Nuclear Winter: a Man-Induced Glaciation

Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect after a large-scale nuclear. war. Smoke from the fires started by nuclear weapons, especially the black, sooty. smoke from cities and industrial facilities, would be heated by the Sun, lifted into the upper stratosphere, and spread globally, lasting for years.

It is speculated that the resulting cooling would lead to widespread crop failure and famine.

When developing computer models of nuclear-winter scenarios, researchers use the conventional bombing of Hamburg, and the Hiroshima firestorm in World War II as example cases where soot might have been injected into the stratosphere, alongside modern observations of natural, large-area wildfire-firestorms.