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What Would a 21st-Century Nuclear War Really Be Like? The World Needs to Know
The United States should back a proposal for a new United Nations study on the effects of nuclear war, using the latest science.
Oct 31, 2024
Coming up for a vote in early November is a resolution advanced by the Ireland and New Zealand delegations to the United Nations to commission a critical new scientific study on the effects of nuclear war. The study, which would be the first under U.N. auspices in more than 30 years, would be run by an independent scientific panel of 21 members and would examine the physical effects and societal consequences of a nuclear war on local, regional, and planetary scales. It would be comprehensive in its scope, including the climate, environmental, and radiological effects of nuclear war and how these would impact public health, global social and economic systems, agriculture, and ecosystems over periods of days, weeks, and decades.
Our Understanding of the Effects of Nuclear War Needs to Be Updated
That nuclear war would be catastrophic and potentially kill hundreds of millions of people has been well known for decades. But we have reason to believe that our current knowledge is incomplete, and some of it is out of date. Since the last time the U.N. commissioned such a report—its 1988 Study on the Climatic and Other Global Effects of Nuclear War—the world population has grown and changed in distribution, economies have become more interdependent, and the environment more fragile. New scientific information has yielded insights, including updates to our understanding of, and ability to model, the atmosphere, and the studies of the long-term effects of radiation on affected populations have yielded new information. Some of this technical work has been presented in the four Conferences on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons.
It is also clear that additional research continues to be needed to fill important knowledge gaps. New studies are being published and commissioned and research gaps are being identified. There have been recently updated studies published of the radiological fallout impacts of atmospheric nuclear detonations and of ground bursts, and the U.S. National Academies is currently conducting an Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War to try to improve our understanding of the risks and effects of nuclear winter, which recent research suggests could kill hundreds of millions or billions of people. In a 2022 report, the U.S. National Academies urged the development of a research program to better understand the effects of low-dose ionizing radiation using recent advances in epidemiology, biological understanding of disease occurrence, and computational and analytical technologies, and it has also become clear that our understanding of how radiation affects women and children differently than men is incomplete.
As long as countries possess nuclear weapons, nuclear war is a possibility.
There is little current, detailed information available about how even a limited nuclear war could affect social and economic systems, including how damage to industry, energy production, and financial systems would affect human well-being and what subsequent migration, conflict, and disease would result. Studies in the 1980s indicated that a relatively limited nuclear war could cause a U.S. economic collapse, which would take many years to recover from, and larger-scale attacks could cause damage from which recovery might not be possible.
A 2023 study by the U.S. National Academies on Risk Analysis Methods for Nuclear War and Nuclear Terrorism, tasked to look at the likelihood and consequences of different nuclear war scenarios, found the information about the consequences incomplete. Given this, the study advised, “There is a need to improve the understanding of less-well-understood physical effects of nuclear weapons (such as fires; damage in modern urban environments; electromagnetic pulse effects; and climatic effects, such as nuclear winter), as well as the assessment and estimation of psychological, societal, and political consequences of nuclear weapons use.”
Why Would a U.N.-Commissioned Study Be Important?
As long as countries possess nuclear weapons, nuclear war is a possibility. Nuclear war does not respect national boundaries, and countries not party to the conflict may be affected, potentially catastrophically. The global community deserves a rigorous, science-based understanding of these possible consequences. This lack of understanding is not limited to the public. The nuclear war consequence models maintained by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for the U.S. Department of Defense provide an incomplete picture, according to the 2023 National Academies study, which found these assessments to be “focused on prompt effects and military objectives. This results in a partial accounting of the consequences leading to a limited understanding of the breadth of the outcomes.”
This new U.N. study needs to be legitimate, transparent, inclusive, and accountable. The global community expects this type of authoritative scientific assessment on global existential threats from its international bodies; an example is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was created to provide governments and the public with regular scientific assessments on climate change, risks posed, and solutions.
What Role Should Scientists Play in Nuclear Weapons Policy?
Scientists have regularly provided critical information and perspectives that have served to sound the alarm on the dangers of the use of nuclear weapons. They’ve done so from the very first moments of the nuclear age, when Manhattan Project scientists wrote the Franck report foretelling the nuclear arms race and signed a Leo Szilard-spearheaded petition to forego the first use of a nuclear bomb. Later, scientists working independently from governments went on to publicly illuminate the dangerous effects of radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear explosions on unsuspecting people, and used those findings to create momentum for the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which kept tests below ground. Scientists have been warning us since the 1980s about nuclear winter—the scenario in which soot from firestorms set off by nuclear war could be lofted into the stratosphere and persist for years, disrupting the climate and thus agriculture on global scales, inducing widespread famine.
In April of this year, the national science academies of the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) weighed in, issuing a statement for the first time on nuclear weapons. They declared that “it is imperative to highlight the known consequences of nuclear warfare,” adding that there is strong scientific evidence that “depending on the scale of use of nuclear weapons, there is the potential for the destruction of entire ecosystems and extinction of species, due to the direct impact of explosions and fires and altered climatic conditions. In the worst cases this could be on the scale of a mass extinction.”
The academies further urged the scientific community “to continue to develop and communicate the scientific evidence base that shows the catastrophic effects of nuclear warfare on human populations and other species with which we share our planet.”
