Nuclear Winter still possible, new research finds

In 2007, a team of scientists published papers describing their research on nuclear winter. They looked not only at whether a nuclear winter could still happen as a result of a nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States (the two countries still harbor most of the world's 26,000 remaining nuclear weapons) - it could - but also what the effects might be of a "limited" exchange. Using India and Pakistan as examples, they hypothesized an exchange of 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs each and modeled the resulting plumes of ash and smoke. The two studies - Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of individual nuclear terrorism by Brian Toon et al and Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts by Alan Robock et al, found that such a conflict could devastate global agriculture, creating a nuclear winter-like effect.