caramel, 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? Uh it does? He sent us the pints of Planning the Elder. Yes, thank you. That your top notch human being. I think we met him in San Francisco or show. Yes. Thanks yea the famous world renowned Planning the Elder beer, which I finally tried and that was delicious. It is dealist ship. Uh,

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 or Thanksgiving is what we're calling it now. And uh, in the meantime, you can get in touch with us if you want to tweet to us. It's s Y s K podcast.

You can join us on Facebook dot com. It's Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know, send us an email to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, join us at at home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com