Even A 'Limited' Nuclear War Would Starve Millions Of People, New Study Reveals

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Even a relatively small nuclear war would create a worldwide food crisis lasting at least a decade in which hundreds of millions would starve, according to our new modeling published in Nature Food.

In a nuclear war, bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere. This soot would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet.

Although the war might only last days or weeks, the impacts on Earth's climate could persist for more than ten years. We used advanced climate and food production models to explore what this would mean for the world's food supply.

[...] We simulated six different war scenarios, because the amount of soot injected into the upper atmosphere would depend on the number of weapons used.

The smallest war in our scenarios was a "limited" conflict between India and Pakistan, involving 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons (less than 3% of the global nuclear arsenal). The largest was a global nuclear holocaust, in which Russia and the United States detonate 90% of the world's nuclear weapons.

[...] Even under the smallest war scenario we considered, sunlight over global crop regions would initially fall by about 10%, and global average temperatures would drop by up to 1-2. For a decade or so, this would cancel out all human-induced warming since the Industrial Revolution.

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