There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchang

There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of that scenario but I could use "kill off 99.9999% of living things and cause 20-50% of species to go extinct in a few years". I have a PhD in Earth Science and have studied this issue some, but atmospheric modeling is not my specialty. If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned. P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is. [1] https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report