Misery of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan would be global

Enlarge / Simulated temperature changes 2 years after a hypothetical nuclear war between India and Pakistan. (credit: Toon et al./Science Advances)

There are few things humans have committed to as whole-heartedly as the art of killing. The culmination of this effort (so far) is nuclear bombs. Not only do these weapons have an almost impossible ability to take lives around the targeted location, but scientists have also warned that nuclear wars would have drastic climate impacts around the world.

While that general idea is pretty well-known, shifting tensions and growing nuclear arsenals have provided a number of different scenarios to analyze over the years. The latest study, led by Owen Toon (a student of Carl Sagan), simulates a plausible war between India and Pakistan in which the combatants use the nuclear weapons they're likely to possess by 2025.

While small wars have broken out between these countries periodically, each has stockpiled nuclear weapons in the hope of creating a threat too terrible to risk further conflict. India has a stated no-first-use policy (unless it's attacked by chemical or biological weapons), while Pakistan's policy is that it won't strike first... unless it sees nukes as the only way to halt an invasion. Details on the precise number of weapons each country has, as well as the yield of those weapons, are hard to come by. But there's certainly a lot of firepower.

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