nuclear warfare essay

Here’s How Bad a Nuclear War Would Actually Be

W e know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as a video . It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke is produced, lofted and spread across the globe, altering the climate and causing mass starvation.

As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact. Ballistic missiles from U.S. submarines west of Norway start striking Russia after about 10 minutes, and Russian ones from north of Canada start hitting the U.S. a few minutes later. The very first strikes fry electronics and power grids by creating an electro-magnetic pulse of tens of thousands of volts per meter. The next strikes target command-and-control centers and nuclear launch facilities. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles take about half an hour to fly from launch to target.

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Major cities are targeted both because they contain military facilities and to stymie the enemy’s post-war recovery. Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones. The U.K. and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the U.S. so, Russia hits them too. Firestorms engulf many cities, where storm-level winds fan the flames, igniting anything that can burn, melting glass and some metals and turning asphalt into flammable hot liquid.

Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research suggests that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity aren’t the worst part: a nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. A large city like Moscow, with almost 50 times more people than Hiroshima, can create much more smoke, and a firestorm that sends plumes of black smoke up into the stratosphere, far above any rain clouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.

It’s important to note that huge uncertainties remain, so the actual humanitarian impact could be either better or worse – a reason to proceed with caution. A recently launched $4M open research program will hopefully help clarify public understanding and inform the global policy conversation, but much more work is needed, since most of the research on this topic is classified and focused on military rather than humanitarian impacts.

We obviously don’t know how many people will survive a nuclear war. But if it’s even remotely as bad as this study predicts, it has no winners, merely losers. It’s easy to feel powerless, but the good news is that there is something you can do to help: please help share this video! The fact that nuclear war is likely to start via gradual escalation, perhaps combined by accident or miscalculation, means that the more people know about nuclear war, the more likely we are to avoid having one.

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The Devastating Effects of Nuclear Weapons

What can nuclear weapons do? How do they achieve their destructive purpose? What would a nuclear war — and its aftermath — look like? In the article that follows, excerpted from Richard Wolfson and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress’s book “ Nuclear Choices for the Twenty-First Century ,” the authors explore these and related questions that reveal the most horrifying realities of nuclear war.

A Bomb Explodes: Short-Term Effects

The most immediate effect of a nuclear explosion is an intense burst of nuclear radiation, primarily gamma rays and neutrons. This direct radiation is produced in the weapon’s nuclear reactions themselves, and lasts well under a second. Lethal direct radiation extends nearly a mile from a 10-kiloton explosion. With most weapons, though, direct radiation is of little significance because other lethal effects generally encompass greater distances. An important exception is the enhanced-radiation weapon, or neutron bomb, which maximizes direct radiation and minimizes other destructive effects.

An exploding nuclear weapon instantly vaporizes itself. What was cold, solid material microseconds earlier becomes a gas hotter than the Sun’s 15-million-degree core. This hot gas radiates its energy in the form of X-rays, which heat the surrounding air. A fireball of superheated air forms and grows rapidly; 10 seconds after a 1-megaton explosion, the fireball is a mile in diameter. The fireball glows visibly from its own heat — so visibly that the early stages of a 1-megaton fireball are many times brighter than the Sun even at a distance of 50 miles. Besides light, the glowing fireball radiates heat.

This thermal flash lasts many seconds and accounts for more than one-third of the weapon’s explosive energy. The intense heat can ignite fires and cause severe burns on exposed flesh as far as 20 miles from a large thermonuclear explosion. Two-thirds of injured Hiroshima survivors showed evidence of such flash burns. You can think of the incendiary effect of thermal flash as analogous to starting a fire using a magnifying glass to concentrate the Sun’s rays. The difference is that rays from a nuclear explosion are so intense that they don’t need concentration to ignite flammable materials.

The intense heat can ignite fires and cause severe burns on exposed flesh as far as 20 miles from a large thermonuclear explosion.

As the rapidly expanding fireball pushes into the surrounding air, it creates a blast wave consisting of an abrupt jump in air pressure. The blast wave moves outward initially at thousands of miles per hour but slows as it spreads. It carries about half the bomb’s explosive energy and is responsible for most of the physical destruction. Normal air pressure is about 15 pounds per square inch (psi). That means every square inch of your body or your house experiences a force of 15 pounds. You don’t usually feel that force, because air pressure is normally exerted equally in all directions, so the 15 pounds pushing a square inch of your body one way is counterbalanced by 15 pounds pushing the other way. What you do feel is overpressure , caused by a greater air pressure on one side of an object.

If you’ve ever tried to open a door against a strong wind, you’ve experienced overpressure. An overpressure of even 1/100 psi could make a door almost impossible to open. That’s because a door has lots of square inches — about 3,000 or more. So 1/100 psi adds up to a lot of pounds. The blast wave of a nuclear explosion may create overpressures of several psi many miles from the explosion site. Think about that! There are about 50,000 square inches in the front wall of a modest house — and that means 50,000 pounds or 25 tons of force even at 1 psi overpressure. Overpressures of 5 psi are enough to destroy most residential buildings. An overpressure of 10 psi collapses most factories and commercial buildings, and 20 psi will level even reinforced concrete structures.

People, remarkably, are relatively immune to overpressure itself. But they aren’t immune to collapsing buildings or to pieces of glass hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles per hour or to having themselves hurled into concrete walls — all of which are direct consequences of a blast wave’s overpressure. Blast effects therefore cause a great many fatalities. Blast effects depend in part on where a weapon is detonated. The most widespread damage to buildings occurs in an air burst , a detonation thousands of feet above the target. The blast wave from an air burst reflects off the ground, which enhances its destructive power. A ground burst , in contrast, digs a huge crater and pulverizes everything in the immediate vicinity, but its blast effects don’t extend as far. Nuclear attacks on cities would probably employ air bursts, whereas ground bursts would be used on hardened military targets such as underground missile silos. As you’ll soon see, the two types of blasts have different implications for radioactive fallout.

How far do a weapon’s destructive effects extend? That distance — the radius of destruction — depends on the explosive yield. The volume encompassing a given level of destruction depends directly on the weapon’s yield. Because volume is proportional to the radius cubed, that means the destructive radius grows approximately as the cube root of the yield. A 10-fold increase in yield then increases the radius of destruction by a factor of only a little over two. The area of destruction grows faster but still not in direct proportion to the yield. That relatively slow increase in destruction with increasing yield is one reason why multiple smaller weapons are more effective than a single larger one. Twenty 50-kiloton warheads, for example, destroy nearly three times the area leveled by a numerically equivalent 1-megaton weapon.

What constitutes the radius of destruction also depends on the level of destruction you want to achieve. Roughly speaking, though, the distance at which overpressure has fallen to about 5 psi is a good definition of destructive radius. Many of the people within this distance would be killed, although some wouldn’t. But some would be killed beyond the 5-psi distance, making the situation roughly equivalent to having everyone within the 5-psi circle killed and everyone outside surviving. The image to the left shows how the destructive zone varies with explosive yield for a hypothetical explosion. This is a simplified picture; a more careful calculation of the effects of nuclear weapons on entire populations requires detailed simulations that include many environmental and geographic variables.

The blast wave is over in a minute or so, but the immediate destruction may not be. Fires started by the thermal flash or by blast effects still rage, and under some circumstances they may coalesce into a single gigantic blaze called a firestorm that can develop its own winds and thus cause the fire to spread. Hot gases rise from the firestorm, replaced by air rushing inward along the surface at hundreds of miles per hour. Winds and fire compound the blast damage, and the fire consumes enough oxygen to suffocate any remaining survivors.

During World War II, bombing of Hamburg with incendiary chemicals resulted in a firestorm that claimed 45,000 lives. The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima resulted in a firestorm; that of Nagasaki did not, likely because of Nagasaki’s rougher terrain. The question of firestorms is important not only to the residents of a target area: Firestorms might also have significant long-term effects on the global climate, as we’ll discuss later.

Both nuclear and conventional weapons produce destructive blast effects, although of vastly different magnitudes. But radioactive fallout is unique to nuclear weapons. Fallout consists primarily of fission products, although neutron capture and other nuclear reactions contribute additional radioactive material. The term fallout generally applies to those isotopes whose half-lives exceed the time scale of the blast and other short-term effects. Although fallout contamination may linger for years and even decades, the dominant lethal effects last from days to weeks, and contemporary civil defense recommendations are for survivors to stay inside for at least 48 hours while the radiation decreases.

The fallout produced in a nuclear explosion depends greatly on the type of weapon, its explosive yield, and where it’s exploded. The neutron bomb, although it produces intense direct radiation, is primarily a fusion device and generates only slight fallout from its fission trigger. Small fission weapons like those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki produce locally significant fallout. But the fission-fusion-fission design used in today’s thermonuclear weapons introduces the new phenomenon of global fallout . Most of this fallout comes from fission of the U-238 jacket that surrounds the fusion fuel. The global effect of these huge weapons comes partly from the sheer quantity of radioactive material and partly from the fact that the radioactive cloud rises well into the stratosphere, where it may take months or even years to reach the ground. Even though we’ve had no nuclear war since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fallout is one weapons effect with which we have experience. Atmospheric nuclear testing before the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty resulted in detectable levels of radioactive fission products across the globe, and some of that radiation is still with us.

Fallout differs greatly depending on whether a weapon is exploded at ground level or high in the atmosphere. In an air burst, the fireball never touches the ground, and radioactivity rises into the stratosphere. This reduces local fallout but enhances global fallout. In a ground burst, the explosion digs a huge crater and entrains tons of soil, rock, and other pulverized material into its rising cloud. Radioactive materials cling to these heavier particles, which drop back the ground in a relatively short time. Rain may wash down particularly large amounts of radioactive material, producing local hot spots of especially intense radioactivity. A hot spot in Albany, New York, thousands of miles from the 1953 Nevada test that produced it, exposed area residents to some 10 times their annual background radiation dose. The exact distribution of fallout depends crucially on wind speed and direction; under some conditions, lethal fallout may extend several hundred miles downwind of an explosion. However, it’s important to recognize that the lethality of fallout quickly decreases as short-lived isotopes decay.

Recommended Response to a Nuclear Explosion

The United States government has recently provided guidance on how to respond to a nuclear detonation. One recommendation is to divide the region of destruction due to blast effects into three separate damage zones. This division provides guidance for first responders in assessing the situation. Outermost is the light damage zone , characterized by “broken windows and easily managed injuries.” Next is the moderate damage zone with “significant building damage, rubble, downed utility lines and some downed poles, overturned automobiles, fires, and serious injuries.” Finally, there’s the severe damage zone , where buildings will be completely collapsed, radiation levels high, and survivors unlikely.

The recommendations also define a dangerous fallout zone spanning different structural damage zones. This is the region where dose rates exceed a whole-body external dose of about 0.1 Sv/hour. First responders must exercise special precautions as they approach the fallout zone in order to limit their own radiation exposure. The dangerous fallout zone can easily stretch 10 to 20 miles (15 to 30 kilometers) from the detonation depending on explosive yield and weather conditions.

Electromagnetic Pulse

A nuclear weapon exploded at very high altitude produces none of the blast or local fallout effects we’ve just described. But intense gamma rays knock electrons out of atoms in the surrounding air, and when the explosion takes place in the rarefied air at high altitude this effect may extend hundreds of miles. As they gyrate in Earth’s magnetic field, the electrons generate an intense pulse of radio waves known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

A single large weapon exploded some 200 miles over the central United States could blanket the entire country with an electromagnetic pulse intense enough to damage computers, communication systems, and other electronic devices. It could also affect satellites used for military communications, reconnaissance, and attack warning. The EMP phenomenon thus has profound implications for a military that depends on sophisticated electronics. In 1962, the United States detonated a 1.4-megaton warhead 250 miles above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. People as far as Australia and New Zealand witnessed the explosion as a red aurora appearing in the night sky. Hawaiians, only 800 miles from the island, experienced a bright flash followed by a green sky and the failure of hundreds of street lights. In total, the Soviet Union and the United States conducted 20 tests of EMP from nuclear detonations. However, it’s unclear how to extrapolate the results to today’s more sensitive and more pervasive electronic equipment.

Since the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 it has been virtually impossible to study EMP effects directly, although elaborate devices have been developed to mimic the electronic impact of nuclear weapons. Increasingly, crucial electronic systems are “hardened” to minimize the impact of EMP. Nevertheless, the use of EMP in a war could wreak havoc with systems for communication and control of military forces.

Many countries are around the world are developing high-powered microwave weapons which, although not nuclear devices, are designed to produce EMPs. These directed-energy weapons , also called e-bombs , emit large pulses of microwaves to destroy electronics on missiles, to stop cars, to detonate explosives remotely, and to down swarms of drones. Despite these EMP weapons being nonlethal in the sense that there’s no bang or blast wave, an enemy may be unable to distinguish their effects from those of nuclear weapons.

Would the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon to produce EMP or the use of a directed-beam EMP weapon be an act of war warranting nuclear retaliation? With its electronic warning systems in disarray, should the EMPed nation launch a nuclear strike on the chance that it was about to be attacked? How are nuclear decisions to be made in a climate of EMP-crippled communications? These are difficult questions, but military strategists need to have answers.

Nuclear War

So far we’ve examined the effects of single nuclear explosions. But a nuclear war would involve hundreds to thousands of explosions, creating a situation for which we simply have no relevant experience. Despite decades of arms reduction treaties, there are still thousands of nuclear weapons in the world’s arsenals. Detonating only a tiny fraction of these would cause mass casualties.

What would a nuclear war be like? When you think of nuclear war, you probably envision an all-out holocaust in which adversaries unleash their arsenals in an attempt to inflict the most damage. Many people — including your authors — believe that misfortune to be the likely outcome of almost any use of nuclear weapons among the superpowers. But nuclear strategists have explored many scenarios that fall short of the all-out nuclear exchange. What might these limited nuclear wars be like? Could they really remain limited ?

Limited Nuclear War

One form of limited nuclear war would be like a conventional battlefield conflict but using low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. Here’s a hypothetical scenario: After its 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia attacks a Baltic country with tanks and ground forces while the United States is distracted by a domestic crisis. NATO responds with decisive counterforce, destroying Russian tanks with fighter jets, but this doesn’t quell Russian resolve. Russia responds with even more tanks and by bombing NATO installations, killing several hundred troops. NATO cannot tolerate such aggression and to prevent further Russian advance launches low-yield tactical nuclear weapons with their dial-a-yield positions set to the lowest settings of only 300 tons TNT equivalent. The goal is to signal Russia that it has crossed a line and to deescalate the situation. NATO’s actions are based on fear that if the Russian aggression weren’t stopped the result would be all-out war in northern Europe.

This strategy is actually being discussed in the higher echelons of the Pentagon. The catchy concept is that use of a few low-yield nuclear weapons could show resolve, with the hoped-for outcome that the other party will back down from its aggressive behavior (this concept is known as escalate to deescalate ). The assumption is that the nuclear attack would remain limited, that parties would go back to the negotiating table, and that saner voices would prevail. However, this assumes a chain of events where everything unfolds as expected. It neglects the incontrovertible fact that, as the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz observed in the 19th century, “Three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” Often coined fog of war , this describes the lack of clarity in wartime situations on which decisions must nevertheless be based. In the scenario described, sensors could have been damaged or lines of communication severed that would have reported the low-yield nature of the nuclear weapons. As a result, Russia might feel its homeland threatened and respond with an all-out attack using strategic nuclear weapons, resulting in millions of deaths.

There is every reason to believe that a limited nuclear war wouldn’t remain limited.

There is every reason to believe that a limited nuclear war wouldn’t remain limited. A 1983 war game known as Proud Prophet involved top-secret nuclear war plans and had as participants high-level decision makers including President Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The war game followed actual plans but unexpectedly ended in total nuclear annihilation with more than half a billion fatalities in the initial onslaught — not including subsequent deaths from starvation. The exercise revealed that a limited nuclear strike may not achieve the desired results! In this case, that was because the team playing the Soviet Union responded to a limited U.S. nuclear strike with a massive all-out nuclear attack.

