Part 1 of 2 Parts
I have posted about the devastating aftermath of even a small exchange of nuclear weapons would lead to a worldwide famine according to new research. Soot from burning cities and military targets would spread around the planet and cool it by reflecting sunlight back into space. The result would be a massive failure of crops worldwide. In a worst case scenario, billions of people would die.
Lili Xia is a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick led the team in the new research. She said, “A large percent of the people will be starving. It’s really bad.” Her research was published in the August 15 issue of the journal Nature Food. The report is the latest in a though experiment that has been going on for decades about the global consequences of nuclear war. Considering the danger of a nuclear war triggered by the war in Ukraine, this study is especially relevant. The Ukraine war has already disrupted global food supplies, which emphasizes the far-reaching impacts of a regional conflict.
Discussions of nuclear war covers a range of lethal impacts form killing people directly in atomic detonations to the linger effects of radiation and other environmental pollution. Xia and her team wanted to look at more remote consequences farther from the scene of a war. They wanted to explore how people all around the plante could also suffer.
Xia and her team modelled how the climate would change in different parts of the world following a nuclear war. They wanted to know how crops and fisheries would be affected by those changes. Xia’s team analyzed six different war scenarios. Each of these would inject different amounts of soot into the atmosphere. This would result in a drop of surface temperatures from two degrees to twenty degrees Fahrenheit which would last for at least a decade.
A nuclear war between India and Pakistan which could be triggered by their dispute over the Kashmir region, could toss between five millions and forty seven tons of soot into the atmosphere. The exact amount of soot would be dependent on how many warheads were exchanged and how many cities destroyed. On the other hand, a full nuclear war between the United States and Russia could produce one hundred and fifty million tons of soot. The global-encircling shroud of soot would last for years until the skies eventually cleared.
Xia and her team used information from United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. They calculated how declining crop yields and fishery catches after a nuclear war would affect the number of calories available for people to eat. They studied several options that would affect their calculations such as whether people continued to raise livestock or whether they routed some or all crops meant to feed livestock to feed human beings instead. The study assumed that there would be some repurposing of biofuel crops for human consumption. People would be forced to reduce or eliminate food waste. The researchers also assumed that international trade would stop as countries chose to feed their citizens rather than exporting food.
Please read Part 2 next