Nuclear War Would Be Worse For Our Climate Than Predicted in The Cold War : ScienceAlert

Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer has revived morbid curiosity in the destructive power of nuclear weapons. There are now an estimated 12,512 nuclear warheads.

A war in which even a fraction of these bombs were detonated would create blast waves and fires capable of killing millions of people almost instantly. The radiation-induced cancers and genetic damage would affect the remaining population for generations.

But what sort of world would remain amid the radioactive fallout?

For the last four decades, scientists modelling the Earth system have run computer simulations to…