American physicist Fred Singer has been one of the most outspoken critics of the exaggerated danger of nuclear weapons. In one of his interviews, he said:
“I have always considered 'nuclear winter' to be a scientifically unsubstantiated hoax, which I talked about in my discussion with Carl Sagan during a discussion in Nightline.
Evidence from the Kuwait oil fires supports this view. In fact, nuclear explosions could create a strong greenhouse effect and cause warming, not cooling. Let's hope we never know how it really happens."
In general, Singer emphasized that the popular myth of nuclear weapons consists of two parts: the so-called "nuclear winter" and the complementary myth of "radioactive contamination of the territory."
But in reality, both of these statements turn out to be nothing more than popular fears and elementary ignorance of the specifics of nuclear weapons and their actions, and they are easy to debunk upon closer scientific examination.
The myths associated with the danger of nuclear weapons are analyzed in detail in the book "Nuclear Myths and Atomic Reality" by Evgeny Pozhidaev.
The first myth tells about the "geological scale" of the action of nuclear weapons and its ability to "break through the earth's crust to the mantle" (which, for example, was attributed to the "Tsar Bomb"). Allegedly, a capacity of 100 megatons of TNT equivalent would be enough for this. In fact, it cannot create any tangible shocks with the planet nuclear weapons.
The diameter of the funnel formed during a ground nuclear explosion in dry sandy and clayey soils (i.e., in fact, the maximum possible - on denser soils it will naturally be smaller) is calculated using a very simple formula: “38 times the cubic root from the power of the explosion in kilotons."
Promotional video:
The explosion of a 1 Mt bomb creates a funnel with a diameter of about 400 meters, while its depth is 7-10 times less (40-60 meters). A ground explosion of an ammunition with a capacity of 58 Mt (the equivalent of a "tsar bomb"), thus, forms a crater with a diameter of about one and a half kilometers and a depth of about 150-200 m.
The explosion of the historical "Tsar Bomb" on Novaya Zemlya was, with some nuances, airborne, and took place over rocky ground - therefore even such values of "digging activity" for nuclear weapons were never achieved.
It is clear that many mountain quarries can boast of a depth of 150-200 meters, and this depth has nothing to do with the upper boundary of the mantle - even in tectonically active zones.
In other words, "breaking through the earth's crust" is nothing more than a version of a journalistic stamp (such a "scarecrow" for nuclear reactors sounds like "Chinese syndrome" - supposedly the molten zone of the reactor can also melt the crust of the Earth down to the mantle. In reality, the melt solidifies almost under the reactor itself).
The next myth about nuclear weapons concerns the destruction of all life on Earth
Allegedly, given the nuclear potential of Russia and the United States, this can be done about 300 times in a row. This myth, popular and repeated many times during the Cold War, also has nothing to do with reality.
In an air explosion with a capacity of 1 Mt, the zone of total destruction (98% of the dead) has a radius of about 3.6 km, of severe and medium destruction - 7.5 km. Already at a distance of 10 km, only 5% of the population perishes (however, 45% receive injuries of varying severity).
In other words, the area of "catastrophic" damage in a megaton nuclear explosion is 176.5 square kilometers (the approximate area of Kirov, Sochi and Naberezhnye Chelny; for comparison, the area of Moscow in 2008 is 1090 square kilometers).
As of March 2013, Russia had 1480 strategic warheads, the United States - 1654. In other words, Russia and the United States can jointly turn a country the size of France, but not the whole world, into a zone of continuous destruction, up to and including average ones.
In addition, it should be borne in mind that the current concept of "nuclear deterrence" no longer implies the use of ammunition with a capacity of 1-2 Mt, as in the 1960s. Today's systems for the guidance and maneuvering of warheads make it possible to achieve a much lower circular probabilistic deviation (CEP), which made it possible, at the same time, to significantly reduce the power of a nuclear warhead, to a value of 100-150 kt of TNT equivalent.
