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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 But we have reason to believe that our current knowledge is incomplete, and some of it is out of date.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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'Serious Risk' of Vital Ocean Current Collapse by 2100, Warn Scientists
"A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated," wrote scientists in a letter to Nordic governments.
Oct 24, 2024
A group of 44 climate scientists from 15 different countries warn there is a "serious risk" that soaring global temperatures will trigger the "catastrophic" collapse of a crucial system of ocean currents—and possibly sooner than established estimates considered likely.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, moves warm water up from the tropics to the North Atlantic, where it sinks and cools before returning south. It is, as letter signatory and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf toldThe Guardian, "one of our planet's largest heat transport systems." If it collapsed, it could lower temperatures in some parts of Europe by up to 30°C.
That's why the scientists sent a letter to the Council of Nordic Ministers over the weekend urging them to take action to understand and prevent a potential collapse.
"A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated," the scientists wrote. "Such an ocean circulation change would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world."
In the letter, the scientists detailed some of the potential "catastrophic" impacts of such a collapse, including "major cooling" in northern Europe, extreme weather, and changes that would "potentially threaten the viability of agriculture in northwestern Europe."
One study cited in the letter shows that London could cool by 10°C and Bergen, Norway by 15°C.
"If Britain and Ireland become like northern Norway, (that) has tremendous consequences. Our finding is that this is not a low probability," Peter Ditlevsen, a University of Copenhagen professor who signed the letter, toldReuters. "This is not something you easily adapt to."
Globally, the scientists said, the end of AMOC could cause the ocean to absorb less carbon dioxide, thereby increasing its presence in the atmosphere. It could also further augment sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast and alter tropical rainfall patterns.
The most recent synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expressed "medium confidence" that the current would not cease functioning before 2100. Since its publication in March 2023, however, a rash of studies have come out upping the risk.
"Given that the outcome would be catastrophic and impacting the entire world for centuries to come, we believe more needs to be done to minimize this risk."
A Nature Communications study, also published last year, looked at 150 years of temperature data and determined with 95% confidence that AMOC would collapse between 2025 and 2095 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise as currently predicted.
Another, published in Science Advances in February, concluded that AMOC was currently "on route to tipping."
There are already signs that AMOC has begun to stall over the last six to seven decades, Rahmstorf told The Guardian, such as the cold blob in the North Atlantic that is defying global warming trends. The water in North Atlantic is also becoming less salty due to meltwater from the Greenland ice sheets and increased precipitation due to climate change. Less salty water is lighter and does not sink, interrupting the process that makes AMOC flow.
"It is an amplifying feedback: As AMOC gets weaker, the subpolar oceans gets less salty, and as the oceans gets less salty then AMOC gets weaker," Rahmstorf explained. "At a certain point this becomes a vicious circle which continues by itself until AMOC has died, even if we stop pushing the system with further emissions."
"The big unknown here—the billion-dollar question—is how far away this tipping point is," Rahmstorf said.
The scientists acknowledged that the chance of the AMOC tipping "remains highly uncertain."
They continued:
The purpose of this letter is to draw attention to the fact that only 'medium confidence' in the AMOC not collapsing is not reassuring, and clearly leaves open the possibility of an AMOC collapse during this century. And there is even greater likelihood that a collapse is triggered this century but only fully plays out in the next.
Given the increasing evidence for a higher risk of an AMOC collapse, we believe it is of critical importance that Arctic tipping point risks, in particular the AMOC risk, are taken seriously in governance and policy. Even with a medium likelihood of occurrence, given that the outcome would be catastrophic and impacting the entire world for centuries to come, we believe more needs to be done to minimize this risk.
To respond to this threat, the scientists urged the council—a group that includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Åland—to launch a study of the risk posed to these countries by an AMOC collapse and to take measures to counter that risk.
"This could involve leveraging the strong international standing of the Nordic countries to increase pressure for greater urgency and priority in the global effort to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, in order to stay close to the 1.5°C target set by the Paris agreement," they wrote.
