The "Soot Loading" Threshold: A technical audit of why a regional nuclear exchange is a global famine event

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Achnback@reddit

Yeah, that is one event I do not prep for: Nuclear exchange complete the Mad Max scenes... No thanks, I will go outside and enjoy the fireworks.

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JRHLowdown3@reddit

Reason 27 to take food storage seriously, i.e, 1-2 years of basic grains supplemented out with things like dehydrated and FD fruits, veg and meats, MREs for the first few weeks, etc.

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Yeah! While we're not in a food shortage situation yet it seems that the ZUS grain harvest will be poor this year due to unfavourable weather. Likewise in the UK we've had a cold, wet start to the year so any root veg are potentially going to be in short supply, and compounded by the Middle East problem that could cause knock-on problems for 2027 (especially with fertiliser shortages).

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flortny@reddit

Hay, hay costs have quadrupled out west which will cause ripple effects through every food market, hay and low grain harvest will effect all meat prices which will drive people to less expensive replacements.

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JRHLowdown3@reddit

Plus 1.

It's been "missed" by a lot of newer folks, but the idea was always about having at least a year supply of food to feed your family, no matter the situation.

I can tell you it's helped us more than a few times over the decades when cash was tight, when we were focusing every extra penny towards getting out of debt, etc.

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4Yk9gop@reddit

How much physical space does 1-2 years of basic food take?

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Forward_Conflict3852@reddit

Roughly 25 five gallon buckets of a variety of grains and beans/legumes will cover 1 person for a year. You would also have to account for stored fats like oil or lard. Depending on how high you stack the buckets it is pretty compact.

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4Yk9gop@reddit

That's what I was worried about. Damn it, I'm going to look like a crazy person.

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JRHLowdown3@reddit

Lot of folks do things like make their bed frame higher to accommodate buckets and #10 case boxes under them. Even small closets which normally hold crap that can be tossed, can hold 6-8 buckets.

If your using QUALITY LIDS, not the lowes or walmart bucket lids, you can stack often 3 high. Walmart or lowes type lids don't go more than 2 and if you can, some support between them.

And most importantly, realize that your properly packed LTS food do NOT have to be 71.2 degrees year round. That is utter BS. We have stored 99% of our LTS in connex containers and in a garage (when still in FL decades ago). We are rotating hard red winter wheat, dry milk and long grain white rice ranging from 1995-1998 currently, not a problem with any of it. And ALL of it was kept in non climate controlled HIGH HEAT environments in S. GA.

If the choice is storing a small quantity of food in textbook "perfect" conditions or a REAL quantity of food in less than perfect conditions, I'm going to opt for more at less than perfect conditions any old day of the week.

This is also one of the multitude of reasons you should focus on true long term storage foods packed properly, versus half way'ing it with grocery store wet packed cans which DO have a much storage rotation and ARE more vulnerable to high heat/poor storage conditions.

In the 40 years (yes truly 40 years) of storing food 99% of the food I've had to toss was either wet packed grocery store cans or crap like white flour. Once I cut that non sense out of the mix, we've had CONSIDERABLY less failures, despite absolutely horrible storage conditions.

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Forward_Conflict3852@reddit

Too many folks worry about temps, but I have never had issues with dry goods packed in mylar with O2 absorbers. You definitely need to watch out on canned goods though. Especially canned tomatoes, pineapple, or other acidic canned foods. They will eventually leak or blow up and make a mess.

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4Yk9gop@reddit

Good info. Thanks.

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CreasingUnicorn@reddit

Add 1 cup of dried lentils to every 2 cups of rice when cooking for a much more filling and nutritious dish. Lentils are small and take about as long as rice to cook (though pre-soaking makes them softer if you have the time).

Add in some tomatoes from the garden and you have a nutritionally complete dish, tastes great with taco seasoning

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JRHLowdown3@reddit

Have been storing and eating lentils regularly since the 90's. They are by far the BEST legume to store IMO.

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FutureVegasMan@reddit

nuclear winter theories are dubious at best, and would require an absurd amount of ground burst detonations which is unlikely in any extended nuclear exchange scenario. EMPs would be devastating, but even at the highest altitudes, the impacts would still be relatively localized to the geographic area where they went off. Countries neighboring India and Pakistan would be at risk, but not the entire world. The killing blow would be supply chain issues caused by the sudden annihilation of millions upon of millions of people and all the infrastructure damage to factories, roads, warehouses and other supply chain vitals.

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dittybopper_05H@reddit

But would that "killing blow" affect the World as a whole?

I mean, it's not like Pakistan and India are major exporters of food or petroleum. Both countries run pretty large trade deficits, in that they import far more than they export.

India does supply about 1/5th of the world's generic pharmaceuticals, so there would be shortages and price increases for inexpensive drugs.

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MerelyMortalModeling@reddit

I feel like you are using AI to confirm your bias.

Plenty of research has shown AI will try to confirm what it believes you believe.

I'd be interested if you published you raw prompts so we could use them to tease out a technical audit on why a regional nuclear exchange would not produce a global famine event.

That said people should still bank food.

