CAN WE SURVIVE A NUCLEAR WAR?

According to the 2013 study by the International Physicians for the

Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan (each possessing about a hundred nuclear weapons) would set off a global famine that could kill two billion people (mainly in China with a population of 1.3 billion and in other developing countries) and effectively end human civilization.

            The prognosis of civilizational destruction had once been associated with a full-scale nuclear war between the two nuclear superpowers (each then having some 20-30,000 nuclear warheads) about a generation ago, with the discovery in 1982-83 of nuclear winter in the wake of nuclear Armageddon. Even then it had been found that in a so-called limited nuclear exchange, the detonation of a few hundred of those apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction on a hundred cities would quickly trigger, within a short period of several weeks, unprecedented climatic and atmospheric catastrophes on a global scale.

            According to the 2013 IPPNW study which was made public on 10 December 2013, based upon research published by climate scientists who had assessed the impact of nuclear explosions in the Earth’s atmosphere and other ecosystems, a nuclear war using as few as 100 nukes (of the explosive power of the 15 KT atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima 6 August 1945) anywhere in the world would disrupt the global climate and devastate crop yields so severely that the lives of more than two billion people would be at risk because of global famine.

            Only about a week earlier, there was a press report early December 1983 that the Kashmir flashpoint could trigger a fourth war between the two nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent.

            Ira Helfand, the author of the IPPNW report, wrote in an article on the day of its release:

            “There are today more than 17,000 nuclear warheads, an ongoing existential threat to human survival that has largely been ignored since the Cold War ended two decades ago...

           “In fact, the humanitarian consequences of even a limited nuclear war, such as a conflict in South Asia between India and Pakistan, involving just 100 Hiroshima-size bombs (13-20 KT) – less than 0.5% of the world’s nuclear   arsenal – would put 2 billion people’s lives and wellbeing at risk.

            “The local effects would be devastating. More than 20 million people would be dead in a week from the explosions, firestorms and immediate radiation effects. But the global consequences would be far worse.

            “The firestorms caused by this war would loft 5 million tons of soot high into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and dropping temperatures across the planet. This climate disruption would cause a sharp, worldwide decline in food production.

            “The resulting global famine would put at risk 870 million people in the developing world who are already malnourished today, and 300 million people living in countries dependent on food imports.

            “In addition, the huge shortfalls in Chinese food production would threaten another 1.3 billion people within China. At the very least there would be a decade of social and economic chaos in the largest country in the world, home to the world’s second largest and most dynamic economy and a large nuclear arsenal of its own.

            “A nuclear war of comparable size anywhere in the world would produce the same global impact. By way of comparison, each U.S. Trident submarine commonly carries 96 warheads, each of which is 10 to 30 times more powerful than the weapons used in the South Asia scenario. This means a single submarine (SSBN) can cause the devastation of a nuclear famine many times over.”

            On a full-scale nuclear conflict between the two nuclear Goliaths, Ira Helfand was reported to have said: “With a large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible – not certain, but possible – extinction of the human race.

             “In this kind of war, biologically there are going to be people surviving somewhere on the planet but the chaos that would result from this would dwarf anything we’ve ever seen in human history...”

             Professors Carl Sagan and Richard Turco, two of the leading scientists responsible for the discovery of nuclear winter, have written in their landmark book A PATH WHERE NO MAN THOUGHT (Century, London, 1991, p. 123):

             “...Efim Slavsky, the Minister of Medium Machine Building – the cover agency for the Soviet nuclear weapons program – in July 1968 told Andrei Sakharov (known as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb), “We’ve got to be strong, stronger than the capitalists – then there’ll be peace. If the imperialists use nuclear weapons, we’ll retaliate at once with everything we’ve got and destroy every target necessary to insure victory.”

              “Sakharov concluded from this, “So our response would be an immediate, all-out nuclear attack on enemy cities and industry, as well as on military targets.”...” That is, both countervalue and counterforce attacks at the same time, in the nuclear jargon. The ultimate prescription for the nuclear Apocalypse.

            “...It would be impossible for the United States to maintain the military commitments which it now sustains around the world (without turning into a garrison state) did we not possess atomic weapons and the will to use them when necessary,” Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34^th US president (1953-61) wrote in his memoirs Mandate for Change (Volume One, Doubleday, New York, 1963, p. 180).

              During Ike’s 8-year presidency, the US military increased its nuclear stockpile twenty times to over 24,000 nuclear warheads by the end of 1961.

               “... (The) conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struugle for power, once again presented to mankind in semireligious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed,” Einstein wrote in an unfinished address drafted several days before his death in mid-April 1955.

               Einstein’s pronouncement was quite prophetic; in 1955 the US had over 3,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union some 200. Three years after the Americans, the Soviets tested on 22 November 1955their first 1.6 megaton hydrogen bomb which was designed and devised jointly by Sakharov and Zeldovich.

               “The threat of the apocalypse will be with us for a long time; the apocalypse may come,” J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1956. Director of the Los Alamos laboratory which produced the world’s first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb (the “Super”) in 1949. He cogently argued that its extreme danger to mankind “wholly outweighs any military advantage”. He was alleged a security risk in 1953, but subsequently exonerated.

                Speaking on 19 September 1956, President Eisenhower said: “We witness today, in the power of nuclear weapons, a new and deadly dimension to the ancient horror of war. Humanity has now achieved, for the first time in its history, the power to end its history...” That would be the true end of history for homo sapiens.

                 Speaking on 26 September 1961, President John F. Kennedy said that nuclear war and its radioactive fallout and environmental impact “spread by winds and waters and (human) fear, could well engulf the great and the small (nations), the rich and the poor, the committed and uncommitted alike.”

                 Then Kennedy stressed, in these immortal words: “Mankind must put an end to war or (nuclear) war will put an end to mankind...”

          Addressing the Polish Sejm (unicameral legislature) on 21 July 1974, Soviet leader General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev declared that “mankind might be wholly destroyed” in a nuclear war.

          “A very large nuclear war would mean a calamity of indescribable proportions and absolutely unpredictable consequences, with the uncertainties tending toward the worse,” Andrei Sakharov wrote on “The Dangers of Thermonuclear War” in Foreign Affairs, Summer 1983.

          “All-out nuclear war would mean the destruction of contemporary civilization, throw man back centuries, cause the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people, and, with a certain degree of probability, would cause man to be destroyed as a biological species...”

          Speaking on the consequences of nuclear war on 11 July 1984, Senator William Proxmire said: “One of the shocking implications of nuclear winter is that we can destroy ourselves (commit mass suicide) by attacking our enemy (committing genocide). Some experts have long maintained that there is no military usefulness to nuclear weapons, or to some types of nuclear weapons.

          “Now we learn that, by employing the nuclear option, we may be shooting ourselves in the head. If the nuclear winter study is correct, we have thousands of weapons in our own arsenal that are pointed at ourselves.

          “Of course, the same situation exists for the Soviet Union.

          “The dilemma we face is that the strategic option we have adopted to assure deterrence could also assure our self-destruction...”

          What’s the solution? Total nuclear disarmament (TND).

          In 2011, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement called for its national societies to educate the public about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, and called for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

         The Mayors for Peace campaign, representing the world’s urban population (half of humanity), is working towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020.