I remember seeing a couple conclusions that some nuclear scientists came to recently:
1.) 100 Hiroshima-sized nukes (the nuke dropped on Hiroshima was tiny compared to current nukes) going off could cause catastrophic climactic results across an area the size of a continent, i.e. a continent-wide nuclear winter that would potentially lead to hundreds of millions of deaths outside of lives lost to the immediate blast + fallout.
2.) If the US and Russia both unleashed just 5% of their total nuclear stockpiles, you are definitely wiping out civilization and getting humans down to close to extinction levels.
IIRC a lot of this is worse than previously understood because past models didn’t account for just how much dirt and debris are kicked up in nuclear blasts.
I remember seeing a couple conclusions that some nuclear scientists came to recently:
1.) 100 Hiroshima-sized nukes (the nuke dropped on Hiroshima was tiny compared to current nukes) going off could cause catastrophic climactic results across an area the size of a continent, i.e. a continent-wide nuclear winter that would potentially lead to hundreds of millions of deaths outside of lives lost to the immediate blast + fallout.
2.) If the US and Russia both unleashed just 5% of their total nuclear stockpiles, you are definitely wiping out civilization and getting humans down to close to extinction levels.
IIRC a lot of this is worse than previously understood because past models didn’t account for just how much dirt and debris are kicked up in nuclear blasts.