What about an attack on North Korea? In 2017, some in the U.S. cabinet advocated for a “bloody nose” strategy in dealing with North Korea’s flagrant violations of international law. This is the notion that in response to a threatening action by North Korea, the U.S. would destroy a significant site to “bloody Pyongyang’s nose.” This might employ a low-yield nuclear attack or a conventional attack. The “bloody nose” strategy relies on the expectation that Pyongyang would be so overwhelmed by U.S. might that they would immediately back down and not retaliate. However, North Korea might see any type of aggression as an attack aimed at overthrowing their regime, and could retaliate with an all-or-nothing response using weapons of mass destruction (including but not necessarily limited to nuclear weapons) as well as their vast conventional force.

In September 2017, during the height of verbal exchanges between President Trump and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, the U.S. flew B-1B Lancer bombers along the North Korean coast, further north of the demilitarized zone than the U.S. had ever done, while still staying over international waters. However, North Korea didn’t respond at all, making analysts wonder whether the bombers were even detected. Uncertainty in North Korea’s ability to discriminate different weapon systems might exacerbate a situation like this one and could lead the North Koreans viewing any intrusion as an “attack on their nation, their way of life and their honor.” This is exactly how the Soviet team in the Proud Prophet war game interpreted it.

What about a limited attack on the United States? Suppose a nuclear adversary decided to cripple the U.S. nuclear retaliatory forces (a virtual impossibility, given nuclear missile submarines, but a scenario considered with deadly seriousness by nuclear planners). Many of the 48 contiguous states have at least one target — a nuclear bomber base, a submarine support base, or intercontinental missile silos — that would warrant destruction in such an attack. The attack, which would require only a tiny fraction of the strategic nuclear weapons in the Russian arsenal, could kill millions of civilians. Those living near targeted bomber and submarine bases would suffer blast and local radiation effects. Intense fallout from ground-burst explosions on missile silos in the Midwest would extend all the way to the Atlantic coast. Fallout would also contaminate a significant fraction of U.S. cropland for up to year and would kill livestock. On the other hand, the U.S. industrial base would remain relatively unscathed, if no further hostilities occurred.

In contrast to attacking military targets, an adversary might seek to cripple the U.S. economy by destroying a vital industry. In one hypothetical attack considered by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, ten Soviet SS-18 missiles, each with eight 1-megaton warheads, attack United States’ oil refineries. The result is destruction of two-thirds of the U.S. oil-refining capability. And even with some evacuation of major cities in the hypothetical crisis leading to the attack, 5 million Americans are killed.

Each of these “limited” nuclear attack scenarios kills millions of Americans — many, many times the 1.2 million killed in all the wars in our nation’s history. Do we want to entertain limited nuclear war as a realistic possibility? Do we believe nuclear war could be limited to “only” a few million casualties? Do we trust the professional strategic planners who prepare our possible nuclear responses to an adversary’s threats? What level of nuclear preparedness do we need to deter attack?

All-Out Nuclear War

Whether from escalation of a limited nuclear conflict or as an outright full-scale attack, an all-out nuclear war remains possible as long as nuclear nations have hundreds to thousands of weapons aimed at one another. What would be the consequences of all-out nuclear war?

Within individual target cities, conditions described earlier for single explosions would prevail. (Most cities, though, would likely be targeted with multiple weapons.) Government estimates suggest that over half of the United States’ population could be killed by the prompt effects of an all-out nuclear war. For those within the appropriate radii of destruction, it would make little difference whether theirs was an isolated explosion or part of a war. But for the survivors in the less damaged areas, the difference could be dramatic.

Consider the injured. Thermal flash burns extend well beyond the 5-psi radius of destruction. A single nuclear explosion might produce 10,000 cases of severe burns requiring specialized medical treatment; in an all-out war there could be several million such cases. Yet the United States has facilities to treat fewer than 2,000 burn cases — virtually all of them in urban areas that would be leveled by nuclear blasts. Burn victims who might be saved, had their injuries resulted from some isolated cause, would succumb in the aftermath of nuclear war. The same goes for fractures, lacerations, missing limbs, crushed skulls, punctured lungs, and myriad other injuries suffered as a result of nuclear blast. Where would be the doctors, the hospitals, the medicines, the equipment needed for their treatment? Most would lie in ruin, and those that remained would be inadequate to the overwhelming numbers of injured. Again, many would die whom modern medicine could normally save.

A single nuclear explosion might produce 10,000 cases of severe burns requiring specialized medical treatment; in an all-out war there could be several million such cases.

In an all-out war, lethal fallout would cover much of the United States. Survivors could avoid fatal radiation exposure only when sheltered with adequate food, water, and medical supplies. Even then, millions would be exposed to radiation high enough to cause lowered disease resistance and greater incidence of subsequent fatal cancer. Lowered disease resistance could lead to death from everyday infections in a population deprived of adequate medical facilities. And the spread of diseases from contaminated water supplies, nonexistent sanitary facilities, lack of medicines, and the millions of dead could reach epidemic proportions. Small wonder that the international group Physicians for Social Responsibility has called nuclear war “the last epidemic.”

Attempts to contain damage to cities, suburbs, and industries would suffer analogously to the treatment of injured people. Firefighting equipment, water supplies, electric power, heavy equipment, fuel supplies, and emergency communications would be gone. Transportation into and out of stricken cities would be blocked by debris. The scarcity of radiation-monitoring equipment and of personnel trained to operate it would make it difficult to know where emergency crews could safely work. Most of all, there would be no healthy neighboring cities to call on for help; all would be crippled in an all-out war.

Is Nuclear War Survivable?

We’ve noted that more than half the United States’ population might be killed outright in an all-out nuclear war. What about the survivors?

Recent studies have used detailed three-dimensional, block-by-block urban terrain models to study the effects of 10-kiloton detonations on Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. The results settle an earlier controversy about whether survivors should evacuate or shelter in place: Staying indoors for 48 hours after a nuclear blast is now recommended. That time allows fallout levels to decay by a factor of 100. Furthermore, buildings between a survivor and the blast can block the worst of the fallout, and going deep inside an urban building can lower fallout levels still further. The same shelter-in-place arguments apply to survivors in the non-urban areas blanketed by fallout.

These new studies, however, consider only single detonations as might occur in a terrorist or rogue attack. In considering all-out nuclear war, we have to ask a further question: Then what?

Individuals might survive for a while, but what about longer term, and what about society as a whole? Extreme and cooperative efforts would be needed for long-term survival, but would the shocked and weakened survivors be up to those efforts? How would individuals react to watching their loved ones die of radiation sickness or untreated injuries? Would an “everyone for themselves” attitude prevail, preventing the cooperation necessary to rebuild society? How would residents of undamaged rural areas react to the streams of urban refugees flooding their communities? What governmental structures could function in the postwar climate? How could people know what was happening throughout the country? Would international organizations be able to cope?

Staying indoors for 48 hours after a nuclear blast is now recommended. That time allows fallout levels to decay by a factor of 100.

Some students of nuclear war see postwar society in a race against time. An all-out war would have destroyed much of the nation’s productive capacity and would have killed many of the experts who could help guide social and physical reconstruction. The war also would have destroyed stocks of food and other materials needed for survival.

On the other hand, the remaining supplies would have to support only the much smaller postwar population. The challenge to the survivors would be to establish production of food and other necessities before the supplies left from before the war were exhausted. Could the war-shocked survivors, their social and governmental structure shattered, meet that challenge? That is a very big nuclear question — so big that it’s best left unanswered, since only an all-out nuclear war could decide it definitively.

Climatic Effects

A large-scale nuclear war would pump huge quantities of chemicals and dust into the upper atmosphere. Humanity was well into the nuclear age before scientists took a good look at the possible consequences of this. What they found was not reassuring.

The upper atmosphere includes a layer enhanced in ozone gas, an unusual form of oxygen that vigorously absorbs the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. In the absence of this ozone layer , more ultraviolet radiation would reach Earth’s surface, with a variety of harmful effects. A nuclear war would produce huge quantities of ozone-consuming chemicals, and studies suggest that even a modest nuclear exchange would result in unprecedented increases in ultraviolet exposure. Marine life might be damaged by the increased ultraviolet radiation, and humans could receive blistering sunburns. More UV radiation would also lead to a greater incidence of fatal skin cancers and to general weakening of the human immune system.

Even more alarming is the fact that soot from the fires of burning cities after a nuclear exchange would be injected high into the atmosphere. A 1983 study by Richard Turco, Carl Sagan, and others (the so-called TTAPS paper) shocked the world with the suggestion that even a modest nuclear exchange — as few as 100 warheads — could trigger drastic global cooling as airborne soot blocked incoming sunlight. In its most extreme form, this nuclear winter hypothesis raised the possibility of extinction of the human species. (This is not the first dust-induced extinction pondered by science. Current thinking holds that the dinosaurs went extinct as a result of climate change brought about by atmospheric dust from an asteroid impact; indeed, that hypothesis helped prompt the nuclear winter research.)

The original nuclear winter study used a computer model that was unsophisticated compared to present-day climate models, and it spurred vigorous controversy among atmospheric scientists. Although not the primary researcher on the publication, Sagan lent his name in order to publicize the work. Two months before Science would publish the paper, he decided to introduce the results in the popular press. This backfired, as Sagan was derided by hawkish physicists like Edward Teller who had a stake in perpetuating the myth that nuclear war could be won and the belief that a missile defense system could protect the United States from nuclear attack. Teller called Sagan an “excellent propagandist” and suggested that the concept of nuclear winter was “highly speculative.” The damage was done, and many considered the nuclear winter phenomenon discredited.

But research on nuclear winter continued. Recent studies with modern climate models show that an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, even with today’s reduced arsenals, could put over 150 million tons of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere. That’s roughly the equivalent of all the garbage the U.S. produces in a year! The result would be a drop in global temperature of some 8°C (more than the difference between today’s temperature and the depths of the last ice age), and even after a decade the temperature would have recovered only 4°C. In the world’s “breadbasket” agricultural regions, the temperature could remain below freezing for a year or more, and precipitation would drop by 90 percent. The effect on the world’s food supply would be devastating.

Even a much smaller nuclear exchange could have catastrophic climate consequences. The research cited above also suggests that a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, involving 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons, would shorten growing seasons and threaten annual monsoon rains, jeopardizing the food supply of a billion people. The image below shows the global picture one month after this hypothetical 100-warhead nuclear exchange.

Nuclear weapons have devastating effects. Destructive blast effects extend miles from the detonation point of a typical nuclear weapon, and lethal fallout may blanket communities hundreds of miles downwind of a single nuclear explosion. An all-out nuclear war would leave survivors with few means of recovery, and could lead to a total breakdown of society. Fallout from an all-out war would expose most of the belligerent nations’ surviving populations to radiation levels ranging from harmful to fatal. And the effects of nuclear war would extend well beyond the warring nations, possibly including climate change severe enough to threaten much of the planet’s human population.

Debate about national and global effects of nuclear war continues, and the issues are unlikely to be decided conclusively without the unfortunate experiment of an actual nuclear war. But enough is known about nuclear war’s possible effects that there is near universal agreement on the need to avoid them. As the great science communicator and astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “It’s elementary planetary hygiene to clean the world of these nuclear weapons.” But can we eliminate nuclear weapons? Should we? What risks might such elimination entail? Those are the real issues in the ongoing debates about the future of nuclear weaponry.

Richard Wolfson is Benjamin F. Wissler Professor of Physics at Middlebury College. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress is Scientist-in-Residence at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. This article is excerpted from their book “ Nuclear Choices for the Twenty-First Century: A Citizen’s Guide. “

air burst A nuclear explosion detonated at an altitude—typically, thousands of feet—that maximizes blast damage. Because its fireball never touches the ground, an air burst produces less radioactive fallout than a ground burst.

blast wave An abrupt jump in air pressure that propagates outward from a nuclear explosion, damaging or destroying whatever it encounters.

direct radiation Nuclear radiation produced in the actual detonation of a nuclear weapon and constituting the most immediate effect on the surrounding environment.

electromagnetic pulse (EMP) An intense burst of radio waves produced by a high-altitude nuclear explosion, capable of damaging electronic equipment over thousands of miles.

fallout Radioactive material, mostly fission products, released into the environment by nuclear explosions.

fireball A mass of air surrounding a nuclear explosion and heated to luminous temperatures.

firestorm A massive fire formed by coalescence of numerous smaller fires.

ground burst A nuclear explosion detonated at ground level, producing a crater and significant fallout but less widespread damage than an air burst.

nuclear difference Phrase we use to describe the roughly million-fold difference in energy released in nuclear reactions versus chemical reactions.

nuclear winter A substantial reduction in global temperature that might result from soot injected into the atmosphere during a nuclear war.

overpressure Excess air pressure encountered in the blast wave of a nuclear explosion. Overpressure of a few pounds per square inch is sufficient to destroy typical wooden houses.

radius of destruction The distance from a nuclear blast within which destruction is near total, often taken as the zone of 5-pound-per-square-inch overpressure.

thermal flash An intense burst of heat radiation in the seconds following a nuclear explosion. The thermal flash of a large weapon can ignite fires and cause third-degree burns tens of miles from the explosion.

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Nowhere to hide

How a nuclear war would kill you — and almost everyone else.

Simulation of soot injected into the atmosphere after a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. (Courtesy Max Tegmark / Future of Life Institute )

October 20, 2022

By François Diaz-Maurin

Design by Thomas Gaulkin

This summer, the New York City Emergency Management department released a new public service announcement on nuclear preparedness, instructing New Yorkers about what to do during a nuclear attack. The 90-second video starts with a woman nonchalantly announcing the catastrophic news: “So there’s been a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why, just know that the big one has hit.” Then the PSA video advises New Yorkers on what to do in case of a nuclear attack: Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned to media and governmental updates.

But nuclear preparedness works better if you are not in the blast radius of a nuclear attack. Otherwise, there’s no going into your house and closing your doors because the house will be gone . Now imagine there have been hundreds of those “big ones.” That’s what even a “small” nuclear war would include. If you are lucky not to be within the blast radius of one of those, it may not ruin your day, but soon enough, it will ruin your whole life.

Effects of a single nuclear explosion

Any nuclear explosion creates radiation, heat, and blast effects that will result in many quick fatalities.

Direct radiation is the most immediate effect of the detonation of a nuclear weapon. It is produced by the nuclear reactions inside the bomb and comes mainly in the form of gamma rays and neutrons.

Direct radiation lasts less than a second, but its lethal level can extend over a mile in all directions from the detonation point of a modern-day nuclear weapon with an explosive yield equal to the effect of several hundred kilotons of TNT.

Photos from the first second of the Trinity test shot, the first nuclear explosion on Earth. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Microseconds into the explosion of a nuclear weapon, energy released in the form of X-rays heats the surrounding environment, forming a fireball of superheated air. Inside the fireball, the temperature and pressure are so extreme that all matter is rendered into a hot plasma of bare nuclei and subatomic particles, as is the case in the Sun’s multi-million-degree core.

The fireball following the airburst explosion of a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon—like the W87 thermonuclear warhead deployed on the Minuteman III missiles currently in service in the US nuclear arsenal—can grow to more than 600 meters (2,000 feet) in diameter and stays blindingly luminous for several seconds, before its surface cools.

The light radiated by the fireball’s heat—accounting for more than one-third of the thermonuclear weapon’s explosive energy—will be so intense that it ignites fires and causes severe burns at great distances. The thermal flash from a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon could cause first-degree burns as far as 13 kilometers (8 miles) from ground zero.

Then comes the blast wave.

The blast wave—which accounts for about half the bomb’s explosive energy—travels initially faster than the speed of sound but slows rapidly as it loses energy by passing through the atmosphere.

Because the radiation superheats the atmosphere around the fireball, air in the surroundings expands and is pushed rapidly outward, creating a shockwave that pushes against anything along its path and has great destructive power.

The destructive power of the blast wave depends on the weapon’s explosive yield and the burst altitude.

Film footage from the Apple 2 / Cue nuclear test shot on May 5, 1955, part of the Operation Teapot series.

An airburst of a 300-kiloton explosion would produce a blast with an overpressure of over 5 pounds per square inch (or 0.3 atmospheres) up to 4.7 kilometers (2.9 miles) from the target. This is enough pressure to destroy most houses, gut skyscrapers, and cause widespread fatalities less than 10 seconds after the explosion.