The United States Should Support This Resolution—and Urge Other Nations to Follow Suit
Given that the United States relies on a strategy of nuclear deterrence, which seeks to obtain security by threatening nuclear war, it seems obvious that this country should want to fully understand the risks it is running.
Nuclear-armed states do not run these risks alone. The rest of the world can be affected by nuclear war via radioactive fallout, environmental changes such as nuclear winter, and disruption of the global economic system. Almost any nuclear war would be a global problem.
As a country with a strong global leadership role, the United States should co-sponsor this resolution and encourage its allies to do the same. The United States should also provide technical advice and offer the participation of its most knowledgeable scientists, while supporting the participation of scientists from a wide range of other nations and communities to ensure their perspectives are included in the scoping and execution of the study.
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Warning 'Future of Science' Is at Stake, 80+ Nobel Laureates Endorse Harris
A Trump victory, the Nobel winners said, would "jeopardize any advancements in our standards of living, slow the progress of science and technology, and impede our responses to climate change."
Oct 25, 2024
Saying that the upcoming U.S. presidential election could be the most important ever for the future of science, a group of 82 Nobel Prize winners in medicine, physics, chemistry, and economics signed an open letter endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris and warning against allowing former President Donald Trump to return to the Oval Office.
The letter, obtained by The New York Times on Thursday, credits advances in science and technology with "enormous increases in living standards and life expectancies over the past two centuries" and expresses concern that Trump could threaten that progress.
"This is the most consequential presidential election in a long time, perhaps ever, for the future of science and the United States," the group of U.S. laureates wrote. "We, the undersigned, strongly support Harris."
The signatories, who include four who won the prize this month, first praise Harris for understanding both the importance of science and technology and that "maintaining America's leadership in these fields requires budgetary support from the federal government, independent universities, and international collaboration."
They also contrasted the two candidates' approach to immigration.
"Harris also recognizes the key role that immigrants have always played in the advancement of science," they wrote.
They then warned of what a second Trump presidency might entail.
"Should Donald Trump win the presidential election, he would undermine future U.S. leadership on these and other fronts, as well as jeopardize any advancements in our standards of living, slow the progress of science and technology, and impede our responses to climate change," they wrote.
"I hope it's a wake-up call for people."
Project 2025, the road map for a second Trump term, contains several anti-science agenda items such as plans get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Trump also displayed great hostility to science during his first term. He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement and rolled back 125 climate and environmental regulations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he floated false cures such as exposure to ultraviolet light and injecting disinfectants. And he proposed a budget that would have dramatically slashed funding for health and science agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Science Foundation.
It was partly these budget cuts, as well Trump's "anti-science" and "anti-university" view, that motivated Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001, to draft Thursday's letter, he told the Times.
While Stiglitz said scientists usually "like to stick to their knitting," in this case "they've recognized this is a moment where you can't be silent."
"I hope it's a wake-up call for people," Stiglitz told the Times. "A consequence of this election is the really profound impact that his agenda has on science and technology."
Stiglitz also drafted another letter, signed by 23 U.S. Nobel Prize winners in economics, endorsing Harris' economic vision over Trump's.
"While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, Harris' economic agenda will improve our nation's health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump," the Nobel economists wrote.
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Look Up: The Scariest Part When We See the Big, Big, Big Picture
As a new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
Oct 23, 2024
This is “Climate week” in New York City, and my inbox has been awash recently in the latest press releases about start-ups and noble initiatives and venal greenwashing. Much of it’s important, and I’ll get to some of it later, but there’s a big new study that came out last week in Science that sets our crucial moment in true perspective. Let’s step back for a moment.
This new study—a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt “biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time”—offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years. That’s the period scientists call the Phanerozoic—the latest of the earth’s four geological eons (we’re still in it), and the one marked by the true profusion of plant and animal life. It’s a lovely piece of science, and it’s lovely too because it reminds us of all we’re heir to in this tiny brief moment that marks the human time on earth. So staggeringly much—strange and extreme and fecund—has come before us.
But it’s also scary as can be, for two big reasons.
The first is that it shows the earth has gotten very very warm in the past. As the Washington Post explained in an excellent analysis yesterday, “the study suggests that at its hottest the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius).” Our current average temperature—already elevated by global warming to the highest value ever recorded—is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15 degrees Celsius. For most of the 500 million years the study covers, the earth has been in a hothouse state, with an average temperature of 71.6 Fahrenheit, or 22 Celsius, much higher than now. Only about an eighth of the time has the earth been in its current “coldhouse” state—but of course that includes all the time that humans have been around. It is the world we know and we’re adapted to.
In every era, it’s increases in carbon dioxide that drive the increases and decreases in temperature. “Carbon dioxide is really that master dial,” Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, said. And so the study makes clear that the mercury could go very high indeed as humans pour carbon into the sky. We won’t burn enough coal and oil and gas to reach the very highest temperatures seen in the geological record—that required periods of incredible volcanism—but we may well double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and this study implies that the fast and slow feedbacks from that could eventually drive temperatures as much as eight degrees Celsius higher, which is more than most current estimates. Over shorter time frames the numbers are just as dramatic
Without rapid action to curbgreenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.
Now, you could look at those numbers and say: well, the earth has been hotter before, so life won’t be wiped out. And that’s true—there’s probably no way to wipe out life, though on a planet with huge numbers of nuclear weapons who knows. But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.
But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.
In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.
Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.
Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.
Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.
That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over this week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work.
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