Nuclear weapons have changed from a "killer of cities" to a "destroyer of bunkers and mines" and allow the military to wage war with each other, and not with the enemy's civilian population
It should be said, however, that with such a much more targeted "fire" and with the use of existing arsenals, the United States, even after the destruction of key facilities providing a retaliatory strike (command posts, communications centers, missile silos, strategic aviation airfields, and so on), can virtually completely and immediately destroy almost the entire urban population of the Russian Federation (in Russia there are 1,097 cities and about 200 "non-urban" settlements with a population of more than 10 thousand people). A significant part of the rural population will also die (mainly due to highly active "fast" radioactive fallout). It is also quite obvious that the indirect effects - disease, hunger, anarchy, will destroy a significant part of the survivors in a short time.
The nuclear attack of the Russian Federation, even in the most "optimistic" version, will be much less effective - the US population is more than twice as numerous, much more dispersed outside the compact urban agglomerations (the well-known "suburbia civilization"), America has a much more "effective" (that is, a somewhat developed and populated) territory, a milder climate for survival.
Nevertheless, a Russian nuclear salvo is more than enough to bring the enemy to the Central African state - provided that the main part of its nuclear arsenal is not destroyed by a preemptive strike.
Naturally, all these calculations are based on the option of a surprise attack, without the possibility of taking any measures to reduce damage (evacuation, use of shelters). In the case of their use, the losses will be several times less.
In other words, the two key nuclear powers, possessing the overwhelming share of atomic weapons, are capable of practically wiping each other off the face of the earth, but not humanity, and even less the biosphere.
In fact, for the almost complete annihilation of humanity alone, at least 100,000 megaton-class warheads will be required - that is, at least two orders of magnitude more than the existing arsenal and an order of magnitude more in power.
The "horror story" of a nuclear winter is that an exchange of nuclear strikes will generate a global drop in temperature, followed by a collapse of the biosphere. The author of the concept of nuclear winter is Carl Sagan (with whom Singer discussed).
I must say that Sagan's personality is quite interesting: in his youth, he took an active part in the development of the American nuclear program (in particular, he worked out the idea of an explosion on the surface of the Moon of a nuclear warhead to demonstrate the capabilities of the United States in military space), but by the end of his career he came to a clear pacifist attitudes of an almost religious nature.
The nuclear apocalypse in his works and in the works of his followers looked like this: an exchange of nuclear strikes would lead to massive forest fires and fires in cities. At the same time, a fire storm will often be observed”, which was actually observed during large city fires - for example, London in 1666, Chicago in 1871, Moscow in 1812.
As a result of forest and urban fires, millions of tons of soot will be thrown into the stratosphere, which screens solar radiation - when 100 Mt of nuclear bombs are exploded, the solar flux at the Earth's surface will be reduced by 20 times, and at an explosion of 10,000 Mt, by 40 times.
A "nuclear night" will come for several months, plant photosynthesis will stop completely. Global temperatures in the "ten thousandth" variant will fall by at least 15 oС, on average - by 25 oС, in some areas - by 30-50 oС.
After the first ten days, the temperature will start to rise slowly, but, in general, the duration of a nuclear winter will be at least 1-1.5 years. Hunger and epidemics will stretch the time of collapse to 2-2.5 years.
The reality is far from so hopeless. The thing is that, having a very tough pacifist motivation, Sagan and his followers, unfortunately, neglected the criteria of scientific character in their works, in fact adjusting the initial data to fit their virtual concept of “nuclear winter”.
Thus, in the event of forest fires, their model assumes that the explosion of a megaton warhead will immediately cause a continuous fire over an area of 1000 square kilometers. Meanwhile, in reality, at a distance of already 10 km from the epicenter (an area of 314 square kilometers), only isolated fire centers will be observed.
Thus, the actual smoke generation during forest fires is 50-60 times less than that stated in the model. In addition, local weather conditions can significantly reduce even the declared probability of a forest fire - rain, fog, snow cover can reduce the area of the fire by several times.