Radioactive fallout

Shortly after the nuclear detonation has released most of its energy in the direct radiation, heat, and blast, the fireball begins to cool and rise, becoming the head of the familiar mushroom cloud. Within it is a highly-radioactive brew of split atoms, which will eventually begin to drop out of the cloud as it is blown by the wind. Radioactive fallout, a form of delayed radioactivity, will expose post-war survivors to near-lethal doses of ionizing radiation.

As for the blast, the severity of the fallout contamination depends on the fission yield of the bomb and its height of burst. For weapons in the hundreds of kilotons, the area of immediate danger can encompass thousands of square kilometers downwind of the detonation site. Radiation levels will be initially dominated by isotopes of short half-lives, which are the most energetic and so most dangerous to biological systems. The acutely lethal effects from the fallout will last from days to weeks, which is why authorities recommend staying inside for at least 48 hours, to allow radiation levels to decrease.

Because its effects are relatively delayed, estimating casualties from the fallout is difficult; the number of deaths and injuries will depend very much on what actions people take after an explosion. But in the vicinity of an explosion, buildings will be completely collapsed, and survivors will not be able to shelter. Survivors finding themselves less than 460 meters (1,500 feet) from a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion will receive an ionizing radiation dose of 500 Roentgen equivalent man (rem). “It is generally believed that humans exposed to about 500 rem of radiation all at once will likely die without medical treatment,” the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says .

But at a distance so close to ground zero, a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion would almost certainly burn and crush to death any human being. The higher the nuclear weapon’s yield, the smaller the acute radiation zone is relative to its other immediate effects.

One detonation of a modern-day, 300-kiloton nuclear warhead—that is, a warhead nearly 10 times the power of the atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined—on a city like New York would lead to over one million people dead and about twice as many people with serious injuries in the first 24 hours after the explosion. There would be almost no survivors within a radius of several kilometers from the explosion site.

deaths after 24 hours

Immediate effects of nuclear war

Excerpt from “ Plan A ” a video simulation of an escalatory nuclear war between the United States and Russia. (Alex Glaser / Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University)

In a nuclear war, hundreds or thousands of detonations would occur within minutes of each other.

Regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan that involved about 100 15-kiloton nuclear weapons launched at urban areas would result in 27 million direct deaths .

deaths from regional war

A global all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia with over four thousand 100-kiloton nuclear warheads would lead, at minimum, to 360 million quick deaths .*  That’s about 30 million people more than the entire US population.

360,000,000

deaths from global war

*  This estimate is based on a scenario of an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States involving 4,400 100-kiloton weapons under the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) limits, where each country can deploy up to 2,200 strategic warheads. The 2010 New START Treaty further limits the US- and Russian-deployed long-range nuclear forces down to 1,550 warheads. But as the average yield of today’s strategic nuclear forces of Russia and the United States far exceeds 100 kilotons, a full nuclear exchange between the two countries involving around 3,000 weapons likely would result in similar direct casualties and soot emissions.

In an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States, the two countries would not limit to shooting nuclear missiles at each other’s homeland but would target some of their weapons at other countries, including ones with nuclear weapons. These countries could launch some or all their weapons in retaliation.

Together, the United Kingdom, China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea currently have an estimated total of over 1,200 nuclear warheads .

As horrific as those statistics are, the tens to hundreds of millions of people dead and injured within the first few days of a nuclear conflict would only be the beginnings of a catastrophe that eventually will encompass the whole world.

Global climatic changes, widespread radioactive contamination, and societal collapse virtually everywhere could be the reality that survivors of a nuclear war would contend with for many decades.

Two years after any nuclear war—small or large—famine alone could be more than 10 times as deadly as the hundreds of bomb blasts involved in the war itself.

The longer-term consequences of nuclear war

The only color photograph of the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945. (Jack Aeby / Los Alamos National Laboratory)

In recent years, in some US military and policy circles, there has been a growing perception that a limited nuclear war can be fought and won. Many experts believe, however, that a limited nuclear war is unlikely to remain limited. What starts with one tactical nuclear strike or a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange between two countries could escalate to an all-out nuclear war ending with the immediate and utter destruction of both countries.

But the catastrophe will not be limited to those two belligerents and their allies.

The long-term regional and global effects of nuclear explosions have been overshadowed in public discussions by the horrific, obvious, local consequences of nuclear explosions. Military planners have also focused on the short-term effects of nuclear explosions because they are tasked with estimating the capabilities of nuclear forces on civilian and military targets. Blast, local radiation fallout, and electromagnetic pulse (an intense burst of radio waves that can damage electronic equipment) are all desired outcomes of the use of nuclear weapons—from a military perspective.

But widespread fires and other global climatic changes resulting from many nuclear explosions may not be accounted for in war plans and nuclear doctrines. These collateral effects are difficult to predict; assessing them requires scientific knowledge that most military planners don’t possess or take into account. Yet, in the few years following a nuclear war, such collateral damage may be responsible for the death of more than half of the human population on Earth.

Global climatic changes

Since the 1980s, as the threat of nuclear war reached new heights, scientists have investigated the long-term, widespread effects of nuclear war on Earth systems. Using a radiative-convective climate model that simulates the vertical profile of atmospheric temperatures, American scientists first showed that a nuclear winter could occur from the smoke produced by the massive forest fires ignited by nuclear weapons after a nuclear war. Two Russian scientists later conducted the first three-dimensional climate modeling showing that global temperatures would drop lower on land than on oceans, potentially causing an agricultural collapse worldwide. Initially contested for its imprecise results due to uncertainties in the scenarios and physical parameters involved, nuclear winter theory is now supported by more sophisticated climate models . While the basic mechanisms of nuclear winter described in the early studies still hold today, most recent calculations have shown that the effects of nuclear war would be more long-lasting and worse than previously thought.

A huge cloud resulting from the massive fires caused by “Little Boy”—the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945—a few hours after the initial explosion. (US Army)

Stratospheric soot injection

The heat and blast from a thermonuclear explosion are so powerful they can initiate large-scale fires in both urban and rural settings. A 300-kiloton detonation in a city like New York or Washington DC could cause a mass fire with a radius of at least 5.6 kilometers (3.5 miles), not altered by any weather conditions. Air in that area would be turned into dust, fire, and smoke.

But a nuclear war will set not just one city on fire , but hundreds of them, all but simultaneously. Even a regional nuclear war—say between India and Pakistan—could lead to widespread firestorms in cities and industrial areas that would have the potential to cause global climatic change , disrupting every form of life on Earth for decades.

Smoke from mass fires after a nuclear war could inject massive amounts of soot into the stratosphere, the Earth’s upper atmosphere. An all-out nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with both countries launching a total of 100 nuclear warheads of an average yield of 15 kilotons, could produce a stratospheric loading of some 5 million tons (or teragrams, Tg) of soot. This is about the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza, pulverized and turned into superheated dust.

A simulation of the vertically averaged smoke optical depth in the first 54 days after a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. ( Robock et al., Atmos. Chem. Phys., 7, 2003–2012, 2007 )

But these lower-end estimates date back to the late 2000s. Since then, India and Pakistan have significantly expanded their nuclear arsenals, both in the number of nuclear warheads and yield. By 2025, India and Pakistan could have up to 250 nuclear weapons each, with yields of 12 kilotons on the low end, up to a few hundred kilotons. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan with such arsenals could send up to 47 Tg of soot into the stratosphere.

For comparison, the recent catastrophic forest fires in Canada in 2017 and Australia in 2019 and 2020 produced 0.3 Tg and 1 Tg of smoke respectively. Chemical analysis showed, however, that only a small percentage of the smoke from these fires was pure soot—0.006 and 0.02 Tg respectively. This is because only wood was burning. Urban fires following a nuclear war would produce more smoke, and a higher fraction would be soot. But these two episodes of massive forest fires demonstrated that when smoke is injected into the lower stratosphere, it is heated by sunlight and lofted at high altitudes—10 to 20 kilometers (33,000 to 66,000 feet)—prolonging the time it stays in the stratosphere. This is precisely the mechanism that now allows scientists to better simulate the long-term impacts of nuclear war. With their models, researchers were able to accurately simulate the smoke from these large forest fires, further supporting the mechanisms that cause nuclear winter.

The climatic response from volcanic eruptions also continues to serve as a basis for understanding the long-term impacts of nuclear war. Volcanic blasts typically send ash and dust up into the stratosphere where it reflects sunlight back into space, resulting in the temporary cooling of the Earth’s surface. Likewise , in the theory of nuclear winter, the climatic effects of a massive injection of soot aerosols into the stratosphere from fires following a nuclear war would lead to the heating of the stratosphere, ozone depletion, and cooling at the surface under this cloud. Volcanic eruptions are also useful because their magnitude can match—or even surpass—the level of nuclear explosions. For instance, the 2022 Hunga Tonga’s underwater volcano released an explosive energy of 61 megatons of TNT equivalent —more than the Tsar Bomba, the largest human-made explosion in history with 50 Mt. Its plume reached altitudes up to about 56 kilometers (35 miles), injecting well over 50 Tg —even up to 146 Tg —of water vapor into the stratosphere where it will stay for years. Such a massive injection of stratospheric water could temporarily impact the climate—although differently than soot.

Aerial footage of the 2022 Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption. The vapor plume reached altitudes up to 56 kilometers (35 miles) and injected more than 50 teragrams of water vapor into the stratosphere. (Tonga Geological Services via YouTube )

Since Russia’s war in Ukraine started, President Putin and other Russian officials have made repeated nuclear threats , in an apparent attempt to deter Western countries from any direct military intervention. If Russia were to ever start—voluntarily or accidentally—nuclear war with the United States and other NATO countries, the number of devastating nuclear explosions involved in a full exchange could waft more than 150 Tg of soot into the stratosphere, leading to a nuclear winter that would disrupt virtually all forms of life on Earth over several decades.

Stratospheric soot injections associated with different nuclear war scenarios would lead to a wide variety of major climatic and biogeochemical changes, including transformations of the atmosphere, oceans, and land. Such global climate changes will be more long-lasting than previously thought because models of the 1980s did not adequately represent the stratospheric plume rise. It is now understood that soot from nuclear firestorms would rise much higher into the stratosphere than once imagined, where soot removal mechanisms in the form of “black rains” are slow. Once the smoke is heated by sunlight it can self-loft to altitudes as high as 80 kilometers (50 miles), penetrating the mesosphere.

A simulation of the vertically averaged smoke optical depth in the first 54 days after a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. (Alan Robock)

Changes in the atmosphere

After soot is injected into the upper atmosphere, it can stay there for months to years, blocking some direct sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface and decreasing temperatures. At high altitudes—20 kilometers (12 miles) and above near the equator and 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) at the poles—the smoke injected by nuclear firestorms would also absorb more radiation from the sun, heating the stratosphere and perturbing stratospheric circulation.

In the stratosphere, the presence of highly absorptive black carbon aerosols would result in considerably enhanced stratospheric temperatures. For instance, in a regional nuclear war scenario that leads to a 5-Tg injection of soot, stratospheric temperatures would remain elevated by 30 degrees Celsius after four years.

The extreme heating observed in the stratosphere would increase the global average loss of the ozone layer—which protects humans and other life on Earth from the severe health and environmental effects of ultraviolet radiation—for the first few years after a nuclear war. Simulations have shown that a regional nuclear war that lasted three days and injected 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere would reduce the ozone layer by 25 percent globally; recovery would take 12 years. A global nuclear war injecting 150 Tg of stratospheric smoke would cause a 75 percent global ozone loss, with the depletion lasting 15 years.

Changes on land

Soot injection in the stratosphere will lead to changes on the Earth’s surface, including the amount of solar radiation that is received, air temperature, and precipitation.

The loss of the Earth’s protective ozone layer would result in several years of extremely high ultraviolet (UV) light at the surface, a hazard to human health and food production. Most recent estimates indicate that the ozone loss after a global nuclear war would lead to a tropical UV index above 35, starting three years after the war and lasting for four years. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers a UV index of 11 to pose an “extreme” danger; 15 minutes of exposure to a UV index of 12 causes unprotected human skin to experience sunburn. Globally, the average sunlight in the UV-B range would increase by 20 percent. High levels of UV-B radiation are known to cause sunburn, photoaging, skin cancer, and cataracts in humans. They also inhibit the photolysis reaction required for leaf expansion and plant growth.

Smoke lofted into the stratosphere would reduce the amount of solar radiation making it to Earth’s surface, reducing global surface temperatures and precipitation dramatically.

Even a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan—causing a relatively modest stratospheric loading of 5 Tg of soot—could produce the lowest temperatures on Earth in the past 1,000 years—temperatures below the post-medieval Little Ice Age. A regional nuclear war with 5-Tg stratospheric soot injection would have the potential to make global average temperatures drop by 1 degree Celsius.

Even though their nuclear arsenals have been cut in size and average yield since the end of the Cold War, a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia would still likely initiate a much more severe nuclear winter, with much of the northern hemisphere facing below-freezing temperatures even during the summer. A global nuclear war that injected 150 Tg of soot into the stratosphere could make temperatures drop by 8 degrees Celsius—3 degrees lower than Ice Age values.

In any nuclear war scenario, the temperature changes would have their greatest effect on mid- and high-latitude agriculture, by reducing the length of the crop season and the temperature even during that season. Below-freezing temperatures could also lead to a significant expansion of sea ice and terrestrial snowpack, causing food shortages and affecting shipping to crucial ports where sea ice is not now a factor.

Global average precipitation after a nuclear war would also drop significantly because the lower amounts of solar radiation reaching the surface would reduce temperatures and water evaporation rates. The precipitation decrease would be the greatest in the tropics . For instance, even a 5-Tg soot injection would lead to a 40 percent precipitation decrease in the Asian monsoon region. South America and Africa would also experience large drops in rainfall.

Changes in the ocean

The longest-lasting consequences of any nuclear war would involve oceans . Regardless of the location and magnitude of a nuclear war, the smoke from the resulting firestorms would quickly reach the stratosphere and be dispersed globally, where it would absorb sunlight and reduce the solar radiation to the ocean surface. The ocean surface would respond more slowly to changes in radiation than the atmosphere and land due to its higher specific heat capacity (i.e., the quantity of heat needed to raise the temperature per unit of mass).

Global ocean temperature decrease will be the greatest starting three to four years after a nuclear war, dropping by approximately 3.5 degrees Celsius for an India-Pakistan war (that injected 47 Tg of smoke into the stratosphere) and six degrees Celsius for a global US-Russia war (150 Tg). Once cooled, the ocean will take even more time to return to its pre-war temperatures, even after the soot has disappeared from the stratosphere and solar radiation returns to normal levels. The delay and duration of the changes will increase linearly with depth. Abnormally low temperatures are likely to persist for decades near the surface, and hundreds of years or longer at depth. For a global nuclear war (150 Tg), changes in ocean temperature to the Arctic sea-ice are likely to last thousands of years—so long that researchers talk of a “nuclear Little Ice Age.”

Because of the dropping solar radiation and temperature on the ocean surface, marine ecosystems would be highly disrupted both by the initial perturbation and by the new, long-lasting ocean state. This will result in global impacts on ecosystem services, such as fisheries. For instance, the marine net primary production (a measure of the new growth of marine algae, which makes up the base of the marine food web) would decline sharply after any nuclear war. In a US-Russia scenario (150 Tg), the global marine net primary production would be cut almost by half in the months after the war and would remain reduced by 20 to 40 percent for over 4 years, with the largest decreases being in the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans.

Impacts on food production

Changes in the atmosphere, surface, and oceans following a nuclear war will have massive and long-term consequences on global agricultural production and food availability. Agriculture responds to the length of growing seasons, the temperature during the growing season, light levels, precipitation, and other factors. A nuclear war will significantly alter all of those factors, on a global scale for years to decades.

Using new climate, crop, and fishery models, researchers have now demonstrated that soot injections larger than 5 Tg would lead to mass food shortages in almost all countries, although some will be at greater risk of famine than others. Globally, livestock production and fishing would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output. After a nuclear war, and after stored food is consumed, the total food calories available in each nation will drop dramatically, putting millions at risk of starvation or undernourishment. Mitigation measures—shifts in production and consumption of livestock food and crops, for example—would not be sufficient to compensate for the global loss of available calories.

The aforementioned food production impacts do not account for the long-term direct impacts of radioactivity on humans or the widespread radioactive contamination of food that could follow a nuclear war. International trade of food products could be greatly reduced or halted as countries hoard domestic supplies. But even assuming a heroic action of altruism by countries whose food systems are less affected, trade could be disrupted by another effect of the war: sea ice.

Cooling of the ocean’s surface would lead to an expansion of sea ice in the first years after a nuclear war, when food shortages would be highest. This expansion would affect shipping into crucial ports in regions where sea ice is not currently experienced, such as the Yellow Sea.

Post-nuclear famine

Number of people and percentage of the population who could die from starvation two years after a nuclear war. Regional nuclear war scenario corresponds to 5Tg of soot produced by 100 15-kiloton nuclear weapons launched between India and Pakistan. Large-scale nuclear war scenario corresponds to 150Tg of soot produced by 4,400 100-kiloton nuclear weapons launched between Russia and the United States. (Source: Xia et al.  Nature Food  3, no. 8 (2022): 586-596 .)

Regional war

The impacts of nuclear war on agricultural food systems would have dire consequences for most humans who survive the war and its immediate effects.

The overall global consequences of nuclear war—including both short-term and long-term impacts—would be even more horrific causing hundreds of millions—even billions—of people to starve to death.

If this ↑ red line represents an estimate of deaths from one 300-kiloton nuclear bomb detonated over New York City ...

... then these ↑ are the direct deaths from an India-Pakistan nuclear war with an exchange of one hundred 15-kiloton warheads ...

... these are the direct deaths from a global nuclear war involving 4,400 100-kiloton warheads ...

... and this is how many people might eventually die from famine two years after that global nuclear war ends ...

5,341,000,000

Two years after a nuclear war ends, nearly everyone might face starvation.

There is nowhere to hide.

François Diaz-Maurin  ( @francoisdm ) is the associate editor for nuclear affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists .

Thomas Gaulkin  ( @ThomasGaulkin ) is multimedia editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists .

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References & Acknowledgments

This article is based on the work of many researchers who have studied the impacts of nuclear war since the 1980s. The author wishes to thank in particular Alex Glaser from Princeton University, Alan Robock from Rutgers University, and Alex Wellerstein from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

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As the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows, nuclear threats are real, present, and dangerous

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Keywords: blast wave , climate impacts of nuclear warfare , famine , food insecurity , nuclear war , nuclear weapons , nuclear winter , radioactive fallout , societal collapse , thermonuclear weapons Topics: Investigative Reporting , Multimedia , Nuclear Risk , Nuclear Weapons

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I must say that I am SICKENED BY THE FACT THAT WE NEED WEAPONS LIKE THESE!!! I WISH THERE WAS A TREATY TO DO AWAY WITH ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND ALL DATA PERTAINING TO NUKES!!!!

The data you need to keep. You would not want to forget just how deadly they are would you?

Still…. You got to laugh eh!

What is there to laugh about?

I love this comment.

Nowhere to hide is bs. There are no nuclear target zones in South America or Africa.

good. you would die of starvation then.

New Zealand and Australia are both shown as having minimal starvation effects. While Australia is well within the worst case scenarios of the Soot effects New Zealand is on the edge of even the worst case extrapolations of these effects. Australia will get hit by Boat refugees, but again New Zealand will get minimal “boat refugees”. Quite simply any attempt to get to New Zealand in a half-arsed overloaded boat will see everyone drown. The only boats like to make it are well supplied vessels carrying modest numbers of people.

Think also about collapsing supply chains. I’m in Canberra, and there’s no likely nuclear target anywhere near here. In a major US-Russia/China nuclear war, the main challenge Australia will face is feeding its own population, plus large numbers of refugees fleeing south from the equatorial regions – plus climate effects. But when supply chains collapse – we lose fuel so can’t get food to the market – and maybe our electric grids collapse too. Its grim here – maybe not to the same extent as the northern hemisphere – but still it won’t be easy for us.

Try reading the article.

If nuclear war happens I would prefer to die in the initial detonation than deal with the slow death of the aftermath. If I survived the initial blast I would probably just end it and not have to deal with the suffering.

Good. The rest of us will need your resources and you lack mentality to survive anyway.

Your Mom’s basement isn’t the bunker you think it is.

Just waiting for your moment of glory eh? You can have your survivalist libertarian fantasy. It won’t work out how you imagine though.

“Survive” haha 😀 Where? Are you 12 years old?

Excellent article. The information given is very unfortunate but also very factual. If a global thermonuclear war ever does occur, you don’t want to be a survivor.

We must stop pouring gasoline on the fire in Ukraine. The most important thing we’ll do in our lives is put an end to this war and negotiate a settlement. The binary view of Amercan exceptionalism vs bad scary Putin is going to end us all, including the awful people making money from soldiers and innocents dying. Tactical nuclear strikes are a myth, this article and others like it should be required reading.

Since the US has repudiated or withdrawn from so many of the treaties already negotiated, I see no way anyone would bother to negotiate any new treaties with the US. How could they trust us?

Your assertion that “the US has repudiated or withdrawn from so many treaties,” is inaccurate, overstated, and made without proper context. Sticking to nuclear treaties: (1) the United States withdrew form the INF Treaty AFTER striving for over a decade to get the Russian Federation to return to compliance (the Russians illegally developed and deployed nuclear-armed intermediate-range ground-launched ballistic missiles–GLBMs); (2) the United States issued legal countermeasures effectively suspending certain aspects of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) Treaty IN RESPONSE to Russia’s unlawful suspension of treaty, but the US nevertheless remains a Party to the New START Treaty …  Read more »

We must end the war in Ukraine. Even if it were a straight case of a greedy Hitler-like demon making a land grab, we should have to bring it to the negotiating table. But it is far more morally complex than that. Kyiv, Washington and NATO as well as Russia have responsibility for this crisis — and its resolution will be negotiated eventually anyway, if we can avoid a nuclear war. By what moral right do we threaten the lives of children in, say, Ecuador or Sri Lanka because of a struggle for dominance among great powers?

To give in to Putin today would be to acquiesce to nothing less than an endless series of similar confrontations and consequent surrenders. It would solve nothing.The world has been warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons since August 1945, and yet the peril persists virtually unabated. Why? As long as nuclear weapons exist, their inevitable use is assured. The only solution is global disarmament, as unlikely as that may be. The ONLY alternative is global catastrophe..

Probably about as accurate as the climate doom predictions that never actually materialize. The plain simple fact is that there are so many variables that cannot be controlled or accounted for that this is all little more than guessing. One thing is for sure: Those who are prepared and determined to survive will on net long outlive those who are unprepated and give up in the face of prophecies of doom like this one. But thats fine, the rest of us will take your resources.

keep collecting those bottle caps and nuka-cola, surely will be useful in a fallout scenario ?

” climate doom predictions that never actually materialize”

snow crab population is down 90% (and is off the menu for the foreseeable future) because of climate change you dolt, but keep believing your right wing denialist news sources. SMDH.

The US southwest is experiencing a 1200 year drought, Pakistan is under water, massive forest fires in NA and Europe, the east coast of Canada has recorded It’s most powerful storm ever, arctic sea ice at lowest levels and so on and so on, and this was all predicted and this clown still would rather indulge his denialist libertarian fantasies rather than face the truth. Sad.

All the more reason to have a “small” nuclear exchange with Russia. That should slow down the global warming a bring things back in balance. President Biden knows what he is doing.

This isn’t Avatar you dolt. 5 billion people would die, including you.

Not to mention the Eastern States of Australia have been underwater pretty much constantly this year. Japanese Encephalitis is a huge concern in NSW.

What a type of life in it’s ( a nuclear war ) aftermath !!! Scavaging and fighting like dogs trying to survive !!!

How’s that any different than the current situation for many folks around the globe today?

What an odd comment.You say these “prophecies of doom” are “false”, but suggest that “those who are prepated (sic)” will survive. But if the prophecies are false, why would you need to be prepated?

Great article. A masterpiece of presentation. Great research and visual is awsome. Is there anyway to send our illustrious world leaders a copy? Don’t forget to include the nuclear wanabes gnawing at the bit to own nukes. Susan Roy wrote a great book on this topic. “Bomboozled: How The U.S. Government Misled Itself and It’s People Into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear War.” It’s a great read. By the way a quick comment. You forgot all about EMP’s. The war would be over before it even started. Mass starvation would be in the cards from the get-go.

Dear Julius. Thank you for your comment. We did briefly talk about electromagnetic pulse, which would result from high-altitude nuclear explosions. These would be intended for very specific uses, such as on military targets to damage their computers, communication systems, and other electronic equipment. The role, however, such weapons would have to prevent a nuclear war from starting is unclear. Our article focuses on what is known from the possible consequences of thermonuclear weapons launched on strategic targets and urban areas. Best regards, François

Thank you for pointing that out to me. I see it now. Again I say Kudos for such a well written article.

Thanks for this beautifully presented piece. One comment that gives me a sliver of hope: firestorms would be difficult to get going in most northern cities in high income countries. This was evident in the last world war. Allied bombing succeeded in Hamburg (where the word feuersturm was coined), but failed in Berlin. Hiroshima and Tokyo had firestorms, but both had a lot of densely packed wooden buildings. Wouldn’t it be much tougher in Moscow or New York, say, with concrete, iron and brick, built to withstand fire? Then there are the spread-out US suburbs. And wrt forest fires: there …  Read more »

what about Dresden?

I agree … Thank You

A nuclear war is the most stupid thing a human being can do, with over 12,000 nukes worldwide with most of them 10 times the power of Hiroshjima en Nagasaki bomb, is erasing planet Earth from the galactic map.

Thank you for this most sobering, unvarnished assessment. It’s insanity to have weapons capable of this level of destruction. Profoundly disturbing that there are people in charge of these weapons who are threatening to use them. They must never be used.

America is so dumb for provoking empires like the Soviet Union to nuke America. Instead just let the bad countries slowly go away because that’s what happened a while after the U.S. and Soviets decided not to nuke eachother.

Why? Just Why do we need nuclear weapons? It’s overkill to the highest level. Haven’t we humans learned from Hiroshima and Nagaski? Frightening!

John Gibson: It stopped the war didn’t it? It also saved countless lives if that war had continued.

The Soviet invasion of Japanese-held territory a few days after Hiroshima did as much as the nukes, since the Japanese were afraid of being divided like Korea was and losing the Emperor, so were motivated to surrender to the US first. But also, Japan was starving, isolated by the US Navy, bombed conventionally every night by the USAAF, with no means to continue. Even Curtis LeMay said the A-bombs weren’t really necessary.

Japan had already surrendered. Learn your history.

You learn your history! The invasion of Soviet armies in Japan held China was about to begin, and the Soviets would have fought with as much anger as they did against the Germans, and America was coming up from the South in Okinawa. The bombs, although terrible, were the only thing that made the die hard Japanese go into peace talks.

No the nuclear weapons were simply a useful diplomatic step off point to surrender to avoid the Russian land invasion that had already begun, the nuclear weapons were no worse than the conventional carpet bombing of Japanese cities. The Russians were going to take Japan by force in a land war and the Japanese took this opportunity to capitulate to the west to avoid this. This is all documented and easy to research

Great, no purpose now in making any long term plans….it seems this scenario is and will be inevitable… bye bye human race, nice knowing you

If it ever happens I want to be directly hit by a warhead. No way do I want to survive only to die the slow painful death that follows. Never let a toddler play with matches; never let man have nuclear weapons. Life 101.

ok thanks 🙂 killing myself now

Love the article just wanted to say thank you ?

This reminds me of the “duck and cover” drills we did in elementary school during the 1950s. They actually told us kids that we’d be safe if we hid under our desks.

Colin Meyer: “Duck & Cover” was only meant to protect us from the broken flying glass and other projectiles – not the heat from the blast if it was a direct hit. Besides, if there was a nuclear strike, would the teachers and Nuns want their kids running around outside when it hit? It was by far the best option. In our grammar school, the Nuns had us all go down to the basement cafeteria and stay beneath the tables.

Thank you for the article it was very while explained and informative. Just hope there is a place we can go to and hide. But if one thing won’t kill you the other will. Thank you again . May God be with us.

At least the ice caps would grow from a nuclear winter and give polar bears a better chance….

It’s actually the perfect solution to global warming. An almost immediate effect of cooling, followed by the collapse of human civilization, which is the root cause. It would give the Earth a breather — in a few decades most of the planet would look as rich and wild as the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

It’s hard to argue with that logic, but what a waste of a beautiful opportunity we humans had! More than 50 years ago, we chose poorly and rather than concentrate all our efforts on further developing safe and efficient nuclear power options we continued developing and building WMD. Today we’re spending billions modernizing our weapons, which can’t be used – and barely any government funding of nuclear power development. Imagine if we’d done the opposite and stopped the nuclear weapons programs and instead had built an entire world powered by clean cheap and safe nuclear power. (eg. Molten Salt Reactors …  Read more »

If you track all the billionaires mega yachts heading to remote locations all at once, you should assume the position.

The 1959 movie “On The Beach” gives a fairly realistic view of what would happen. While the northern hemisphere is empty of human life, the radioactivity and fallout slowly drifts into the southern hemisphere, finally killing what is left of humanity. A global thermonuclear war is the end of us all.

Yeah I love that movie (and the book, the movie is very accurate to the source material), but it’s grim as hell

There are plenty of sources showing fallout maps worse case, and NONE of them show radioactivity flowing from north to south of the equator. It doesn’t work that way, real life is not the movies.

Does not work that way – there isn’t a lot of inter-mix between northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere weather patterns.

Also, in the novel by Shute, they use cobalt jacketed nukes, which are purposely designed to spread fallout globally. No one deploys such weapons and have not considered doing so since the 1950s.

I don’t believe the ‘On the Beach’ scenario is accurate.

Better active today than radioactive tomorrow (circa 1970)

Great Piece. I do question the US not starving, Russia not starving, Australia and India not starving. I anticipate the Q theorists, who will one day have their own whack-a-doodle dark web university, to reason that global waring and nuclear winter can easily cancel each other out. To think there are whack-a-doodles on the internet is much less worrying than to think of nuclear deterrence Warhawks. These folks get a military pension, go right into nuclear weapons manufacture, and get saluted every 4rth of July.

Australia is pretty out of the way and we produce a LOT of food. It’ll suck, but we’re in a less awful position.

Brian Whit. I’m pretty sure thats just for a regional nuclear war. I couldn’t find one country that didnt starve in the map of the global nuclear war.

As Nikita Khrushchev said, in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the living will envy the dead.

Until Germany “nuked” the Berlin Research Reactor as a panic reaction to the Fukushima Catastrophe (WTH… Yeah, talk about German Angst!), I was an active member of Civil Defense here – and I deeply appreciate your excellent, factual information about the “N” in CBRN, combined with equally outstanding visuals – thank you for this masterpiece / article! Now I’d really love to see a similar article addressing the “R” side of things (and, according to experts, a much more likely scenario than N – with regard to “blaming the other party” being possible and “uncertainty of how NATO would respond” …  Read more »

To hoard tactical nukes below 100 kilotons is wasteful and should be avoided. Battlefield tactical nukes of under 1,000 kilotons should be built and preserved as highly credible deterrance. Strategic nukes of over 1,000 kilotons should be treasured and kept deployable on outerspace-friendly missiles, to be used within the mesosphere as a climate-control asset to drastically reduce global-warming. So, Bill Gates can be spared of having to think of blocking out the Sun and hatching an artificial sun too for whatever purpose ! LOL !

Where’s my mannequin?!!!

So what you’re saying is in order to stop global warming and reverse it, India and Pakistan need to have an all-out nuclear exchange

What will be the impact of abandoned nuclear power plants in the aftermath of different scenarios discussed in the article? Just for basis of discussion: a 1GWe power plant produces a 5 times greater amount of fission products than the Hiroshima bomb – per day.

Hit the wrong key. Given the collapse of the electrical grid, the cooling ponds would dry. Chernobyl.

