Suppose someone wants to balance the books, once and for all…
No. Nuclear winter is basically about the amount of dust that gets kicked up by the explosions, plus the ashes of burning cities, forests, etc.
Guam is a smallish island in the north pacific. There simply isn’t enough matter to be dispersed into the atmosphere to cause trouble at a global scale.
The cataclysmic 1883 eruption of the Krakatao volcano is estimated at an equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT (840 PJ)—about 13,000 times the yield of the Little Boy bomb (13 to 16 kt) that devastated Hiroshima, four times the yield of Tsar Bomba (50 Mt), the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated.
The Turco/Toon/Ackerman/Pollack/Sagan paper looks at a 5,000 megaton-exchange baseline (!).
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I guess I was being partially sarcastic.
Fixed that etc.
The Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention.
It’s from 1983. It’s the first paper of its kind. It’s probably been refined, and/or refuted since then, if only as a a matter of historical curiosity, as it had implications for climate modeling. It’s also been attacked for its political implications, though the rigor of some of those attacks is surely in doubt.
Yes, IIRC some interesting work was done using data collected from observing the burning oil fields after 1990ies gulf war.
And of course in the context of evaluating volcanoes.
The 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano caused the 1816 “year without a summer”. I couldn’t find any megaton equivalent, but it’s rated on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) as a class 7 event, wich means it ejected > 100 km3 of material.
In comparison, the 1883 Krakatoa eruption is a VEI 6, ejecting > 10 km3.
You probably can’t just scale up, but for the sake of the argument, let’s say that if Krakatao was like 200 megatons, Tambora might have been in the region of 2,000 megatons, ballpark.
So no nuclear winter from nuking Guam.
When the original paper on nuclear winter came out in 1983, the mainstream mindset in both the military and politics was very close to General Turgidson’s in Dr. Strangelove - fallout isn’t all that bad, a nuclear war can be contained, a preemptive strike is worth considering, even all-out nuclear war can be survivable, and so on. So of course the paper was highly political and controversial as it challenged doctrine.
You spend decades and untold billions to build up overkill capacity (not to mention cozy fiefdoms), selling it to politics and the people as something that is good, neccessary, safe and in everybodies best interest, and along comes a bunch of hippy eggheads that tell everybody that they will be totally screwed anyway when you get to actually use your toys. Of course you’ll like it. And the same goes for the guys who make and sell the stuff, and the guys who signed the cheques.
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At least the Republicans have publicly come forward with their approach to solving global warming.
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