Finally, the bulk of soot during forest fires does not reach the stratosphere and is quickly washed out from the lower atmospheric layers.
In addition, the concept of a nuclear strike on forests, in order to set fire to their maximum area, remains unclear: the concept of "nuclear deterrence" implies a strike at sensitive points of the enemy, but not an indirect but maximum "boomerang" strike on its own.
Interestingly, in Sagan's early works such a “strike on forests” sounded like the only myth, but even then calculations showed that forest fires were not enough to create an effect - and the concept of a “fire storm” in cities attacked by nuclear weapons was used.
It must be said that a "fire storm" in cities requires very specific conditions for its occurrence - flat terrain and a huge mass of easily combustible buildings. Where even one of these conditions was not met, the fire storm did not occur.
So, for example, Nagasaki, built in a typically Japanese spirit, with a mass of wooden buildings, but located in a hilly area, did not fall victim to it. In modern cities with their reinforced concrete and brick buildings, a fire storm cannot occur for purely technical reasons.
Skyscrapers, burning like candles, painted by the wild imagination of Soviet physicists, are nothing more than a phantom. It is enough to look, for example, at the aftermath of the WTC attack in New York in September 2001, to make sure that the skyscraper, filled to capacity with jet fuel, did not flare up like a candle, but rather slowly “smoldered” for an hour.
At the same time, the city fires of 1944-45, like, obviously, earlier ones, did not lead to a significant release of soot into the stratosphere - the smoke rose only 5-6 km (the boundary of the stratosphere is 10-12 km) and was washed out of the atmosphere in a few days in the form the so-called "black rain".
All warnings regarding weather conditions at the points of use of nuclear weapons also remain in force - any moisture in the atmosphere or on the surface of the earth significantly reduces the effectiveness of light and thermal radiation of a nuclear explosion and, as a result, the likelihood of a subsequent fire.
In other words, the amount of screening soot in the stratosphere will turn out to be orders of magnitude less than that included in the model. At the same time, the concept of "nuclear winter" has already been tested "by default" experimentally.
Prior to Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, Sagan argued that oil soot emissions from burning Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil wells would cause a fairly severe cooling on a global scale - a “year without summer” modeled on 1816, when every night in June- July temperatures dropped below zero even in the United States.
World average temperatures then dropped by 2.5 degrees, resulting in global hunger. However, in reality, after the Gulf War, the daily burnup of 3 million barrels of oil and up to 70 million cubic meters of gas, which lasted for about a year, had a very local (within the region) and limited effect on the climate.
Works on the topic of nuclear winter (with even more "original" and divorced from reality models) continue to be published, but their political undertones are becoming more and more obvious. The latest surge of interest in them strangely coincided with the initiative of US President Barack Obama for general nuclear disarmament.
The second horror story, as mentioned above, is called "global radioactive contamination"
If you believe her, an atomic war will lead to the transformation of a significant part of the planet into a nuclear desert, and the territory subjected to nuclear strikes will be useless for the winner.
In reality, almost all ammunition with a capacity of megatons and hundreds of kilotons is hydrogen (thermonuclear). The main part of their energy is released due to the fusion reaction, during which radionuclides do not appear in significant volumes.
However, such ammunition does contain fissile material. So, in a two-phase thermonuclear device (“puff” scheme), the nuclear part itself acts only as a trigger that starts the thermonuclear fusion reaction.
In the case of a megaton warhead, this is a low-yield plutonium charge with a capacity of about 1 kt. For comparison, the plutonium bomb that fell on Nagasaki had an equivalent of 21 kt, while in a nuclear explosion only 1.2 kg of fissile matter out of 5 burned out, the rest of the plutonium "mud" with a half-life of 28 thousand years simply scattered around the neighborhood, adding additional contribution to radioactive contamination.
