CNANW

The Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons | Le Réseau canadien pour l’abolition des armes nucléaires

Simpson: Russian-Ukraine war brings nuclear risk to level not seen since Cuban missile crisis

September 18, 2023

Winter is coming so Russia’s chokehold on European gas, superior tank manoeuvres on snow, and increased mobilization effort foretell a conventional advantage.

The Hill Times, October 10, 2022

The Russian-Ukraine crisis may pose a greater risk of nuclear use than the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago this month. According to the Ukrainian president’s head office, Andriy Yermak the country’s intelligence agencies believe there is a “very high” risk that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons. Experts caution that Moscow’s leader is “desperate,” and like a cornered rat, President Vladimir Putin may use nuclear weapons to force the enemy to back down, a part of Russian military doctrine known as escalate to de-escalate.

Last month, Putin’s thinly veiled nuclear threat as he ordered a partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists stated that Russia would “use all the means at our disposal” to defend its territory. But the White House’s warnings have been stark, and U.S. President Joe Biden made it clear at the UN General Assembly that Russia’s threats would be opposed. More recently, he warned the world could face “Armageddon,” assessing the nuclear risk at its highest in 60 years. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in an interview on the sidelines of the assembly, confirmed that the United States sent warnings to Russia to steer clear of nuclear war. Former CIA director and retired four-star army general David Petreus explicitly warned the U.S. and its allies would destroy Russia’s troops and equipment in Ukraine—as well as sink its Black Sea fleet—if the Russian president uses nuclear weapons.

War is folly and assuredly Putin’s inner circle must be questioning the ill-fated decision to attack Kiev to topple Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government. Putin’s attempt to liberate the Donbas region by sheer force, not persuasion, and sham legislation purporting to formally annex four Ukrainian regions—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia—cannot obscure the reality that Russia’s military does not yet control the war-torn territory and Russia’s reign would be tenuous for generations to come.

Ukrainian troops are retaking more territory in regions illegally annexed by Russia and making breakthroughs in the east and south, recapturing villages and liberating settlements. However, Russian forces struck targets far from the front line last week, purportedly using self-destructing, Iran-supplied drones to hit the city of Bila Tserkva, south of Kiev. The entire Crimean peninsula, annexed in 2014, is also under constant threat due to Ukraine’s sinking of the Russian warship Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea fleet. Russian submarines might not be able to safely harbor there and might have to be redeployed to the Arctic and Baltic Sea.

Winter is coming so Russia’s chokehold on European gas, superior tank manoeuvres on snow, and increased mobilization effort foretell a conventional advantage. However, Ukraine will receive even more sophisticated weapons, in part because the horror of discovering mass graves and tortured Ukrainian bodies lessens the United States’ reluctance to ratchet up the conflict by filling Ukraine’s war chest with billions of dollars of military aid.

Forebodingly, Putin’s speeches are replete with references to the neo-Nazis and the neo-Nazi coup-appointed regime in Ukraine. The leader’s preoccupation with defending the motherland from “Western pseudo-values” may signal a return in his mind to the Siege of Leningrad, where he was born and over a million died. How to defy and reassure a paranoid, violent man who holds all the levers of power and is neither subject to democracy nor beholden to others in his inner cabal?

History is replete with evidence that men fear knives borne by men within the inner circle who stab the strongest in the back. As Thomas Hobbes warns, “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest by secret machination or confederacy.” The account of the Last Supper in the King James Bible highlights Jesus’s disciple Judas’s betrayal of him. Former U.S. president Donald Trump was betrayed by close aides, from Steve Bannon to his daughter Ivanka. There are legions of legendary stories of betrayal because, in their pursuit of power, leaders cast aside sycophants who become marginalized, secret enemies.

Irrational, vengeful followers may fully support decisions by autocratic men, like Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un, or Trump to use nuclear weapons. But the nuclear taboo has become much stronger since the Cuban missile crisis because so much more is known about the effects of nuclear winter, even from the use of 50 tactical nuclear weapons, merely 0.3 per cent of the world’s arsenal. Russian doctrine allows local commanders to use tactical nuclear weapons to stave off defeat, or loss of Russian territory. But if Russia crosses the line, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser to the White House disclosed the United States will respond decisively.

China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi are preaching caution to Putin directly, not mincing their words. At the same time, opposition is growing in Russian cities and remote villages in far-flung regions to mobilizing untrained men to become more cannon fodder. Putin’s recent claim that the United States created a precedent for the use of nuclear weapons with its bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 seemed to imply that if the West continues to support Kyiv and send weapons to Ukraine, he could resort to the nuclear option.

As each day passes, the nuclear threats Putin has made, veiled in self-pity and grandiosity, make the threat of an above-ground demonstration shot of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine’s east more credible. Putin’s aggressive threats lower the threshold for nuclear use and increase the risk of nuclear conflict and global catastrophe. The likelihood of nuclear use today may be more—or less—than it was back in late February, but unlikely events happen all the time. Nuclear threats are bluffs—until the catastrophic day they are not.

Nevertheless, the norm of non-use can act as a powerful restraint on leaders, just as it did in 1962 during the executive committee’s decision-making process in the United States. Once the Cuban missile crisis ended, significant steps that led to nuclear disarmament were taken, including the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. If this crisis ends safely, frightened world leaders will need to strongly promote stability, peace, and security.

Erika Simpson is a professor of international politics at Western University, the president of the Canadian Peace Research Association, and the co-author of How to De-escalate Dangerous Nuclear Weapons and Force Deployments in Europe.

Reducing the Nuclear Weapons Risks in the Ukraine Conflict

September 18, 2023

Report on November 29, 2022 Special Meeting of CNANW

In a recent statement, NATO’s Secretary General, a former social-democratic Norwegian Prime Minster, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg said that the alliance will continue to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes”. He added: “We will not back down.” Prominent columnists have challenged the very idea that a ceasefire in the Ukraine crisis is possible or have even suggested that it might lengthen the war on Russian President Putin’s terms. Some press for a “fight to victory” by Kyiv, given recent gains on the battlefield. Sometimes the nuclear weapons threat is seen as blackmail, a bluff, or a risk worth ignoring.

How then can Canada constructively contribute to peace?

Panelists at the CNANW discussion in late November were asked to consider opportunities for reducing the nuclear weapon threat, and prospects for peace. All acknowledged the dire situation in Ukraine following the illegal Russian invasion.

English: Report-on-Nov-29-Special-Meeting-of-CNANW_finalDownload
Français: RAPPORT-Réunion-spéciale-du-CNANW_Nov2022Download
The Hill Times: CollinsLemieux_UkrainePeaceJan0923_HTDownload

CNWC — Canada and the Stockholm Initiative

September 18, 2023

Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention welcomes Canada’s participation in the 16-nation Stockholm Initiative (SI). The initiative’s recommendations, in the form of a series of “stepping stones,” have the important virtue of being well-established, practical, and doable – and all the measures advanced are still urgently needed actions to pull our planet back from the precipice of nuclear catastrophe. To be sure, much more is required, but the SI affords Canada an important opportunity, as part of its multilateral engagement with like-minded states, to elevate attention to nuclear arms control and disarmament internationally, and to pursue it as a clear national priority.

Read further: https://www.cnanw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/CNWC-Canada-and-the-Stockholm-Initiative-Appendix.pdf

How Many Intensive Care Beds Will A Nuclear Weapon Explosion Require?

September 18, 2023

Tom Sauer and Ramesh Thakur

A novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China late last year, hopping in one way or another from other animals to humans. Initially the rest of the world thought this outbreak was a local problem and then was shocked at the brutality of the lockdown that the Chinese authorities clamped on Wuhan to quarantine the infection cluster. Despite China’s efforts at containment, soon the virus rode the highways and byways of globalisation to quickly circle the world. Other countries realised their hospital systems could be overwhelmed unless they drastically slowed the surge of new infections. No country had the number of beds in its intensive care units (ICUs) to manage patient loads under worst-case scenarios of letting this new coronavirus spread through the community to acquire herd immunity.

