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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung
AGA 4: Nuclear Weapons and the Atmosphere
AGA 4.1: Invited Talk
Thursday, March 23, 2023, 14:00–14:45, HSZ/0002
Mass Starvation? Impacts of Nuclear War on Climate Change and Food Security — Lili Xia1 and •Kim Scherrer2 — 1Rutgers University — 2University of Bergen
The direct effects of nuclear war would be horrific, with blast, fires, and radiation killing and injuring many people. But in 1983, United States and Soviet Union scientists showed that a nuclear war could also produce a nuclear winter, with catastrophic consequences for global food supplies for people far removed from the conflict. Smoke from fires ignited by nuclear weapons exploded on cities and industrial targets would block out sunlight, causing dark, cold, and dry surface conditions, producing a nuclear winter, with surface temperatures below freezing even in summer for years. Climate change caused by smoke from fires ignited by nuclear weapons would limit the amount of food that could be grown on land our caught at sea. After stored food was consumed there would be mass food shortages in almost all countries. We used one climate model, one crop model, and one fishery model climate to estimate the impacts from six scenarios of stratospheric soot injection, predicting the total food calories available in each nation post-war after stored food was consumed. We estimated that more than 2*billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5*billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia.