Although Kearny was of the opinion that future more accurate models would " indicate there will be even smaller reductions in temperature " , including future potential models that did not so readily accept that firestorms would occur as dependably as nuclear winter modellers assume , in '' NWSS '' Kearny did summarize the comparatively moderate cooling estimate of no more than a few days , from the 1986 '' Nuclear Winter Reappraised '' model by Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider . This was done in an effort to convey to his readers that contrary to the popular opinion at the time , in the conclusion of these two climate scientists , " on scientific grounds the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishing low level of probability . " However while a 1988 article by Brian Martin in '' Science and Public Policy '' states that although '' Nuclear Winter Reappraised '' concluded the US-Soviet " nuclear winter " would be much less severe than originally thought , with the authors describing the effects more as a " nuclear autumn " , other statements by Thompson and Schneider show that they " resisted the interpretation that this means a rejection of the basic points made about nuclear winter " . In the Alan Robock et al. 2007 paper they write that " because of the use of the term ' nuclear autumn ' by Thompson and Schneider 1986 , even though the authors made clear that the climatic consequences would be large , in policy circles the theory of nuclear winter is considered by some to have been exaggerated and disproved e.g. , Martin , 1988 . " In 2007 Schneider expressed his tentative support for the cooling results of the limited nuclear war ( Pakistan and India ) analyzed in the 2006 model , saying " The sun is much stronger in the tropics than it is in mid-latitudes . Therefore , a much more limited war there could have a much larger effect , because you are putting the smoke in the worst possible place " , and " anything that you can do to discourage people from thinking that there is any way to win anything with a nuclear exchange is a good idea . " The contribution of smoke from the ignition of live non-desert vegetation , living forests , grasses and so on , nearby to many missile silos is a source of smoke originally assumed to be very large in the initial " Twilight at Noon " paper , and also found in the popular TTAPS publication . However , this assumption was examined by Bush and Small in 1987 and they found that the burning of live vegetation could only conceivably contribute very slightly to the estimated total " nonurban smoke production " . With the vegetation 's potential to sustain burning only probable if it is within a radius or two from the surface of the nuclear fireball , which is at a distance that would also experience extreme blast winds that would influence any such fires . This reduction in the estimate of the non-urban smoke hazard is supported by the earlier preliminary '' Estimating Nuclear Forest Fires '' publication of 1984 , and by the 1950 – 60s in-field examination of surface-scorched , mangled but never burnt-down tropical forests on the surrounding islands from the shot points in the Operation Castle , and Operation Redwing test series
mangled
Operation Blowdown
Nuclear winter