[Peace-discuss] Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War.

[Brussel Morton K.]

The statements below are from a report  in Physics Today, a  
periodical of the American Institute of Physics. The complete  
article, by Owen B. Toon, Alan Robock, and Richard P. Turco,
can be referenced at

http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_61/ 
iss_12/37_1.shtml?type=PTALERT

and is entitled Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War.

Note that it states that even a limited nuclear exchange between  
Pakistan and India would have harsh global effects.

…Scientific debate and analysis of the issues discussed in this  
article are essential not only to ascertain the science behind the  
results but also to create political action. Gorbachev, who together  
with Reagan had the courage to initiate the builddown of nuclear  
weapons in 1986, said in an interview at the 2000 State of the World  
Forum, “Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a  
nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely  
destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great  
stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that  
situation.” Former vice president Al Gore noted in his 2007 Nobel  
Prize acceptance speech, “More than two decades ago, scientists  
calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and soot into  
the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere,  
causing a ‘nuclear winter.’ Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo  
helped galvanize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.”

Many researchers have evaluated the consequences of single nuclear  
explosions, and a few groups have considered the results of a small  
number of explosions. But our work represents the only unclassified  
study of the consequences of a regional nuclear conflict and the only  
one to consider the consequences of a nuclear exchange involving the  
SORT arsenal. Neither the US Department of Homeland Security nor any  
other governmental agency in the world currently has an unclassified  
program to evaluate the impact of nuclear conflict. Neither the US  
National Academy of Sciences, nor any other scientific body in the  
world, has conducted a study of the issue in the past 20 years.

That said, the science community has long recognized the importance  
of nuclear winter. It was investigated by numerous organizations  
during the 1980s, all of which found the basic science to be sound.  
Our most recent calculations also support the nuclear-winter concept  
and show that the effects would be more long lasting and therefore  
worse than thought in the 1980s.

Nevertheless, a misperception that the nuclear-winter idea has been  
discredited has permeated the nuclear policy community. That error  
has resulted in many misleading policy conclusions. For instance, one  
research group recently concluded that the US could successfully  
destroy Russia in a surprise first-strike nuclear attack.10 However,  
because of nuclear winter, such an action might be suicidal. To  
recall some specifics, an attack by the US on Russia and China with  
2200 weapons could produce 86.4 Tg of soot, enough to create Ice Age  
conditions, affect agriculture worldwide, and possibly lead to mass  
starvation.

Lynn Eden of the Center for International Security and Cooperation  
explores the military view of nuclear damage in her book Whole World  
on Fire.11 Blast is a sure result of a nuclear explosion. And  
military planners know how to consider blast effects when they  
evaluate whether a nuclear force is capable of destroying a target.  
Fires are collateral damage that may not be planned or accounted for.  
Unfortunately, that collateral damage may be capable of killing most  
of Earth’s population.

Climate and chemistry models have greatly advanced since the 1980s,  
and the ability to compute the environmental changes after a nuclear  
conflict has been much improved. Our climate and atmospheric  
chemistry work is based on standard global models from NASA Goddard’s  
Institute for Space Studies and from the US National Center for  
Atmospheric Research. Many scientists have used those models to  
investigate climate change and volcanic eruptions, both of which are  
relevant to considerations of the environmental effects of nuclear  
war. In the past two decades, researchers have extensively studied  
other bodies whose atmospheres exhibit behaviors corresponding to  
nuclear winter; included in such studies are the thermal structure of  
Titan’s ambient atmospheres and the thermal structure of Mars’s  
atmosphere during global dust storms. Like volcanoes, large forest  
fires regularly produce phenomena similar to those associated with  
the injection of soot into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear  
attack. Although plenty remains to be done, over the past 20 years  
scientists have gained a much greater understanding of natural  
analogues to nuclear-weapons explosions.

Substantial uncertainties attend the analysis presented in this  
article; references 5 and 8 discuss many of them in detail. Some  
uncertainties may be reduced relatively easily. To give a few  
examples: Surveys of fuel loading would reduce the uncertainty in  
fuel consumption in urban firestorms. Numerical modeling of large  
urban fires would reduce the uncertainty in smoke plume heights.  
Investigations of smoke removal in pyrocumulus clouds associated with  
fires would reduce the uncertainty in how much soot is actually  
injected into the upper atmosphere. Particularly valuable would be  
analyses of agricultural impacts associated with the climate changes  
following regional conflicts.

For any nuclear conflict, nuclear winter would seriously affect  
noncombatant countries.12 In a hypothetical SORT war, for example, we  
estimate that most of the world’s population, including that of the  
Southern Hemisphere, would be threatened by the indirect effects on  
global climate. Even a regional war between India and Pakistan, for  
instance, has the potential to dramatically damage Europe, the US,  
and other regions through global ozone loss and climate change. The  
current nuclear buildups in an increasing number of countries point  
to conflicts in the next few decades that would be more extreme than  
a war today between India and Pakistan. The growing number of  
countries with weapons also makes nuclear conflict more likely.

The environmental threat posed by nuclear weapons demands serious  
attention. It should be carefully analyzed by governments worldwide— 
advised by a broad section of the scientific community—and widely  
debated by the public.
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