Johan Rockström, a letter signatory who leads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wrote on social media that global politics, "particularly in [the] Nordic region, can no longer exclude [the] risk of AMOC collapse."
And there is one way that political leaders can stave off such a collapse, as well as other climate tipping points, according to Rahmstorf.
"This is all driven mainly by fossil fuel emissions and also deforestation, so both must be stopped," he told The Guardian. "We must stick to the Paris agreement and limit global heating as close to 1.5°C as possible."
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The AI Push Is Reigniting the Battle for the Soul of the US Academy
The moment requires greater public pushback against the military conquest of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers.
Oct 01, 2024
The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.
Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.
In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least—and brace yourself for this—$100 million in Pentagon funding.
And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.
The Pentagon Goes to School
Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least—and brace yourself for this—$100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million. And here’s a surprise: Two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M.
In 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy.
Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics—weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.
“I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.”
Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products.
In addition, the Pentagon is working aggressively to bring new universities into the fold. In January 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a defense-funded research center at Howard University, the first of its kind at a historically Black college.
Given the campus Gaza demonstrations of last spring, perhaps you also won’t be surprised to learn that the recent surge in Pentagon spending faces increasing criticism from students and faculty alike. Targets of protest include the Lavender program, which has used AI to multiply the number of targets the Israeli armed forces can hit in a given time frame. But beyond focusing on companies enabling Israel’s war effort, current activists are also looking at the broader role of their universities in the all-American war system.
For example, at Indiana University research on ties to companies fueling the killings in Gaza grew into a study of the larger role of universities in supporting the military system as a whole. Student activists found that the most important connection involved that university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, whose mission is “to provide acquisition, engineering… and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare, and special warfare weapons.” In response, student activists have launched a “Keep Crane Off Campus” campaign.
A Science of Death or for Life?
Graduating science and engineering students increasingly face a moral dilemma about whether they want to put their skills to work developing instruments of death. Journalist Indigo Olivier captured that conflict in a series of interviews with graduating engineering students. She quotes one at the University of West Florida who strongly opposes doing weapons work this way: “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility… Every tool can be a weapon… I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.” By contrast, Cameron Davis, a 2021 computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, told Olivier about the dilemma faced by so many graduating engineers: “A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But he went on to say that the high pay at weapons firms “drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”
The choice faced by today’s science and engineering graduates is nothing new. The use of science for military ends has a long history in the United States. But there have also been numerous examples of scientists who resisted dangerous or seemingly unworkable military schemes. When President Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defense plan in 1986, for instance, he promised, all too improbably, to develop an impenetrable shield that would protect the United States from any and all incoming nuclear-armed missiles. In response, physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund circulated a pledge to refuse to work on that program. It would, in the end, be signed by more than 7,000 scientists. And that document actually helped puncture the mystique of the Star Wars plan, a reminder that protest against the militarization of education isn’t always in vain.
James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded.
Scientists have also played a leading role in pressing for nuclear arms control and disarmament, founding organizations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), the Federation of American Scientists (1945), the global Pugwash movement (1957), the Council for a Livable World (1962), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969). To this day, all of them continue to work to curb the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy this planet as a livable place for humanity.
A central figure in this movement was Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project over moral qualms about the potential impact of the atomic bomb. In 1957, he helped organize the founding meeting of the Pugwash Conference, an international organization devoted to the control and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. In some respects Pugwash was a forerunner of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which successfully pressed for the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021.
Enabling Endless War and Widespread Torture
The social sciences also have a long, conflicted history of ties to the Pentagon and the military services. Two prominent examples from earlier in this century were the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Program (HTS) and the role of psychologists in crafting torture programs associated with the Global War on Terror, launched after the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan.
The HTS was initially intended to reduce the “cultural knowledge gap” suffered by U.S. troops involved in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq early in this century. The theory was that military personnel with a better sense of local norms and practices would be more effective in winning “hearts and minds” and so defeating determined enemies on their home turf. The plan included the deployment of psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists in Human Terrain Teams alongside American troops in the field.