This article was similar to the results that I researched during the 1980s while serving as an ICBM launch officer in the US Air Force. The consequences that I could have been responsible for was enough to lead me to resign my commission and leave the Air Force. The one problem with the hypothesis of this article was the yield of the weapons that were used in their calculations. The yields of the weapons on nuclear alert today are many more times more powerful than those used in the hypothesis. An all out nuclear exchange between Russia and the US …  Read more »

Not worth it over a regional dispute

Can we pick a day to send all our nukes into the sun?

It would be the perfect solution to curb climate change, only collateral damage has the same consequences as climate change. The sixth mass extinction once the first explosion is launched, a domino effect impossible to stop, in my humble opinion humanity has an expiration date, by mistake or planning our disappearance is almost a fact.

if you live near an obvious military target u r probably toast. examples are Seattle, SanDiego, Col Springs, Norfolk, JAcksnville, Omaha, etc. I live midway between 2 ANG bases w/tankers, about 60 E of one and 30 W of the other so I’ll get heavy fallout. Cooked.

Mt. Tambora was 33 Gt TNT equivalent, in one place, launching pulverized rock into the stratosphere. It caused the year without a summer. That is our baseline. The nuclear winter scenarios you post here are unrealistic with respect to how a nuclear war would be fought and how easily cities burn.

China, Russia, Britain, the United States and France have agreed that a further spread of nuclear arms and a nuclear war should be avoided, according to a joint statement by the five nuclear powers.

“We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the English-language version of the statement read.

The joint statement echoed the words spoken decades earlier by two leaders of nuclear superpowers: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This statement was first made by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at their summit in Geneva in 1985.

If you add-up all the nuclear tests done over the years, it’s reasonable to postulate that we have been living in a default state of nuclear winter. Slow freeze, slow poison version. This article talks about regional wars involving perhaps 100 warheads in the low-yield range as still having a profound effect. That is perhaps 100-300MT detonated in a short period of time with resulting fires. Consider that 1958 saw approx 102MT of tests done. In 1962, there was 140MT detonated. There has been approximately 60-80MT per year between 1963-1983, falling to less than 40MT after 1985. Many of these …  Read more »

Not much optimism when, in the face of all these otherwise terrifying data, the people most likely to push the button believe that god, in some form or another, will protect the chosen. Can’t avoid nuclear war when it’s actually hoped for.

Bulletin Daily

Cost of climate change comparable to economic damage caused by fighting a war

By Oliver Milman

Missing the forest for the trees: The role of forests in Earth’s climate goes far beyond carbon storage

By Sara Blichner , James Weber

Surrounded by oil platforms, this coral reef in the Gulf of Mexico continues to thrive. For now.

By Jesse Nichols

A ‘plague’ comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history

By Colin Elliott

Formal risk assessments and nuclear arms control: exploring the value of modern methodologies

By Vicki Bier , Robert J. Budnitz , Olli Heinonen , Richard C. Lanza , Ronald F. Lehman , Sally Leivesley , Charles F. McMillan , George H. Miller , Anita Nilsson , John Organek , Robert N. Schock

How one Oregon county plans to make big oil pay for the 2021 heat dome

By Jeffrey B. Simon

France wants to extend its nuclear umbrella to Europe. But is Macron ready to trade Paris for Helsinki?

By Carine Guerout , Jason Moyer

May issue: The future of food in a time of climate change

By Dan Drollette Jr

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Events, news & press, the history of nuclear warfare and the future of nuclear energy.

The first atomic strike in 1945 changed the world forever.

On August 6, 1945, the world changed forever when the first atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, Japan, killing thousands of people instantly. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, decisively ending Japan’s involvement in World War II. Thousands of people died from radiation poisoning within a year. Since that earth-shattering day, the world has grappled with a controversial technology that not only poses strategic risks in its ability to wipe out humanity but also provides a potential solution to problems of sustainable energy.  

The Hoover Institution has a long relationship with nuclear history. The Library & Archives house the original strike orders and footage taken of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, acquired from Harold Agnew, along with his papers. Agnew worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory during World War II and was an observer on The Great Artiste , a B-29 that flew behind the Enola Gay on the first atomic strike mission. The Agnew atomic bomb footage is the most-requested motion picture film in Hoover’s collections. His papers include newspaper clippings from the time documenting how people grappled with the news of the attack. The clippings evince an air of newfound terror tinged with fascination about nuclear technology. The Library & Archives also house collections of newspapers from the Marshall Islands during the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in the 1940s and 1950s, and the papers of nuclear physicist Edward Teller and nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, as well as some of the papers of physicist Sidney Drell.

Since the first atomic bomb dropped, world leaders have been forced to contend with the strategic reality of nuclear arms. Few understand this better than former secretary of state and Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow George Shultz. In his book Learning from Experience , Shultz wrote about his vision for global nuclear disarmament:

Out of office and out of Washington, I and my good friends and colleagues Sid Drell, Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, and Sam Nunn try to keep the flame burning so that when and if the global atmosphere improves, the ideas stand ready to help lessen our dependence on nuclear weapons with their ability to wipe out humanity.

From the beginning of our appeals, my colleagues and I have stressed that the world is complicated. We highlight the regional conflicts that would have to be settled. We point out that a world without nuclear weapons would not be the world as it is, minus nuclear weapons. Steps to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons cannot be ignored. For Instance, conflicts have driven decisions to acquire nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. ( Learning from Experience , pp. 86–87)

Today, Hoover fellows including George Shultz, Admiral James O. Ellis Jr., Jim Timbie, Jeremy Carl, James Goodby, and many others continue to research and consider the risks of nuclear arms, while also recognizing the benefits of nuclear energy. Ellis and Shultz write , “Nuclear power alone will not solve our energy problems. But we do not think they can be solved without it. . . . One of us, between other jobs, built nuclear plants for a living; between other jobs, the other helped make them safer. In many respects, this is a personal topic for us both.” They acknowledge America’s strategic position as the world’s largest nuclear power generator. They argue that America needs to bring the country’s brightest minds and technologies to navigate nuclear energy research and development responsibly and ensure that is a part of a cleaner global energy system. Though the decades since the first atomic bomb was dropped have brought fear about such powerful weapons, it is perhaps to be hoped that the possibilities of nuclear energy can make the future bright.

Resources on nuclear energy, warfare, and disarmament by Hoover Fellows:

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• Chapter 11: Redefining Energy Security 
• The Benefits of Nuclear Power
• Reinventing Nuclear Energy
• A Crack In the Ice: The Legacy of the Reykjavik Summit
• No Nukes Is Good Nukes: Nuclear Proliferation
• Chain Reactions
• Let’s Talk about Nuclear Security—Informally
• At 90, Perry Driven by Vision of a Nuclear-Free World
• Spending Less on Nuclear Weapons Could Actually Make Us Safer
• Nuclear Birthday
• Area 45: Trump’s Energy Strategy, the Nuclear Option, Featuring Jeremy Carl
• The Ultimate Defense
• War Games on the Korean Peninsula
• How North Korea Is Ensuring a Nuclear Arms Race in Asia
• The New Nuclear Arms Race
• World-Renowned Nuclear Experts Analyze Risks and Rewards of the Nuclear Enterprise in a New Book Edited by George P. Shultz and Sidney D. Drell
• We Participated in INF Negotiations. Abandoning It Threatens Our Very Existence.
• George Shultz: We Must Preserve This Nuclear Treaty
• Reinventing Nuclear Power 

Library & Archives Nuclear Collections:

• Harold M. Agnew miscellaneous papers, 1943–1994
• Edward Teller papers, 1910–2005
• Albert J. and Roberta Wohlstetter papers, 1919–2007
• Sidney D. Drell papers, 1945–2015
• Conference on the Discontinuance of Nuclear Weapon Tests proceedings, 1961
• The Nuclear Age video tape, 1988
• New Documentation Relating to “Project A” of the Manhattan Project Donated to Hoover Archives

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Nuclear weapons: Why reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation

The consequences of nuclear war would be devastating. much more should – and can – be done to reduce the risk that humanity will ever fight such a war..

The shockwave and heat that the detonation of a single nuclear weapon creates can end the lives of millions of people immediately.

But even larger is the devastation that would follow a nuclear war.

The first reason for this is nuclear fallout. Radioactive dust from the detonating bombs rises up into the atmosphere and spreads out over large areas of the world from where it falls down and causes deadly levels of radiation.

The second reason is less widely known. But this consequence – 'nuclear winter' and the worldwide famine that would follow – is now believed to be the most serious consequence of nuclear war.

Cities that are attacked by nuclear missiles burn at such an intensity that they create their own wind system, a firestorm: hot air above the burning city ascends and is replaced by air that rushes in from all directions. The storm-force winds fan the flames and create immense heat.

From this firestorm, large columns of smoke and soot rise up above the burning cities and travel all the way up to the stratosphere. There it spreads around the planet and blocks the sun’s light. At that great height – far above the clouds – it cannot be rained out, meaning that it will remain there for years, darkening the sky and thereby drying and chilling the planet.

The nuclear winter that would follow a large-scale nuclear war is expected to lead to temperature declines of 20 or even 30 degrees Celsius (60–86° F) in many of the world’s agricultural regions – including much of Eurasia and North America. Nuclear winter would cause a 'nuclear famine'. The world’s food production would fail and billions of people would starve. 1

These consequences – nuclear fallout and nuclear winter leading to famine – mean that the destruction caused by nuclear weapons is not contained to the battlefield. It would not just harm the attacked country. Nuclear war would devastate all countries, including the attacker.

The possibility of global devastation is what makes the prospect of nuclear war so very terrifying. And it is also why nuclear weapons are so unattractive for warfare. A weapon that can lead to self-destruction is not a weapon that can be used strategically.

US President Reagan put it in clear words at the height of the Cold War: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” 2

Nuclear stockpiles have been reduced, but the risk remains high

40 years after Reagan’s words, the Cold War is over and nuclear stockpiles have been reduced considerably, as the chart shows.

The world has learned that nuclear armament is not the one-way street that it was once believed to be. Disarmament is possible.

But the chart also shows that there are still almost ten thousand nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries on our planet, at least. 3 Each of these weapons can cause enormous destruction; many are much larger than the ones that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 4

Collectively these weapons are immensely destructive. The nuclear winter scenario outlined above would kill billions of people— billions— in the years that follow a large-scale nuclear war, even if it was fought “only” with today’s reduced stockpiles. 5

It is unclear whether humanity as a species could possibly survive a full-scale nuclear war with the current stockpiles. 6 A nuclear war might well be humanity’s final war.

Close Calls: Instances that threatened to push the ‘balance of terror’ out of balance and into war

The ‘balance of terror’ is the idea that all involved political leaders are so scared of nuclear war that they never launch a nuclear attack.

If this is achievable at all, it can only be achieved if all nuclear powers keep their weapons in check. This is because the balance is vulnerable to accidents: a nuclear bomb that detonates accidentally – or even just a false alarm, with no weapons even involved – can trigger nuclear retaliation because several countries keep their nuclear weapons on ‘launch on warning’; in response to a warning, their leaders can decide within minutes whether they want to launch a retaliatory strike.

For the balance of terror to be a balance, all parties need to be in control at all times. This however is not the case.

In the timeline, you can read through some of the close calls during the past decades.

The risk of nuclear war might well be low – because neither side would want to fight such a war that would have such awful consequences for everyone on the planet. But there is a risk that the kinds of technical errors and accidents listed here could lead accidentally to the use of nuclear weapons, as a nuclear power can incorrectly come to believe that they are under attack.

This is why false alarms, errors, and close calls are so crucial to monitor: they are the incidents that can push the ‘balance of terror’ out of balance and into war.

Accidents and errors are of course not the only possible path that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. There is the risk of a terribly irresponsible person leading a country possessing nuclear weapons. There is the risk of nuclear terrorism, possibly after a terrorist organization steals weapons. There is the possibility that hackers can take control of the nuclear chain of command. And there is the possibility that several of these factors play a role at the same time.

A timeline of nuclear weapons ‘close calls’ 7

Below this post, you find additional lists of close calls, where you find much more information on each of these incidents.

How to reduce the risk of nuclear war?

An escalating conflict between nuclear powers – but also an accident, a hacker, a terrorist, or an irresponsible leader – could lead to the detonation of nuclear weapons.

Those risks only go to zero if all nuclear weapons are removed from the world. I believe this is what humanity should work towards, but it is exceedingly hard to achieve, at least in the short term. It is therefore important to see that there are additional ways that can reduce the chance of the world suffering the horrors of nuclear war. 8

A more peaceful world : Many world regions in which our ancestors fought merciless wars over countless generations are extraordinarily peaceful in our times. The rise of democracy, international trade, diplomacy, and a cultural attitude shift against the glorification of war are some of the drivers credited for this development. 9

Making the world a more peaceful place will reduce the risk of nuclear confrontation. Efforts that reduce the chance of any war reduce the chance of nuclear war.

Nuclear treaties : Several non-proliferation treaties have been key in achieving the large reduction of nuclear stockpiles. However, key treaties – like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the US and Russia – have been suspended and additional agreements could be reached.

The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which became effective in 2021, is a recent development in this direction.

Smaller nuclear stockpiles : Reducing the stockpiles further is seen as an important and achievable goal by experts.

It is considered achievable because smaller stockpiles would still provide the deterrence benefits from nuclear weapons. And it is important as it reduces the risk of accidents and the chance that a possible nuclear war would end civilization.

Better monitoring, better control: The risk can be further reduced by efforts to better control nuclear weapons – so that close calls occur less frequently. Similarly better monitoring systems would reduce the chance of false alarms.

Taking nuclear weapons off ‘hair-trigger alert’ would reduce the risk that any accident that does occur can rapidly spiral out of control. And a well-resourced International Atomic Energy Agency can verify that the agreements in the treaties are met.

Better public understanding, global relations, and culture : Finally I also believe that it will help to see clearly that billions of us share the same goal. None of us wants to live through a nuclear war, none of us wants to die in one. As Reagan said, a nuclear war cannot be won and it would be better to do away with these weapons entirely.

A generation ago a broad and highly visible societal movement pursued the goal of nuclear disarmament. These efforts were to a good extent successful. But since then, this goal has unfortunately lost much of the attention it once received – and this is despite the fact that things have not fundamentally changed: the world still possesses weapons that could kill billions. 10 I wish it was a more prominent concern in our generation so that more young people would set themselves the goal to make the world safe from nuclear weapons.

Below this post you find resources on where you can get engaged or donate, to help reduce the danger from nuclear weapons.

I believe some dangers are exaggerated – for example, I believe that the fear of terrorist attacks is often wildly out of proportion with the actual risk. But when it comes to nuclear weapons I believe the opposite is true.

There are many today who hardly give nuclear conflict a thought and I think this is a big mistake.

For eight decades, people have been producing nuclear weapons. Several countries have dedicated vast sums of money to their construction. And now we live in a world in which these weapons endanger our entire civilization and our future.

These destructive weapons are perhaps the clearest example that technology and innovation are not only forces for good, they can also enable catastrophic destruction.

Without the Second World War and the Cold War, the world might have never developed these weapons and we might find the idea that anyone could possibly build such weapons unimaginable. But this is not the world we live in. We live in a world with weapons of enormous destructiveness and we have to see the risks that they pose to all of us and find ways to reduce them.

I hope that there are many in the world today who take on the challenge to make the world more peaceful and to reduce the risk from nuclear weapons. The goal has to be that humanity never ends up using this most destructive technology that we ever developed.

Resources to continue reading and finding ways to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons

• Hiroshima : John Hersey’s report for the New Yorker about the bombing of Hiroshima, published in August 1946.
• ’80,000 Hours’ profile on Nuclear Security : an article focusing on the question of how to choose a career that makes the world safer from nuclear weapons.
• The ‘Future of Life Institute’ on Nuclear Weapons : this page includes an extensive list of additional references – including videos, research papers, and many organizations that are dedicated to reducing the risk from nuclear weapons.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Charlie Giattino, Hannah Ritchie, and Edouard Mathieu for reading drafts of this and for their very helpful comments and ideas.

Additional lists of close calls with nuclear weapons

* Future of Life Institute – Accidental nuclear war: A timeline of close calls .

