Tanada wrote: that everything post war would be horror piled atop horror, however that just isn't the case. There are not enough devices to create the level of contamination portrayed now and there were not even enough back when that movie was made.
The film was deliberately very constrained due to its need to have a plot. To this end it is largely a short exchange.
In the real world the biggest UK cities would have been targeted with 20 megatons weapons. Among the northern cities that would likely see Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Nottingham hit. These weapons have radius of 1st degree burns out to 50km. The 1st degree burns radius from these cities overlaps.
Each of the large steel works in Sheffield would have been targeted with 500kt type weapons as would the other large towns and key infrastructure facilities such as Drax power station and the M1\A1 road interchange.
The film depicts a 300 megatons exchange. In reality the USSR had over 8000 megaton’s in 42000 weapons at that time. The UK alone could expect to receive 300 megaton’s.
The US could reasonably expect 10 000 weapons targeted at it. Perhaps 2000 megaton’s in total. Anything with a population of 200 000 up would get its own visit. Every large airport, every major road junction, individual factories and large power stations would all be assigned their own nuke. A large number of the weapons would be ground bursting, not air bursting so the long term irradiative damage would be significant. Research from Japan indicates that after 100 days after the bomb detonated, a Hiroshima sized bomb, would still be producing 10 times the gamma radiation of the Chernobyl accident from its releases. Most bombs are 100 times bigger and many 1 000 times bigger although the fusion element of the weapon would be nowhere nears as damaging. Still on those numbers and with perhaps 500 ground bursts (in reality it would be more like 5000), one hundred days after the attack the US would have large areas heavily blanketed in enough radiation to trigger immediate radiation sickness, let alone long term cancer and other health issues.
In terms of climate, the aerosol cooling would not be as significant as originally thought, but the sea ice and snow pack feedback would be enough to trigger an estimated 7C drop in temperatures for a couple of years.
The effects of the smoke cloud on surface temperature are extremely large (Fig. 2).
177 Stratospheric temperatures are also severely perturbed (Fig. 3). A global average surface cooling
178 of –7°C to –8°C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4°C (Fig. 2).
179 Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was
180 about –5°C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history
181 of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land. Maps of the temperature
182 changes for the Northern Hemisphere summers for the year of smoke injection (Year 0) and the
183 next year (Year 1) are shown in Fig. 4. Cooling of more than –20°C occurs over large areas of
184 North America and of more than –30°C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions
http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/~gera/nwi ... cepted.pdfAs a result of the cooling of the Earth’s surface, evapotranspiration is reduced and the
195 global hydrological cycle is weakened. In addition, Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon
196 circulations collapse, because the driving continent-ocean temperature gradient does not develop.
197 The resulting global precipitation is reduced by about 45% (Fig. 2). As an example, Fig. 6
198 shows a map of precipitation change for the Northern Hemisphere summer one year after the
199 smoke injection. The largest precipitation reductions are in the Intertropical Convergence Zone
200 and in areas affected by the North American, Asian, and African summer monsoons. The small
201 areas of increased precipitation are in the subtropics in response to a severely weakened Hadley
202 Cell. Figure 7 shows time series of monthly precipitation for the same Iowa location as shown in
203 Fig. 5, and it is clear
This event would lack the ultra thick ice that comes from a glaciation so would unlikely trigger an ice age as the aerosols were reduced the thin snow pack on the edge would melt back and the abedo would slowly return to normalize levels. However in the event of a real nuclear war, northern hemisphere agriculture would not be possible for several years.
