Latest news with #NuclearWar:AScenario
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First Post
4 days ago
- Politics
- First Post
80 years after Hiroshima: Nuclear threat still looms over global security
History, with its grim cycles and painful lessons, has every reason to indict humanity. In the week marking the 80th anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russia announced it no longer considers itself bound by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, blaming 'the actions of Western countries' for creating a 'direct threat' to its security. Last Friday, US President Donald Trump said he had ordered the deployment of two nuclear submarines 'in appropriate regions' following what he described as 'highly provocative comments' by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD It is ironic that nuclear weapons still exist, despite the well-known devastation they cause to the planet—and the threat of nuclear sabre-rattling remains as constant as the air we breathe. Aside from white lilies and sombre memorial services for the dead, and sympathy for those emotionally and physically maimed by the two blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, little has moved forward in practical terms. In the prologue of her book Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen describes a frightening vision of what the next nuclear bomb explosion might look like. For now, it is only imagination—but reality would unfold within minutes if the bombs were ever detonated, for whatever reason. She writes: 'A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and Eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at the center of the Earth's sun. In the first fraction of a second this thermonuclear bomb strikes… there is light…. Soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength. The light superheats the surrounding air to a millions of degrees, creating a massive fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour. Within a few seconds, this fireball increases to a diameter of a little more than a mile (5,700 feet across), its light and heat so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon.' This, of course, is Jacobsen's speculative scenario of what might happen if a nuclear bomb were to strike the Pentagon outside Washington. But if such an event were to occur, her imagined horror would become exact, unbearable reality. In the 653-page book The Effects of Nuclear War, authored along with Philip J Dolan, Samuel Galsstone writes, 'There are inherent difficulties in making exact measurements of weapons effects. The results are often dependent upon circumstances, which are difficult, and sometimes impossible, to control even in tests and would certainly be unpredictable in the event of an attack.' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Then, after the immediate destruction there is the curse of a nuclear winter which is inevitable. A legacy of devastation, a present of peril Eighty years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed more than 200,000 people and left haunting reminders of nuclear warfare, the world remains on edge. Far from fading into the pages of history, nuclear weapons continue to cast a long, ominous shadow over global peace and security. While the world has avoided another nuclear strike since 1945, today's risks may be even more acute driven by geopolitical volatility, advancing technologies and the slow unravelling of disarmament frameworks. A world still armed to the teeth As of early 2025, the global stockpile of nuclear warheads stands at approximately 12,241, with the vast majority—over 90 per cent—held by United States and Russia. This massive arsenal is not just a relic of the Cold War but a continually modernised force, featuring increasingly sophisticated delivery systems and warhead designs, Andrew Hammond writes in The Business Times. While global treaties have aimed to curb proliferation, they have done little to dismantle the core of existing nuclear forces. Slowing clock of disarmament The post-Cold War era witnessed a surge of hope for nuclear disarmament. Treaties such as the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start) and initiatives like the Nuclear Security Summits led to tangible reductions and enhanced controls over nuclear materials. However, this progress has since slowed, if not reversed. Today, the momentum has shifted towards rearmament. The United States is developing a new generation of nuclear weapons and has indicated an openness to resuming nuclear testing. Meanwhile, China has more than tripled its arsenal, reaching around 600 warheads. These developments have reignited fears of a new arms race, especially as Russia also pursues advanced systems like hypersonic missiles and underwater nuclear drones. Submarines are indeed deadly platforms for nuclear launches. Efforts such as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which came into force in 2021, have garnered support from many non-nuclear states. Yet, they have been largely dismissed by nuclear-armed nations. The global appetite for disarmament, once buoyed by the horrors of Hiroshima, is faltering in the face of renewed strategic competition. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Tensions in a fragile world Geopolitical fault lines are increasingly volatile, exacerbating the risk of nuclear conflict. Recent exchanges between Medvedev and Trump over nuclear threats serve as stark reminders of how easily diplomatic tensions can veer into dangerous territory. Medvedev's reference to Russia's 'Dead Hand' nuclear retaliation system and Trump's counter by repositioning submarines closer to Russia are not just posturing, they reflect the peril of miscalculation in today's hyper-charged political climate. Other hotspots, including the enduring India-Pakistan conflict and North Korea's relentless nuclear testing, add layers of complexity. These regions combine deep-seated historical animosities with nuclear capabilities, making them particularly susceptible to escalation. Iran, for its part, remains a significant concern. Reeling from attacks on its nuclear facilities, Tehran may further accelerate its nuclear programme, potentially pushing other regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Turkey toward similar ambitions. Technology: The new wildcard While nuclear weapons have always embodied existential danger, emerging technologies are making the nuclear scenario even more unpredictable. Artificial intelligence, cyber warfare and advanced missile defence systems are disrupting the traditional logic of nuclear deterrence. According to Hammond, AI-driven systems, if poorly managed, could make decisions faster than human operators can verify, increasing the likelihood of misjudgements. Meanwhile, cyberattacks on nuclear command and control systems could trigger false alarms or disable safeguards. The potential for accidental launches or misinterpreted threats has grown significantly in an era of digital warfare and machine decision-making. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD During the Cold War and into the 1990s, several false alarms nearly triggered nuclear war due to technical errors and misinterpretations. In the 1950s, a flock of Canadian geese was mistaken for a Soviet bomber attack by radar systems. The 1960s saw meteor showers and radar reflections from the moon falsely indicating a missile strike, while in 1979, a human error led to a false nuclear alert, causing Norad (North American Aerospace Defense Command) to scramble fighter jets. A year later, a faulty computer chip triggered a similar scare, prompting the preparation of B-52 bombers and the President's emergency aircraft. The most serious incident occurred in 1995 when a Norwegian research rocket was misidentified by Russian systems as a US nuclear missile, prompting president Boris Yeltsin to consider a retaliatory strike, an act he ultimately resisted, narrowly avoiding catastrophe. Terrorism threat Beyond state actors, the threat of nuclear terrorism has not disappeared. While acquiring a functional nuclear weapon remains a high barrier for non-state groups, the possibility of a radiological dispersal device (dirty bomb) is far more feasible. Such a weapon would use conventional explosives to spread radioactive material, potentially causing mass panic, economic chaos and long-term contamination of urban centres.. Hammond mentions former US defence secretary Robert Gates who once remarked that the thought of a terrorist obtaining a nuclear weapon was what kept him awake at night. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Treaties undermined, norms at risk International treaties and arms control frameworks that once served as guardrails are now fraying. The Doomsday Clock, maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was set just one second from midnight earlier this year, the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe. Eighty years after Hiroshima, the world faces a dual nuclear threat: that of state-led warfare and non-state terrorism. While the horrors of 1945 forged a powerful global aversion to nuclear war, that consensus is under threat. The only way to ensure nuclear weapons are never used again is to eliminate them altogether. Eight decades on, the urgency of that mission has never been clearer.
Winnipeg Free Press
30-07-2025
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
The little-known dangers we live with
Opinion We have spent 80 years under the shadow of the atomic bomb. The first atomic weapons obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, at the close of the Second World War. As with the Holocaust, the generation of atomic witnesses is almost all gone, and the perpetrators have already left the stage. Unlike the Holocaust, however, those atomic victims lack the public memorials and current reminders of a horror that should never be allowed to happen again. Unfortunately, 'Never Again' is hardly the motto of militaries around the world. Ever since 1945, we have lived under the shadow of the same horror being repeated on a larger, even a global, scale. ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES A man looks over the expanse of ruins left the explosion of the atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, Japan. Some 140,000 people died here immediately. The Doomsday Clock, kept by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, continues to creep closer to midnight. At its start in 1947, we were seven minutes away from global catastrophe; now, as of Jan. 28, 2025, we are 89 seconds away, one second closer than the year before. While the Doomsday Clock continues to focus primarily on the likelihood of nuclear annihilation, it has evolved. That ominous clock now also assesses other various mass extinction possibilities, both biological and ecological, any of which might (in their turn) also trigger a nuclear event. If you are one of those people who think nuclear war is survivable — limited to some unfortunate place somewhere else — you need to read Annie Jacobsen's book Nuclear War: A Scenario. It is a detailed, step-by-step timeline of how the world as we know it — including ourselves, everything and everyone we value — could be erased in the time it takes you to shower and eat breakfast in the morning, all without warning. The tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, however delivered and whoever controls them, are also many thousands of times more than would be needed to trigger global extinction on a geological level. We would be goners, like the dinosaurs, and if some higher life form eventually develops from the cockroaches that always survive, they might dig up our fossils in amazement some day, too. Yet there are few university courses anywhere in Canada that focus on the nuclear threat, past or present. We continue to suffer from cultural amnesia — deliberately encouraged, even cultivated, and terribly dangerous. We are not safer because we don't know or talk about the bomb. Worse, what people know about the bomb these days shies away from the horror of what happened, and what is likely someday to happen again. Deceptive stories have rendered nuclear weapons an acceptable and reasonable military option. Nothing