* Alan F. Philips, M.D. – 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War , published on Nuclear Files

* Josh Harkinson (2014) – That Time We Almost Nuked North Carolina

* Union of Concerned Scientists (2015) – Close Calls with Nuclear Weapons

* Chatham House Report (2014) – Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy authored by Patricia Lewis, Heather Williams, Benoît Pelopidas, and Sasan Aghlani

* Wikipedia – List of Nuclear Close Calls

On Nuclear Winter see:

* Jägermeyr, Jonas, Alan Robock, Joshua Elliott, Christoph Müller, Lili Xia, Nikolay Khabarov, Christian Folberth, et al. (2020) – ‘ A Regional Nuclear Conflict Would Compromise Global Food Security’ . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 13 (31 March 2020): 7071–81.

* Robock, A., L. Oman, and G. L. Stenchikov (2007) – Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences , J. Geophys. Res., 112, D13107, doi:10.1029/2006JD008235.

* Alan Robock & Owen Brian Toon (2012) – Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war . In Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 68, 66–74.

* Alan Robock & Owen Brian Toon (2016) – Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter , In the New York Times, Feb. 11, 2016.

Some additional points:

* The risk of nuclear winter (initially termed ‘nuclear twilight’) was only discovered in the early 1980s, more than 3 decades after the bombs were first used.

* The main mechanism by which a nuclear winter is expected to cause a decline in global food production is by reducing the growing season, the days in a row without frost. See Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov (2007).

* Robock estimates that the smoke and soot would rise as high as 40 kilometers (25 miles) into the atmosphere. See Robock and Toon (2016).

* Before the nuclear famine kills people from hunger, many will die from hypothermia.

* In addition to the impact on the climate, the ozone layer is expected to get depleted in such a scenario. This would allow more ultraviolet radiation to reach our planet’s surface, harming plant and animal life.

* In general there is only relatively little scientific work that focuses on nuclear winter and additional, good research could be useful to provide a better understanding. Due to the lack of research there remains uncertainty about how devastating a nuclear winter would be. In particular there is disagreement on how likely it is that all of humanity would die in a nuclear winter.

* The paper by Jägermeyr et al (2020) shows that among the countries with the largest food production losses would be the US and Russia, those countries that have the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

For anyone who interested in the impact of nuclear winter on food production and famine, Ord (2020) cites the following:

* Cropper, W. P., and Harwell, M. A. (1986) – “Food Availability after Nuclear War,” in M. A. Harwell and T. C. Hutchinson (eds.), The Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War (SCOPE 28), vol. 2: Ecological, Agricultural, and Human Effects. John Wiley and Sons.

* Helfand, I. (2013) – Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? Physicians for Social Responsibility.

* Xia, L., Robock, A., Mills, M., Stenke, A., and Helfand, I. (2015) – Decadal Reduction of Chinese Agriculture after a Regional Nuclear War . Earth’s Future, 3(2), 37–48.

Reagan in his State of the Union address in 1984, quoted in the New York Times: Bernard Gwertzman (1984) – Reagan reassures Russians on war . In the New York Times January 26, 1984.

There are nine countries that are known to possess nuclear weapons: Russia, United States, France, China, United Kingdom, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. South Africa once possessed nuclear weapons and is the first state to voluntarily give up nuclear weapons.

The explosive power of a nuclear weapon is called the yield of a nuclear weapon. It is the amount of energy released when that weapon is detonated. It is usually measured in ‘TNT equivalents’.

The bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13–18 kilotons of TNT. (one kiloton are 1000 tonnes)

The largest bomb that was ever detonated is the ‘Tsar Bomba’ built by the USSR and detonated in October 1961. Its yield was about 50 megatons of TNT. That’s 50,000 kilotons of TNT or about 3,333-times the yield of the bomb in Hiroshima.

The scenario in Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov (2007) is based on the nuclear stockpiles after the large reduction that was achieved after the end of the Cold War. It shows that the world still retains enough weapons to produce “a large, long-lasting, unprecedented global climate change,” as the authors put it. Since the publication of this study, the stockpiles have been reduced further, as the chart shows, but not very strongly so.

For a recent discussion of this question see Ord (2020) – The Precipice.

This list is largely based on Toby Ord’s 2020 book The Precipice . His list can be found in Chapter 4 and Appendix C of his book.

Ord in turn relies mostly on a document from the US Department of Defense from 1981: Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving US Nuclear Weapons (1950–1980) .

This list is mostly based on the ’80,000 Hours’ profile on Nuclear Security and Toby Ord (2020) – The Precipice.

For big overviews of this literature see the forthcoming book Christopher Blattman (2022) – Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace and Steven Pinker (2011) – The Better Angels of our Nature for a big overview

Lawrence S. Wittner – Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement . Stanford University Press.

One indication for the declining interest in the last generation: Mentions of “nuclear war” in books and newspapers peaked in 1985 and declined strongly since then (see Google Ngram for ‘nuclear war’ ).

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The risk of nuclear conflict is rising.

Nuclear nations are building up their arsenals, speeding toward the next arms race. Is anyone paying attention?

Today’s generation of weapons — many of which are fractions of the size of the bombs America dropped in 1945 but magnitudes more deadly than conventional ones — poses an unpredictable threat.

It hangs over battlefields in Ukraine as well as places where the next war might occur: the Persian Gulf, the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula.

This is one story of what’s at stake — if even one small nuclear weapon were used — based on modeling, research and hundreds of hours of interviews with people who have lived through an atomic detonation, dedicated their lives to studying nuclear war or are planning for its aftermath.

Nuclear war is often described as unimaginable. In fact, it’s not imagined enough.

• Share full article

If it seems alarmist to anticipate the horrifying aftermath of a nuclear attack, consider this: The United States and Ukraine governments have been planning for this scenario for at least two years.

In the fall of 2022, a U.S. intelligence assessment put the odds at 50-50 that Russia would launch a nuclear strike to halt Ukrainian forces if they breached its defense of Crimea. Preparing for the worst, American officials rushed supplies to Europe. Ukraine has set up hundreds of radiation detectors around cities and power plants, along with more than 1,000 smaller hand-held monitors sent by the United States.

Nearly 200 hospitals in Ukraine have been identified as go-to facilities in the event of a nuclear attack. Thousands of doctors, nurses and other workers have been trained on how to respond and treat radiation exposure. And millions of potassium iodide tablets, which protect the thyroid from picking up radioactive material linked with cancer, are stockpiled around the country.

But well before that — just four days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, in fact — the Biden administration had directed a small group of experts and strategists, a “Tiger Team,” to devise a new nuclear “playbook” of contingency plans and responses. Pulling in experts from the intelligence, military and policy fields, they pored over years-old emergency preparedness plans, weapon-effects modeling and escalation scenarios, dusting off materials that in the age of counterterrorism and cyberwarfare were long believed to have faded into irrelevance.

The playbook, which was coordinated by the National Security Council, now sits in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing of the White House. It has a newly updated, detailed menu of diplomatic and military options for President Biden — and any future president — to act upon if a nuclear attack occurs in Ukraine.

At the heart of all of this work is a chilling conclusion: The possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, is more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War. “We've had 30 pretty successful years keeping the genie in the bottle,” a senior administration official on the Tiger Team said. While both America and Russia have hugely reduced their nuclear arsenals since the height of the Cold War, the official said, “Right now is when nuclear risk is most at the forefront.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded the world of this existential danger last week when he publicly warned of nuclear war if NATO deepened its involvement in Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin, February 2024

The risk of nuclear escalation in Ukraine, while now low, has been a primary concern for the Biden administration throughout the conflict, details of which are being reported here for the first time. In a series of interviews over the past year, U.S. and Ukrainian officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, diplomacy and ongoing security preparations.

And while it may cause sleepless nights in Washington and Kyiv, most of the world has barely registered the threat. Perhaps it’s because an entire generation came of age in a post-Cold War world, when the possibility of nuclear war was thought to be firmly behind us. It is time to remind ourselves of the consequences in order to avoid them.

Even after last week’s nuclear threat, few believe that Mr. Putin will wake up one day and decide to lob megaton warheads at Washington or European capitals in retaliation for supporting Ukraine. What Western allies see as more likely is that Russia will use a so-called tactical nuclear weapon, which is less destructive and designed to strike targets over short distances to devastate military units on the battlefield.

The strategic thinking behind those weapons is that they are far less damaging than city-destroying hydrogen bombs and therefore more “usable” in warfare. The United States estimates Russia has a stockpile of up to 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads, some small enough they fit in an artillery shell.

But the detonation of any tactical nuclear weapon would be an unprecedented test of the dogma of deterrence, a theory that has underwritten America’s military policy for the past 70 years. The idea stipulates that adversaries are deterred from launching a nuclear attack against the United States — or more than 30 of its treaty-covered allies — because by doing so they risk an overwhelming counterattack.

Possessing nuclear weapons isn’t about winning a nuclear war, the theory goes; it’s about preventing one. It hinges upon a carefully calibrated balance of terror among nuclear states.

Source: Federation of American Scientists

Figures and dates are based on estimates of the number of warheads for military use and may not mark when a nation's first nuclear test took place.

If Mr. Putin dropped a nuclear weapon on Ukraine — a nonnuclear nation that’s not covered by anyone’s nuclear umbrella — what then? If deterrence fails, how is it possible to reduce the risk of one attack escalating into a global catastrophe?

We might find an answer in the autumn of 2022, when fears of Russia’s nuclear use in Ukraine were most palpable. A lightning Ukrainian military counteroffensive had reclaimed territory from the Russians in the northeastern region of Kharkiv. The Ukrainians were on the cusp of breaching Russian defense lines at Kherson in the south, possibly causing a second Russian retreat that could signal an imminent broader military collapse.

U.S. intelligence estimated that if Ukraine’s fighters managed to break through Russian defenses — and were on the march to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet is based — it came down to a coin flip whether or not Russia would launch a tactical nuclear weapon to stop them, senior administration officials said.

Moscow has made implicit and explicit nuclear threats throughout the war to scare off Western intervention. Around this time, however, a series of frightening episodes took place.

On Oct. 23, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of Russia made a flurry of phone calls to the defense chiefs of four NATO nations, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, to say Russia had indications that Ukrainian fighters could detonate a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive wrapped in radioactive material — on their own territory to frame Moscow.

American intelligence also intercepted chatter around then among Russian military leaders about using a tactical nuclear weapon, according to current and former Biden administration officials. General Austin and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Gen. Mark Milley, held three phone calls in four days with Russian counterparts during this tense period.

Believing the Russians were building an unfounded pretext for their own nuclear attack, the Biden administration quickly began a multilateral effort with allies, adversaries and nations in between to de-escalate the situation and try to talk Moscow out of it. For nearly a week, Biden aides pulled all-nighters at the White House, coordinating high-level conversations and planning for the worst: the detonation of a small nuclear device in Ukrainian territory that had the power of a few kilotons or less.

Many in the administration believed the Kremlin’s dirty bomb ploy posed the greatest risk of nuclear war since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. State Department officials traveled to Poland to ensure that medical supplies and radiation equipment were rushed over the border. The Energy Department sent equipment to collect potential debris so that it could be later analyzed by American scientists for weapon design characteristics and the origin of the nuclear material. U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees nuclear operations, directed a team of experts (cheekily named The Writers’ Club, because their findings were written up daily for the Pentagon leadership) to assess the risk and determine which conditions would trigger Russia to go nuclear.

While cautions about the potential withering economic, diplomatic and military consequences were delivered in private to Moscow, administration officials also publicly sounded alarm bells.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, October 2022

The administration’s diplomatic push was coupled with efforts by leaders of several nations, including China, India and Turkey, to explain to Mr. Putin’s government the potential costs if he were to go through with a nuclear attack. That November, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Burns, met with his Russian counterpart in Turkey, where he conveyed a similar warning. On Nov. 16, the Group of 20 released a joint statement:

If the Russian leader was indeed inching toward the brink, he stepped back.

What took place to prevent a nuclear attack that fall was a rare moment of consensus on an issue on which world leaders seem to be moving farther apart. Russia is replacing its Soviet-era hardware with new jets, missiles and submarines. And the other eight nations that have nuclear weapons are believed to be enhancing their arsenals in parts of the world that are already on edge.

India, which has continuing tensions over its borders with China and Pakistan, is fielding longer-range weapons.

Pakistan is developing new ballistic missiles and expanding nuclear production facilities.

North Korea, which has an arsenal of several hundred missiles and dozens of nuclear warheads, regularly threatens to attack South Korea, where the U.S. keeps about 28,500 troops.

China, which has publicly expressed its desire to control the U.S.-allied island of Taiwan by force if necessary, is increasing its nuclear arsenal at a “scale and pace unseen since the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race that ended in the late 1980s,” the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States concluded in October.

So while Washington has been helping Ukraine prepare for a nuclear attack, Taiwan or South Korea could be next. The National Security Council has already coordinated contingency playbooks for possible conflicts that could turn nuclear in Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East. Iran, which has continued its nuclear program amid Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, has amassed enough enriched uranium to build several weapons if and when it chooses.

During this time of widening conflict, the rising nuclear threat is especially destabilizing: A nuclear explosion in Ukraine or Gaza, where tens of thousands of civilians have already been killed or injured, would sizeably escalate either conflict and its humanitarian toll.

The world has been through a version of this moment before. The last nuclear standoff during the Cold War was cooled in part because of numerous nonproliferation efforts and arms control agreements between the United States and the former Soviet Union. The two nations, recognizing the terrifying situation they were in, worked to identify weapons that were mutually menacing and simply agreed to eliminate them. Nuclear warhead numbers plummeted to 12,500 today from roughly 70,400 in 1986.

Now that shared safety net of treaties and agreements is nearly gone. After a decade of diplomatic breakdown and military antagonism, only one major arms treaty between the United States and Russia remains — New START, which Mr. Putin suspended Russia’s participation in last year. The treaty is set to expire in February 2026.

President Vladimir Putin, February 2023

That means we are just two years away from a world in which there are no major treaty limits on the number of strategic nuclear weapons the United States and Russia deploy. Already today, because of the New START suspension, the two nations disclose little information about their arsenals to each other and do not engage in talks for further agreements. If nuclear deterrence — however flawed a concept it may be — is to work, transparency about nations’ capabilities is critical. Without better communication, the risk of rapid escalation and miscalculation will grow.

The danger of nuclear use in Ukraine fluctuates. It waned after Ukraine’s drive to recapture territory and sever Russia’s supply lines to Crimea was stopped short. But if the momentum swings back in Ukraine’s favor, or if Mr. Putin feels threatened by increased Western intervention, it could rise again. A U.S. intelligence report declassified late last year estimated Russia had lost around 315,000 troops to death or injury in Ukraine since 2022. That’s nearly 90 percent of its prewar force, along with at least 20 warships, thousands of battle tanks and heavy weapons — all major losses that could create more dependency on its tactical nuclear arsenal.

This isn’t an easy time for adversaries to be making big leaps of faith, but history shows it’s not impossible to forge deals amid international crises.

The Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and underwater, was signed by the United States, Britain and the former Soviet Union in 1963, less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis. Negotiations over the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which froze the number of American and Soviet long-range, nuclear-capable missiles, were concluded less than two months after the United States bombed Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam in 1972, damaging some Soviet ships. Several close calls in Europe during the Cold War contributed to a sweeping collection of agreements between Washington and Moscow that capped the number of each nation’s strategic weapons, opened communication channels and amplified monitoring and verification measures.

China’s aggressive nuclear buildup has complicated the strategic balance of the Cold War, raising questions in the United States about how to handle a three-way competition. In June, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, publicly offered to hold nuclear arms control negotiations with Russia and China — one-on-one or multilaterally — without preconditions. The proposal has resulted in only preliminary discussions with the Chinese and was met with outright dismissal from the Russians, according to administration officials.

Nuclear arms treaties typically take months or years to negotiate. And while the agreements don’t solve everything, they do allow governments to gain insights and assurances about an adversary’s stockpile that they otherwise wouldn’t have. Left in the dark, governments are forced to plan for the worst, building offensive and defensive capabilities.

The United States is now preparing to build new nuclear warheads for the first time since 1991, part of a decades-long program to overhaul its nuclear forces that’s estimated to cost up to $2 trillion. The outline of that plan was drawn up in 2010 — in a much different security environment than what the country faces today. This administration, or the next one, could make the political case that even more weapons need to be built in response to the expansion and modernization of other nations’ arsenals, particularly Russia’s and China’s.

