What Is a Nuclear Winter?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Nuclear winter is a theory that was first devised back in the early 80s when climatologists looked at fires from nuclear war. The smoke would create something like a blanket around the atmosphere and it would block incoming sunlight such that the climate would actually cool really drastically. That's the winter in nuclear winter. Not only would it be extremely cold, it would be very, very difficult to grow food.

Vladimir Putin keeps threatening to use smaller nuclear weapons to win his war. Author J. Peter Scoblic says “there’s no such thing as small nukes.”

This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.

Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained

Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices