“A heading in one recent report concerned with effects of nuclear detonations reads, ‘Megatons Mean Fire Storms,’ and the report predicts that a 20-megaton nuclear burst is sure to produce a 300-square mile fire storm. [Reference: Gerard Piel (then the anti-civil defense publisher of the Scientific American), ‘The Illusion of Civil Defense,’ published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1962, pp. 2-8.] The report further states that blastproof bomb shelters afforded no protection in World War II fire storms, and the reader is left to conclude that vast fire storm areas in which there will be no survivors are an assured consequence of future nuclear attacks. … the 40,000-50,000 persons killed by the fire storm at Hamburg constituted only 14 to 18 percent of the people in the fire storm area and 3 to 4 percent of Hamburg’s total population at the time of the attack. … Two of three buildings in a 4.5 square mile area were burning 20 minutes after the incendiary attack began at Hamburg, and similar figures were reported for other German fire storm cities.”

- Robert M. Rodden, Floyd I. John, and Richard Laurino, Exploratory Analysis of Fire Storms, Stanford Research Institute, AD616638, 1965, pages 1, 5.

Media lying about the thermal ignitions (leading to lies about firestorms and nuclear winter caused by the soot of such fires blocking sunlight) can be traced back to the secret classification of the full three-volume 1947 report on Hiroshima by the Strategic Bombing Survey, which was edited out of the brief single volume “summary” that the openly published a year earlier, 1946. Here is the key revelation (originally ‘secret’ May 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, pp. 4-6):

‘Six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet [975 m] of air zero stated that black cotton black-out curtains were ignited by flash heat… A large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was, however, in agreement that a great majority of the original fires were started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires …There had been practically no rain in the city for about 3 weeks. The velocity of the wind … was not more than 5 miles [8 km] per hour…. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion… almost no effort was made to fight this conflagration … There were no automatic sprinkler systems in building…’ [Emphasis added.]

Please show me a modern city that is today built out of 1945 Hiroshima style wood frame houses with charcoal stoves amid bamboo furnishings and paper screens. Even Hiroshima is no longer built like that, it’s a modern steel, concrete, and brick city and would not suffer a firestorm if a bomb dropped on it again. By the way, the “nuclear winter” from the Hiroshima fire storm blocked out the sun for 25 minutes (from burst time at 8:15 am until 8:40) in Hiroshima as shown by the meteorological sunshine records printed in Figure 6 (3H) of Drs. Ashley W. Oughterson, Henry L. Barnett, George V. LeRoy, Jack D. Rosenbaum, Averill A. Liebow, B. Aubrey Schneider, and E. Cuyler Hammond, Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs: The Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, Volume 1, Office of the Air Surgeon, report NP-3036, April 19, 1951, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (linked here). There were no reported casualties due to 25 minutes of sunlight deprivation.

So even where city firestorms have actually occurred, there was not a nuclear winter. What about the theoretical predictions that a nuclear attack on oil supplies will cause a nuclear winter, made by the founder of nuclear winter hype, Paul Crutzen? Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army invaded Kuwait and set all of its oil wells on fire as it was driven back into Iraq by America in 1991.

Peter Aldhous, ‘Oil-well climate catastrophe?’, Nature, vol. 349 (1991), p. 96:

‘The fears expressed last week centred around the cloud of soot that would result if Kuwait’s oil wells were set alight by Iraqi forces … with effects similar to those of the “nuclear winter” … Paul Crutzen, from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, has produced some rough calculations which predict a cloud of soot covering half of the Northern Hemisphere within 100 days. Crutzen … estimates that temperatures beneath such a cloud could be reduced by 5-10 degrees C …’

Dr Richard D. Small of Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation, California, responded in Nature, vol. 350 (1991), pp. 11-12, that 16,000 metric tons of actual soot is produced from 220,000 metric tons of oil burned every day, and anyway:

‘My estimates of the smoke produced by destruction of Kuwait’s oil wells and refineries and the smoke stabilization altitude do not support any of the purported impacts. The smoke is not injected high enough to spread over large areas of the Northern Hemisphere, nor is enough produced to cause a measurable temperature change or failure of the monsoons.’

It turned out that the nuclear winter hype was false, because even if you do somwhow manage to start a firestorm in the modern world (the wooden medieval areas of Hamburg and Dresden weren’t rebuilt with wood after they burned in firestorms), it simply doen’t produce a stable layer of soot in the stratosphere like the computer simulation. At Hiroshima the soot returned to the ground promptly because it is hydroscopic: it forms water droplets, rain. (It wasn’t fallout: the firestorm took over 20 minutes to get doing, by which time the radioactive mushroom cloud had been blown miles downwind.)

“Do you expect us to believe that the authors of these publications are unaware of these points of yours? Shouldn’t you first try to submit such critiques for publication in similar journals to the articles on the other side, before asking non-expert readers to believe you are more expert than the other authors?”

Well, there are disciplinary issues here, as well as historical ones.

I read with great interest the piece in the _Scientific American_ and I’ll willingly grant that the predicted consequences would follow from the assumed causes. However, even a peer-reviewed paper may only have been validated with respect to the disciplinary field it is addressing. A climate science paper will be validated by other climate scientists looking for what *they* find interesting, i.e. a novel way to perturb the climate and original predictions of climatic effects down the line. But the reviewers might not take issue with the underlying assumptions (they would be ignoring the fact that cows aren’t spherical and of homogeneous density, to quote an old joke) about the initial conditions.

And while it is purely subjective, I was struck by the authors’ insistence that their past work could now be applied to a new and different situation, spanning at least an order of magnitude in distance from the original case study. No, I haven’t looked into the issue, but to what extent are they continuing to use the same models they used two decades ago, when computers were much less powerful and simplifying assumptions were absolutely necessary? I’d be leery of rejecting out of hand some of the objections raised above.

Can non-expert readers look at papers and historical record that say that historically no firestorm occured in Nagasaki ?

I will try to publish my article.

I do not see the authors mentioning the building composition or having any focus on the firestorm starting aspect. It is taken as an assumption that firestorms will occur. They only take loading into account to say how big the fires get.

They only listed the 200 weapons for India and 200 for Pakistan and the 100 kt per weapon. I do not see any serious attempt to investigate it. They do not discuss targeting and likely nuclear war targeting strategy. they do not discuss delivery mechanisms. Most of Pakistan and India’s weapons must be delivered by planes. If those planes are blown up on the ground and the airfields destroyed then it will be tough for the attacked side to respond. Only the missiles that are not destroyed could respond.

This is standard analysis methods used for analysing situations during the cold War.

Again non-experts can grasp that if you assume all the weapons are launched and hit cities that this shows that the authors of that scenario chose not to try to make a first pass at that aspect of the question.

Can non-experts take the time to read all of the powerpoints and research papers on the Robock and Toon pages ? It is tedious but yes it can be done. Can it be seen that 90-95% of the work all relates to proving the climate effect after the smoke is in the stratosphere ? I think it can be. Can it be seen that Robock and Toon make no attempt to personally analyze the firestorm ignition aspect ?
I say it can be without expert opinion.

I see dozens of powerpoints and papers on the Robock and Toon sites. I have looked them over and it is quite clear that I as a non-expert can read and only see climate analysis. they do not deeply examine how many nuclear weapons are there, how many would be launched in a realistic scenario, what they would target, what the composition of the cities are, topology and city layout, firestorm ignition conditions, how much smoke there would be from a partially burning city. If I missed some critical powerpoint or paper then a non-expert can find the link and present it.

A non-expert can also determine that the Robock and Toon case is based upon many cities burning nearly completely and if this is shown to be clearly not the case then the rest of the analysis has lost a foundational element. they could say that it would be bad for an attacker to hit cities with a lot of extra fire accelerants (fuel, incindiaries etc…) to help ensure that all of the cities burn to help meet the starting conditions.

I will send my questions to Robock and Toon and give them an opportunity to show that I am wrong that they have considered this and have a case on this.

I see no claims that my case is flawed on any technical basis. You are just saying that I have not published and they have so they must be more right. This seems to be going to a bias to authority, which goes counter to the overcomingbias of the title.

Does India, Pakistan have more and bigger nuclear weapons ? 200 each and 100kt average or do they eah have less than 90 with most at 25kt.

Did Nagasaki have a firestorm ? If that does not matter then why not ?

Are there counter documents and studies which indicate that starting citywide firestorms are easier ?

EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS OF FIRE STORMS
http://www.stormingmedia.us/83/8366/0836616.html

1. Firestorms are not so easy to start

Firestorms have always required at least 50% of buildings to be ignited. A 71 pages long report by Robert M. Rodden, Floyd I. John, and Richard Laurino, Exploratory Analysis of Fire Storms, Stanford Research Institute, California, report AD616638, May 1965, identified the following parameters required by all firestorms:

2. Nagasaki did not have a firestorm

Problems of fire in Nuclear Warfare (1961), Jerald E. Hill,
Rand Corporation

Jerald E. Hill
Rand Corporation

In Nagasaki, in spite of the similar yield, altitude of burst and weather conditions, a fire storm did not develop, probably because of the uneven terrain, the irregular layout of the city and the location of ground zero. In a long relatively narrow river valley north of the center of the city.

the mechanism for the firestorm in Hiroshima which had nothing to do with thermal radiation but was just due to overturned breakfast charcoal braziers

3. From indian housing census
Material of Roofs in India

Concrete 19.8%
Tiles 32.6%
Grass, wood, mud 21.9%
Other 25.7%

Material of Walls

Burnt Brick 43.7%
Mud, Unburnt Brick 32.2%
Grass, Wood, etc. 10.2%
Other 13.9%

.
4. The original case listed pakistan and india each having 200 nukes of 100kt each. Most reports have each having less than 90 nukes and most being 25kt. Targeting in an exchange would have one side shooting first and trying to take out the other nukes. Seems like a max of 100 nukes exchanged

I can guarantee that this is the case. I have heard arguments about the average temperature on Mars used as the sole support for the proposition that we should stop worrying about climate change.

http://partnershipsinaction.org/downloads/briefs/Building_and_Construction_Improvement_Pakistan.pdf

http://pakistaniat.com/2009/05/28/architecture-mud-homes/

But if its not the fire itself but instead the power of the bomb blowing the rubbish into the atmosphere then the big eruptions in recorded history displaced over 100 billion cubic meters (vs 50 million tonnes or so of soot) of stuff into the air much higher than (i presume) a nuclear bomb could throw things.

Both of those seem to have made a bit less than a degree of difference. So either they are over estimating or they seem to have some other assumptions that they should highlight…