Nuclear war involving less than 3% of global stockpiles may kill one-third of the world’s population in two years, as per a new international study led by scientists at Rutgers University.
According to the Rutgers University study, a greater nuclear battle between Russia and the United States might kill three-fourths of the world’s population in the same time frame.
More than 5 billion people would starve in the event of a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
This significant global research indicates that even a little confrontation between two nations involving nuclear weapons would result in widespread starvation.
Even a small-scale trade between countries like India and Pakistan might have disastrous effects on global food supplies and result in mass mortality throughout the planet.
Researchers calculate the amount of ash produce by nuclear conflicts of various sizes, as well as the impact on food production when large cities in India, Pakistan, the United States, or Russia burn.
Three to four years after the nuclear exchange, global food, animal, and fishery yields would have drop by 90%, spreading starvation, disruption, and collapse and triggering additional feedback loops.
Six alternative nuclear war scenarios were research by academic scientists.
As per the study publish in the journal Nature Food, a full-scale confrontation between the US and Russia would wipe out more than half of humanity in the worst-case scenario.
The results come at a time when, 30 years after the Cold War’s conclusion, the potential of nuclear war may be greater than ever.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has also warn that “the prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.”
The researchers hypothesise that the detonation of even a tiny proportion of the world’s nuclear weapons would cause large firestorms that would swiftly inject sun-blocking soot into the sky, causing an abrupt cooling of the climate.
Researchers use climate models to predict how much smoke would reach the stratosphere, where there is no precipitation to wash it away, and how this would affect temperature, precipitation, and sunshine.
Researchers then assess how these changes would effect agricultural productivity and how fish would react to changes in the ocean.
As a result, they predict that tens of millions of deaths in the battle zone would be follow by hundreds of millions of deaths from starving across the world.