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JRHLowdown3@reddit

I agree. While it's not totally probable IMO, it's one of many scenarios to plan and prepare for.

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TexFarmer@reddit

Just an FYI, 1 volcano going off puts 10X more material into the atmosphere than any nuke.
Most nukes are designed for air burst for maximum effect, so much less material is deposited into the air.
Luckily, volcanoes don't knock out power grids, but 1 single volcano going off can easily give us a year without a summer.

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grahampositive@reddit

Ok but in that scenario, there would've necessarily be a global power grid collapse as well. So refrigeration/freezing would be unaffected, and grow lights could be used in limited cases to help supplement crop yields. Even if something like that made absolutely zero economic sense right now, we could do it if we wanted.

Couple a "no summer" event with a power grid and supply chain collapse and now you've got a global famine

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JRHLowdown3@reddit

So much of this "info" comes from Carl Sagan's "theory" of nuclear winter. It's been argued back and forth a ton of times.

Most of the time when the "what if" game is played towards that end (nuclear winter), the ASSumption is all ground bursts, everything used everywhere, etc. Basically absolute worst case scenario. Highly unlikely but nevertheless.

That being said, while I personally don't think it would be that bad, if you want to prepare for that, this would mean multi years of food storage to begin with. This would mean assuming for all electronics to fail except whatever you have already protected (backups, etc). This sort of scenario would be that "Threads" movie bad- massive starvation, etc. No your starving neighbor isn't going to share that BBQ dog leg with you type of deal.

If you study this and read books like "Long term effects of nuclear war" by Glasstone, you'll get a handle for stuff like what animals might likely do better than others for the homestead. What crops will likely do better, etc.

The #1 thing anyone concerned about this should do is take a hard look at your LTS and double it- at least.

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dittybopper_05H@reddit

Are your assumptions that every nuclear explosion will result in a firestorm?

Because that's an invalid assumption. Modern cities and military facilities don't have enough of a fuel load for a firestorm to start.

So you end up with something more akin to the oil well fires in the first Gulf War in any limited exchange. Not fun, but the soot doesn't get lofted into the stratosphere.

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smsff2@reddit

I remember reading different papers with different estimates of the amount of combustible material used in modern construction. The results are beyond catastrophic in every conceivable scenario. It does not matter whether every single explosion results in a firestorm or not. For the average prepper, the difference in the amount of supplies needed between these scenarios is negligible.

You can help science by estimating how much combustible material you have in your own house, and I can run the calculations for you. Let’s say that every dwelling contains exactly the same amount of combustible material as your house. What would the results be in that case?

I see this as a good exercise in arithmetic. Potentially, it could also demonstrate that you need to prepare regardless of where you live or what kind of house construction you have.

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dittybopper_05H@reddit

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10109450/

Sources of burnable material within U.S. cities are analyzed. Based on a detailed evaluation of construction practices, storage of burnable contents, building function and layout, and density of buildings in city districts, we derive urban fuel load densities in terms of land use type and geographic location. Residential building fuel loads vary regionally from 123 to 150 kg m-2; nonresidential building classes have loads from 39 to 273 kg m-2. The results indicate that average U.S. urban area fuel loads range from 14 to 21 kg m-2.

According to the research done in WWII in support of burninating German and Japanese cities to the ground in intentional firestorms, you need a fuel load of at least 40 kg/m^(2). Which means you have to have at least 40 kilograms of available combustible material per square meter.

Modern US cities don't have that kind of fuel load as that link shows, so no firestorms can develop. I suspect that most modern cities are similar. Concrete, steel, and glass do not burn like wood construction. Plus, the flammability of the contents of buildings is not what it once was.

Also, there are some other rules for the development of a firestorm.

You need calm winds, below about 13 km/h.

You need an affected area of at least 1.3 square kilometers.

And the last thing you need is multiple hundreds or thousands of near-simultaneous ignition sources. Remember that, it's important.

When a nuclear bomb goes off, the thermal radiation can and will ignite flammable material, but the subsequent blast will "blow it out". This is akin to blowing out a candle, or using explosives to blow out a burning oil well.

And indeed, at Nagasaki, no firestorm developed.

So what about Hiroshima?

Buried in the reports is a single line, almost throw-away in nature, that explained what happened:

A large proportion of over 1,000 persons ques-
tioned was, however, in agreement that a great
majority of the original fires were started by debris
falling on kitchen charcoal fires.

https://ia800809.us.archive.org/18/items/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima_text.pdf

(page 4, Summary paragraph 8. Emphasis added).

Later on in the "Air War and Emotional Stress" part we find this:

Many workers were still out-of-doors en route to their jobs. The
majority of school children, along with some adults from the
suburbs, were also outside, hard at work building firebreaks as a
defense against possible incendiary raids. Housewives, especially in
middle-class families, were at home, preparing breakfast. Only a few
minutes later, their flaming charcoal stoves were to create hundreds
of local fires, adding to a general conflagration of such intensity that
even if the assiduous labor of Hiroshima's school children had been
completed, the fire storm still would have been beyond control.

