What will happen if a nuclear war breaks out? Chilling findings from study reveals...

India.com

26-07-2025

While the world is still grappling with the threat of nuclear war, a new study has raised new alarm bells. The study indicated that even a small nuclear war could be a dangerous threat to humanity. It could lead to a breakdown of global supply chains and a loss of crops, resulting in famine in many parts of the world.
A study led by researchers at Penn State University, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, emphasized that whether a nuclear war is regional or global, its impacts would be significant enough to plunge the planet into darkness and create catastrophic famine.
According to a report from Firstpost, this study is especially important at a time of rising geopolitical instability and nuclear weapons taking on new prominence in global geopolitics. The study provides a detailed model for how a nuclear war could impact global agriculture. The study explores how the expulsion of soot from a nuclear war would block sunlight on Earth, disrupting various climatic systems, which would then produce disastrous effects for food production across the world.
At the core of this study is the assumption that nuclear firestorms, in particular, those started in burning cities and industrial areas, would inject enormous concentrations of soot into the atmosphere. The soot would spread throughout the atmosphere globally. Thus, it will be a major blocking layer (essentially a dark haze) at the upper bounds of the troposphere, preventing any sunlight from penetrating the Earth's surface. Such a blocking layer could persist for a number of years. This will lead to dropping temperatures. changing weather patterns, and potentially eliminating food security for a vast portion of the world.
In the event of a large nuclear conflict, such as one between Russia and the United States, the amount of light hitting Earth's surface could decrease so drastically that worldwide corn production would drop by as much as 80 percent, according to Firstpost. Such a colossal collapse in agricultural output would destroy food security for much of the planet, leading to famine and instability on a global level.
To assess what the potential impacts might be, the team used a model called the Cycles agroecosystem model, a sophisticated simulation of agriculture developed at Penn State University. This model integrates climate-specific daily weather, soil chemistry, crop growth, and the movement of nitrogen and carbon to predict how crops would react to different combinations of climate and agricultural practices.
For this study, the model was calibrated specifically for nuclear winter – with a diminished sunlight exposure, lower global temperature, and increased exposure to harmful UV-B radiation from ozone layer depletion.
When would agriculture begin to recover—if at all?
'Using maize (Zea maize L.) as a sentinel crop, we found that annual maize production could decline from 7% after a small-scale regional nuclear war with 5 Tg soot injection, to 80% after a global nuclear war with 150 Tg soot injection, with recovery taking from 7 to 12 years. UV-B damage would peak 6–8 years post-war and can further decrease annual maize production by 7%. Over the recovery period, adaptive selection of maize maturity types to track changing temperatures could increase production by 10% compared to a no-adaptation strategy,' reads the statement in the abstract section of the study.
The researchers applied the model to follow the effects over ten years, specifically to witness how maize (corn), being one of the world's most important staple food crops, would respond to the extreme and stressful conditions.
The researchers analyzed six hypothetical nuclear war scenarios, and one of the more horrifying findings was that recovery of global food systems could take longer than a decade after the conflict. In essence, once a nuclear war happens, the fallout from it will last for decades. The unequivocal conclusion from the study is that a nuclear war would involve far more than military or political disaster. It would cause an ecological and humanitarian collapse. A nuclear war of any scale would create a famine across the world, with consequences that could adversely affect the future of mankind for centuries to come.
Researchers analyzed six possible nuclear war scenarios corresponding to the amount of soot injected into the atmosphere. The soot injections ranged from 5 teragrams (Tg) representing a regional conflict between India and Pakistan, to a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia with soot injections of 150–165 Tg.
What happens to crops if sunlight disappears?
The differences are stark: the global war scenario would inject 30 to 33 times more soot than the regional one with far worse global cooling, extreme reductions in sunlight, and widespread crop failures of historic proportions.
What is nuclear winter, and why is it dangerous?
Probably the most astonishing aspect is how long the effects of nuclear winter would last. It is also important to note that it is not a normal incident or a transitory natural disaster in which agriculture might recover quickly. Recovery after a nuclear war will take almost a decade or longer to go back to productive agricultural conditions.
The destruction occurs from the first years and after, and indeed there is still considerable and persistent damage at year 12. As such, food systems would not have time to stabilize or recover during this 'prolonged onslaught of destruction.
This study shows that adaptation strategies like dynamic tailoring of maize maturity types can improve food production by 10% over a 13 year recovery period compared with static approaches under a global nuclear war scenario,' reads the statement in the conclusion section of the study.