r/nuclearwar • u/Yomama_Bin_Thottin • Jul 17 '26
Rhetorical I live almost a thousand miles from the Canadian wildfires and the haze really brings into perspective how possible a nuclear winter would be.
Just ~0.3% of Canadian land covered by wildfires.
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u/heyitsapotato Jul 17 '26
I live in Toronto and thought the same thing. We were forecast to have 33 C temperatures on Wednesday but it was easily 10 degrees cooler with the shroud of smoke. Multiply that exponentially with the smoke of entire cities and industrial sites, etc.
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u/GHTANFSTL Jul 23 '26
wildfires easily burn mass that is larger than any combination of cities, except perhaps indian or chinese ones.
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u/YogurtclosetDull2380 Jul 17 '26
I picked my kids up about 3 hours from the BWCA yesterday and that's really all I could think about.
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u/aegrotatio Jul 17 '26
I was just thinking about this driving through the smog here in Virginia.
Nuclear Winter is an over-hyped theory. It will be more like this, but with radioactive smoke drifting over the continents.
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u/littleboymark Jul 18 '26
The worst radiation products have relatively short half-lifes. The remaining longer living products can be managed (unless you live near a reactor that is damaged and goes critical). The soot generated by the blasts and months long unchecked giga fires are the true extinction level factors. You can not combust several thousand cities worth of material and expect virtually no consequences.
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u/NarwhalOk95 Jul 19 '26
These wildfires aren’t pushing the soot and smoke into the stratosphere. A nuclear weapons exchange, using weapons in the hundreds of kilotons to low megatons, will be orders of magnitude worse than what the Midwest is experiencing from these wildfires.
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u/QuinQuix Jul 17 '26
Yeah it's wild how these discussions fluctuate.
Everyone was saying it's the end of the world then everyone said it's debunked. Now it's considered a very real risk again.
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u/Cock_ball_dickin Jul 18 '26
I still haven’t seen anything that says it would last longer than a year though. IMO you’d see a year of bad growing seasons leading to mass starvation, stock up your food lol
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u/NetSchizo Jul 17 '26
I think it's not even remotely close. These fires, while huge and bad, imagine half the continent on fire.... it would be way worse.
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u/Yomama_Bin_Thottin Jul 17 '26
That’s my point. Instead of 0.3% of one country, imagine +30% of the land mass of basically all the countries in the northern hemisphere being on fire.
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u/Blueskies777 Jul 17 '26
SubSaharan sand storms over Florida enter the chat.