Billions Would Die in Even 'Limited' Nuclear War
For months now, thanks to the bold and belligerent behavior of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the world has been once again worried about the potential for nuclear war.
Putin has been taking a great deal of international heat over his decision to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine, but in an effort to fend off any potential interference, he and his media surrogates have been suggesting that they’d have no problem popping off a few atomic weapons.
Now, as experts begin to extrapolate the potential for disaster in such a scenario, a terrifying new reality is taking shape.
A nuclear conflict involving less than 3% of the world’s stockpiles could kill a third of the world’s population within two years, according to a new international study led by scientists at Rutgers University. A larger nuclear conflict between Russia and the United States could kill three-fourths of the world’s population in the same timeframe, according to the research published Monday in Nature Food.
“It’s really a cautionary tale that any use of nuclear weapons could be a catastrophe for the world,” said climate scientist and study author Alan Robock, a distinguished professor in Rutgers’ Department of Environmental Sciences.
The weapons could set off a chain reaction of issues.
The detonation of even just a small fraction of the world’s nuclear weapons would spark massive firestorms that would rapidly inject sun-blocking soot into the atmosphere, touching off a sudden cooling of the climate, the researchers theorized.
Advertisement - story continues belowResearchers used climate models to calculate how much smoke would reach the stratosphere — where no precipitation occurs to wash it away — and how this would change temperature, precipitation and sunlight. Then they calculated how these changes would affect the production of various crops, as well as how fish would respond to changes in the ocean.
As a result, they projected that tens of millions of immediate fatalities in the war zone would be followed by hundreds of millions of starvation deaths around the globe.
And, on top of that, the potential damage to the ozone layer that would occur on account of such a weapon’s use would irradiate crops with far more ultraviolet light than usual, creating yet another hurdle for the global food supply.