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tonyPick submitted a story that was rewritten to become:

[Ed note: Let's preface this story with the reality that this is, in reality, a question that cannot be answered - how may warheads will be fired, where will they land, what are the weather conditions? That stated, it is an interesting thought experiment and understanding the actual science behind the question can take us away from emotional appeals to a more nuanced understanding of the actual risks. --martyb]

There's an interesting pair of articles over at The Conversation which discuss the potential impacts of smaller scale nuclear conflicts, the perceptions of them, and the risks involved in even localised conflicts.

Initially Mattia Eken argued in March that the threat is often exaggerated and overhyped:

Claims exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons have become commonplace, especially after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. In the early War on Terror years, Richard Lugar, a former US senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that terrorists armed with nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to the Western way of life. What he failed to explain is how.

It is by no means certain that a single nuclear detonation (or even several) would do away with our current way of life. Indeed, we're still here despite having nuked our own planet more than 2,000 times – a tally expressed beautifully in this video by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto).

While the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty forced nuclear tests underground, around 500 of all the nuclear weapons detonated were unleashed in the Earth's atmosphere. This includes the world's largest ever nuclear detonation, the 57-megaton bomb known as Tsar Bomba, detonated by the Soviet Union on October 30 1961.

Tsar Bomba was more than 3,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That is immense destructive power – but as one physicist explained, it's only "one-thousandth the force of an earthquake, one-thousandth the force of a hurricane".

He concluded that:

nuclear weapons are here to stay; they can't be "un-invented". If we want to live with them and mitigate the very real risks they pose, we must be honest about what those risks really are. Overegging them to frighten ourselves more than we need to keeps nobody safe.

More recently a response was published by Professor David McCoy, discussing research modelling the impact on environment and climate which indicates more significant long term impacts globally. Highlighting the impact of a limited conflict between India and Pakistan he discusses the worldwide impacts on global food production:

The greatest concern derives from relatively new research which has modelled the indirect effects of nuclear detonations on the environment and climate. The most-studied scenario is a limited regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, involving 100 Hiroshima-sized warheads (small by modern standards) detonated mostly over urban areas. Many analysts suggest that this is a plausible scenario in the event of an all-out war between the two states, whose combined arsenals amount to more than 220 nuclear warheads.

In this event, an estimated 20m people could die within a week from the direct effects of the explosions, fire, and local radiation. That alone is catastrophic – more deaths than in the entire of World War I.

Such an exchange would likely cause wide-spread fires casting megatons of soot into the stratosphere:

According to one study, maize production in the US (the world's largest producer) would decline by an average by 12% over ten years in our given scenario. In China, middle season rice would fall by 17% over a decade, maize by 16%, and winter wheat by 31%. With total world grain reserves amounting to less than 100 days of global consumption, such effects would place an estimated 2 billion people at risk of famine.

So much for a limited exchange. What if the US and Russia went at it?

A large-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia would be far worse. Most Russian and US weapons are 10 to 50 times stronger than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima. In a war involving the use of the two nations' strategic nuclear weapons (those intended to be used away from battlefield, aimed at infrastructure or cities), some 150m tonnes of soot could be lofted into the upper atmosphere. This would reduce global temperatures by 8°C – the "nuclear winter" scenario. Under these conditions, food production would stop and the vast majority of the human race is likely to starve.

The DPRK {North Korea) currently has nowhere near the nuclear stockpiles of Russia or the US or any of the other nuclear powers. It was not long ago that they had none at all. Were the DPRK to enter into battle with its entire current arsenal, it would be a calamity, yes. As time passes, even more weapons are being added to its arsenal. Do we accept that a limited exchange is necessary, now, to preclude an even more catastrophic exchange later? What about all the refugees that would stream north into China? What would happen to Seoul in South Korea from which so many high tech as well as heavy industry products come (think Samsung, Hyundai, etc.)

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