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Scientific American
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Scientific American
India and Pakistan Remind Us We Need to Stop the Risk of Nuclear War
We are living in a scary time. After a terrorist attack that killed at least 26 people, mostly Indian tourists, in Kashmir in April, India blamed the attack on Pakistan, threatened to cut off that nation's water supplies and followed up in May with airstrikes. Pakistan has promised a ' measured but forceful response,' threatening a wider war endangering everyone. India and Pakistan each have about 170 nuclear weapons. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas. That smoke would rise into the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above the troposphere where we live, which has no rain to wash out the smoke. Our research has found that the smoke would block out the sun, making it cold, dark and dry at Earth's surface, choking agriculture for five years or more around the world. The result would be global famine. Like it or not, humanity still has a nuclear dagger pointed at its throat. But there is another choice that starts with the U.S. If we take our land-based missiles off their hair-trigger alerts and negotiate with Russia to reduce our nuclear arsenal, we could set an example for the rest of the world. If we eventually sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the U.S. could provide an example to Iran and other nations with an interest in building their own nuclear arsenal. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The alternatives are terrifying. One of us (Robock) published an article in Scientific American 15 years ago describing how a war in South Asia, like the one now possible between India and Pakistan, could produce global climate change and threaten the world's food supply, but we did not know how large that threat would be. In the years since then we have calculated, for a range of smoke amounts released from nuclear war, the specific effects on agriculture in each nation. From there, we estimated how the people would fare under the assumption that their stored food was gone, trade was halted, and they kept the same agricultural activity. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could kill one to two billion people through starvation in the two years after the war. The U.S. and Russia have more than 8,000 deployed nuclear weapons. A nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia could kill more than six billion people around the world in the following two years. The direct impacts of blast, radiation and fire on those attacked by nuclear weapons would be horrific, as we know from what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, but 10 to 20 times more people would die from famine. Many people assume that there will never be another nuclear war, since it has now been 80 years and several generations since the last one. They also have been told that nuclear deterrence must be maintained to keep us safe. Yet threats to use nuclear weapons from Russia and North Korea, and even from the U.S. president, have worried many. The New START treaty, the only remaining arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia, expires next year. China is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal. President Trump just proposed a budget for the next fiscal year with a 13 percent increase for the Defense Department. This is exactly the wrong direction for the U.S. A substantial part of the defense budget is for a ' modernization ' of our nuclear arsenal. Our nuclear 'triad' is composed of land-based missiles, submarine missiles and nuclear bombs that could be dropped from airplanes. We already have all of these, and they cannot be used without the risk of killing almost all the people on the planet. They need to be removed, not modernized. Deterrence is a myth. The theory is that we will not be attacked because we will attack an enemy if they attack us, thus deterring them. But in order for it to work, they have to believe that we will act as a suicide bomber. That is, that we will attack an enemy, producing so much smoke that we will be unable to grow any crops for more than five years and thus all starve to death. This is not mutual assured destruction (the so-called 'MAD' theory). It is self-assured destruction (SAD). The upcoming Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, a report from the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine due out this summer, the first such report since 1985, will make this danger more plain. The rest of the world well understands the risk we all face. In 2017, after three international conferences on the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, including the indirect effects on food supply based on our work, the United Nations passed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which prohibits possession, manufacture, development and testing of nuclear weapons, stationing and installment of nuclear weapons or assistance in such activities, by its parties. The treaty came into force on January 22, 2021. There are currently 94 signatories and 73 states parties, but the nine countries, notably including the U.S., with nuclear weapons have not signed it and are trying to ignore the will of the rest of world. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which led the effort to get this treaty, was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize 'for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.' For deterrence to succeed, there must be no use of nuclear weapons by accident, terrorists, computer malfunctions, hackers or unstable leaders. We have come close many times. As Beatrice Fihn, executive director of ICAN, said in her Nobel Peace Prize Lecture on December 10, 2017, 'If only a small fraction of today's nuclear weapons were used, soot and smoke from the firestorms would loft high into the atmosphere—cooling, darkening and drying the Earth's surface for more than a decade. It would obliterate food crops, putting billions at risk of starvation. Yet we continue to live in denial of this existential threat.… The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending, and it is up to us what that ending will be. Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us? One of these things will happen. The only rational course of action is to cease living under the conditions where our mutual destruction is only one impulsive tantrum away.' When Carl Sagan, a leader in early nuclear-winter research, was asked if he didn't want to keep our nuclear weapons as a deterrent, he said: 'For myself, I would far rather have a world in which the climatic catastrophe cannot happen, independent of the vicissitudes of leaders, institutions, and machines. This seems to me elementary planetary hygiene, as well as elementary patriotism.' We agree.
Time of India
03-05-2025
- Science
- Time of India
Nostradamus predicted the year of conflict between India and Pakistan in 2025—did he warn of a nuclear disaster
The potential for a war between India and Pakistan, especially after events such as the Pahalgam terror attack of April 22, 2025, has raised serious concern about the threat of nuclear escalation. To this effect, a 2019 report forebodingly predicted the timing of the war, forecasting 2025 as the year when a potential war could erupt. This delves profoundly into the calamitous consequences of a nuclear war between these two nations, underscoring the global impact a disaster of such magnitude would possess. Nuclear catastrophe between India and Pakistan: Experts warn in groundbreaking study The primary research was done by researchers from the University of Colorado, with the help of Rutgers University, and published in Science Advances. The study collected data and feedback from a diverse set of organizations and experts such as US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Federation of American Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, as well as institutions like the University of Texas at Rio Grande and the University of California at Los Angeles. The final aim of the 2019 study was to sound an alarm about the nuclear war potential catastrophe between India and Pakistan. It stressed the need for international conventions that work against such wars, specifically pointing out the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The forecasts of the study were to get everyone to realise how horrible the aftermath of an atomic war would be for not just the South Asian region but the world at large. According to the simulations in the research, Indian and Pakistani nuclear attacks could result in 100 million immediate fatalities. Additionally, another 50 to 125 million could perish from the aftermath, including radiation, injuries, and environmental damage. The research detailed one example of India deploying 100 nuclear strategic weapons and Pakistan deploying 150 and showed how massive the loss of life would be. How nuclear conflict could trigger a global famine crisis In addition to the direct destruction, the study predicted that a nuclear conflict would initiate a global mass starvation phenomenon. This would occur because the nuclear explosions would initiate fires which would release huge quantities of soot and black carbon into the atmosphere. The smoke would obscure sunlight, reducing global temperatures as much as 5 degrees Celsius, destroying agriculture worldwide. A decrease in world precipitation by as much as 30% would further intensify food deficits, resulting in mass famine. One of the authors of the report from Rutgers University's Department of Environmental Sciences, Alan Robock, pointed out that the destruction would not be limited to the targeted cities but would be universal. "A war like that would threaten not just the areas where bombs would be dropped but the whole world," Robock said. India and Pakistan's nuclear inventory growth and its global impact The study also made an estimate of the probable size of India's and Pakistan's nuclear weapons inventories by 2025. It predicted that India's maximum inventory size would be 400 to 500 nuclear weapons by then, with explosive yields equivalent to Hiroshima bombs of World War II, whose weights range between 15 kilotons (15,000 tonnes TNT). The Pakistani stockpile would also see enormous growth, further increasing the risks of a nuclear war in the subcontinent. Maybe the most eye-opening aspect of the study was that it investigated the environmental impact of a nuclear war. The authors calculated that the nuclear explosions would ignite fires that would release between 16 million and 36 million tonnes of soot into the atmosphere. This black carbon would cover the sun and disrupt the Earth's climate system, leading to an effect of nuclear winter. The study warned that plant growth may reduce by up to 30% and ocean productivity by up to 15%. The climatic conditions would persist for a minimum of 10 years because the soot would remain suspended in the atmosphere for a very long period, making it hard to recover. Also Read | Baba Vanga's 2025 predictions: Is the next world war just around the corner - here's what she predicted about the global wars and other crisis Discover everything about astrology at the Times of India , including daily horoscopes for Aries , Taurus , Gemini , Cancer , Leo , Virgo , Libra , Scorpio , Sagittarius , Capricorn , Aquarius , and Pisces .