Launched in 2007, the program sparked intense protests in the academic community, with a particularly acrimonious debate within the American Anthropological Association. Ed Liebow, the executive director of the association, argued that its debate “convinced a very large majority of our members that it was just not a responsible way for professional anthropologists to conduct themselves.” After a distinctly grim history that included “reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding,” as well as a belief by many commanders that Human Terrain Teams were simply ineffective, the Army quietly abandoned the program in 2014.
The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”
An even more controversial use of social scientists in the service of the war machine was the role of psychologists as advisors to the CIA’s torture programs at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and other of that agency’s “black sites.” James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded. That interrogation program, developed by Mitchell with psychologist John Bruce Jessom, included resorting to “violence, sleep deprivation, and humiliation.”
The role of psychologists in crafting the CIA’s torture program drew harsh criticism within the profession. A 2015 report by independent critics revealed that the leaders of the American Psychological Association had “secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror.” Over time, it became ever clearer that the torture program was not only immoral but remarkably ineffective, since the victims of such torture often told interrogators what they wanted to hear, whether or not their admissions squared with reality.
That was then, of course. But today, resistance to the militarization of science has extended to the growing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging military technologies. For example, in 2018, there was a huge protest movement at Google when employees learned that the company was working on Project Maven, a communications network designed to enable more accurate drone strikes. More than 4,000 Google scientists and engineers signed a letter to company leadership calling for them to steer clear of military work, dozens resigned over the issue, and the protests had a distinct effect on the company. That year, Google announced that it would not renew its Project Maven contract, and pledged that it “will not design or deploy AI” for weapons.
Unfortunately, the lure of military funding was simply too strong. Just a few years after those Project Maven protests, Google again began doing work for the Pentagon, as noted in a 2021 New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger. Their article pointed to Google’s “aggressive pursuit” of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project, which will attempt to “modernize the Pentagon’s cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield.” (Cloud technology is the term for the delivery of computing services over the internet.)
Meanwhile, a cohort of Google workers has continued to resist such military projects. An October 2021 letter in the British Guardian from “Google and Amazon workers of conscience” called on the companies to “pull out of Project Nimbus [a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military and government] and cut all ties with the Israeli military.” As they wrote then, “This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children. The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians.”
Of course, their demand seems even more relevant today in the context of the war on Gaza that had then not officially begun.
The Future of American Science
Obviously, many scientists do deeply useful research on everything from preventing disease to creating green-energy options that has nothing to do with the military. But the current increases in weapons research could set back such efforts by soaking up an ever larger share of available funds, while also drawing ever more top talent into the military sphere.
The stakes are particularly high now, given the ongoing rush to develop AI-driven weaponry and other emerging technologies that pose the risk of everything from unintended slaughter due to system malfunctions to making war more likely, given the (at least theoretical) ability to limit casualties for the attacking side. In short, turning back the flood of funding for military research and weaponry from the Pentagon and key venture capital firms will be a difficult undertaking. After all, AI is already performing a wide range of military and civilian tasks. Banning it altogether may no longer be a realistic goal, but putting guardrails around its military use might still be.
Such efforts are, in fact, already underway. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has called for an international dialogue on “the pressing dangers that these systems pose to peace and international security and to civilians.” ICRAC elaborates on precisely what these risks are: “Autonomous systems have the potential to accelerate the pace and tempo of warfare, to undermine existing arms controls and regulations, to exacerbate the dangers of asymmetric warfare, and to destabilize regional and global security, [as well as to] further the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force and obscure the moral and legal responsibility for war crimes.”
The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”
Instead of listening almost exclusively to happy talk about the military value of AI by individuals and organizations that stand to profit from its adoption, isn’t it time to begin paying attention to the skeptics, while holding back on the deployment of emerging military technologies until there is a national conversation about what they can and can’t accomplish, with scientists playing a central role in bringing the debate back to Earth?
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