Even a small-scale,
regional
nuclear war could produce as many direct fatalities as all of World War
II and
disrupt the global climate for a decade or more, with environmental
effects
that could be devastating for everyone on Earth, university researchers
have
found. These powerful
conclusions are
being presented Dec. 11 during a press conference and a special
technical
session at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union in A team of scientists
at Rutgers,
The State University of New Jersey; the University of Against the backdrop
of growing
tensions in the Middle East and nuclear "saber rattling" elsewhere in
Asia, the authors point out that even the smallest nuclear powers today
and in
the near future may have as many as 50 or more Hiroshima-size (15
kiloton)
weapons in their arsenals; all told, about 40 countries possess enough
plutonium and/or uranium to construct substantial nuclear arsenals. Owen "Brian" Toon,
chair of the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a
member of the
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU-Boulder, oversaw the
analysis of potential fatalities based on an assessment of current
nuclear
weapons inventories and population densities in large urban complexes.
His team
focused on scenarios of smoke emissions that urban firestorms could
produce. "The results
described in
one of the new papers represent the first comprehensive quantitative
study of
the consequences of a nuclear conflict between smaller nuclear states,"
said Toon and his co-authors. "A small country is likely to direct its
weapons against population centers to maximize damage and achieve the
greatest
advantage," Toon said. Fatality estimates for a plausible regional
conflict ranged from 2.6 million to 16.7 million per country. Alan Robock, a
professor in the
department of environmental sciences and associate director of the
Center for
Environmental Prediction at Rutgers’ "Considering the
relatively
small number and size of the weapons, the effects are surprisingly
large. The
potential devastation would be catastrophic and long term," said
Richard
Turco, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and a member and
founding
director of UCLA's Institute of the Environment. Turco once headed a
team
including Toon and Carl Sagan that originally defined "nuclear
winter." While a regional
nuclear
confrontation among emerging third-world nuclear powers might be
geographically
constrained, Robock and his colleagues have concluded that the
environmental
impacts could be worldwide. "We examined the
climatic
effects of the smoke produced in a regional conflict in the subtropics
between
two opposing nations, each using 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons to
attack
the other’s most populated urban areas," Robock said. The
researchers
carried out their simulations using a modern climate model coupled with
estimates of smoke emissions provided by Toon and his colleagues, which
amounted to as much as five million metric tons of "soot" particles. "A cooling of
several
degrees would occur over large areas of North America and When Robock and his
team applied
their climate model to calibrate the recorded response to the 1912
eruptions of
Katmai volcano in But the climatic
disruption
resulting from Tambora lasted for only about one year, the authors
note. In
their most recent computer simulation, in which carbon particles remain
in the
stratosphere for up to 10 years, the climatic effects are greater and
last
longer than those associated with the Tambora eruption. "With the exchange
of 100
15-kiloton weapons as posed in this scenario, the estimated quantities
of smoke
generated could lead to global climate anomalies exceeding any changes
experienced in recorded history," Robock said. "And that’s
just 0.03
percent of the total explosive power of the current world nuclear
arsenal."
http://ruweb.rutgers.edu/news-media.shtml Recommend this Article to a Friend Back to: News |
Subscribe to the Earth Observatory About the Earth Observatory Contact Us Privacy Policy and Important Notices Responsible NASA Official: Lorraine A. Remer Webmaster: Goran Halusa We're a part of the Science Mission Directorate |