The Snark | When the Sun Goes Out | Nuclear Winter

The Day After

Everyone knows the mushroom cloud image: one flash, one fireball, one city erased. But the real nightmare isn’t what happens in the first minutes of a nuclear exchange – it’s what comes after. If two nuclear-armed nations go at it, the bombs don’t just kill millions on impact. They start fires. Cities burn for days, their buildings, cars, fuel depots, and forests vomiting smoke into the sky. And this smoke doesn’t behave politely, drifting away like a campfire plume. It punches upward, lifted by heat into the stratosphere, where it hangs for years. Sunlight gets blocked. Temperatures drop. Crops fail. Welcome to nuclear winter.

What Happens When the Sky Turns Black

In the 1980s, Carl Sagan and his colleagues first modeled what might happen if hundreds of nuclear weapons burned dozens of cities. Their prediction: the earth cools dramatically, global agriculture collapses, and famine sweeps across continents. More recent studies have scaled it down to terrifyingly realistic scenarios. One often cited: if India and Pakistan exchanged just 100 to 150 nuclear warheads – a fraction of the global arsenal – up to 150 million tons of soot could rise into the upper atmosphere. That’s enough to block out 20–40% of sunlight across the globe.

What would that look like? Imagine summer that feels like winter. The growing season shrinks to weeks, or vanishes entirely. Temperatures in major breadbasket regions – the U.S. Midwest, Ukraine, China – could plunge by 10–20 degrees Celsius. Even in the tropics, cold snaps would kill crops. Photosynthesis slows to a crawl. Oceans cool, circulation changes, monsoons weaken. Animals starve. Humans starve faster.

And it wouldn’t be over quickly. The soot doesn’t just rain back down. Up there in the stratosphere, it stays suspended. Models show the dimming could last 5–10 years. The first two would be catastrophic, but recovery could take decades.

The Human Consequences

Let’s play it out. Within weeks of the exchange, food exports collapse. Grain reserves run out in months. The UN has estimated that even a “limited” nuclear war in South Asia could lead to the starvation of 1–2 billion people. That’s not counting the chaos: failed states, civil wars, mass migrations, desperate borders. Imagine entire populations walking north or south, chasing a sun that no longer shines.

You think The Forlorn Hope was bad? They boiled their shoes and ate the dead to cross 100 miles of snow. Nuclear winter is that, but global: billions of people, all boiling metaphorical shoes at once. And the worst part? The survivors would be asking themselves the same question: do we turn back, or keep walking into the dark?

What Writers Can Do With It

For writers, nuclear winter is agony on a scale fiction rarely dares to touch. You don’t just put a few characters through hell – you put the whole species there. And the beauty (the terrible beauty) is that it isn’t even science fiction. It’s science fact.

• You can write the scientist who saw it coming and was ignored.

• The farmer who tries to grow wheat in frozen mud.

• The family fighting their neighbors over a single can of beans.

• The soldier who deserts when he realizes there’s nothing left to defend.

• The priest preaching hope under a blackened sky.

The Forlorn Hope gave you seventeen people trudging through snow, breaking apart under hunger and despair. Nuclear winter gives you billions of Forlorn Hopes, each one a personal drama of survival, surrender, or betrayal.

Writers love to dream up apocalypses: zombies, asteroids, plagues. But here’s one waiting in the wings, entirely real, entirely possible, and arguably more terrifying than any fiction. Because when the sun goes out, the story doesn’t. It multiplies.

The Snark