Cinematic Effects of Nuclear War

What are the meteorological effects of a global nuclear war? Would the evening sky and dusk become blood red-colored and lasts longer than usual? Would the sun look different in the horizon? I know that the war could produce a "nuclear winter", but what happened before the global dimming? Would the temperature worldwide risen significantly before dropping to freeze?
Any info will be appreciated, since I need these for cinematic effects of a nuclear war.

Thanks in advance!
 
Why? Presuming a global strategic exchange between the US and USSR in the Cold War, everyone capable of appreciating those 'cinematic effects' would be dead.

Mike Turcotte
 
You may want to change the spelling on that.

You want CLIMATIC effects.

CINEMATIC means "how does this affect the movie industry?"

(Which is an interesting topic in itself. Just not... here.)
 
Pre 1970's, the effects would be rather small since most weapons had small yields. However post 1970's, when most Weapons ready for launch were higher yields, the effects would be larger, but not as what you described.

The combine yield is probably no greater than 15 Gigatons. The Yield of all Nuclear Explosions was about 510 megatons according to wikipedia, and that didin't really alter the weather patterns.
 
Pre 1970's, the effects would be rather small since most weapons had small yields. However post 1970's, when most Weapons ready for launch were higher yields, the effects would be larger, but not as what you described.

The combine yield is probably no greater than 15 Gigatons. The Yield of all Nuclear Explosions was about 510 megatons according to wikipedia, and that didin't really alter the weather patterns.

Except most of those were set off underground, underwater, or in the desert, over the span of 50 years. I'm no nuclear winter scaremonger, but it's a bit different when you're talking about firing cities en masse. Also, total warhead count matters much more than total yield - weapon effect scales sublinearly with yield, so total yield isn't a very useful figure for climatic purposes.
 
What kind of exchange are you talking about?

Although both sides had enough weapons to destroy every useful targets multiple times over, I suspect many of that was based on the necessity of having spare bombs in the event of a first-strike or inter-service rivalries.

(The Navy has 10,000 bombs? Well, I want 10,000 bombs too!)

A counterforce strike might be fairly small, while a countervalue strike would be much larger and more destructive.
 
I and others discuss that matter
in The Cuban Missile War Timeline https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=65071
here about Nuclear Winter
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=1823354&postcount=837

In short:
With 1 mega tons (100 x 10 kilo tons) use on citys you can start severer nuclear winter
wat is followed by "Ultraviolet summer" decause the ozone layer is dissolved
it take 10 years until cilmat get normal over a world who as experienced bigges mass extinction, since death of the Dinosaur !
 
I and others discuss that matter
in The Cuban Missile War Timeline https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=65071
here about Nuclear Winter
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=1823354&postcount=837

In short:
With 1 mega tons (100 x 10 kilo tons) use on citys you can start severer nuclear winter
wat is followed by "Ultraviolet summer" decause the ozone layer is dissolved
it take 10 years until cilmat get normal over a world who as experienced bigges mass extinction, since death of the Dinosaur !

By 'in short' you mean your personal opinion.
Which hs little to do with the realities and much do you with your personal fantasies regarding the environmental effects of a nuclear exchange

Effects of even a major exchange are (relatively) short lived- months. Compared to a volcano or the sun(things which affect the atmosphere and the ozone and other layers)humanity is small change
 
By 'in short' you mean your personal opinion.
Which hs little to do with the realities and much do you with your personal fantasies regarding the environmental effects of a nuclear exchange

Effects of even a major exchange are (relatively) short lived- months. Compared to a volcano or the sun(things which affect the atmosphere and the ozone and other layers)humanity is small change

He links to a paper in a climate science journal. I've read the paper. I am not a climate scientist, but they make a... Not entirely convincing argument.

If I recall correctly, you worked for the USAF in a function related to nuclear weapons, yes? I'd be interested in your views on the recent work on climate modeling of nuclear exchanges. The recent studies all depend on the assumption of stratospheric lofting of substantial amounts of soot from burning cities. As a layman, the papers seem to make a convincing case that if the soot got up that high it would, indeed, stay up there for a decade or more thanks to solar heating.

But the papers I've read, and I have not read them all, don't discuss how the soot gets up there, except to cite entirely unconvincing data from forest fires. I came away with the impression that, at least as far as fiction goes, one could plausibly justify anything between "six months of unpleasant weather" to NO FOOD FOR TEN YEARS EVERYONE DIES.
 
In short:
With 1 mega tons (100 x 10 kilo tons) use on citys you can start severer nuclear winter

So why didn't the Tsar Bomba wipe out humanity? That was 50 megatons all by itself.

Or the Castle Bravo shot? 15 megatons.

IIRC there were at least half a dozen individual tests that exceeded 1 MT all by themselves, and there were over 200 atmospheric tests by the US alone prior to the 1963 treaty.
 
So why didn't the Tsar Bomba wipe out humanity? That was 50 megatons all by itself.

Or the Castle Bravo shot? 15 megatons.

IIRC there were at least half a dozen individual tests that exceeded 1 MT all by themselves, and there were over 200 atmospheric tests by the US alone prior to the 1963 treaty.

Because in this scenario it won't be the immediate fallout of the explosion leading to the nuclear winter, it will be the secondary effects - burning cities, burning factories, burning forests etc. filing the atmosphere with soot.
 
So why didn't the Tsar Bomba wipe out humanity? That was 50 megatons all by itself.

Or the Castle Bravo shot? 15 megatons.

IIRC there were at least half a dozen individual tests that exceeded 1 MT all by themselves, and there were over 200 atmospheric tests by the US alone prior to the 1963 treaty.

