“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” – Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Baghavad Gita, upon observing the successful detonation of the Trinity device in New Mexico, 1945.
An issue of the respected science journal Nature (Robock, 2011) discusses nuclear winter. Many people may recall that in the 1970’s about 70,000 nuclear weapons were pointed at various nations in a condition aptly named at the time Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD.
Translation: Try to pop me, and I’ll obliterate all your cities within 20 minutes.
Atmospheric and nuclear physicists, among a large number of other worried people all over the world, published several papers pointing out that the soot raised by a MAD nuclear exchange would lead to a massive and fatal drop in world temperatures.
Bottom line: those who die in the initial detonations would be the lucky ones. The rest of the human population would slowly freeze and starve to death. As children, this possibility preoccupied both of us a lot.
There is a precedent for this, by the way. About 74,000 years ago Toba (a supervolcano in Indonesia) erupted. According to scientists analyzing genetic diversity, this triggered a freeze that reduced the proto-human population worldwide to as few as 2,000 to 10,000 people, creating a bottleneck in human evolution (Gibbons, 1993; Ambrose, 1998). There are counter-arguments to this scenario, but we don’t have space here to jump down that rabbit hole.
Because of these and other studies, Ronald Reagan took steps in parallel with Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union to reduce the tension in the 1980’s – and together they reduced the worldwide arsenal. Today there are about 22,000 nuclear weapons in the world (in various states of readiness or not so ready), and the New Start Treaty between Russia and the United States hoped to potentially drop this number to 5,000. History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme (supposedly by Mark Twain) and we seem to be on a new cycle of nuclear threats as this is written.
The author of the Nature paper points out that there are at least 200 known (if unacknowledged) ballistic nuclear weapons in Israel, a rapidly-growing arsenal in increasingly unstable Pakistan, unknown arsenals in India and China, and a growing nuclear arsenal in increasingly bellicose North Korea. These all pose a growing and very real threat to humanity as a whole. Radioactivity and cancer reach far beyond the destruction zone of the initial blast.
Human history has a consistent and rather bad track record of one charismatic nut causing the deaths of millions of people at a time – Stalin’s Collectivization and Hitler’s Final Solution at 20,000,000 victims each come to mind. Up to 70,000,000 died during the political convulsions triggered by Mao Tse-tung in China (Schram, 2007).
The Nature author, Robock, refers to studies having access to far better atmospheric models than were available just a decade ago. These models can deal with more variables, they have a much finer 3-D modeling grid, and all of the modeling is based on much better experimental data. Here’s what the modeling now tells us:
Their initial assumption is a 50-Hiroshima-bomb equivalent nuclear exchange – say, an exchange between Pakistan and India, but Iran-Israel and North Korea vs. the US are other real possibilities. If lobbed at cities, the debris raised by these detonations will amount to a calculated 5 megatons of smoke and toxic soot. Open-air nuclear tests in the 1960’s show that this debris will quickly reach the Troposphere, and new models show it will be heated and rise to the Stratosphere, where it will circulate worldwide for years.
There’s no safe hidey-hole, either: radioactive debris from an exchange in the Northern Hemisphere will take a while, but it will reach and impact the Southern Hemisphere.
Fifty Hiroshima bombs will drop the worldwide average temperature by -0.7 degrees C. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is comparable to the temperature drop during the Little Ice Age (1400AD – 1850AD). During this time, millions died of famine in Europe alone.
An even larger exchange is a real possibility – and carries with it proportionally greater consequences. The modeling is not advanced enough yet to even know if the increase will in fact be proportional – it could push the Earth’s climate to a tipping-point where a new Glacial Age is precipitated. We know just enough to be scared, and this clearly comes across in the otherwise dry scientific discussion of the Nature article.
The underlying problem right now is that the human population is over 8 billion and growing, and it is meta-stable. By meta-stable, we mean that a small perturbation may have huge, disproportionate consequences. There are vast numbers of people living right now on the edge of survival – seeking food on a day-to-day basis. There are huge and persistent famines underway in North Korea and in much of Africa.
What can YOU do about this? As an individual, not much, beyond gathering at least some fraction of a year’s supply of food and water, and helping people in many other ways such as working at homeless shelters and volunteering at soup kitchens. Why would you bother? Because you may be able to help neighbors on your block and in east Africa when (not if) the worldwide food situation worsens.
Taking care of others is a basic responsibility for anyone who calls themselves followers of Christ. It is pounded into our awareness, repeatedly, in the Book of Mormon.