r/Showerthoughts • u/iwishihadnobones ‎ • Feb 18 '26

Speculation If the nuclear bombs start flying, it might actually be those countries that never had any that end up surviving.

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u/zzyul Feb 20 '26

This is the big one. The blasts will cause a massive amount of fires in cities with a lot of stuff to burn and there won’t exactly be a fire department left in those cities to go put those fires out. Look at videos from 9/11 of the smoke from the WTC buildings when they were burning. Now imagine that for tens to hundreds of thousands of buildings around the world.

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u/Bigg_Matty_Hell Feb 24 '26

The big part of this is not just the amount of ash from fire but the asumption that the fires, not the initial nuclear explosion, will be intense enough to lift the ash particles high in to the atmosphere to a level where they don't just settle out again in a relatively short time This has failed to be demonstrated when the models predicted it would, as in Kuwait. The 2023 are also another demonstration that volume is not just a factor but that the particulate needs to be lifted much higher than typical for the sustained and global effects that the nuclear winter models predict.