Often in forecasts of the future, words are heard about all kinds of disasters in our civilization and the growing threat of nuclear war, in particular. Professor Stephen Hawking has recently made frightening statements, recommending that people quickly settle on neighboring planets.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, once explained: The environment has been hard hit by the nuclear arms race. Calculations made by Russian and American scientists have shown that a nuclear war will lead to a nuclear winter.
This is an extremely destructive factor for all life on earth.
To what has been said, we can add that knowledge, the main engine and stimulus for the development of civilization, if used with the opposite vector, will throw us into the Stone Age. The survivors of a nuclear disaster will begin the evolutionary path anew, from sticks to stone axes.
So what exactly is nuclear winter? Let's get a look. Today, nuclear weapons have the ability to wipe out entire states and billions of people from the face of the planet in a matter of seconds.
Sending the earthly civilization to the "end of the world" looks easy to implement if we are foolish enough to use a nuclear arsenal. It will be an instant jump to the bottom of evolution - a nightmare path. But, these are not only the direct consequences of a nuclear war, there are also long-term consequences.
Yes, in trying to protect oneself from the initial explosion, retaliatory strikes will inevitably follow - retaliation, as it is called. The spread of lethal radiation will spread everywhere, becoming the primary struggle for the survivors. But this is not all that the survivor will suffocate in on the ashes of civilization.
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Nuclear winter
Given the massive scale of destruction in a nuclear war, unthinkable amounts of dust, dirt, soot and ash will arise. About five or six billion people are mixed with the dust of buildings and road surfaces.
All this devilish brew of the former life will be absorbed into the atmosphere, forming large black clouds, heated by firestorms.
A day or two will be enough time for the eruption of death to envelop the entire globe in impenetrable darkness of thick clouds - the atmosphere will become lethal for breathing.
In no time at all, dense masses of dust and burns will reach the stratosphere, blocking the sun's rays from reaching the planet. This will be the time of the nuclear winter - when the poor, irradiated survivors of the nuclear war will have to deal with something else. As if billions of dead and a radioactive killer weren't enough to die.
A huge, practically uncountable amount of products of nuclear war will quickly flood the planet's stratosphere, provoking a sudden and destructive change in temperature. We are not saying that the temperature will gradually decrease. We're talking about how survivors will see a sharp drop in temperature. In a day, the rays and heat of the Sun will be blocked, as a result of our stupidity and recklessness, the Earth will cool down sharply.
The collapse is also a powerful loss of oxygen. The burning planet will lose incomprehensible amounts of air - what we breathe - but replenishment due to the absence of the Sun and taking into account the burned out "green lungs" of the planet is difficult.
The idea that an exchange of nuclear strikes will be accompanied by the deposition of particulate matter into the atmosphere is not new, it has been noted by many researchers. However, it has been speculated that the associated sunlight attenuation could be large enough to cause severe air temperature drops of fairly recent origin.
Scientific teams studying the effects of nuclear winter noted that the mass extinction that gripped the planet 65 million years ago was the destruction from an abundant amount of particles in the atmosphere, the result of a large meteorite colliding with the Earth. This is a clear warning that, by engaging in nuclear war on a planetary scale, we risk repeating the path of extinction of the dinosaurs - all as a result of significant changes in the planet's temperature and poisoned air.
The consequences of the atmospheric condition will add to the list of relatively well-understood consequences of a nuclear war, … the survivors will be doomed to continue their survival and save lives in Arctic temperatures, but not the restoration of the former civilization.
Long-term atmospheric effects mean additional problems that will not be mitigated by prior readiness - radiation, contaminated air, mutations and food poisoning.
This is inconsistent with any notion of a rapid post-war recovery of social structure.
The identified problems of a nuclear winter pose a completely new threat to the population, even those far from the target areas directly affected by the strike. This poses the problem of additional major risks for any country that has initiated the use of nuclear weapons.
Even if a retaliatory nuclear strike for some reason did not follow, the impact of a nuclear winter under radioactive fallout will still destroy the population on the planet's surface.
In light of all of the above, you are probably asking to what extent the Earth's temperature will be reduced in a nuclear winter? It is difficult to say for sure, given that the exchange of nuclear strikes can be localized or "sound" around the world. Whatever the answer, for the survivors of the war, life will be a bleak existence. And a very, very, very cold survival with a short life.