More common, however, are three-phase munitions, where the fusion zone, "charged" with lithium deuteride, which is used to synthesize tritium into a thermonuclear reaction, is enclosed in a uranium shell, in which a "dirty" fission reaction takes place, amplifying and directing a thermonuclear explosion.
It can even be made of uranium-238 that is unsuitable for conventional nuclear weapons. However, due to weight constraints in modern strategic munitions, it is sometimes preferred to use less of the more effective uranium-235.
Nevertheless, even in this case, the amount of radionuclides released during an air explosion of a megaton ammunition will exceed the level of Nagasaki not by 50, as it should be, based on the power, but only 10 times.
A separate variant of nuclear weapons, which was proposed at the height of a nuclear war, were the so-called "cobalt" bombs, in which additional "dirt" would be obtained as a result of secondary neutron irradiation of a nuclear and thermonuclear explosion of the outer cobalt shell of a munition, however, for the same reasons, the doctrine " nuclear deterrent”, which replaced the doctrine of“nuclear destruction”, they were never massively adopted.
In the ammunition existing today, the picture is different - due to the predominance of short-lived isotopes in the products of their explosion, the intensity of radioactive radiation decreases rapidly - decreasing after 7 hours by 10 times, 49 hours - by 100, 343 hours - by 1000 times.
That is, in principle, in a few months even the territory of the epicenter of the explosion can be repopulated, in extreme cases, this will happen in a few years, which is a second on the scale of history.
However, there is no need to wait until the radioactivity drops to the notorious 15-20 microroentgens per hour - people without any consequences have been living for centuries in areas where the natural background exceeds standards by hundreds of times.
So, in France, the background in places is up to 200 mcr / h, in India (states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu) - up to 320 mcr / h, in Brazil on the beaches of the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espiritu Santo, the background ranges from 100 to 1000 mcr / h (on the beaches of the resort town of Guarapari - 2000 md / h).
In the resort Iranian Ramsar, the average background is 3000, and the maximum is 5000 mcr / h, while its main source is radon, which suggests a massive intake of this radioactive gas into the body.
In general, the latest research in biology shows a paradoxical fact - if radiation does not reach some boundary limits associated with the symptoms of "radiation sickness", then living organisms are very steadily resist its effects. Thus, the concept of “non-threshold” radiation impact on living organisms, which was very popular in the 1960s-1980s, may well turn out to be the same myth as the “nuclear winter” itself.
Hiroshima then and now!
As a result, for example, the panic predictions after the Hiroshima bombing ("vegetation will be able to appear only in 75 years, and in 60-90 a person will be able to live"), let's put it mildly, did not come true. The surviving population was not evacuated, however, being in Hiroshima after the nuclear bombardment, it did not completely die out and did not mutate. Between 1945 and 1970, among the survivors of the bombing, the number of leukemia exceeded the norm by less than double the norm (250 cases versus 170 in the control group).
Similar facts can be cited for the Semipalatinsk test site. In total, 26 ground (the dirtiest) and 91 air nuclear explosions were made on it. The explosions for the most part were also extremely "dirty" - the first Soviet nuclear bomb (the famous and extremely poorly designed Sakharov "puff") was especially distinguished, in which no more than 20% of the 400 kilotons of total power accounted for the fusion reaction.
A peaceful nuclear explosion, which created Lake Chagan, also provided impressive emissions.
At the site of the explosion of the notorious puff - a funnel overgrown with absolutely normal grass. The nuclear lake Chagan looks no less casual, despite the veil of hysterical rumors hovering around.
In the Russian and Kazakh press you can find passages like this: “It is curious that the water in the“atomic”lake is clean, and there is even fish there. However, the edges of the reservoir "fade" so strongly that their level of radiation is actually equal to radioactive waste. At this point, the dosimeter shows 1 microsievert per hour, which is 114 times more than the norm”. The photograph of the dosimeter attached to the article shows 0.2 microsievert and 0.02 millirentgen - that is, 200 μR / h. As shown above, compared to Ramsar, Kerala and Brazilian beaches, this is a somewhat pale result.
