Abstract
Atmospheric soot loadings from nuclear weapon detonation would cause disruptions to the Earth’s climate, limiting terrestrial and aquatic food production. Here, we use climate, crop and fishery models to estimate the impacts arising from six scenarios of stratospheric soot injection, predicting the total food calories available in each nation post-war after stored food is consumed. In quantifying impacts away from target areas, we demonstrate that soot injections larger than 5 Tg would lead to mass food shortages, and livestock and aquatic food production would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output, in almost all countries. Adaptation measures such as food waste reduction would have limited impact on increasing available calories. We estimate more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia—underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war.Main
Extraordinary events such as large volcanic eruptions or nuclear war could cause sudden global climate disruptions and affect food security. Global volcanic cooling caused by sulfuric acid aerosols in the stratosphere has resulted in severe famines and political instability, for example, after the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland1 or the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia2,3. For a nuclear war, the global cooling would depend on the yields of the weapons, the number of weapons and the targets, among other atmospheric and geographic factors. In a nuclear war, bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet4,5,6. Such soot loadings would cause decadal disruptions in Earth’s climate7,8,9, which would impact food production systems on land and in the oceans. In the 1980s, there were investigations of nuclear winter impacts on global agricultural production10 and food availability11 for 15 nations, but new information now allows us to update those estimates. Several studies have recently analysed changes of major grain crops12,13,14 and marine wild catch fisheries15 for different scenarios of regional nuclear war using climate, crop and fishery models. A war between India and Pakistan, which recently are accumulating more nuclear weapons with higher yield16, could produce a stratospheric loading of 5–47 Tg of soot. A war between the United States, its allies and Russia—who possess more than 90% of the global nuclear arsenal—could produce more than 150 Tg of soot and a nuclear winter4,5,6,7,8,9. While amounts of soot injection into the stratosphere from the use of fewer nuclear weapons would have smaller global impacts17, once a nuclear war starts, it may be very difficult to limit escalation18.
The scenarios we studied are listed in Table 1. Each scenario assumes a nuclear war lasting one week, resulting in the number and yield of nuclear weapons shown in the table and producing different amounts of soot in the stratosphere. There are many war scenarios that could result in similar amounts of smoke and thus similar climate shocks, including wars involving the other nuclear-armed nations (China, France, United Kingdom, North Korea and Israel)....
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"There! That's what I think of ye. Before an hour's out, I'll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour's out, ye'll laugh upon the other side. Them that die'll be the lucky ones...If now-concerned reader had asked why I went with the pirate "living/dead" thing I couldn't have explained to save my life but it turns out there was a reason. From WikiQuote:
...Disputed
- The living will envy the dead.
- The attribution of this widely quoted remark about nuclear war to Khrushchev is disputed in Respectfully Quoted : A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
- In Russia this quote is usually attributed to the translation of Treasure Island by Nikolay Chukovsky: "А те из вас, кто останется в живых, позавидуют мертвым!" ("Those of you who will stay alive will envy the dead", originally: "Them that die'll be the lucky ones").[2]
