Daily Archives: March 11, 2022

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has suggested that he would consider using nuclear weapons if confronted with a NATO military response in Ukraine, or if faced with a direct threat to his person or regime. If the war spreads to a NATO country like Estonia or Poland a direct US-Russia confrontation would take place, with a clear danger of runaway nuclear escalation.

The world is therefore arguably now closer to nuclear conflict than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. So what would a full-scale nuclear exchange look like in reality? Is it truly global Armageddon, or would it be survivable for some people and places?

Many scientists have investigated this question already. Their work is surprisingly little known, likely because in peacetime no one wants to think the unthinkable. But we are no longer in peacetime and the shadows of multiple mushroom clouds are looming once again over our planet.

The latest assessment of Russian nuclear military capability estimates that as of early 2022 Russia has a stockpile of approximately 4,477 nuclear warheads nearly 6,000 if retired warheads are included. The US maintains a similar inventory of 5,500 warheads, with 3,800 of those rapidly deployable.

The explosive power of these weapons is difficult to comprehend. It has been estimated that about 3 million tons (megatons or Mt) of TNT equivalent were detonated in World War II. For comparison, each of the UKs Trident submarines carries 4 megatons of TNT equivalent on 40 nuclear warheads, meaning each submarine can cause more explosive destruction than took place during the entirety of World War II.

In 1945 the US attacked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, giving us two real-world examples of the effects of nuclear weapons on human populations.

A total of 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 73,000 in Nagasaki died instantaneously or within five months due to the nuclear blast, intense radiant heat from the fireball and ionizing radiation.

Many people caught within 1km of ground zero were carbonized by heat rays, and those up to 1.5km away suffered flash burning with large areas of skin later peeling off. Some, especially those inside buildings, were reduced to white bones as all flesh was vaporized by the intense heat.

Many survivors, later to become known as hibakusha in Japanese, suffered acute radiation sickness (ARS) from neutron and gamma rays released by nuclear fission in the blasts. Symptoms included bloody diarrhea, hair loss, fever and intense thirst. Many later died. As well as direct radiation from the fireballs they were also exposed to radioactive fallout from the bomb.

The longer-term effects of radiation experienced by the hibakusha have been intensively studied, and include increased levels of leukemia and solid cancers. However, experiencing an atomic bombing was not an automatic death sentence: among the 100,000 or so survivors the excess rates of cancer over the subsequent years were about 850, and leukemia less than 100.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that apart from short-term ARS long-term radiation from fallout will be the least of our problems following a nuclear war. Much more serious will be social collapse, famine and the breakdown of much of the planetary biosphere.

Prior to the Ukraine war it seemed very unlikely that the superpowers would confront each other again, so many researchers turned to studying the impacts of more limited nuclear conflicts.

One study published two years ago looked at the likely impacts of a nuclear exchange of about 100 Hiroshima-sized detonations (15 kt yield each) on the most-populated urban areas of India and Pakistan. Each detonation was estimated to incinerate an area of 13 square km, with this scenario generating about 5 Tg (teragrams) of soot as smoke from wildfires and burning buildings entered the atmosphere.

Direct human deaths in this limited nuclear war scenario are not quantified in the study, but would presumably number in the tens to hundreds of millions. The planetary impacts are also severe: as the soot reaches the stratosphere it circulates globally, blocking incoming solar radiation and dropping the Earths surface temperature by 1.8C in the first five years.

This would be a greater cooling than caused by any recent volcanic eruption, and more than any climate perturbation for at least the last 1,000 years. Rainfall patterns are drastically altered, and total precipitation declines by about 8 percent. (These results come from widely-used climate models of the same types used to project long-term impacts of greenhouse gas emissions.)

Food exports collapse as stocks are depleted within a single year, and by year four a total of 1.3 billion people face a loss of about a fifth of their current food supply. The researchers conclude that a regional conflict using <1 percent of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.

A2014 study of the same scenario (of a 100-weapon nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan) found that the soot penetrating the stratosphere would cause severe damage to the Earths ozone layer, increasing UV penetration by 30-80 percent over the mid-latitudes. This would cause widespread damage to human health, agriculture, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, the researchers wrote. The combined cooling and enhanced UV would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine.

If global nuclear famine could result from just 100 nuclear detonations, what might be the result of a fuller exchange of the several thousand warheads held in current inventories by the US and Russia?

One 2008 study looked at a Russia-US nuclear war scenario, where Russia would target 2,200 weapons on Western countries and the US would target 1,100 weapons each on China and Russia. In total, therefore, 4,400 warheads detonate, equivalent to roughly half the current inventories held each by Russia and the US.

Nuclear weapons held by other states were not used in this scenario, which has a 440-Mt explosive yield, equivalent to about 150 times all the bombs detonated in World War II. This full-scale nuclear war was estimated to cause 770 million direct deaths and generate 180 Tg of soot from burning cities and forests. In the US, about half the population would be within 5km of a ground zero, and a fifth of the countrys citizens would be killed outright.

A subsequent study, published in 2019, looked at a comparable but slightly lower 150 Tg atmospheric soot injection following an equivalent scale nuclear war. The devastation causes so much smoke that only 30-40 percent of sunlight reaches the Earths surface for the subsequent six months.

A massive drop in temperature follows, with the weather staying below freezing throughout the subsequent Northern Hemisphere summer. In Iowa, for example, the model shows temperatures staying below 0C for 730 days straight. There is no growing season. This is a true nuclear winter.

Nor is it just a short blip. Temperatures still drop below freezing in summer for several years thereafter, and global precipitation falls by half by years three and four. It takes over a decade for anything like climatic normality to return to the planet.

By this time, most of Earths human population will be long dead. The worlds food production would crash by more than 90 percent, causing global famine that would kill billions by starvation. In most countries less than a quarter of the population survives by the end of year two in this scenario. Global fish stocks are decimated and the ozone layer collapses.

The models are eerily specific. In the 4,400 warhead/150 Tg soot nuclear war scenario, averaged over the subsequent five years, China sees a reduction in food calories of 97.2 percent, France by 97.5 percent, Russia by 99.7 percent, the UK by 99.5 percent and the US by 98.9 percent. In all these countries, virtually everyone who survived the initial blasts would subsequently starve.

Even the 150 Tg soot nuclear war scenario is orders of magnitude less than the amount of smoke and other particulates put into the atmosphere by the asteroid that hit the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs and about two-thirds of species alive at the time.

This implies that some humans would survive, eventually to repopulate the planet, and that a species-level extinction of Homo sapiens is unlikely even after a full-scale nuclear war. But the vast majority of the human population would suffer extremely unpleasant deaths from burns, radiation and starvation, and human civilization would likely collapse entirely. Survivors would eke out a living on a devastated, barren planet.

It was this shared understanding of the consequences of nuclear Armageddon that led to the 1985 statement by then US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. This statement was reaffirmed by Presidents Biden and Putin as recently as January 2022. Even as war rages in Ukraine it remains as true now as it was then.

With childrens hospitals bombed and refugees shelled as they flee, emotions run high. But cool heads must ultimately prevail, so that we can collectively step back from the brink of Russia-NATO confrontation before it is too late. The price of nuclear escalation is planetary suicide, with no winners at all. That wont save lives in Ukraine it will simply take the death toll of the current war from the thousands to the billions.

Image: Nuclear bomb test in the ocean. Photo: Shutterstock/Romolo Tavani

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What the science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia? - Alliance for Science

Mr. Clinton was perhaps more correct than he knew. The transactional attitude he identified appeared to be the key to understanding Russias president. Mr. Putin had inherited a very particular vision of what the West actually was. For him, it was, according to Gleb Pavlovsky, a former close aide, synonymous with the liberal capitalist order, which he understood in terms of Soviet caricature: It meant tolerating oligarchs, privatizing state industries, paying and accepting bribes, hollowing out state capacity and having some semblance of power-sharing. Mr. Putin thought his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had failed because they failed to understand this.

Mr. Putin himself acted like a savvy applicant to the West in many respects. He gamely signed on to the global war on terror, later allowing the United States to use his bases for the war in Afghanistan, and extinguished a terrorist insurgency at home. Since coming to power, Mr. Putin has also made Moscow into a paragon of fiscal rectitude, and, according to the former aide, he explored the idea of installing an American-style two-party system in Russia.

But as the economy Mr. Putin presided over threatened to crash in a state-stripping bonanza, he tried to shore up the state sector and turned to increasingly authoritarian measures at home. As former Warsaw Pact countries welcomed NATO expansion, he shifted to a more civilizational understanding of Russias place in the world, one based on Eastern values: the Orthodox Church, patriarchal chauvinism, anti-homosexuality edicts, as well as a notion of a greater ethnic Russian identity whose ancient wellspring is inconveniently Kyiv, Ukraine. Protesters such as Pussy Riot and others who struck directly at this neo-civilizational image came in for swift retribution.

Mr. Putins turn reflected a broader phenomenon of authoritarian-led liberalizing economies trying to fill an empty ideological space that seemed poised to be filled by Western idolatry. In China, too, in the late 2000s, there was a turn to a civilizational understanding in Beijing, where dutiful readers of Mr. Huntington have spread notions of Chinese civilization in the forms of global Confucius Institutes or a program for cultural self-confidence, and which President Xi Jinping today expresses in his elliptical thought.

