Around almost any type of weapon, there are many popular beliefs and outright myths that greatly excite the public interested in the army and weapons. Nuclear weapons are no exception.
Among such myths is the well-known concept of "nuclear winter". Let's take a closer look at it …
The devastating consequences of heatstroke, blast waves, as well as penetrating and residual radiation have been known to scientists for a long time, but the indirect impact of such explosions on the environment has been ignored for many years. Only in the 70s were several studies carried out, during which it was found that the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation, can be weakened by the release of large volumes of nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, which will occur after numerous nuclear explosions.
Further study of the problem showed that dust clouds thrown out by nuclear explosions into the upper layers of the atmosphere can impede heat exchange between it and the surface, which will lead to a temporary cooling of air masses. Then scientists drew attention to the consequences of forest and urban fires (the so-called "firestorm" effect) caused by fireballs * nuclear explosions, and in 1983. an ambitious project called TTAPS was launched (according to the first letters of the names of the authors: RP Turco, OB Toon, TP Ackerman, JB Pollack and Carl Sagan). It included detailed consideration of such factors as smoke and soot from burning oil fields and plastic in cities destroyed by explosions (smoke from such materials absorbs sunlight much more "effectively" than smoke from a burning tree). It was the TTAPS project that gave rise to the term “Nuclear winter”. Subsequently, this ominous hypothesis was developed and supplemented by the scientific communities of American and Soviet scientists. From the Soviet side, such climatologists and mathematicians as N. N. Moiseev, V. V. Alexandrov, A. M. Tarko.
As the researchers suggest, the root cause of a nuclear winter will be the numerous fireballs caused by the explosions of nuclear warheads. These fireballs will lead to huge uncontrollable fires in all cities and forests caught in their range. Heating the air above these fires will cause huge columns of smoke, soot and ash to rise to great heights, where they can hover for weeks until they settle to the ground or are washed out of the atmosphere with rains.
Several hundred million tons of ash and soot will be transported by east and west winds until they form a dense, uniform belt of particles covering the entire Northern Hemisphere and extending from 30 ° N. up to 60 ° N (it is there that all major cities are located and almost the entire population of potential countries participating in the conflict is concentrated). Due to atmospheric circulation, the Southern Hemisphere will then be partially affected.
These thick black clouds shield the earth's surface, preventing sunlight (90%) from reaching it for months. Its temperature will drop sharply, most likely by 20-40 degrees C. The duration of the onset nuclear winter will depend on the total power of nuclear explosions, and in the case of a "hard" variant it can reach two years. At the same time, the amount of cooling in explosions of 100 and 10,000 Mt differs slightly.
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In conditions of complete darkness, low temperatures and fallout, the process of photosynthesis will practically stop, and most of the terrestrial flora and fauna will be destroyed. In the Northern Hemisphere, many animals will not survive due to the lack of food and the difficulty of finding it in the "nuclear night". In the tropics and subtropics, cold will be an important factor - even a short-term drop in temperature will destroy heat-loving plants and animals. Many species of mammals, all birds, most reptiles will die out. A sharp jump in the level of ionizing radiation up to 500-1000 rad ("radiation shock") will kill most mammals and birds and cause serious radiation damage to conifers. Giant fires will destroy most of the forests, steppes, and agricultural land.
Agroecosystems that are so important for maintaining human life will certainly perish. All fruit trees, vineyards will be completely frozen, all farm animals will die. A decrease in the average annual temperature not even by 20 ° - 40 ° С, but "only" by 6 ° - 7 ° С is tantamount to a complete loss of crops. Even without direct casualties from nuclear strikes, this alone would be the worst disaster that humanity has ever experienced.
Thus, people who survived the first strike will face the Arctic cold, high levels of residual radiation and the general destruction of industrial, medical and transport infrastructure. Together with the cessation of food supplies, the loss of crops and tremendous psychological stress, this will lead to colossal human losses from hunger, exhaustion and disease. Nuclear winter can reduce the population of the Earth by several times or even tens of times, which will mean the actual end of civilization. Even the countries of the Southern Hemisphere, such as Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia or Australia, which will be destroyed, despite the fact that not a single warhead will explode on their territory, may not avoid a common fate.
The possibility of a nuclear winter was predicted by G. S. Golitsyn in the USSR and Karl Sagan in the USA, then this hypothesis was confirmed by model calculations of the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This work was carried out by Academician N. N. Moiseev and Professors V. V. Aleksandrov and G. L. Stenchikov. A nuclear war will lead to a "global nuclear night" that will last for about a year. Hundreds of millions of tons of soil, the soot of burning cities and forests will make the sky impenetrable to sunlight. Two main possibilities were considered: the total yield of nuclear explosions of 10,000 and 100 Mt. With the power of nuclear explosions of 10,000 Mt, the solar flux at the Earth's surface will be reduced by 400 times, the characteristic time for self-cleaning of the atmosphere will be approximately 3-4 months.
