Nuclear war could ignite 'global food crisis'

I recently absorbed some alarming information on nuclear weapons and the catastrophic global impact of even a small-scale nuclear war.

For starters, a very interesting article in The New Yorker focused on three Plowshares peace activists, including an 82-year-old nun, who easily broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 is the nation's sole industrial complex where weapons-grade uranium is fabricated and stored, according to the article by Eric Schlosser.

Then I found an informative interactive on nuclear weapons on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists website. The interactive shows that the number of nuclear warheads around the planet dropped from a peak of 64,099 in 1986 to 10,144 in 2013 - an 84 percent decline. But the number of nations with nuclear weapons has risen to nine.

And the U.S. is now negotiating with Iran regarding the future of its nuclear program, according to a USA Today story.

Blog: Hurricanes: scary scenarios for NJ

Lastly, I looked at a recent study by Lili Xia and Alan Robock of Rutgers University and several others on the potential agricultural impact of a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

Those nations had 110 and 120 nuclear weapons, respectively, in 2013, according to the interactive.

The Rutgers-led study says that a regional war between India and Pakistan could lower global surface temperatures by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, or 1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, for five to 10 years. That would have major impacts on precipitation and solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface, according to the study published in Earth's Future, a scientific journal.

Blog: Warning: Storm surge, flooding risks to rise

The researchers found that a cooler, drier and darker environment in China would reduce yearly production of rice by 29 percent, maize by 20 percent and wheat by 53 percent, according to the study. China is the world's largest grain grower, the study notes.

Five years after a nuclear war, rice, maize and wheat production would still be quite depressed in China, ranging from 16 to 26 percent lower for rice, 9 to 20 percent lower for maize and 32 to 43 percent lower for wheat. That's assuming several different kinds of agricultural management: no irrigation, automatic irrigation, the application of 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of nitrogen fertilizer per hectare (2.5 acres) or a 10-day delay in planting, according to the study.

Story: The $100 billion hurricane?

The decrease in food availability would persist, but gradually ease, for more than a decade, according to the study, which does not delve into how many people could be killed or injured during such a war.

"Assuming these impacts are indicative of those in other major grain producers, a nuclear war using much less than 1 percent of the current global arsenal could produce a global food crisis and put a billion people at risk of famine," the study says.

Now that's an extremely scary thought.

I talked with Robock, a Wall resident, meteorologist and distinguished professor in Rutgers University's Department of Environmental Sciences, this morning.

He said the researchers calculated that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, involving 50 nuclear weapons apiece, would generate 6.5 million tons of black soot.

The soot would be blown around the world in the upper atmosphere for years, making it cooler and drier at the Earth's surface, he said.

While the soot would not trigger a nuclear winter – below freezing temperatures year-round in the middle of the continent – "it would be such a large climate change it would be unprecedented in recorded human history," he said.

In fact, it would be colder than the Little Ice Age between 1300 to 1850, Robock said.

U.S. agriculture would see a 20 to 40 percent reduction in production for the first five years and a little bit less in the next five years. The world food trade would come to a halt, people would start hoarding food and there would be a huge shortage of food, he said.

Maybe 1 billion people would be at risk of starvation worldwide, he said.

"Nuclear weapons are pretty useless," Robock said. "They don't even deter attacks."

If the U.S. hit Russia with a nuclear first strike and Russia did not respond, "everybody in the U.S. would die from starvation," he said.

Robock has posted his work and that of others on a web page entitled "Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict; Nuclear Winter is Still a Danger."

And you might want to check out his lengthy, 57-megabyte PowerPoint presentation: Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict.