The Science is Clear: Using Nuclear Weapons Could Mean Humanity’s Demise
By:
Guy Quinlan, President, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy
As the Tenth Review Conference of Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) winds down, the situation around nuclear weapons couldn’t be more dire. With geopolitical tensions having reached heights not experienced since the Cold War, the lurking thought of a nuclear catastrophe has crept into the minds of many. People are right to be apprehensive, any use of nuclear weapons would spell the end of our planet as we know it.
In a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, hundreds of millions of deaths from blast, fire, and radiation would be only the beginning. In a study released on August 15, 2022, Rutgers climate scientists Lili Xia, Alan Robock, and their colleagues calculate that five billion people would subsequently die from hunger.
Smoke and soot from firestorms caused by nuclear explosions would linger in the atmosphere for years, blocking sunlight. This would cause drastic drops in global temperature and lead to massive crop failures. Even a much smaller nuclear war between India and Pakistan is calculated to lead to two billion hunger deaths.
Another scientific study released this summer calculates the effects of a nuclear war on the ocean. It finds that, in addition to the massive crop failures mentioned above, “the nuclear cooling event” would decimate marine life and cause massive expansion of sea ice, ushering in a “Nuclear Little Ice Age.” Climate models indicate that the ocean would take many decades to return to normal.
To subject humanity and the planet to this kind of danger from the threat of nuclear weapons is not only a flagrant violation of international law but also an affront to reason and to human decency. But we must not let fear cripple our means for action. This can start with the governments who have taken a responsible approach to addressing nuclear weapons.
The member states of the NPT should call on the United States and Russia to promptly renew negotiations on extension of New START, as well as broader negotiations on arms control and strategic stability, and to heed the repeated resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly calling for a lowering of nuclear missile alert status to reduce the risk of accidental war.
Furthermore, the NPT nuclear-armed states should make a prompt and time-specific commitment to good faith negotiations on complete nuclear disarmament under Article VI of the NPT. A good starting point to this would be pressuring nuclear armed states like the United States and China to begin serious discussions of transparency and strategic stability.
The world remains fortunate that nuclear annihilation was not the end result of the Cold War. However, we cannot afford to remain complacent as governments dance on knife’s edge. The international community needs to hold nuclear armed states accountable to their commitment to disarmament, otherwise our luck may run dry.
Sources:
Xia, Lili, Alan Robock, Kim Scherrer, Cheryl S. Harrison, Jonas Jägermeyr, Charles G. Bardeen, Owen B. Toon, and Ryan Heneghan, 2022: “Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection.” Nature Food, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00573-0
Harrison, Cheryl S., Tyler Rohr, Alice DuVivier, Elizabeth A. Maroon, Scott Bachman, Charles G. Bardeen, Joshua Coupe, Victoria Garza, Ryan Heneghan, Nicole S. Lovenduski, Philipp Neubauer, Victor Rangel, Alan Robock, Kim Scherrer, Samantha Stevenson, and Owen B. Toon, 2022: “A new ocean state after nuclear war.” AGU Advances, 3, e2021AV000610, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000610