zlacker

> Do you have a citation on nuclear winter not being a thing? The last thing I read on the subject was that even a full blown exchange between india and pakistan would be enough to wreak havoc on agriculture in large swaths of the world for a year or two

A good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...

The gist is that in the 80s nuclear winter was portrayed as apocalyptic by Carl Sagan and others using shoddy models in order to advance an arms control agenda. More recent work depicts far more modest climactic effects that are highly variable based on the season the nuclear war would occur in (worst in the summer, very modest to non-existent in the winter). The issue seems to be not so much the bombs themselves; but how cities burn, how much soot would be produced, and how it would move through the atmosphere.

This is also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in.... Sagan's nuclear-winter modeling team predicted in 1990 that 100 oil well fires would produce a small-scale global nuclear winter. In 1991 Iraq started 800 oil well fires, which caused no such thing. The only effects were localized and stopped soon after the fires were put out.