Back then, the Japanese would cook on something called a "shichirin", a charcoal brazier made out of diatomaceous earth, burning "binchotan", a relatively smoke-free charcoal. Hiroshima was a very very built-up city with relatively narrow streets, limited open spaces like parks and wide boulevards, and buildings mostly made of wood with internal walls and doors often made of paper.

The Hiroshima bomb detonated at 8:15 in the morning local time, while the fires in thousands of shichirin were still burning, and these buildings of wood and paper collapsed in on them.

The conflagration didn't really get going until about 10 or 15 minutes after the bombing, which is what you would expect for smoldering charcoal igniting shattered wood. Had the fires been directly ignited by the thermal pulse (and there were indeed some of those), the firestorm would have started pretty much immediately after the explosion.

The Nagasaki bombing used a significantly more powerful bomb^(1), but it happened at 11 AM local time, and the morning cooking fires were out, and so there was no firestorm.

^(1. You have to be careful though because explosions don't scale linearly. The effects go up with the inverse cube of the yield. A 100 kiloton bomb has a yield ten times that of a 10 kiloton bomb, but it doesn't cause 10 times more damage. It's roughly 4.6 times the damage. A 1 megaton bomb (1,000 kilotons) is nominally 100 times the power of a 10 kiloton bomb, but only causes 21 times the damage of a 10 kiloton bomb. This also applies to conventional explosions.)

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AnitaResPrep@reddit

Think to the last wildfires in California ... And the temperatures are not htose of nuclear balst ...

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dittybopper_05H@reddit

Those weren't firestorms, they were conflagrations, and the soot from them didn't rise into the stratosphere, because while they moved fast and destroyed a lot of homes, it wasn't a large area simultaneously ignited.

It was a flame front that moved rapidly in front of very strong winds pushing them, exacerbated by the geography of the area.

Remember one of the requirements for a firestorm is that the winds have to be below 13 km/hr, or 8 mph. The Santa Ana winds during the Palisades Fire were up to 60 mph in gusts.

And you can clearly see the smoke from that devastating fire hugging the ground, and not reaching up into the stratosphere in pictures taken from aircraft:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_Fire

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Lancashire_Toreador@reddit

Yeah, most of the “one nuke goes off and the entire planet freezes over”, papers seem to usually be derived ultimately from the TTAPS paper

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smsff2@reddit

What do you mean by “derived”? All similar research asks similar questions, so they will obviously arrive at similar conclusions. You can do the calculations yourself; it’s not very complicated.

Your comment almost makes it sound as if every researcher is simply repeating the original TTAPS paper. Carl Sagan definitely popularized the idea, but he was not the originator of the concept of nuclear winter, and he certainly did not influence the calculations of countless researchers who came after him.

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Lancashire_Toreador@reddit

Research builds on previous work and a lot of the times has to inherit assumptions that the previous Work made.

I have a lot of faith in our pure computational power to model climate effects from nuclear war but ultimately if the foundation is flawed, it doesn’t matter how good your research into luminous Ather is, it’s still wrong.

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smsff2@reddit

Luminiferous aether was our best hypothesis and explained all known experiments for more than two centuries.

Luminiferous aether, like phlogiston, is one of the well-known examples in physics where an imperfect original assumption still led to correct calculations. Those calculations could then be used in real life, in mechanics and engineering, to predict correct outcomes. For centuries, these theories were used successfully in all known cases.

Even today, phlogiston and luminiferous aether can still produce calculations that are correct in the vast majority of practical situations. For example, you can calculate the effectiveness of your house insulation using ideas from phlogiston theory, and the results will still be usable in practice. The cases where the phlogiston theory breaks down are so specific that they are largely irrelevant to ordinary construction.

Similarly, luminiferous aether theory fails mainly in situations involving multiple moving observers at relativistic speeds. Even now, more than a century after the theory was abandoned, we still do not have any human observers or even mechanisms moving at relativistic speeds. Our satellites move much more slowly.

Unlike the luminiferous aether theory, TTAPS does not postulate any assumptions about the physical world. It is a well-known scientific paper, and researchers typically read it before developing their own ideas. They may borrow wording or illustrative examples from it; however, it is not directly used in calculations.

The following assumptions are directly used in calculations. We know the energy released in a nuclear explosion. We also know what types of radiation it produces: alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, fission fragments, and other forms of ionizing radiation.

We know the composition of modern cities and the amount of combustible material in them. Specifically, wood is still a primary material in today’s construction, even 81 years after nuclear weapons were first introduced.

From there, we can estimate the amount of soot produced. We also know how and to what temperature different objects are heated. We can construct a heat distribution map.

From that point, we can use the Navier–Stokes equations to model how the overheated mushroom cloud rises through the atmosphere and transports soot into the stratosphere.

Now let’s focus on a single particle of soot suspended in the stratosphere. We can use the Stefan–Boltzmann law to calculate the energy balance between solar radiation absorbed by the particle and thermal radiation emitted by it. If we want to be very precise, we can use the Navier–Stokes equations for a detailed simulation of heat transfer between the soot particle and the surrounding air. We can also use the drag equation to calculate the air resistance the particle experiences on its way down.

As you can see, there is no reference to TTAPS anywhere in the calculations.

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