With the power of nuclear explosions of 100 Mt, the solar flux near the Earth's surface will decrease 20 times, the characteristic time for self-cleaning of the atmosphere is about a month. At the same time, the entire climatic mechanism of the Earth changes dramatically, which manifests itself in an extremely strong cooling of the atmosphere over the continents (over the first 10 days, the average temperature drops by 15 degrees, and then begins to rise slightly). In some areas of the Earth it will get colder by 30-50 degrees. These works received a wide public response in the wide press of different countries. Subsequently, many physicists disputed the reliability and stability of the results obtained, but the hypothesis was not convincingly refuted.
Many are confused by the fact that the theory of YAZ appeared suspiciously "in time", coinciding in time with the period of so-called "detente" and "new thinking", and preceding the collapse of the USSR and its voluntary abandonment of its positions on the world stage. The mysterious disappearance in 1985 also added fuel to the fire. in Spain V. Aleksandrov - one of the Soviet developers of the theory of YaZ.
However, the opponents of the YaZ theory are not only scientists - mathematicians and climatologists, who discovered significant errors and assumptions in the calculations of K. Sagan and N. Moiseev. Often, attacks on YaZ are politically charged.
This whole story initially gave the impression of a grandiose "psychic attack" undertaken by the US leadership on the Soviet leadership. Its purpose was quite obvious: to force the Soviet leadership to abandon the use of nuclear weapons, which would give the United States a military advantage. If a massive retaliatory or retaliatory nuclear strike leads to a "nuclear winter", then it is pointless to use it: such a strike would entail a radical undermining of agriculture, severe crop failures over a number of years, which would cause severe famine even with Soviet strategic food supplies.
Judging by the fact that Marshal of the Soviet Union S. F. Akhromeev recalled that at the end of 1983 at the General Staff at the end of 1983, that is, after the appearance of the concept of "nuclear winter", its presentation at an unprecedented scientific Soviet-American scientific conference with a direct Moscow-Washington teleconference on October 31 - November 1, 1983 and American exercises Able Archer-83, which began on November 2, 1983 and practiced the conduct of a full-scale nuclear war, began to develop plans for a complete renunciation of nuclear weapons, the "psychic attack" reached its goal.
American version
She explains the emergence of the YaZ theory by the fact that the ATS possessed superiority over NATO in conventional weapons in Europe, and therefore it was beneficial for the USSR not to use nuclear weapons in the event of a large-scale war.
It is also alarming that after the end of the Cold War, no attempts have been made to simulate the effect of NZ on modern equipment (such as the Blue Sky supercomputer installed at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research with a peak performance of up to 7 Teraflops and 31.5 TB of external memory). If such research does take place, it is of a private nature and does not receive widespread publicity, much less government support. All this may speak in favor of the version of the “custom-made” nature of the YaZ theory.
The world peace movement applauded this concept as it saw it as an argument for complete nuclear disarmament. It has found a certain application in large military strategy, as one of the varieties of MAD - Mutual Assured Destruction, or guaranteed mutual destruction. The essence of this idea was that none of the opponents in a possible nuclear war would dare to launch a massive strike, since in any case it would be destroyed, if not by nuclear heat, then by the subsequent cold. This was and is one of the pillars of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.
Using the concept of "nuclear winter" as an argument for nuclear deterrence is far from safe, for the simple reason that it is self-deception.
It is not easy to argue with the concept under which the names of prominent scientists stand, but in this case it is necessary, because the most important issue of military strategy is at stake: whether or not to rely on nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
Forest fires: matmodel and field tests
So, the concept of "nuclear winter" postulates that in the event of massive nuclear strikes, explosions will set fire to cities and forests (academician N. N. Moiseev proceeded in his estimates from the area of forest fires of 1 million sq. Km), and only in forest fires generate about 4 billion tons of soot, which will create clouds impenetrable to sunlight, cover the entire Northern Hemisphere and a "nuclear winter" will come. Fires in cities will add more soot to this.
But to this horror it is worth adding a few remarks.
To begin with, it is worth noting that this concept is based on estimates, calculations and mathematical modeling, and it has been adopted as a guide for critical policy decisions without testing. It seems that the main role here was played by absolute trust in scientists: they say, if they said, then how it is.
Meanwhile, it is difficult to understand how such a statement could be taken on faith, especially at the level of the chief of the General Staff. The fact is that every person who, at least once in his life, kindled a fire or stoked a stove with wood, knows that wood hardly smokes when burning, that is, it does not emit soot, unlike rubber, plastics and diesel fuel with kerosene. The main product of wood combustion is carbon dioxide, which is transparent to light. They say that it has a greenhouse effect, so that from large-scale forest fires, one would rather expect a warming of the climate.
