Over the past few weeks, the military conflict between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan has once again raised a striking question: What impact does a “limited” nuclear war have on the global climate? The answer is not reassuring. Over the past decade, studies have found that such conflicts will be able to cause a catastrophic global nuclear winter, and recent work predicts that more than 2 billion people may be killed – after famine and disease, ultimately causing tens of millions.
Special dangers of global nuclear war
In the 1980s and early 1990s, a series of scientific papers published by Soviet and Western scientists, including the famous scientist Carl Sagan, host of the PBS “Cosmos” TV series, and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, had terrible consequences for the global climate of major nuclear exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union. They said the nuclear explosion would make large-scale dust clouds high into the stratosphere, blocking so much sunshine that nuclear winters would lead to nuclear winters. Global temperatures will keep 20-40 degrees Celsius for several months and keep 2-6 degrees Celsius lower for one to three years. Up to 70% of the Earth's protective stratospheric ozone layer will be destroyed, allowing large doses of UV or UV to reach the surface. This UV light will kill many of the marine organisms that form the basis of the food chain, leading to the collapse of the fishery and the hunger of people and animals that depend on it. UV rays will also blind animals, and then they will linger and starve. Cold and dust can cause widespread crop failure and global famine, killing billions of people who have not died in nuclear explosions.
Nuclear Winter Papers are widely attributed to the nuclear weapons reduction treaty that led to the 1990s, because it is clear that we are risking catastrophic global climate change in the context of a full-scale nuclear war.
Even “limited” nuclear power can kill billions of dollars
But even the limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan is a catastrophic threat to the Earth's climate. Brian Toon of the University of Colorado, Alan Robock of Rutgers University and Rich Turco of UCLA's landmark 2008 paper concluded that the war between India and Pakistan produced 15 kiloton tabtery of City in each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons, which would immediately explode in the city, which would immediately kill 45 million million million million million millionaires.
And the 2014 paper led by Michael Mills of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “years of global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss after regional nuclear conflicts” found that the ultimate loss would be global and astronomy higher.
Mills and his co-authors used a climate model of the Earth system, including atmospheric chemistry, ocean dynamics and interactive sea ice and land components to study a limited nuclear war in which each side emits 50 15 kilograms of weapons – an estimated 340 or more warheads in India and Pakistan are estimated to be 30%. Suppose these cities exploded and started 100 fires. Fires are self-feeding fires that draw air into itself and create huge columns of smoke that spread into the stratosphere and spread around the world. The model predicts that smoke can prevent the sun from energy enough to reduce the global average temperature by 1.25 degrees Celsius for three to four years and reduce intake by more than 0.5 degrees in a decade.
This impact will be similar to what happened after the largest volcanic eruption in history, the Tambella eruption in Indonesia in 1815. The cooling of this eruption triggered a notorious year, with no summer in the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, when killing the frost every month in New England destroyed agriculture and caused enormous difficulties. The unusually cold and wet weather in Europe has triggered widespread harvest failures, leading to famine and economic collapse.
However, the cooling effect of the eruption lasted only about three years. The cooling of limited nuclear exchange will last five to ten years without summer, while crop yields have significantly reduced by more than a decade. Killing frost will reduce the growth season by 10-40 days per year in the medium term for five years. Global precipitation will fall by 6% in the first five years and 4.5% in 10 years, resulting in a severe increase in regional drought. In Asian monsoon regions including the Middle East, Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, rainfall will also drop by 20-80% per year, so even the “winners” of the nuclear war between India and Pakistan will suffer devastating famine due to the failure of the genetic monsoon rainfall in life.
The destruction of ozone will lead to another global disaster. As the stratosphere absorbs the smoke of sunlight, the stratosphere will heat up to 30 degrees Celsius (54°F). In the thermal stratosphere, chemical reactions destroy ozone, resulting in a global ozone loss of 20-50% in densely populated areas. UV rays will increase by 30-80% in mid-latitude, which could cause widespread damage to human health, agriculture, as well as terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
Latest research
The latest research reinforces these conclusions. The catastrophic forest fires in Canada in 2017, and a large amount of smoke in Australia entered the stratosphere in 2019 and 2020. These events allow researchers to test models of what nuclear war might do.
A 2022 paper, led by Lili Xia of Rutgers University, “Global Food Insecurity and Reduced Famine, Reduced Crop, Marine Fisheries and Livestock Production Due to Climate Destruction from Smoke Injected by Nuclear Wars”, uses the latest climate, crop and fisheries models to determine the impact of nuclear war on human survival.
“In a nuclear war, bombs targeting urban and industrial areas will begin to fire, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which will be spread across the planet globally,” the author wrote. “Such ash load will result in a decade-long disruption in the Earth’s climate, which will affect food production systems on land and oceans.”
They estimate that more than 2 billion people will die in a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan. The 100 nuclear weapons used in this war represent only 0.8% of the world's total nuclear arsenal of more than 12,000 warheads, and the authors estimate that more than 5 billion warheads could die in the global nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
In an article in the 2023 Journal of Public Health Policy, Andreas Vilhelmsson and Seth Baum implored experts and public health experts and agencies to study the potential catastrophic health impacts of nuclear winter: “Given the global scope of the nuclear winter, public health experts and agencies should be involved from around the world.”
Most importantly: Preventing nuclear war is crucial to protecting the future of mankind.
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