could be further from the truth — then or now. For example, the bomb was not needed to end the Second World War. Japan had already made overtures toward peace — and been ignored. There is no evidence then-U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt ever intended such a weapon to be used — he died before the Trinity test demonstrated what the bomb would do. The Allies had definite information by early 1944 that there was no Nazi bomb, nor anything like the Manhattan Project. There never was evidence that Japan had made any similar effort. In other words, there was no enemy nuclear threat, whatsoever, long before Alamogordo. Then-vice-president Harry Truman apparently knew little or nothing about the Manhattan Project until he became president in April 1945. He learned that the U.S. had spent about US$2 billion developing a weapon that had not yet been used. So, with planes following to record the events, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, not to end the war, but to demonstrate the bomb and so (coincidentally) ensure his election as president in 1948. As far as the American military knew, the bomb just made a bigger bang with less effort. There was no clear understanding of radiation or its lethal effects, and early Japanese reports of the aftermath were dismissed as propaganda. Had 20 bombs been ready, 20 would have been dropped. Nor were they concerned about causing civilian casualties — the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities actually killed more people than the two atomic bombs. Weekday Mornings A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day. I will stop there, but much more could be said. Looking ahead to the post-war period, the lies, disinformation and utter ignorance associated with the nuclear arms race and its inevitable consequences are stunning. That we are all still here is evidence of luck rather than intention. Since the early 1980s, we have known that whatever was not immediately destroyed would suffer through a global 'nuclear winter,' perhaps for decades — a toxic, radioactive ice age, in which nothing healthy could grow. Worse, even a few weapons detonated in the right northern cities might be enough to trigger that same nuclear winter. Despite this, we still dither, allowing politicians and their military sidekicks, without challenge, to game the consequences of global nuclear genocide. After 80 years under the shadow of the bomb, the world is much more dangerous today. You need to find out why, and do something about it, before that Doomsday Clock strikes midnight. Peter Denton writes from his nuclear-free home in rural Manitoba.
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First Post
25-07-2025
- Science
- First Post
What happens if nuclear war strikes? Sun blocked, crops fail, famine unleashed
With nuclear war making it to geopolitical debates, a major new study warns that even a limited atomic conflict could trigger global food security and plunge the Earth into darkness for days read more It was just a coincidence that new research on how a nuclear winter could devastate agriculture appeared around the same time The New York Times published a recent review serving as a timely reminder to read Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, a gripping and sobering non-fiction narrative published last March that imagines, in minute-by-minute detail, what could happen if a nuclear missile were launched at the United States. Based entirely on real-world protocols, interviews with military and civilian experts and declassified documents, the author argues that nuclear deterrence is an illusion sustained by dangerous assumptions that technology is infallible, that decisions can be made perfectly under pressure and that all actors will behave rationally. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Through this realistic yet terrifying scenario, she urges readers and policymakers to recognise how little time stands between peace and unthinkable devastation and to reconsider the policies that make nuclear war possible with just one miscalculation. At its core, her book is a warning. And the new scientific study published in Environmental Research Letters by researchers at Penn State University too delivers a chilling warning: a nuclear war — whether regional or global — could plunge the planet into darkness, collapse food systems and unleash unprecedented global famine. As geopolitical conflicts intensify and nuclear sabre-rattling returns to the global stage, this research takes on urgent significance. It presents the most comprehensive modelling to date of how nuclear war could impact global agriculture by simulating how firestorm-generated soot would block sunlight, disrupt climate systems and devastate crop production. Soot, smoke and a shroud over the Earth At the core of the study is the projection that soot from nuclear firestorms, particularly from burning cities and industrial areas, would be lofted into the stratosphere, forming a sun-blocking layer that could linger for years. In the case of a large-scale nuclear conflict, such as one between the United States and Russia, sunlight reaching Earth's surface could decline so sharply that global corn yields would plummet by as much as 80 per cent. That level of collapse would obliterate food security for much of the world. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Should we trust this study? To understand how bad the effects could be, the researchers used a tool called the Cycles agroecosystem model. This is an advanced farming simulation developed at Penn State. It uses daily weather data, soil chemistry, how plants grow and how carbon and nitrogen interact to predict how crops will respond to different farming methods and climate conditions. For this study, the model was adjusted to show what would happen during a nuclear winter—a time with less sunlight, colder global temperatures and more harmful UV-B rays due to damage to the ozone layer. The researchers ran the model over ten years to see how maize (corn), one of the world's main crops, would do under these extreme conditions. What all could happen in nuclear wars The researchers examined six potential nuclear war scenarios, each modelled according to the amount of soot that would be released. These ranged from a 5-teragram (Tg) soot injection—representative of a regional India-Pakistan conflict—to a 150–165 Tg scenario, representing a full-scale US-Russia nuclear exchange. The difference is vast: the global war scenario would inject 30 to 33 times more soot than the regional conflict, drastically intensifying global cooling and crop failures. Food may become scarce Even in the smallest modelled scenario, where about 5 Tg of soot is introduced into the atmosphere, the results are alarming. Corn yields decline globally by approximately 7 per cent, enough to strain food supply chains and cause spikes in food prices, especially in vulnerable countries with high import dependence. The regional war scenario would still block 20 to 35 per cent of incoming sunlight and reduce global surface temperatures by 2°C to 5°C — enough to disrupt climate systems such as the South Asian monsoon, with serious consequences for rice and wheat harvests. Under the full-scale global nuclear war scenario, however, the damage becomes existential. With 150–165 Tg of soot darkening the skies, the study predicts a catastrophic 80 per cent global decline in corn production. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD This would not be a temporary setback. Nuclear winter conditions would persist for seven to twelve years, with global temperatures plunging and crop-growing seasons shortened to the point where staple crops could not mature. The sun would be blocked to such a degree that most agricultural regions would become temporarily unviable. It could be a perfect storm The Cycles model simulated not only cooling and sunlight reduction but also the intensification of UV-B radiation, due to ozone layer destruction from soot-induced atmospheric changes. UV-B is known to damage plant tissues and impair growth. In the scenarios studied, UV-B peaks six to eight years after detonation, during which time even recovering climate conditions would be undermined by elevated radiation. This further reduces potential yields and delays the recovery of agricultural systems. Why this all matters While the seven per cent drop in corn under the India-Pakistan war model may appear modest, the global food system is tightly interconnected. A shortfall in one region — particularly in maize, wheat or rice — can ripple across continents through disrupted trade networks, hoarding, price inflation and access inequality. In the regional scenario, billions could face hunger, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The 80 per cent yield loss in the full global war model, however, represents nothing short of a planetary food collapse. If other staple crops like wheat, rice and soybeans experience similar declines (as past nuclear winter studies suggest), widespread famine would become nearly inevitable. Such an outcome would overwhelm international aid systems, incite civil unrest and result in deaths numbering in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Seven to 12 years of darkness and hunger One of the most startling findings is the duration of the nuclear winter effects. Unlike a temporary natural disaster, the recovery of agricultural conditions after a nuclear war would take close to a decade — or more. The damage peaks in the early years but remains significant through year 12, meaning food systems would not have time to stabilise or self-correct. Recovery is not linear and the compound stresses of sunlight loss, UV-B radiation and global trade breakdown would delay return to normalcy. How we can survive The study also explores adaptation strategies that could provide some degree of protection. One approach is the use of short-season crop varieties, particularly maize types that mature quickly and are less dependent on long, warm growing seasons. Adjusting planting calendars, improving nutrient management and selecting crop types more tolerant of cold and UV-B radiation are other possibilities. In model simulations, such adaptive measures resulted in up to 10 per cent higher yields compared to non-adaptive scenarios, especially in the post-peak years of the nuclear winter. However, these adaptations face significant real-world barriers. Most notably, access to seeds of shorter-maturity crops and the infrastructure to distribute them would likely be disrupted in a post-nuclear world. Recognising this, the study recommends the creation of 'agricultural resilience kits' which means pre-stocked packages of adaptive seeds, tools and guidance tailored for different regions. These kits could be distributed preemptively or stored for rapid deployment after a disaster, providing a lifeline to struggling farming communities. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Maybe, it's time for real action The conclusion of the study is unequivocal. A nuclear war would be far more than a military or political catastrophe. It would be an ecological and humanitarian collapse. Even a limited regional exchange could trigger dangerous global agricultural shocks. A full-scale nuclear conflict would bring about a planetary famine, with long-term consequences for civilisation itself. The Penn State researchers emphasise the importance of preparedness and diplomacy, noting that the current level of planning for such a scenario is vastly inadequate. This study deepens our understanding of the far-reaching impacts of nuclear weapons not just in terms of immediate loss of life, but through the slow, cruel scenario of starvation and ecological collapse. It serves as a scientific imperative to reduce the risk of nuclear war and to invest in climate-resilient agricultural systems that can withstand global-scale disruptions. People refer to Hiroshima or Nagasaki as nuclear catastrophe in wars. But that happened 80 years ago. Nuclear technology has vastly improved, and bombs become a thousand times more powerful. While some intensify nuclear sabre-rattling, the rest of the world hopes that sanity prevails as geopolitical games look increasingly chaotic.