Further, Marshal Akhromeev had every opportunity to check the truth of the model by full-scale tests. This could be done in a variety of ways. For example, you can request forest protection data from which forests burned every year, and based on measurements of the burned out forests, find out how much combustible material has turned into combustion products and which ones. If such data did not suit the General Staff, then it was possible to conduct an experiment: accurately measure the weight of wood in some area of the forest, then set it on fire (up to a full-scale nuclear test), and during the fire measure whether as much soot was formed into the matmodel. It was possible to take several experimental sections of the forest and check how it burns in summer and winter, in the rain and in clear weather. The factor of the season mattered, because in winter our forests are covered with snow and cannot burn. Burn the forest, of courseIt is a pity, but several thousand hectares is an acceptable price for solving the most important strategic issue.
Could not find any information that such tests were carried out.
The realistic estimates of forest fires were doubted, for example, by I. M. Abduragimov, a firefighting expert who even tried to protest the concept of a "nuclear winter". According to his estimates, based on the experience of real forest fires, it turned out that with the usual burnout of 20% of combustible material in the forest, a maximum of 200-400 grams of soot per square meter is formed. meter. 1 million sq. kilometers of forest fires will produce a maximum of 400 million tons of soot, which is ten times less than in the Moiseev model.
Further - more interesting. Apparently, field tests of the concept of "nuclear winter" took place in our country during the forest fires of 2007-2012, especially in 2010, when about 12 million hectares or 120 thousand square meters were burned out. km, that is, 12% of the scale adopted for the "nuclear winter" model. You cannot dismiss this, because if the effect had taken place, it would have manifested itself.
The most interesting thing is that calculations of the formation of soot in these fires were carried out, published in the journal "Meteorology and Hydrology", No. 7 for 2015. The result was overturning. Soot actually formed 2.5 grams per square meter. meters of forest fire. Over the entire area of the fires, about 300 thousand tons of soot were formed, which is easy to translate into an estimated million square meters. km - 2.5 million tons, which is 1600 times less than in the "nuclear winter" model. And this - in the best conditions of a dry and hot summer, when the rain did not extinguish the fires, and extinguishing could not cope with the fire.
There was a thick smog in the cities, many settlements were damaged by fire, a lot of damage, and so on, only now nothing like a "nuclear winter" came close. Yes, there was a poor harvest in 2010, then 62.7 million tons of grain were harvested, which is even less than in the previous poor harvest in 2000. But still, with an average grain consumption in Russia of 32 million tons per year, we came out even with a good supply of grain, not counting carry-over stocks.
So, even if a million sq. km of forests in the event of a nuclear war, "nuclear winter", agricultural crisis and famine will not come.
Is it true that burning cities will smoke the sky?
Checking how the cities burn was, of course, more difficult. However, even here, the General Staff, which possesses numerous military construction and sapper units, had the opportunity to build an experimental city, set it on fire and see how it burns and whether it is true that clouds of soot will cover everything around.
THEM. Abduragimov also disputed estimates for fires in cities, pointing out that the content of combustible material per unit area is greatly overestimated, and that even with the strongest fires it does not burn out entirely, but only by about 50%, and besides, a shock wave over a large area will knock down the flames, and the rubble will strangle the fires.
However, we have the opportunity to look at an example of a city that burned with a blue flame. This is, of course, Dresden during the bombing on February 13-15, 1945. It was dropped 1,500 tons of high-explosive and 1,200 tons of incendiary bombs on the night of February 13-14, 500 tons of high-explosive and 300 tons of incendiary bombs in the afternoon of February 14 and 465 tons of high-explosive bombs on February 15. Total: 2,465 tons of high-explosive and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs. According to the British physicist, Baron Patrick Stuart Maynard Blackett, the destructive equivalent of the Hiroshima uranium bomb 18-21 kt was 600 tons of high-explosive bombs. In total, the strike on Dresden was equivalent to 4.1 Hiroshima bombs, that is, up to 86 kt.
It is usually said that almost all or all of Dresden was destroyed. This is certainly not the case. In 1946, the municipality of Dresden published the brochure "In Dresden wird gebaut und das Gewerbe arbeitet wieder". It provided accurate data on the destruction as the municipality needed to draw up a plan to rebuild the city. The aftermath of the bombing was impressive. In the center of the city lay a mountain of ruins with a volume of up to 20 million cubic meters, covering an area of 1000 hectares with a height of about two meters. They dug mines in it in order to get the surviving things, tools, and useful parts of buildings from under the rubble. However, out of 228 thousand apartments in Dresden, 75 thousand were completely destroyed, 18 thousand were badly damaged and unusable. 81 thousand apartments were slightly damaged. Total destroyed 93 thousand apartments or 40.7% of the existing ones. The area of severe damage was 15 square kilometers.
But what area did Dresden have? This is rarely reported, and one might get the impression that the city was compact. However, this is not the case. According to the pre-war German encyclopedia Der Große Brockhaus, in 1930 Dresden, together with its suburbs, had an area of 109 sq. Km. It was one of the largest cities in Germany. The destruction zone accounted for 13.7% of the city's territory.
Although in Dresden there was a strong fire for many days, which grew into a "fire storm", nevertheless, the city was not completely burnt down, this is in the first place. Secondly, the smoke and soot from the fire in Dresden failed to rise high into the atmosphere and create a dense, stable cloud, after a couple of days the soot was washed away by the rain. Thirdly, 43 large cities in Germany were destroyed and burned down from the bombing. They were located on a fairly compact territory, and some influence of smoke from city fires and hostilities on the climate, one must think, could be. In any case, the winter of 1945/46 in Germany was very snowy and cold, it was even called “the winter of the century”. Germany, devastated by the war, had a very difficult time, but even the Germans, stripped, naked and homeless, with an extreme shortage of grain and coal, survived it. In 1946 and 1947, there were severe droughts in Eastern Europe. But neither the immediate onset of winter in the middle of summer (if we are talking about the bombing of 1944), nor the onset of a long period of cold snap was observed.
So the calculations that fires in cities after nuclear explosions will cover the sky with black clouds and cause an instant offensive of sibirische Kälte are clearly not justified by well-known examples.
Insufficient evidence base
It is known that even local weather forecasts have a not very high degree of reliability (no more than 80%). In global climate modeling, it is necessary to take into account an order of magnitude more factors, not all of which were known at the time of the study.
It is difficult to judge how real the constructions of N. Moiseev - K. Sagan are, since we are talking about an imitation model, the connection of which with reality is not obvious. Calculations of atmospheric circulation are still far from perfect, and the computing power, "supercomputers" (BSEM-6, Cray-XMP), which were at the disposal of scientists in the 80s, are inferior in performance even to modern PCs.
The Sagan-Moiseev nuclear winter model does not take into account such factors as the emission of greenhouse gases (CO2) due to multiple fires, as well as the effect of aerosols on the heat loss of the earth's surface.
It also ignores the fact that the planet's climate is a self-regulating mechanism. For example, the greenhouse effect can be offset by the fact that plants begin to absorb more carbon dioxide. It is difficult to judge which compensatory mechanisms can be activated in the event of the release of huge volumes of ash and dust into the atmosphere. For example, the SN effect can "soften" the high heat capacity of the oceans, the heat of which will not allow convection processes to stop, and the dust will fall out a little earlier than the calculations showed. It is possible that a change in the Earth's albedo will lead to the fact that it will absorb more solar energy, which, together with the greenhouse effect caused by the release of aerosols, will not lead to a cooling, but to a warming of the earth's surface ("Venus variant"). However, even in this case, one of the protective mechanisms may turn on - the oceans will begin to evaporate more intensively, dust will fall out with rains, and the albedo will return to normal.
Many climatologists admit that ID is theoretically possible, but it cannot be the result of even a large-scale conflict between Russia and the United States. In their opinion, the entire arsenal of the superpowers is not enough to achieve the desired effect. To illustrate this thesis, the explosion of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883 is given, the estimates of the megatonnage of which vary from 150 megatons to several thousand. If the latter is true, then it is quite comparable to a small but intense nuclear war. The eruption of the volcano ejected about 18 km3 of rock into the atmosphere and led to the so-called "year without summer" - a slight decrease in the average annual temperature throughout the planet. But not to the death of civilization, as we know.
You can and miscalculate
So, a comparison of the concept of "nuclear winter" and its foundations with real cases of large-scale urban and forest fires very clearly show its inconsistency. Such release of soot during fires, which is embedded in it, simply does not happen. That is why belief in a “nuclear winter” is self-deception, and building a doctrine of nuclear deterrence on this basis is clearly wrong.
This is already quite a serious matter. Believing that a potential adversary will not dare to launch a massive nuclear strike, because he himself will die from a "nuclear winter", you can be wrong. If the Americans fabricated this concept for the nuclear disarmament of the Soviet Union, then we can be sure that they themselves have a good idea of the true state of affairs and that they are not afraid of a massive nuclear strike. It is another matter that the Americans have never expressed their readiness to fight in the style of an exchange of crushing blows; they have always been interested in achieving an advantage, or even better, the first unpunished strike, combined with the guarantee that they will not be struck forward. The concept of "nuclear winter" works for this and is quite good. Moreover, to the great chagrin of the peace fighters, this concept did not lead to general nuclear disarmament, and they will have to find others,more powerful arguments.