More than 5 billion people would die of hunger following a full-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia, according to a global study led by Rutgers climate scientists, published Aug. 15 in the journal Nature Food [9]. The team estimated how much sun-blocking soot would enter the atmosphere from firestorms that would be ignited by the detonation of nuclear weapons. Researchers calculated soot dispersal from six scenarios—from a regional India-Pakistan exchange to a large US-Russia war.
The data then were entered into the Community Earth System Model (CESM [12]), a climate forecasting tool supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR [13]). The CESM Community Land Model [14] was used to estimate productivity of major crops (maize, rice, wheat and soybean) on a country-by-country basis. The researchers also examined projected changes to livestock pasture and in global marine fisheries.
Under even the smallest nuclear scenario, a localized war between India and Pakistan, global average caloric production decreased 7% within five years of the conflict. In the largest scenario—a full-scale US-Russia nuclear conflict—global average caloric production decreased by about 90% three to four years after the exchange.
"The data tell us one thing: We must prevent a nuclear war from ever happening," said Alan Robock, professor of climate science with the Department of Environmental Sciences [10] at Rutgers University and co-author of the study. (Phys.Org [15])
Other studies [16] have found that a full-scale US-Russia exchange could bring on nuclear winter [17] and potentially mean human extinction [18].