To those of us whose primary professional interest lies in nuclear weapons and the dangers they pose, the coronavirus pandemic is a striking validation of the Humanitarian Initiative, which took off 10 years ago with three core propositions: First, no country individually has the capacity to cope with the humanitarian consequences of a nuclear war, and the international system doesn’t have it collectively, either. Second, it is therefore in the interests of all humanity that nuclear weapons never be used again, under any circumstances. And finally: The only guarantee of non-use is the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. These precepts were the powerful impetus behind the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty that 122 states at the United Nations adopted in July 2017.

The pandemic speaks to the truth of the first proposition about the power of the bomb. The near-universal response to the panic created by COVID-19 leads us to the conclusion that the number of ICU beds needed to deal with a disaster should become a new norm, and a new way to judge when radical action is needed to respond to a global threat. So what other types of global catastrophes could call for more hospital infrastructure and personnel than is now available? The bomb is one obvious answer. Are the number of ICU beds sufficient to respond to a disaster caused by the explosion of one nuclear weapon or, in a war, many? No, they are not sufficient. Not even close.

A serious threat assessment consists of estimating the size of a threat and its probability. For the nuclear threat, estimating the size is rather straightforward; the probability is more difficult. A nuclear cataclysm is low probability in the short term, almost certain in the long run, and high impact whenever it happens. Let’s put it another way: For nuclear peace to hold, deterrence and fail-safe mechanisms must work every single time. For nuclear catastrophe to occur, either deterrence or fail safe mechanisms need to break down only once. This is not a comforting equation. Moreover, deterrence stability depends on rational decision-makers being always in office in every single nuclear-armed country. The leaders of the nine countries with the bomb today—China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Paki- stan, Russia, the UK, and the United States—do not universally reassure on this score.

So let’s take the number of available intensive care beds as the new measure and apply it to potential nuclear catastrophes. With the help of Stephens Institute of Technology researcher Alex Wellerstein’s Nukemap, we can model the approximate results of a hit on a target city by a nuclear warhead of choice. The largest bomb tested by Pakistan—which has a yield equal to 45 kilotons of TNT—would kill 358,350 people and injure 1.28 million, if used in an airburst over Delhi. But there would almost certainly be many more injuries; almost four million people live within the 7 kilometre radius in which the detonation would break glass windows and create other “light” blast effects—which actually are not light and would cause major injuries. If Russia launched one of its nuclear-armed, 800-kiloton Topol missiles against NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, 536,180 people would die and 572,830 would be injured. If a 5,000-kiloton Chinese Deng Fong-5 missile reaches Brussels, 839,550 will die and another 876,260 people will be seriously injured. Belgium’s 1,900 ICU beds (minus those of Brussels and surroundings, which would of course be instantly destroyed or rendered unusable) could not begin to cope with a humanitarian disaster of this magnitude. And what if more than one nuclear warhead explodes? What about a nuclear war that produces dozens or hundreds of nuclear explosions?

No society is prepared for such a man-made disaster. Worse, no society can ever be prepared for such a scenario. Nevertheless, many nations (including our home countries of Belgium and Australia) base their defense policies on the threat that the United States will use nuclear weapons in their defense, if necessary.

We cannot predict when and with what ferocity the next global pandemic will hit. But we can be certain that Covid-19 will not be the last pandemic disease to afflict humanity, and we should be making preparations to forestall such a disaster. We also cannot predict when and where nuclear weapons will be used again, and by whom. But we can be grimly confident that a nuclear warhead will be detonated someday, somewhere, if not by choice and design, then inadvertently, through accidental launch, rogue launch, or system failure.

Nuclear deterrence has proven itself to be anything but foolproof. Syria and Egypt attacked Israel in 1973, even though the Jewish state possessed nuclear weapons; in 1991, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein also disregarded Israel’s nuclear arsenal, firing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv. Argentina attacked the nuclear-armed UK in the Falkland Islands war. India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, fought the Kargil war in 1999 (more than 1,000 people died) and had a dog-fight in February last year. We would not call these conflicts—any one of which might have resulted in the use of nuclear weapons—expressions of security or stability. A policy based on hope and luck (as US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described the conduct of the Cuban Missile Crisis) cannot be the basis of a serious defense policy.

