Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect that is hypothesized to occur after widespread urban firestorms following a large-scale nuclear war. The hypothesis is based on
Pyrocumulonimbus cloud formed by the firestorm following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 1945. Nuclear winter effects are triggered by at least a hundred such city firestorms.
Picture of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud taken from a commercial airliner cruising at about 10 km. In 2002, various sensing instruments detected 17 distinct pyrocumulonimbus cloud events in North America alone.
Smoke rising in Lochcarron, Scotland, is stopped by an overlying natural low-level inversion layer of warmer air (2006).
Diagram obtained by the CIA from the International Seminar on Nuclear War in Italy 1984. It depicts the findings of Soviet 3-D computer model research on nuclear winter from 1983, and although containing similar errors as earlier Western models, it was the first 3-D model of nuclear winter. (The three dimensions in the model are longitude, latitude and altitude.) The diagram shows the models predictions of global temperature changes after a global nuclear exchange. The top image shows effects after 40 days, the bottom after 243 days. A co-author was nuclear winter modelling pioneer
A nuclear holocaust, also known as a nuclear apocalypse, nuclear annihilation, nuclear armageddon, or atomic holocaust, is a theoretical scenario where the mass detonation of nuclear weapons causes wi
Mushroom cloud from the 1954 explosion of Castle Bravo, the largest nuclear weapon detonated by the U.S.
Castle Bravo nuclear test