A good handful of decades ago, in the 1980s, some scientists posed a resounding question, one of those that take your breath away… and dreams: What would happen if a global nuclear war broke out? Science fiction literature had explored the issue some time ago and would end up leading to the very graphic expression of “nuclear winter”. Today, forty years later, the same restlessness still causes headaches and papers in top-tier magazines.
That’s what a group of experts led by climate scientists at Rutgers University just did. And their answers, collected in an extensive study published in Nature FoodThey are, to say the least, discouraging. If a large-scale nuclear weapons conflict broke out between the US and Russia, they would end up facing starvation. 5 billion people and the impact would be devastating in virtually all countries. Only a tiny club would be saved.
How have they calculated it?
The legacy of war
To start the team, in which experts from different countries participated, they six war scenarios different. Five of them would be more or less extensive conflicts, with a variable scope, but always starting from the same base: a war between India and Pakistan. The other would be a clash between Washington and Moscow in which a larger nuclear arsenal would be deployed.
They then analyzed how the atmosphere would be affected in each of these cases: the amount of soot that would remain in suspension depending on the deflagration and, above all, to what extent that layer would block sunlight and cool the planet. Beyond the damage that the bombs could cause and their death toll, what they were interested in calculating at Rutgers is how the corn, rice, wheat or soybean crops would be affected. Whether or not we would have anything to eat.
For the estimate, they used a tool from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) that allowed them to draw forecasts country by country, assess changes in pastures and also in world fishing. The conclusions are to tremble. As minimum.
Even in the kindest scenario, triggered by a standoff between India and Pakistan, global average caloric output would fall. 7% in just five years. Perhaps seen like this, on paper, it doesn’t seem like much; but in its decades of records, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has never detected a similar reduction in crop yields.
The outlook would be bad. Very bad. But it would have nothing to do with what the worst case scenario throws up, a hypothetical large-scale nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia. In that case, they explain from the Rutgers center, the world’s average caloric production would plummet by around 90% during the three or four years that followed the conflagration.
What would that mean?
That more than 75% of the planet he would be suffering or starving in a matter of two years.
It would not matter if we ditched crops that we now reserve to feed livestock or managed to reduce the tons of food that we waste each year, in the event of a major explosion the margin for savings would be minimal and its effects very limited.
The study also yields some interesting conclusions, such as the lesser impact of the war on fishing, although it would not be free from the consequences of the nuclear conflagration.
All affected, but with nuances
But would we all suffer equally? Would all nations be equally affected?
Almost all of them, the report concludes: “Crop declines would be more severe in the mid and high latitude nations, including the main exporting countries, such as Russia or the USA”. Throughout the article Naturein fact, only a couple of cases in Oceania are mentioned.
“In the 150 Tg scenario [el peor], most nations would have a lower calorie intake than resting energy expenditure. An exception is Australia”, settle the researchers, who point out as a key that —despite the war— its wheat production would still allow it to meet the caloric needs of the population. Something similar would happen in neighboring New Zealand.
The researchers acknowledge in any case limitations of his study, which “drinks” basically from the data handled by the FAO on a national scale: “within each nation, particularly large ones, there may be large regional inequalities driven by limitations in infrastructure, economic structures and government policies.”
The map that includes Nature it is clarifying.
The plane on the left shows the distribution of calorie consumption in 2010, leaving international trade out of the equation, and those on the right pose different post war scenarios, depending on whether or not resources are used to feed the herds. They all start from the basis that there is no international trade and calories are distributed evenly across countries.
The countries in red are those that would face a fatal scenario, with a lower calorie intake than is necessary to maintain a basal metabolic rate. The yellow ones indicate the areas in which the consumption would be so low that the inhabitants would lose weight and hardly have any strength.
The best stops are the green ones, a hue that identifies the countries in which there would be enough food for its inhabitants to maintain physical activity. A very small handful belongs to that select club with some territories spread across Oceania, America and the Middle East.
The conclusion of the report is devastating:
“Light reduction, global cooling and likely trade restrictions after nuclear wars would be a catastrophe for food security. The negative impact of climatic disturbances on crop production generally cannot be offset by livestock and aquatic feeds. More than 2 billion people could die from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan and more than 5 billion from a war between the US and Russia.
Chart | Nature Food