Roughly the same thing could be observed on the Bikini Atoll, where the Americans detonated a 15 Mt ammunition (however, "pure" single-phase).
“Four years after the tests of the hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Atoll, scientists exploring the 1.5-kilometer crater formed after the explosion found completely different from what they expected to see under water: instead of a lifeless space in the crater, large corals bloomed with a height of 1 m and a trunk diameter of about 30 cm, many fish swam - the underwater ecosystem was completely restored."
In other words, the prospect of life in a radioactive desert with soil and water poisoned for many years does not threaten humanity even in the worst case. In general, a one-time destruction of humanity and all the more so all life forms on Earth with the help of nuclear weapons is technically impossible.
At the same time, the idea of the "sufficiency" of several nuclear charges to inflict unacceptable damage on the enemy, and the myth of the "uselessness" for the aggressor of the territory subjected to a nuclear attack, and the legend of the impossibility of a nuclear war as such, due to the inevitability of a global catastrophe, are equally dangerous. in the event that the retaliatory nuclear strike turns out to be weak.
Victory over an adversary who does not have nuclear parity and a sufficient number of nuclear weapons is possible - without a global catastrophe and with significant benefits.
The origin of the "horror stories" explains their complete scientific groundlessness. So, all the research of scientists about the "nuclear winter" was reduced to hypotheses and assumptions, and if you dig deeper, then we come not at all to scientific, but to politically motivated birth of these myths.
The authors of the "nuclear winter" hypothesis were based on calculations of the effect of the emission of smoke and soot into the atmosphere from burning cities and forests, which would lead to the impenetrability of the atmosphere for sunlight and cooling of the Earth - effects more destructive than destruction from explosions and radiation.
However, recent calculations have led scientists to the conclusion, rather, about a "nuclear autumn", the consequences of which will be less serious than the direct impact of explosions. George Rathjens of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that some climate researchers have been "completely irresponsible" for the past 4 years, publishing findings without checking the underlying uncertainties.
New doubts about the extreme consequences of a nuclear winter began to grow after the discoveries of scientists at the State Center for Atmospheric Research and the Lawrence Livermore State Laboratory. Recent calculations have shown that in the worst case, the temperature will drop by 11-17 C for only a few weeks - if the exchange of nuclear strikes takes place in a hot, clear and dry July. For the winter war, the effect will be much lower.
The peak of the escalation of panic around nuclear weapons occurred in the 1980s, when the problem of a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR was acute. This myth was whipped up mainly by US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. At that time, the ardent Anglo- and Americanophile Mikhail Gorbachev had already fallen to the lot of the Soviet Union.
The political background of those years and its influence on "scientific processes" are well described in the work of I. M. Abduragimov "Physics and chemistry of combustion processes refute the concept of" nuclear night "and" nuclear winter ". Fires Cannot Prevent Nuclear Conflict ":
“The idea to shift the entire burden of the consequences of a nuclear conflict onto the combustion processes of solid combustible materials (forests and the combustible load of large megacities with high-rise buildings) belongs to Academician N. N. Moiseev (see, for example, "The Gaia System and the Problem of the Forbidden Line" (the nature and future of civilization) Academician N. Moiseev J. "Science and Life" No. 1 1986 pp. 54-66 (continued in the next issues) and others) and, possibly, K. Sagan and P. Krutzen, who have nothing to do with the diffusion combustion of solid combustible materials (and even under fire conditions!).
Dozens of doctoral and hundreds of master's theses were successfully defended in those years on this fertile soil (fueled by the political doctrine of the most talkative General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee M. S. Gorbachev).
The President of the United States of those years Ronald Reagan openly promised that he would ruin Russia (and, accordingly, sweep away Gorbachev) in the economic race for the nuclear arms of our two countries (the rest were not at all capable of it).
Author: adeptdao
