“What’s important about black carbon is it absorbs radiation very, very efficiently,” said Coupe. This soot, or black carbon, is the key factor in producing a nuclear winter. He said these urban fires would burn everything in sight, producing “a very dirty, sooty, smoke.” “Even asphalt can burn at the temperatures these bombs get to,” said Joshua Coupe, an atmospheric science doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday. And if those cities were hit, everything would likely burn. They noted that important metropolitan areas-population centers or cities with strategic value, for example-would likely be targeted. To weigh the intensity of a nuclear war between two well-armed nations, the team considered the current arsenals of the two countries. A nuclear winter would occur in the aftermath of nuclear blasts in cities smoke would effectively block out sunlight, causing below-freezing temperatures to engulf the world. If nuclear war broke out between the United States and Russia, the global repercussions would extend beyond politics and trigger major climatic trauma-specifically, a nuclear winter. They estimate a decade-long winter could linger after the explosions, wreaking havoc on temperatures, sunlight, and precipitation worldwide. The team used new climate models to approximate just how long-and how severe-the nuclear winter might be if Russia and the United States engage in nuclear conflict. Smoke from smoldering cities is projected to make its way to the stratosphere, where it will trigger a nuclear winter. In a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, researchers detail a decade of destruction following a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. These immediate effects are terrifying, but scientists say the fallout of a nuclear war would likely last well beyond the initial explosions. The thought of nuclear war may conjure images of looming mushroom clouds, duck and cover drills, or local radiation fallout.