Turkey, too, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has pushed a vision of a neo-Ottoman sphere stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, which is a direct repudiation of Ataturks more bounded vision of Turkish nationalism. More recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has revived ideas about Hindu supremacy, glorifying his nations ancient past Hindustan is his Kyivan Rus and using it as a bludgeon against his opponents. The turn to civilizational imagining provides a useful lever for ruling elites who want to suppress other forms of solidarity, whether class, regional or ecologically based, and to restrict the attractions of cosmopolitanism for their economic elites.

For all the talk about how Ukraine is despite whatever losses on the battlefield winning the P.R. war, there is a sense in which Mr. Putin has already won at another level of framing the conflict. The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order appear like the provincial set of principles of a particular people, in a particular place.

Of the 10 most-populous countries in the world, only one the United States supports major economic sanctions against Russia. Indonesia, Nigeria, India and Brazil have all condemned the Russian invasion, but they do not seem prepared to follow the West in its preferred countermeasures. Nor do non-Western states appear to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result from, as Senator Rob Portman phrased it, putting a noose on the Putin economy. North Africa and the Middle East rely on Russia for basics from fertilizer to wheat; Central Asian populations rely on its remittances. Major disruptions to these economic networks seem unlikely to relieve Ukrainian suffering.

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Opinion | Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is The West Falling for It? - The New York Times

Soldiers take part in a military exercise at the Adazi military base, Latvia (Getty)

Russia has warned it will respond to what it describes as Nato's "provocative" deployment of soldiers and military hardware near its border.

Nato has been gathering troops in a number of its member states in recent weeks after Vladimir Putin began amassing his own soldiers on the Ukrainian border before launching a full-scale invasion two weeks ago.

Nato members have so far rejected Ukrainian pleas to establish a no-fly zone over its skies, making it clear that any such move could provoke direct engagement with Russian military jets that could in turn spark a wider war.

Troops are currently based in the eastern European countries of Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Damage to buildings in Kharkiv after Russian shelling, as the invasion stretches into its 14th day (Getty)

A Russian tank lies destroyed after being destroyed by Ukrainian forces. Russia has faced a strong resistance from Ukraine since attempting to invade (Getty)

Moscow has frequently accused Nato of provocation, despite repeated assurances that the alliance is a defensive one and poses no threat to Russians. On Wednesday, the Russian foreign ministry stoked tensions further.

"The build-up of NATO forces on the eastern flank is openly provocative," it said. "The containment of Russia has obviously become the alliance's main mission again.

"We will respond to the confrontation policy pursued by #NATO towards our country."

Ukraine has stated as recently as last month that joining Nato to bolster its security is a key ambition. Putin is said to be angered by such a move and Russia has stated that Ukraine must "enshrine its neutrality" before any ceasefire can be brokered.

Read more: What is Nato, which countries are members and how has it responded to Russias invasion of Ukraine?

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In response, President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to suggest he would no longer seek membership, telling ABC News on Monday: "I have cooled down regarding this question a long time ago after we understood that ... NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine."

He added he did not want to be president of a "country which is begging for something on its knees."

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Ukraine has also appealed to Nato to supply fighter jets to help with their efforts in holding off Russian forces. On Tuesday, Poland said it was ready to deploy all its MIG-29 jets to Rammstein Air Base in Germany and put them at the disposal of the United States

However, the Pentagon dismissed the proposed solution as "untenable" saying the prospect of the jets' departing from a US and Nato base in Germany "to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire Nato alliance".

Vladimir Putin is keen to ensure Nato does not get any stronger (Getty)

Putin's actions have now driven 2 million people out of Ukraine and into neighbouring countries as refugees, the UN said on Tuesday.

It is is the largest humanitarian crisis since World War Two.

US intelligence authorities warned on Tuesday that Putin could decide to leave Ukraine if his efforts to take over are continually stalled, but warned he could double down on the violence before deciding to.

We assess Putin feels aggrieved the West does not give him proper deference and perceives this as a war he cannot afford to lose. But what he might be willing to accept as a victory may change over time, given the significant costs he is incurring, Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told members of the House Intelligence Committee.

Watch: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses MPs in the House of Commons

Western officials believe Putin had hoped to have Ukraine well under his control within days of launching the invasion, but say poor planning, bad leadership and a fierce line of resistance from the Ukrainian people have stalled the Russian progress.

The US defence office has claimed Russia has deployed nearly all the 150,000 troops who were stationed on the border, but has only "made little progress".

An unnamed official added the Russians are "frustrated by a stiff Ukrainian resistance as well as their own internal challenges".

The nation's largest cities are still under Ukrainian control, but coming under constant Russian bombardment as Putin's force step-up their campaign of misery.

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Russia vows to react to 'confrontational' build-up of Nato on its border - Yahoo News