What is the probability of a nuclear war or simply the explosion of a single nuclear weapon? Certainly it is more than zero. And the probability seems to be rising rather than falling. If US President Donald Trump does not extend New START by the end of this year, for the first time in 50 years the world will end up without any bilateral arms control treaty that includes verification. The nuclear-armed countries have not negotiated one new arms control treaty since 2010. North Korea now has nuclear weapons, and Iran may be the next in line.

The world is facing a clear threat of an “outbreak” of nuclear weapons proliferation.

As of now, there are no treatments or preventive measures that work against the new coronavirus circling the world. But a “vaccine” against nuclear weapons use already exists— the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, often known simply as the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty. Unfortunately, despite their legal obligations under Article 6 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the five nuclear weapon states and their allies, and also the four nuclear armed states outside the NPT, are refusing to take the prophylactic medication the ban treaty prescribes. The nuclear weapon “haves” refuse to give up their nuclear privileges, even though they promised to do so under the NPT. The US alone will spend $50 billion this year on the maintenance and modernisation of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles.

Doctors know better. They know that they won’t be of any help in a nuclear war. That is why the World Medical Association stands behind the Nuclear Ban Treaty since 2018. The same for the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the International Council of Nurses, and International Red Cross.

The world has experienced epidemics and pandemics before. It suffered but endured. The coronavirus pandemic too shall pass, and life will go on. But the world is unlikely to return to the pre-pandemic state of affairs. Countries will rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity for critical medical supplies and equipment and create institutional structures to manage a surge in ICU capacity for future epidemiological crises. They will rebuild some vital border protections. And they will build functional redundancy into global supply chains to reduce exposure to single points of critical supply.

But such measures will not work as preparations against a nuclear war; no infrastructure, no matter how sophisticated or extensive, could cope with the horrible injury toll. Using ICU beds as a new norm informs us that no after-the-fact response to a nuclear bomb explosion can work. So prevention in the form of the Ban Treaty vaccine must be universally administered. In the post-pandemic world, therefore, eliminating nuclear weapons must be a top priority of the utmost urgency.

  The Authors      

Tom Sauer is an Associate Professor in international politics at the Universiteit Antwerpen in Belgium. Sauer is a former fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He received the 2019 Rotary International Alumni Global Service Award.

Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy and Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Australian National University; Senior Research Fellow with the Toda Peace Institute; and a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General.

  Toda Peace Institute    

The Toda Peace Institute is an independent, nonpartisan institute committed to advancing a more just and peaceful world through policy-oriented peace research and practice. The Institute commissions evidence-based research, convenes multi-track and multi-disciplinary problem-solving workshops and seminars, and promotes dialogue across ethnic, cultural, religious and political divides. It catalyses practical, policy-oriented conversations between theoretical experts, practitioners, policymakers and civil society leaders in order to discern innovative and creative solutions to the major problems confronting the world in the twenty-first century (see www.toda.org for more information).

Notes: 1. This article was first published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 28 April 2010 https://thebulletin.org/2020/04/how-many-intensive-care-beds-will-a-nuclear-weapon-explosion-require/

Contact Us

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3-1 Samon-cho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0017, Japan Email: contact@toda.org

Roche: Canada can’t hide behind NATO in refusal to sign treaty on nuclear weapons prohibition

September 18, 2023

Douglas Roche: “The Canadian government has said it cannot make such a commitment because of its membership in NATO. But the letter contests this stand, arguing that nothing in the new treaty precludes a NATO state joining, as long as it never assists the use of nuclear weapons.”

EDMONTON—Lloyd Axworthy, Jean-Jacques Blais, Jean Chrétien, Bill Graham, John McCallum, John Manley, and John Turner.

These seven names hardly need an introduction to readers of The Hill Times, and certainly not to the Government of Canada. Two of them are former prime ministers, three are former foreign ministers, and two are former defence ministers, who ran and served Liberal governments.

All of them signed an open letter [en français], released on Sept. 21, that features 53 former high officials of NATO countries expressing support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It is an astonishing rebuke of NATO’s moribund policies on nuclear weapons, and the most serious challenge to NATO’s nuclear orthodoxy in the organization’s 71-year history. Even two former NATO secretaries-general, Javier Solana and Willy Claes, as well as former U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, joined in this protest.

Read more

John Polanyi: We must do more to prevent nuclear war

September 18, 2023

Nuclear Armageddon is the global peril that time forgot. But amid all the concern about environmental degradation, disarmament remains imperative, says Nobel laureate John Polanyi.

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It is remarkable how speedily history has been transformed. Further developments will come as fast. As Thunberg stressed, we need now to believe in change. Not just scientific change, but also social. You will hear people say that you can’t change human nature. But you can change human behaviour, as we must. 

As early as 1945 leading scientists – Szilard and Nobel laureate James Franck among them – realised that world history had undergone a fundamental transformation. They stated this clearly, despite the fact that they were prevented from speaking publicly by secrecy. 

What these scientists were saying, in advance of the first A-bomb, was the following (I quote from their report, given in secret): “Unless an effective international control…is instituted, a race for nuclear armaments is certain to ensue following the first revelation of our possession of a nuclear weapon.” 

They were right. Seventy years later, we still find ourselves in the midst of that arms race. As their report foresaw, such a race isn’t likely to end spontaneously, but disastrously – unless we deliberately curb armaments. And that we must do by law.  

The notion that war should be subject to law, is not new. It is as old as war. What is altogether new today is the scale on which we can kill, which leaves us no alternative but to curb war by law. 

Read full essay:  Do more to prevent nuclear war

Peggy Mason: Canada — From nuclear disarmament stalwart to nuclear weapons apologist

September 18, 2023

“To understand the extent of Canada’s retreat from staunch defender of meaningful steps towards increased nuclear restraint and eventual disarmament to the shocking role of U.S. nuclear weapons apologist, it is necessary to review the position of Canada in the context of the NPT and NATO.” (Peggy Mason is President of the Rideau Institute.)

Download pdf here: From nuclear disarmament stalwart to nuclear weapons apologist

Regehr and Roche on INF Treaty

September 18, 2023

Canada must be clear-eyed about nuclear disarmament
ERNIE REGEHR AND DOUGLAS ROCHE
Globe and Mail
JANUARY 20, 2019

Ernie Regehr is the chairman of Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a project of Canadian Pugwash, and the former executive director of Project Ploughshares. Douglas Roche was a senator from 1998 to 2004, and was the Canadian ambassador for disarmament.

The world is about to lose one of the most important nuclear disarmament agreements ever made – and distressingly, Canada is silent.

The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, signed by then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan and former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. It bans the possession, production and flight-testing of ground-launched missiles within the 500-to-5,500 kilometre range and bans launchers for such missiles. Also, it resulted in the elimination of 2,692 Soviet and U.S. missiles based in Europe, and it was key to building an innovative system of verification, data exchanges, and mutual consultations.

Now, U.S. President Donald Trump has said the United States intends to suspend its participation in early February, leading to its termination six months later. The United States says the Russians are cheating. Russia says the United States is stretching the treaty’s boundaries. The debate over who’s right is what verification procedures and diplomatic talks are all about.

The stakes are very high. Mr. Gorbachev, now in retirement, and George Shultz, who was Mr. Reagan’s secretary of state, have issued a dire warning that “abandoning the INF” would undermine strategic stability and be a step towards an immensely destructive war. Retired senator Sam Nunn and Barack Obama’s former energy secretary Ernest J. Moniz, two giants in the realm of U.S. arms control who now run the Nuclear Threat Initiative, have also warned of a “cascade of negative consequences” if the INF treaty is abandoned. Those risks include the unfettered deployment by Russia of intermediate missiles sparking a new arms race, serious division within NATO, and the undermining of efforts to rally the world to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons and missiles.

