Nuclear Winter — What does it mean?

With the recent events surprising quite a lot of us, anxiety about a third world war skyrocketed. Especially after the thread of a nuclear attack, everyone heard the term “nuclear winter”. What does this mean? Would it be the end of humanity?

Gernot Gradwohl
3 min readMar 15, 2022
Photo by Florian van Duyn on Unsplash

After the thread of Putin that he would use nuclear weapons if a country decides to step into this war with Ukraine I started to hear the term “nuclear winter” quite often. Since I wasn’t sure what this means I started to investigate it a little bit.

What is a nuclear winter?

Because of the extreme destructive power of a nuclear bomb the climate will change if enough of the bombs will explode in a short enough time frame. Nuclear winter is the word for a such an event.

When such a bomb goes off it will burn everything in a certain area. Houses, cars, trees and everything else. This things will burn with such a high temperature that the soot will rise high up in the atmosphere. When enough of this soot accumulates there it will block enough direct sunlight so that the temperature here on the ground will drastically decrease. Some researchers are suggesting that the average temperature will…

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Gernot Gradwohl

Passionate programmer. Love the elegance of Ruby. Recently started to dig into functional programming with Elixir.