They were used on barren wilderness instead of cities? I mean, it would be pretty damn stupid for someone to nuke their own cities, and once fallout was discovered people made extra sure to avoid setting them off anywhere important. The Tsar Bomba was dropped on a frozen, tundra-covered island; there's not a lot to burn there. Similarly, Castle Bravo was detonated on a coral reef. Again, not much to burn. Most of the other big shots were on islands or in deserts also. Even if they had been dropped on cities, all those shots were in a specific place, rather than multiple relatively small bombs dropped in widely separated locations. The idea of nuclear winter has always been dependent on the multiplying effect of burning cities spread over the planet. A single bomb dropped in a barren location won't throw up enough debris, and even a bomb dropped on a big city won't spread those debris over a large enough area to have any climatological effects.

Astrodragon said:
Effects of even a major exchange are (relatively) short lived- months. Compared to a volcano or the sun(things which affect the atmosphere and the ozone and other layers)humanity is small change

Volcanoes can have severe climatological effects that last months. Even one Year without a Summer can be seriously bad news. Combined with the devastation wrought by a full-scale nuclear exchange in the first place, that's quite enough to kill a large fraction of those that survived the initial attacks.
 
Sigh. Yes, wilderness... except of course for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Do you really think cities burn 100 times worse than wilderness? Have you ever seen a forest fire?

I'm not even going to start on the fact that 10kt is more like an artillery shell for battlefield use than a city-buster. A 10kt bomb isn't going to burn, say, New York to the ground.
 
Sigh. Yes, wilderness... except of course for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now that's just moving the goal posts. You were talking about big MT+ bombs earlier, and I was responding to that. Anyways, those two together obviously don't meet the standards Michel was talking about.

Do you really think cities burn 100 times worse than wilderness? Have you ever seen a forest fire?

This is why I went out of my way to explicitly describe where the bombs were dropped (especially Tsar Bomba) to show that they were not dropped on forests, and especially were dropped on areas that don't burn. Like deserts, or the ocean.

I'm not even going to start on the fact that 10kt is more like an artillery shell for battlefield use than a city-buster. A 10kt bomb isn't going to burn, say, New York to the ground.

So the only two city-busters ever actually used, which did bust cities, were just artillery shells? I mean, come on. Anyways, are you seriously suggesting that the fires started by a 10kT device dropped on New York (or other cities, particularly if you dropped it in the right places) won't be at least extremely devastating and burn a large part of the city, between the water main breaches, radioactivity, and immediate blast effects that mean firefighting efforts are going to be extremely compromised for some time, and the gas line breaches and immediate flash fires that will start many fires in different locations?
 
The way I understood it, the OP is asking not so much what would happen to the sky, but what the sky would look like in nuclear winter.
I'm not sure about the color, but my guess would be that there'd be way more clouds and noon would look somewhat more like dawn or dusk.
 
Fat Man: 21kt
Little Boy: 15kt

Hey, look! Neither one was 10kt.

Also, while I haven't checked their models, here's a fun tool:

http://www.carloslabs.com/node/20

Per the link, note that a 15kt weapon doesn't even clear Central Park. If dropped in the center, individuals at the ends will be getting 1st degree burns and will be hit by about 1psi of overpressure. You can survive that without medical care. If the wind is JUST RIGHT and you hit an end, almost all of the people in the park will probably die of radiation exposure. People outside will have increased risk of cancer.

Certainly not a city-annihilator. Nukes are not magic.

I suggest you read up on The Bomb. It is a fascinating subject.
 
Fat Man: 21kt
Little Boy: 15kt

Hey, look! Neither one was 10kt.

Hey, look! Neither one was more than twice that!

Far, far closer to 10kT than to 1 MT, which I might remind you was what you were originally talking about.

Also, while I haven't checked their models, here's a fun tool:

http://www.carloslabs.com/node/20

Per the link, note that a 15kt weapon doesn't even clear Central Park. If dropped in the center, individuals at the ends will be getting 1st degree burns and will be hit by about 1psi of overpressure. You can survive that without medical care. If the wind is JUST RIGHT and you hit an end, almost all of the people in the park will probably die of radiation exposure. People outside will have increased risk of cancer.

You know, you're making it sound like dropping a 15 kT bomb on Central Park would just barely take out the park, let alone the rest of the city. To me, it looks like the 1 PSI zone edge is in New Jersey and you just wiped out Lower Manhattan. Then the fires start around the edge of the blast zone, and those spread up into Upper Manhattan, which (if it wasn't disturbed by the bomb going off--and you know people will be panicking) will shortly be on fire as the FDNY will be in chaos, multiple water lines near the bomb impact site are ruptured (interfering with firefighting efforts), gas lines are broken and catching flame, etc. etc. The immediate impact of the bomb is not the only or even the most important impact, in the same way that the immediate impact of the 1906 earthquake was not the most important factor in the destruction of San Francisco and the losses that occurred.

(Which is kind of the entire point of everything that I've been saying so far--you are focusing much too much on the direct effects of the bomb itself, rather than the indirect effects, which when it comes to non-hardened structures like cities are at least as important.)
 
OK, one last try: what weapon do you have selected in the bottom left corner? The numbers I gave were for Little Boy (15kt). Note that's 50% more than the 10kt originally listed.

An earthquake is virtually a unique event in the public safety lexicon, and is nothing like an explosion of any scale. I spent five years riding ambulances. I'm a licensed paramedic and rescue technician. I also served as a volunteer with the NDMS (back before DHS ate it), which was trained specifically for disaster response. In the course of all that I took ICS several times, as well as HazMat through Ops level. What are your credentials for judging the effects of events on the public safety systems of urban areas?
 
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