Twenty years ago, the results of climate model simulations of the response to smoke and
3 dust from a massive nuclear exchange between the superpowers could be summarized as
4 “nuclear winter,” with rapid temperature, precipitation, and insolation drops at the surface that
5 would threaten global agriculture for at least a year. The global nuclear arsenal has fallen by a
6 factor of three since then, but there has been an expansion of the number of nuclear weapons
7 states, with additional states trying to develop nuclear arsenals. We use a modern climate model
8 to re-examine the climate response to a range of nuclear wars, producing 50 and 150 Tg of
9 smoke, using moderate, and large portions of the current global arsenal, and find that there would
10 be significant climatic responses to all the scenarios. This is the first time that an atmosphere-
11 ocean general circulation model has been used for such a simulation, and the first time that 10-yr
12 simulations have been conducted. The response to the 150 Tg scenario can still be characterized
13 as “nuclear winter,” but both produce global catastrophic consequences. The changes are more
14 long-lasting than previously thought, however, because the new model, National Aeronautics and
15 Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE, is able to represent the
16 atmosphere up to 80 km, and simulates plume rise to the middle and upper stratosphere,
17 producing a long aerosol lifetime. The indirect effects of nuclear weapons would have
18 devastating consequences for the planet, and continued nuclear arsenal reductions will be needed
19 before the threat of nuclear winter is removed from the Earth.
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