Nuclear Annihilation

Lately I've been pretty obsessed with the concept of nuclear war, and more specifically the idea of a "nuclear winter". In the early 1980s an atmospheric scientist named Salzberg was conducting research on the possible environmental consequences of a nuclear war and in his calculations he discovered, to his horror, that the vast quantities of black smoke produced by burning cities and extensive forest fires following a nuclear exchange would drastically affect our atmosphere. This factor had never been considered beforehand, and during the few decades previous to this when nuclear arsenals were constantly growing it was commonly believed by scientists that the worst damage made by a thermonuclear bomb would be the immediate fallout and the blast damage of the bomb itself. They were wrong.

This alarming (and basically, accidental) finding prompted both Russian and American scientists to investigate the possibilty further and over the next few years they gradually discovered that the smoke produced by a typical, fairly conservative nuclear war scenario between the USSR and US would cut off most sunlight from reaching the surface of the northern hemisphere for a number of months at least, and the proportion of smoke which entered the stratosphere could remain there for years, thus significantly lowering global temperatures over an extended period of time. The inital effects of such an event would essentially be "twilight at noon"; almost total darkness extending over continental-sized areas for weeks on end. Crops in the world's largest food-producing regions would certainly fail and as a result, pastoral agriculture would quickly disappear. Food reserves in most first world countries are only capable of sustaining populations for a number of weeks, and this estimation is not taking account of the hysteric mass looting and hoarding that would inevitably take place in such a panicked time. In the central regions of large land masses such as North America and Russia, temperatures could fall to many degrees below zero and create conditions comparable to Arctic Circle areas. Billions would already be dead from the inital blast damage in cities and from the subsequent radioactive fallout. The people remaining would be emotionally overwhelmed and completely unready to face the task of survival in the cold aftermath of a nuclear confrontation. Scientists postulate that these people's only reaction to the rapid disintegration of society and its framework would be utter apathy: feelings of total shock and loss over what had happened to them, their loved ones, and the world they once knew would create feelings of numbness and detachment from the continuing horror around them. In these freezing, dark and foodless conditions many more would die from starvation and epidemics of diseases such as pneumonia, typhoid, dysentery and even bubonic plague. These epidemics would spread relentlessly and quickly take the lives of many more survivors, mainly the young, old and those weakened by starvation and extreme cold.
After the initial few years of nuclear winter and the gradual warming of conditions there would probably only be a small fraction of the earth's population remaining: a few hundred million at most; somewhere around the levels of the Late Middle Ages. It is hard to say how much society would have recovered, if at all, after such a utterly destructive experience. It is possible that a primitive form of communal subsistence farming would have developed, albeit with limited crop yield due to the lingering cold conditions, rudimentary agricultural tools and an extremely basic grasp of farming possessed by most survivors. This would only occur if the surviving population would have the strength and determination to continue living. The vast quantities of smoke which would have entered the stratosphere following the nuclear fires would have removed much of the planet's ozone, resulting in a very high level of UV radiation reaching the earth's surface. The repercussions of this for the survivors and their children would be a high occurence of cancers, stillbirths and foetal deformation, sterility, and cataracts causing blindness.
Another possibility, explored by the writer Cormac McCarthy in his novel "The Road" (which I strongly recommend you read, it's a fucking masterpiece), is the emergence of brutal cannibalistic tribes who roam the wasted earth searching for fellow survivors to consume. Now I know that sounds pretty mental and science-fictioney, but think about it. Who knows what humanity is capable of when pushed into a corner like this. An event like this would undoubtedly be the single most devastating thing that has ever happened to humankind - it could even signify the extinction of humanity, and there is no way we can possibly know how the remainder of the earth's population would behave following such an event.

So yeah. I think about this kind of stuff a lot and it absolutely fascinates me to no end. I've read a few books about the subject and the more I learn about this, the more I want to know. What originally exposed me to the idea of nuclear winter was a movie called Threads that I saw a few months ago, which is a dramatised-documentary thing made by the BBC in 1984 when nuclear war was far closer to becoming reality than it is now. Now I know that nuclear war isn't nearly as relevant or engaging a topic as it used to be, but I'm still intrigued by it and the fact is that the world's collective nuclear arsenal is still powerful enough to destroy every large city on this planet many times over.
Anyway, Threads is one of the most disturbing, horrifying and compelling films I've ever seen. The events that occur on screen during it are 100% factual - this is not a science-fiction movie, it is reality. It's called Threads because ultimately its message is that humanity's downfall in the event of a global catastrophe will be the destruction of the "threads" of communication, altruism and co-operation that hold society together. The seemingly fantastical and implausible things that you witness when watching it are not fabrications but truths. That's probably the most affecting element of this film. After watching it, certain moments and images from the movie stayed in my head and wouldn't go away. They still haunt me now; ideas such as the depiction of the breakdown of education and literacy in the post-apocalyptic "society" (where the children of survivors learn only basic, grunting communication techniques from their numb, shellshocked, near-mute parents. Children who are completely animalistic due to the nature of the world they've grown up in, deprived of basic morality, intellect and humanity). I can't even imagine what watching this must've been like for people in 1984.
I don't really know why I made this blog post. I don't even really know why I'm so obsessed with nuclear winter. I guess all the things I've talked about in this blog are the things that I'm fixated on: the initial fiery immolation of technology and conventional society, the bitter, dark, endless winter which follows, and then the people who somehow emerge alive; demoralised, apathetic, cannibalistic and basically animals. The idea of civilisation and morality breaking down and being replaced with a brutal, heartless paradigm of survival is really interesting to me.

One.