My last couple of blog posts had to do with the Stuxnet computer worm and the Iranian nuclear program. The Saudis, the Iranians and the Israelis are engaged in a complex conflict over the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, there is another nuclear problem in the same part of the world. Pakistan and India have gone to war three times since they were created in 1949. They both possess nuclear weapons and have threatened to use them.
India and Pakistan both have about one hundred nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them. If they went to war, it would be a small exchange of warheads when compared to the U.S. and Russia which each have over a thousand warheads aimed at each other. If either the Pakistanis or the Indians executed a first strike that overwhelmed the other, within months, the fallout from the nuclear blasts would be carried back into the attacking country by the changing wind patterns. It would really be a no win scenario.
Recently, the Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility updated a study that was first published in 2012. The study covered the potential global effects of a nuclear war between Pakistan and India. Beyond the immediate tens of millions of deaths where their bombs fell, there would be serious global impacts.
The study concluded that the result of such a war would be a global famine caused by the particles of black carbon that would be injected into the atmosphere by even a limited nuclear exchange. The U.S. corn and soybean production would drop by at least ten percent and the Chinese rice production would drop by at least twenty one percent over four years. Chinese wheat production would be hard hit as well. It would drop fifty percent in the first year after the war and would still be thirty percent lower than current levels for ten years. The study estimated that over a billion people would die as a result of the famine cause by the nuclear war.
It is likely that such a devastating event would cause many additional global problems. The fallout would spread around the planet, endangering all life. The need for medical care for survivors would be enormous. The destroyed infrastructure in either or both combatants would put the survivors at risk with the loss of electrical power, water purification, and distribution networks for food and medicine. Disease would run wild through Pakistan, India and beyond, killing tens of millions more. Refugees would flood into surrounding countries, toppling governments and inciting armed conflict. In other parts of the world, totalitarian governments would come to power as traumatized citizens fell prey to demagogues. It is likely that human civilization itself would so heavily impacted by such a war that the world could fall into a hellish dark ages. The only solution to such a possibility is to work for the total elimination of all nuclear weapons in all of the nine countries currently known or believed to possess them and strenuous efforts to keep other countries from developing them.