The end of the INF also portends the collapse of the U.S.-Russia New START pact, which is due to expire in 2021 unless it is renewed. The United States has signalled it isn’t interested in renewing the one nuclear disarmament pillar left to hold a new outbreak of long-range missiles in check, and the nuclear-armed states are already modernizing their nuclear stocks.

Countries such as Canada must intervene and demand a diplomatic review of INF compliance procedures because we have a big stake in whether the world will lapse into a new nuclear arms race – and that could be where things are headed.

The importance and success of this treaty cannot be in doubt. The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the international organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, warns against “a world ungoverned by treaties constraining actions of states with nuclear weapons,” and concludes that “decades of effort to build an architecture of restraint are unravelling because key lessons from the early years of the Cold War seem to have been forgotten.”

In 2018, both the Group of Seven and NATO summits – two groups that include Canada as a member – declared that the preservation of the INF treaty is a key to Euro-Atlantic and international security. That’s a good start. But we are disappointed that the government of Canada has itself remained inexplicably silent in the face of the Trump administration’s threat to abandon the treaty.

This is not simply a European or U.S.-Russia matter. Canada definitely has a stake in averting the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of any nuclear weapon. As the great Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff once said, “No incineration without representation.”

This is not a time for quiet diplomacy. Canada has a voice and stature in the world. We must be heard by those who control our fate of whether we will live or die in a nuclear war. What the world should be witnessing is not the collapse of nuclear arms control treaties, but new agreements to provide for further reductions in deployed and stockpiled nuclear weapons.

Silence is an abrogation of responsibility. We urge Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government to provide bold, public, and insistent leadership, because continued silence won’t do anything to stop the loudest and most tragic explosion.

Presentations to Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (2004)

September 18, 2023

Presentations and Documents Submitted to the
Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade on Disarmament Issues (2004)
Bev Delong, President, Lawyers for Social Responsibility: here (rtf)
Présentation Devant le Comité Permanent des Affaires Étrangères et du Commerce International sur les Questions de Désarmement: ici (doc)

Sarah Estabrooks, Project Ploughshares, “Canada and NATO: An Opportunity for Leadership”: here (doc)
Le Canada et l’OTAN: une occasion de prendre l’initiative: ici (doc)

Debbie Grisdale, Executive Director, Physicians for Global Survival (Canada): here (doc)

Testimony by Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C., Chairman, Middle Powers Initiative: here (doc)
Témoignage de l’honorable Douglas Roche, O.C.: ici (doc)

Alan Phillips and Steven Starr: No Launch on Warning in english: here (pdf)
Éliminer le lancement sur alerte par Alan Phillips et Steven Starr: ici (pdf)

Déclaration sur le désarmement nucléaire, la politique de l’OTAN et les églises (2001): ici (doc)
Les Églises pressent l’OTAN d’éliminer au plus tôt les armes nucléaires (1999): ici (pdf)
Déclaration du comité executif du coe sur le traite de non-proliferation nucléaire (tnp), 2004: ici (doc)

Probable climatic effects of a nuclear weapon exhcange

September 18, 2023

What are the probable climatic effects of a nuclear weapon exchange?

Consider the scientific work recently done on the consequences for the climate of a regional nuclear war fought in the sub-tropics by US researchers using the NASA computer model (Model 1E, also used by the International Panel on Climate Change to predict global warming). This and other recent research is summarized in the Nuclear Darkness website created by Steven Starr.

In particular, please note the article by Steven Starr entitled “The Climatic Consequences of Nuclear War, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 2010

INESAP article by Steven Starr

See also the following primary source literature:

•Owen B. Toon, Richard P. Turco, Alan Robock, Charles Bardeen, Luke Oman, and Georgiy L. Stenchikov, Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of individual nuclear terrorism,Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Vol. 7, 2007, p. 1973-2002.

•Alan Robock, Luke Oman, Georgiy L. Stenchikov, Owen B. Toon, Charles Bardeen, and Richard P. Turco, Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Vol. 7, 2007, p. 2003-2012.

•Alan Robock, Luke Oman, and Georgiy L. Stenchikov, Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences, Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres, Vol. 112, No. D13, 2007.

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