From Deadly Hell to Deadly Cold... How Can Nuclear War Change Earth's Climate Forever?

Introduction to translation

While the Russians threaten to use nuclear power, and ballistic missiles are put on alert in a number of countries of the world, we may have to bear in mind that even the mere hint of the possibility of using nuclear, albeit with a low probability, is an unimaginable disaster - as an ordinary citizen of a country Arab, for example - the size of its impact, this report from "The Atlantic" presents you with part of this impact, related to the change that will affect the entire Earth's climate, including our Arab countries, in the event of a nuclear war between Russia and NATO or anywhere else in the world.

translation text

When we talk about the causes of climate change, the first reasons that come to our mind are oil, gas, coal and cars, that is, everything related to energy policy in general, and this is due to good reasons, for example, that burning fossil fuels leads to the emission of carbon dioxide, which It penetrates the atmosphere causing a rise in temperature, so the more fossil fuels we burn, the worse the climate will change.

Just two years ago, the previous Trump administration in America adopted a terrible policy in an attempt to weaken the country's standards in fuel efficiency. If successful, this policy would increase oil consumption for decades to come and create an uninhabitable climate.

But energy is not the only area that can determine whether we have a habitable climate or not, and foreign policy - especially nuclear war - plays a terrifying role in it.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine several weeks ago, this threat has become more realistic.

With the onset of the crisis, many American artists, climate groups, and some members of Congress expressed their support for the decision to make Ukraine a "no-fly zone."

Despite the kindness of expression and the good intentions of these people, this step is very sensitive, because the imposition of a "no-fly" over Ukraine means that NATO and the United States will issue an explicit threat to shoot down any Russian aircraft flying in Ukrainian airspace.

This scenario will require an American bombing of Russian territory to eliminate its air defenses, and this will entail the risks of a rapid escalation of the situation, and may ignite an open war between the United States and Russia.

Then both sides will see it as an opportunity to erupt a nuclear war that will have a far worse impact on the climate than any energy policy previously proposed by Donald Trump.

When we refer to how serious it is, we mean it seriously.

If you are concerned about rapid and catastrophic changes in the planet’s climate, it is imperative that you be terrified about nuclear war, because not only will it kill tens of millions of people, but the mere use of nuclear weapons in relatively “minor” skirmishes would destroy the planet’s climate. disastrous in the long run.

mini nightmare

Imagine with me a nuclear bomb with an explosive force equivalent to 1 megaton (i.e. one million tons), said to be the size of a warhead carried by a modern Russian ICBM (the warheads carried by American ICBMs may be larger than that).

Detonation of a bomb of this size four miles away produces winds equivalent to that of a Category 5 hurricane (one of the deadliest on record) that instantly flattens buildings, destroying power lines, and blowing up gas pipelines.

To illustrate how catastrophic the subject is, you have to know that anyone within seven miles of the explosion will suffer third-degree burns that iron the skin and cause sores in the flesh.

In the midst of these circumstances—and we haven't yet talked about the effects of radiation that destroy the organs themselves—the eight-mile blast would turn this place into an area full of human misery.

At that moment, we will begin to confront the dire consequences of climate change.

Hot, dry, hurricane-force winds may be the fiercest version of the Santa Ana winds in California that caused the worst wildfires in the state, and likewise we will find that a small “nuclear” war between two countries is able to set fires in urban and wild forests, and these fires may expand. to reach the size of small states.

One study in 2007 estimated that the explosion of 100 small nuclear warheads, which is equivalent to only 0.03% of the planet's total arsenal, could lead to "total casualties equal to the number of lives that World War II took worldwide", leaving behind towering clouds carrying 5 megatons of soot (black smoke) and ash into the atmosphere.

All this carbon would change the climate and keep us out of the sun. Within months, the average temperature of the planet will drop by more than two degrees Fahrenheit, and this cold may last for more than a decade, and this will destabilize the world with a 10% reduction in precipitation. This could result in a global drought that will reduce the growing season in parts of North America and Europe to just 10-20 days.

All of this is capable of triggering a global food crisis that modern history has not witnessed before.

Over five years, corn, wheat and soybean yields will fall by more than 11%, all while we're only talking about small skirmishes with nuclear weapons, let alone a slightly larger conflict involving, say, 250 of the world's 13,080 nuclear warheads?

The wider nightmare

Although the world will get colder, a nuclear winter will not be the same as “conventional climate change,” but things will go much further.

If we use this number of heads, the ocean waters will gradually begin to recede, and there will be a decrease in the amount of plankton that depends on the photosynthesis process that forms the basis of the marine food chain by 5-15%. It is also likely that fishermen in Worldwide a decrease in their production by almost 30%.

Although the world will get colder, a nuclear winter (or "nuclear fall" as some researchers prefer to call it) will not be analogous to "conventional climate change" caused by humans, but things will go much further.

In the short term, things will get worse as a result of a phenomenon called ocean acidification (a phenomenon that results from a significant increase in the dissolution of carbon dioxide in the world's oceans, which leads to a significant increase in the acidity of those oceans).

The thick layer of smoke will destroy about 75% of the ozone layer in the atmosphere, which means that more ultraviolet rays will be escaping through the planet's atmosphere, causing an epidemic of skin cancer and other medical problems.

Not only humans, but also remote islands where UV levels will be high, so that even the initially untouched plants and animals of the global slaughter will not escape the inevitable danger of these rays.

Giant Machine by Paul N. Edwards

Nowadays, we don't often think of nuclear war as a climate problem, even though concerns about these kinds of dangers have been part of how modern climate change has received political attention in the first place.

In the 1980s, some scientists, including Professor Paul N.

Edwards of Stanford University, who published a book called "A Vast Machine", in which he summarized his magical history of climate modeling, finally prepared the public to understand the dangers of global warming.

Even before that, climate science and nuclear engineering were linked.

In 1945, for example, John von Neumann, a Princeton University physicist and a member of the Manhattan Project (which was the first to produce nuclear weapons during World War II), was interested in the first programmable computer because he hoped it could solve two problems: The first is the mechanism of the hydrogen bomb explosion, and the second is the mathematical modeling of the Earth's climate.

At the time, military interest in meteorology was high, and although good weather forecasting helped the Allies win World War II, officials remained concerned about the possibility of weather manipulation becoming a weapon in the Cold War. Fortunately, the era's worst fears did not materialize. Or at least we haven't seen it yet.

Far from the immediate negative consequences of nuclear bombs, the full impact of nuclear exchanges could be much worse.

If the gasoline and diesel, which were used by conventional military operations for several years, left behind a global devastation, things will be complicated after a nuclear war, especially if society tries to repopulate the remnants of destruction with energy derived from fossil fuels.

After the war, humans will turn to fossil fuel reserves as the easiest source of energy to turn to, because renewable energy, wind turbines, and other decarbonization technology (which allows the use of fossil fuels with very low carbon dioxide emissions) require safe factories, highly efficient engineers, and networks complex global trade exchanges.

In other words, it all depends on the existence of peace, and solving the problem of climate change is a luxury for a planet that does not know the meaning of peace.

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Translation: Somaya Zaher

This report has been translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect the website of Meydan.