Behind a nondescript door on the fifth floor of the State Department building in Washington, down the hall from the former offices of the director of the Manhattan Project, a windowless control room provides a direct channel between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.

The National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center was established in 1988 as a 24-hour watch station to facilitate the information exchange required by various arms control treaties and security-building agreements, mostly between the United States and Russia.

With a Russian translator always on the floor, the center once buzzed with more than 1,000 messages a year regarding the testing, movement and maintenance of Russia’s weapons, missiles and bombers. Last year, after the abandonment of New START, the center received fewer than a dozen of those messages.

W.J. Hennigan writes about national security issues for Opinion from Washington, D.C. He has reported from more than two dozen countries, covering war, the arms trade and the lives of U.S. service members. Additional reporting by Spencer Cohen. A selection of sources consulted in reporting this project can be found here .

National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center photographed by An-My Lê for The New York Times. Illustrations by Tim McDonagh. Animation by Jil Tai. Phone call: Robert L. Knudsen/U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (test ban). Treaty photos: Corbis/Getty Images (SALT); Bettmann/Getty Images (INF); Joe Klamar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (NEW START). Videos: The Union Herald, via YouTube; RTVI News, via YouTube; CGTN, via YouTube; Global News, via YouTube; Pakistan Armed Forces, via YouTube; AFP, via YouTube .

Edited by Krista Mahr, Kathleen Kingsbury and Meeta Agrawal. Produced by Jessia Ma, Kate Elazegui, Shoshana Schultz, Quoctrung Bui, Jacqueline Bates and Ana Becker.

This Times Opinion series is funded through philanthropic grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York , Outrider Foundation and the Prospect Hill Foundation . Funders have no control over the selection or focus of articles or the editing process and do not review articles before publication. The Times retains full editorial control.

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How a small nuclear war would transform the entire planet

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It all starts in 2025, as tensions between India and Pakistan escalate over the contested region of Kashmir. When a terrorist attacks a site in India, that country sends tanks rolling across the border with Pakistan. As a show of force against the invading army, Pakistan decides to detonate several small nuclear bombs.

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In the 75 years since the first successful test of a plutonium bomb, nuclear weapons have changed the face of warfare. Here, troops in the 11th Airborne division watch an atomic explosion at close range in the Las Vegas desert on November 1, 1951.

• HISTORY & CULTURE

How the advent of nuclear weapons changed the course of history

Many scientists came to regret their role in creating a weapon that can obliterate anyone and anything in its vicinity in seconds.

At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, a light brighter than the sun radiated over New Mexico. The fireball annihilated everything in the vicinity, then produced a mushroom cloud that billowed more than seven miles high.

In the aftermath, the scientists who had produced the blast laughed and shook hands and passed around celebratory drinks. Then they settled into grim thought about the deadly potential of the weapon they had created. They had just produced the world’s first nuclear explosion. ( Here's what happened that day in the desert. )

The test, code-named “Trinity,” was a triumph; it proved that scientists could harness the power of plutonium fission. It thrust the world into the atomic age, changing warfare and geopolitical relations forever. Less than a month later, the U.S. dropped two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan—further proving it was now possible to obliterate large swaths of land and kill masses of people in seconds.

In August 1945, the United States decided to drop its newly developed nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an attempt to end World War II. In this photograph, an unidentified man stands next to a tiled fireplace where a house once stood in Hiroshima on Sept. 7, 1945.

Scientists had been trying to figure out how to produce nuclear fission—a reaction that happens when atomic nuclei are split, producing a massive amount of power—since the phenomenon’s discovery in the 1930s. Nazi Germany was first to try to weaponize such energy, and word of its efforts leaked out of the country along with political dissidents and exiled scientists, many of them German Jews.

In 1941, after emigre physicist Albert Einstein warned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Germany might be trying to develop a fission bomb, the United States joined the first nuclear arms race. It launched a secret atomic research project, code-named the Manhattan Project, bringing together the nation’s most eminent physicists with exiled scientists from Germany and other Nazi-occupied countries.

The project was carried out at dozens of sites, from Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Although it employed an estimated 600,000 people over the life of the project, its purpose was so secret that many of the people who contributed to it had no sense of how their efforts contributed to the larger, coordinated goal. Researchers pursued two paths toward a nuclear weapon: one that relied on uranium and another, more complex path, that relied on plutonium.

For Hungry Minds

After years of research, the Manhattan Project made history in 1945 when the test of “the gadget,” one of three plutonium bombs produced before the end of the war, succeeded. The U.S. had also developed an untested uranium bomb. Despite the obvious potential of these weapons to end or alter the course of the ongoing World War II, many of the scientists who helped develop nuclear technology opposed its use in warfare. Leo Szilard, a physicist who discovered the nuclear chain reaction, petitioned the administration of Harry S. Truman (who had succeeded Roosevelt as president) not to use it in war. But his pleas, which were accompanied by the signatures of scores of Manhattan Project scientists, went unheard .

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 “superbomber” dropped a uranium bomb over Hiroshima in an attempt to force Japan’s unconditional surrender. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a plutonium bomb, identical to the Trinity test bomb, over Nagasaki. The attacks decimated both cities and killed or wounded at least 200,000 civilians. ( For those who survived, memories of the bomb are impossible to forget. )

Japan surrendered on August 15. Some historians argue the nuclear blasts had an additional purpose: to intimidate the Soviet Union. Without a doubt, the blasts kicked off the Cold War .

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Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had already green-lit a nuclear program in 1943, and a year and a half after the bombings in Japan, the Soviet Union achieved its first nuclear chain reaction. In 1949, the U.S.S.R. tested “First Lightening,” its first nuclear device.

Ironically, the United States leadership believed that building a robust nuclear arsenal would act as a deterrent, helping prevent a third world war by showing that the U.S. could crush the U.S.S.R., should it invade Western Europe. But as the U.S. began investing in thermonuclear weapons with hundreds of times the firepower of the bombs it used to end World War II, the Soviets followed on its heels. In 1961, the Soviet Union tested the “ Tsar Bomba ,” a powerful weapon yielding the equivalent of 50 megatons of TNT and producing a mushroom cloud as high as Mount Everest.

“No matter how many bombs they had or how big their explosions grew, they needed more and bigger,” writes historian Craig Nelson. ”Enough was never enough.”

As additional countries gained nuclear capacity and the Cold War reached a fever pitch in the late 1950s and early 1960s, an anti-nuclear movement grew in response to a variety of nuclear accidents and weapons tests with environmental and human tolls.

Scientists and the public began to push first for a ban on nuclear testing and then for disarmament. Einstein—whose initial warning to Roosevelt had been designed to prevent nuclear war, rather than set it in motion—was among them. In a 1955 manifesto, the physicist and a group of intellectuals pleaded for the world to abandon its nuclear weapons. “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable,” they wrote . “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”

The urgent issue went unresolved. Then, in 1962, reports of a Soviet arms build-up in Cuba led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense standoff between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that many feared would end in nuclear catastrophe.

In response to activists’ concerns, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (and later Russia) signed a partial test ban treaty in 1963, followed by a nuclear nonproliferation treaty in 1968, and a variety of additional agreements designed to limit the number of nuclear weapons.

Nevertheless, in early 2020 there were an estimated 13,410 nuclear weapons in the world—down from a peak of around 70,300 in 1986— according to the Federation of American Scientists. The FAS reports that 91 percent of all nuclear warheads are owned by Russia and the U.S. The other nuclear nations are France, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. Iran is suspected of attempting to build its own nuclear weapon.

Despite the dangers of nuclear proliferation, only two nuclear weapons—the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—have been deployed in a war. Still, writes the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, "The dangers from such weapons arise from their very existence.”

Seventy-five years after the Trinity test, humanity has thus far survived the nuclear age. But in a world with thousands of nuclear weapons, constantly changing political alliances, and continued geopolitical strife, the concerns raised by the scientists who birthed the technology that makes nuclear war possible remain.

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Conclusion: Strategic Stability & Nuclear War

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Christopher F. Chyba , Robert Legvold; Conclusion: Strategic Stability & Nuclear War. Daedalus 2020; 149 (2): 222–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01799

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If the fear of nuclear war has faded as the Cold War recedes into the misty past, we may need to remind ourselves of what these weapons can do. At least five of the nine countries that currently possess nuclear weapons can deliver thermonuclear warheads, each with the explosive equivalent of several hundred thousand tons of TNT, nearly halfway around the Earth. 1 The intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that would deliver them at this range are called “strategic” because they can reach into an adversary's homeland to destroy leadership, military, infrastructure, or civilian targets. Warheads on different missiles are characterized by their yield (explosive energy) and their accuracy. Estimates in the open literature suggest that the United States, for example, can deliver a 455 kiloton warhead launched from a Trident ballistic missile submarine over six thousand miles to detonate within the length of a football field of its target. 2 The yield of 455 kilotons means that the energy released would equal the explosive energy of 455,000 kilograms (about one million pounds) of high explosive (TNT), which would be more than thirty times the energy released by the nuclear weapon detonated by the United States over Hiroshima during World War II. Depending on the relative location of the submarine launching the SLBM and its intended target, the time between the launch and the detonation of the warhead could be as short as six to ten minutes. 3 An adversary might have only that much warning time to recognize that an attack was underway and react.

Some Russian and Chinese strategic missiles are thought to carry warheads of even larger explosive yields. For example, the Russian SS-19 Mod 3 ICBM carries six independently targetable warheads (MIRVs) that reportedly have a yield as high as 750 kilotons. 4 Figure 1 shows the effects of one such 750-kiloton warhead exploding 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) above New York City, centered on Midtown Manhattan. 5 The four concentric rings in the figure illustrate the effects of the explosion. Moving outward from the point of detonation: Within the first ring (radius 2.5 kilometers) the blast is so strong that even heavily built concrete buildings are demolished. Virtually every person within this area is killed in the blast. This ring extends entirely across the island of Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson. The second ring (radius 5.7 kilometers) reaches into New Jersey and the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. It marks the distance out to which residential buildings collapse. At this distance, “injuries are universal and fatalities are widespread.” The third ring (radius 11 kilometers) shows the effects of the immediate thermal radiation (high intensity ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light emitted by the explosion). Out to this distance, anyone with a line of sight to the detonation suffers third-degree burns to exposed skin. Finally, the fourth ring (radius 15 kilometers) marks the distance out to which windows shatter, with resulting injuries from flying glass. Overall, more than 1.8 million people would be killed nearly instantly, and over 2 million more immediately wounded. These numbers ignore the effects of frestorms–massive urban fires driven by hurricane-force winds that may result from the nuclear detonation 6 –as well as longer-term radiation and fallout. Of course, many hospitals and firehouses would be destroyed, and many medical personnel immediately killed, limiting the life-saving potential of first-responders.

Nuclear Blast above Midtown Manhattan

These results are for a single large strategic warhead. Under the 2011 New START arms control treaty, Russia and the United States agreed to reduce their numbers of deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 on each side. 7 China, France, and the United Kingdom have smaller numbers of warheads on missiles, estimated at about 290, 300, and 225 warheads, respectively. 8 In a nuclear war, or a conventional war that escalated to the use of strategic nuclear weapons, many–perhaps hundreds or more–such detonations might take place.

This must never be allowed to happen. One way to try to ensure that it never does is to threaten nuclear-armed adversaries with nuclear retaliation from forces that would credibly survive an initial attack (the “first strike”). Potential attackers would then presumably be deterred from launching a first strike because they would feel certain to suffer devastating nuclear retaliation. 9 Yet this deterrent posture carries with it an inescapable, perhaps small but difficult to quantify, possibility of inadvertent or mistaken nuclear war. 10

Another way to try to ensure that the worst never happens is to eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide. But this approach raises its own challenges. One is how to reduce and then eliminate nuclear weapons with sufficient verification that all countries could feel confident that no weapons were hidden in violation of the disarmament agreements. A second is that weapons know-how cannot be unlearned and relevant capabilities fully undone, so that in a major war or political crisis, there could be pressure to recreate rapidly and perhaps preemptively use nuclear weapons. That is, a world of zero nuclear weapons could prove dangerously unstable. Experts have dedicated much attention to these challenges, but they are far from solved. 11 At the same time, as this volume of Dædalus has highlighted, a future world in which stability is preserved through nuclear deterrence also faces considerable known and unknown challenges.

But there are other possible security catastrophes that states also wish to prevent: for example, full-scale conventional war among the major powers. World War II resulted in the deaths of over sixty million people. 12 The major powers have not waged total war against one another since 1945, even if many other smaller conflicts have been fought. There is more than one reason for this “Long Peace,” but it is likely that the existence of nuclear weapons has induced caution on the part of the major powers over being drawn into major war. 13 The successful mating of fusion warheads to ICBMs or SLBMs has for this reason been termed the “nuclear revolution,” because the likelihood of major war among states equipped with these weapons has been, some argue, greatly reduced by removing any doubt in the minds of national leaders about the horrific outcome of such a war. 14 Ballistic missile defense systems remain all but useless against more than a small number of incoming strategic warheads, so there is no reliable defense. 15 Therefore, in a face-off among nuclear-armed states, rational leaders provided with competent technical information must recognize that their country lies open to destruction. There is no denying the devastating consequences of thermonuclear war. Since full-scale conventional war could escalate to nuclear war, rational leaders would not risk waging full-scale war on another ICBM- or SLBM-wielding thermonuclear power. 16 And so, as some have argued, peace at this level has endured.

Various countries at various times have claimed other vital uses for nuclear weapons. Before it gave up its small, indigenous nuclear weapons arsenal, apartheid South Africa imagined that threatening the use of its weapons would force the great powers to negotiate an end to any conflict that menaced it. 17 Pakistan's senior generals have been clear that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons first if needed to repel a purely conventional Indian invasion. 18 It seems likely that North Korea's Kim Jong-un views the threat to use his country's nuclear weapons as his ultimate guarantor of regime and personal survival. 19 Finally, some countries, at least under certain leaders, may have pursued nuclear superiority (more nuclear missiles, with more nuclear warheads, say, than one's adversary) under the belief that this putative superiority in itself would confer other advantages or intimidate adversaries away from certain courses of action. 20 Not unrelatedly, some countries may pursue nuclear weapons to protect themselves against the possibility of nuclear blackmail or coercion. 21

And so, we find ourselves in our current dilemma. Countries desire the security afforded by their own or their allies' nuclear weapons, but as long as these weapons exist, there remains a chance that they could be used in limited or even vast numbers. This could result from escalation in the context of an ongoing conventional war, with one side concluding it had no choice but to strike first; or it might result from an erroneous conclusion made under time pressure that another state has launched a nuclear attack; or from a miscalculation by a leader who is not realistically informed or who has rebuffed efforts to be so informed; or even via an irrational leader coming to power and making heinous decisions. It is sobering that since the end of World War II, nuclear adversaries have considered the use of nuclear weapons in preventive war, have explicitly or implicitly threatened the use of nuclear weapons, and, in the Cuban missile crisis, have come close to misjudgments that would have led to nuclear war. 22 Concerns over escalation to the use of nuclear weapons are therefore justified by the historical record. At the same time, there has been no wartime use of nuclear weapons and no full-scale war between major powers since 1945.

Nuclear-armed states have aimed to reduce the likelihood of the various pathways to nuclear weapons use by seeking to create conditions of strategic stability . Strategic stability is usually taken to include both crisis stability and arms race stability. Crisis stability means that even in a conventional war or faced with a possible nuclear attack, states would not use nuclear weapons for fear that such escalation would bring certain disaster. Crisis stability must be robust even against inadvertent or mistaken nuclear escalation. Arms race stability means that nuclear powers do not have incentives to pursue weapons or weapon deployments resulting in action-reaction cycles that undermine crisis stability.

The goal of this volume has been to examine whether current directions in international affairs and a concomitant technological evolution are eroding strategic stability and placing the world at greater risk of nuclear weapons use–and if so, what might be done about it. In particular, this volume had its genesis in three particular concerns that appear to threaten strategic stability: the increasing complexity of nuclear relationships in a world of multiple and increasingly capable nuclear powers; the near-collapse of bilateral strategic arms control between the United States and Russia; and the development and possible deployment of new technologies whose characteristics overall seem likely to be destabilizing. Separately or combined, each of these trends could make escalation to nuclear weapons use more likely. These are wide-ranging multilateral challenges, but this volume has focused primarily on the triangular relationship among China, Russia, and the United States, with only occasional discussion of other nuclear powers. This reflects a practical decision to begin with these core relationships, not a belief that only those relationships matter. Subsequent work will expand this focus. 23

During the Cold War, countries looked to a variety of means to prevent escalation to nuclear war, without forsaking what they perceived as the security benefits of their nuclear arsenals. The dream of a successful defense against a large-scale nuclear attack never ended, but the technical reality remained that warheads launched from ICBMs and SLBMs were extremely difficult to intercept, and that an attacker's countermeasures were technically simpler and less expensive than a defender's interceptors. 24 Absent a credible defense against strategic missiles, other approaches came to the fore.

The least subtle of these was deterrence. In broad terms, deterrence in the nuclear context seeks to alter an adversary's cost-benefit calculation with respect to the use of nuclear weapons. 25 Its most stark realization was in the condition of mutual assured destruction (MAD) between the United States and the Soviet Union. Once secure second-strike systems were in place, each side understood that full-scale nuclear war would mean mutual annihilation, regardless of who struck first. Each country was deterred, they hoped, from reaching for the nuclear trigger by a recognition that no conceivable benefit was worth this level of “assured destruction.”

In less stark manifestations of deterrence, countries sought to supplement the threat of punishment with steps that would deny an adversary's efforts to achieve their goals in launching an attack: so-called deterrence by denial. For example, an adversary might imagine that small-scale nuclear weapons could be employed in limited fashion to secure a desired objective without leading to unacceptable further escalation. Deterrence by denial meant fashioning capabilities that would dissuade an adversary from trying, thus cutting off a dangerous path to even greater nuclear weapons use. If nuclear weapons were nevertheless used in a limited way, some theorists argued that adversaries, faced with an opponent whose escalatory options were superior, might still be deterred from moving to higher levels of nuclear destruction. 26

Beyond deterrence, the United States and the Soviet Union, and then Russia, engaged in a variety of arms control measures that were intended to reduce the incentives either side might have for escalating to nuclear weapons use. 27 Arms control sought to improve the adversaries' knowledge of one another, both through technical transparency into each other's military capabilities and by enhancing leadership communication in crisis. Consequently, escalation through fear, misunderstanding, or worst-case analyses would be less likely. Jon Wolfsthal, in his essay for this volume, highlights several major U.S.-Soviet arms control treaties that embodied these objectives. 28 The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty sought to limit strategic missile defense deployments to spare each side a costly defensive arms race that could, at its worst, provide the false impression that launching a first nuclear strike was credible due to an effective defense against an adversary's reply. The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Agreement (INF) stabilized the U.S. Russian nuclear relationship by eliminating the two countries' intermediate- range nuclear missiles in Europe and elsewhere, thereby freeing Moscow and European capitals from the fear of nuclear destruction from a nonstrategic missile that, because of the shorter ranges involved, could eliminate leadership, command and control, or other targets with warning times much shorter than those of ICBMs. The second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), signed by the United States and the Russian Federation in 1993, required the removal of MIRVed warheads from ICBMs. This would have reduced incentives for a first strike against vulnerable land-based missiles hosting multiple warheads. (The treaty, however, never entered into force.) All these agreements instantiate a view of arms control motivated by the desire to enhance strategic stability, rather than the intention to reduce the size of nuclear arsenals as such. Yet there were also arms control agreements that seemed more concerned with simple measures of parity than with enhancing stability. 29

As the archives open, we are learning that the impulses prompting leadership in the two countries to turn to arms control were as broadly political as they were an effort to manage nuclear risks. James Cameron, in his essay in this volume, stresses this larger geopolitical context for arms control. Perhaps this should be unsurprising, since such a long-lasting foreign policy tool might be expected to serve many constituencies in order to survive over many decades. Cameron argues in particular that arms control, including the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), was used by the United States and the Soviet Union “to preserve their dominance of global politics at the expense of their allies' military options.” 30 Similarly, as he and other historians have shown, bringing U.S. allies under the protection of its nuclear umbrella was a powerful way to avert nuclear proliferation among those allies. In particular, both the United States and the Soviet Union valued the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty as a barrier to Germany pursuing a nuclear option. The crucial interplay between deterrent practices and arms control in the pursuit of broader objectives did not cease with the end of the Cold War. Looking ahead, if nuclear arms control is to have a future not only between the United States and Russia but among the other major nuclear powers, it will only be if leaders see it as a way to achieve larger geopolitical objectives as well as a safer nuclear world.

Another view of the nuclear threat, one whose roots reach back to some of the scientists who produced the first atomic bomb, was that measures such as deterrence and arms control could not guarantee strategic stability in perpetuity, and that international security ultimately would require the elimination of nuclear weapons. 31 The recognition that nuclear weapons bring peril as well as stability was one motive behind Article VI of the NPT, which calls for their ultimate elimination. 32 Throughout the Cold War, there was an ebb and flow of efforts by elements of civil society or on the part of non-nuclear-weapon states to pursue international security though nuclear disarmament. 33 The focus in this volume on relations among and strategic approaches of the three leading nuclear-weapon states–the United States, Russia, and China–risks paying too little attention to the views of non-nuclear-weapon states who find the continuing strategic face-off (claims for the efficacy of deterrence or no) to be deeply troubling. Harald Müller and Carmen Wunderlich, in their essay discussing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, trace the ways in which the apparent lack of attention on the part of the nuclear-weapon states to their Article VI NPT commitments and their backtracking on past commitments have encouraged 122 nations to negotiate–though not yet bring into force–a treaty to ban nuclear weapons altogether. 34

All these approaches to maintaining strategic stability have been affected by the transition from the largely bilateral nuclear rivalry of the Cold War to today's more complicated nuclear world. Disturbingly, the trends we identify here–increasingly complex relations among increasingly capable nuclear-armed states, the collapse of formal arms control, destabilizing technological advances–are not merely moving in parallel, but may reinforce one another in powerful ways. Steven Miller, in his lead essay for this volume, argues that the effects of the transition from a predominantly U.S.-Russian nuclear weapons relationship to a Chinese-Russian-U.S. nuclear triangle can already be seen in important outcomes. 35 Miller argues that while accusations of treaty noncompliance were the proximate cause of U.S. withdrawal from the INF, strategic calculations reflecting the more complicated three-way Chinese-Russian-U.S. relationship undergirded this decision: because of the bilateral INF treaty, neither Russia nor the United States could match China's growing missile capabilities in the 500–5,500 kilometer range. A bilateral treaty was no longer well suited for a trilateral military relationship.

Miller gives a second example of increasing complexity due to multilateral nuclear decision-making. In the case of ballistic missile defense, steps taken by the United States to defend itself against small numbers of North Korean ICBMs or (possible future) Iranian ICBMs are seen by China and Russia as laying the groundwork for a more extensive and effective system to counter their own strategic nuclear forces. (And, Miller argues, the Trump administration has given them additional cause for this interpretation.) Steps taken in response by China will potentially affect India's decisions about its own nuclear forces. Beijing sits at an apex of two nuclear triangles, one with the United States and Russia, the other with India and Pakistan. At a minimum, as Miller approvingly quotes former Ambassador Steven Pifer, “Strategic stability appears increasingly a multilateral and multi-domain construct.” 36 Miller is doubtless correct when he concludes that formal treaty-based bilateral arms control, a classic tool for managing strategic stability, is less and less suited for the world in which we now live. Nor is multilateral arms control likely to fill the void. As Miller warns: “Bilateral arms control is collapsing but seems in any case insufficient; trilateral arms control seems necessary but so far remains impossible; multilateral arms control is comatose; and regional arms control is desirable but is as yet nonexistent.” 37

Any successful path forward will depend on the United States, Russia, and China finding some measure of common ground. If the essays in this volume by Anya Loukianova Fink and Olga Oliker, Li Bin, and Brad Roberts make one thing clear, that will not be easy. Reconstructing the perspectives of Russia, China, and the United States, respectively, the authors each describe a set of concerns fundamentally at odds with those of at least one of the other two. For Roberts, striving to pursue an approach to nuclear deterrence that lowers the risk of nuclear war remains key for the United States, but the context in which the United States must conduct this pursuit is altogether different. Russia, he argues, is no longer a potential partner in seeking to reduce nuclear risks, but a dangerous adversary striving to create a nuclear posture serving its aggressive foreign policy agenda. 38 The risk to be averted, therefore, is first and foremost that U.S. deterrence will fall short. By Fink and Oliker's retelling, Russia, in contrast, sees the situation in reverse: Russia's nuclear forces are designed to deter the primary threat posed by the United States. As its once dominant role in a shifting global setting fades, Russia's leadership contends, the United States counts on its military power, underpinned by nuclear weapons, to threaten and coerce others. It seeks nuclear superiority and now focuses on new technologies and weapons systems intended to degrade the Russian nuclear deterrent and make nuclear weapons more usable. 39

Not only have U.S. and Russian views on what threatens strategic stability sharply diverged, making preserving, let alone extending, the nuclear arms control process a fading prospect, but the way each side now both defines the specific threat that it sees in the other side's weapons programs and doctrinal shifts and prepares to counter them seems likely to increase the chance of inadvertent escalation across the nuclear threshold. In the meantime, Li argues, the disparity between the size of the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and those of all other countries means that the numerical aspects of U.S.-Russian arms control treaties “cannot apply to China.” 40 In other words, formal multilateral arms control is, as Miller suggested, not currently an available option. As the United States begins to treat China as a rising geopolitical threat and its enhanced nuclear forces as a source of concern, China's changing perceptions of global trends, the nature of the nuclear world, and the challenges it faces, according to Li, widens the gulf.

Complicating all issues of mutual understanding and potential escalation is the arrival–likely in the absence of any related arms control measures–of a set of new technologies that overall will probably make nuclear forces and their associated command and control appear more vulnerable. The most immediate of these is cyberspace operations. In his essay, James Acton systematically describes the ways in which cyber weapons differ from traditional weapons and, in particular, those aspects of cyber operations that seem especially destabilizing. 41 He acknowledges, however, that credible approaches to mitigate this threat are inadequate to the need. Christopher Chyba, in his essay, examines a wide range of new technologies, and proposes a framework to think through a given technology's impact on strategic stability. The intent of his framework is to help ensure that consideration (by any country) of new technologies systematically confronts the variety of ways in which destabilizing effects may result, so that possible mitigating steps can at least be considered. 42

How, then, are we to work within this world to lessen the chances of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons? Most of our authors propose elements of a response, but Linton Brooks, James Timbie, and Nina Tannenwald, in their essays, take this question as their primary focus. There is consensus that the United States and Russia should take advantage of New START's provision that allows the two parties to extend the treaty by five years beyond its looming 2021 expiration deadline. Brooks emphasizes that the transparency and predictability measures implemented in New START benefit the United States more than Russia because the United States is inherently the more open of the two countries. Moreover, while much of the information exchanged between the two sides could be obtained by national intelligence, this would require the diversion of these resources away from other intelligence requirements. And still, some of the information provided by New START, Brooks warns, “cannot be obtained in any other way.” 43

Yet Brooks–in agreement with other authors in this volume–acknowledges that a replacement treaty is nevertheless unlikely. 44 Timbie is clear about why further arms control treaties of any kind between Russia and the United States seem improbable. “Russia,” he notes, “has taken the position that further agreements must address third-country forces, missile defense, and precision conventional systems.” 45 But it is unlikely that China will agree to enter a formal treaty process, and the United States is unlikely to negotiate treaty commitments limiting missile defense. To this, one might add the seeming unwillingness of the current U.S. Senate to ratify treaties of nearly any kind, and arms control treaties in particular.

With the end of New START, bilateral arms control between the United States and Russia in the sense of formal legally binding treaties comes to an end. Brooks emphasizes that it is important to analyze carefully what the consequences of this loss of information and restraint will be, and to understand what mitigating steps may be taken to compensate for at least some of what will be lost. To this end, Timbie proposes an extensive list of transparency measures, numerical limits, and constraints on behavior that could be agreed upon as political, rather than legal, agreements. Verification would of necessity be weaker than with New START, but perhaps some limited verification measures could nevertheless be put in place. This would circumvent the U.S. treaty-ratification problem, even if the agreements are more fragile, more easily repudiated by incoming presidential administrations, and less well verified. Given the Russian concerns that Timbie himself identifies, it is unclear how realistic these proposals may be. But at the least, they should be vigorously explored.

With the decline of treaty-based arms control among the nuclear-weapon powers, Tannenwald calls for all nuclear-armed states to move toward a “regime of nuclear restraint and responsibility.” 46 Restraint, in her view, should “primarily take the form of reciprocal commitments and unilateral measures to avoid an arms race and reduce nuclear dangers.” And responsibility means committing to “responsible deterrence,” which not only prioritizes strategic stability and the immediate goal of preventing nuclear war but retains the ultimate goal of disarmament. Nuclear disarmament is, after all, a treaty requirement that the United States accepted when it ratified the NPT for, as Article VI of the U.S. Constitution states, ratified treaties are “the supreme law of the land.” 47 Nevertheless, the willingness of the United States publicly to embrace this obligation has varied greatly from administration to administration, and in the current state of affairs, this “ultimate” goal may seem very distant indeed. In the meantime, Tannenwald suggests a series of measures that could be pursued absent formal treaties, some by all nuclear-armed states, some by the United States, Russia, and China, and some unilaterally by the United States. One challenge is to ensure that unilateral measures would be effective beyond just the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. We see Tannenwald's suggestions as reinforcing the calls by Müller and Wunderlich for the advocates of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the advocates of deterrence to work harder to find common ground to prevent the worst outcomes from coming to pass.

The authors of this volume bring a diversity of views to the issue of strategic stability in this new multipolar world. Nevertheless, there is broad, albeit not universal, agreement on several points:

Russia and the United States should extend New START's expiration date from 2021 to 2026. They should then use that time to pursue a successor treaty that would further extend the transparency, predictability, and numerical limits (and ideally, lower limits) that New START provides. Yet most authors of this volume fear that extension is not likely, and that even if the treaty were extended, a formal successor treaty is unlikely to be realized.

If formal bilateral arms control treaties prove impossible, Russia and the United States should work to put in place politically binding agreements to capture much of the security and stability benefits that will be lost with the formal treaty process. However challenging such agreements may prove to be, the two states should vigorously explore these options.

On a bilateral or a multilateral basis, the United States, Russia, and China should pursue discussions intended to improve understanding of one another's strategic concerns and views on which actions by an adversary would be especially concerning or dangerous. Until that happens, the widening gap in the outlook and actions of these three major actors will only make this new nuclear environment less manageable and more dangerous.

China, Russia, and the United States should also actively work to see whether and where common ground can be found concerning efforts to mitigate arms spirals and restrain the development, deployment, or use of destabilizing technologies. They should then pursue politically binding agreements to advance these goals, albeit with a clear eye to the limits of verification that would exist in this format.

In addition, we embrace certain recommendations that were made by individual or a few authors:

The United States should strengthen resilience in its many forms–including to early warning, command and control, and communications–as a key mechanism both for deterrence (by denial) and for mitigating the risk of escalation of nonconventional attacks (such as cyber- or bio-attacks) or conventional warfare (including attacks in space) to the use of nuclear weapons. 48

While military intelligence and operations will increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into the interpretation of large amounts of empirical data, AI should nevertheless not be allowed, either intentionally or inadvertently, to enter or creep into actual decision-making for nuclear weapons use.

Little is to be gained, and perhaps much lost, by insisting on the opposition between those who emphasize deterrence as the central element of strategic stability and those who see a necessity for nuclear disarmament. In the U.S.-Russian-Chinese context, steps that would enhance stability by constraining weapons numbers or deployment of specific destabilizing technologies, or by improving communication regarding concerns about, and likely responses to, an adversary's possible strategic or tactical actions, could serve both causes.

The world has lived with nuclear weapons for seventy-five years. Although the number of states with nuclear weapons has grown slowly, the weapons themselves, while being used for many purposes, have not been detonated in war since the end of World War II. But the new era we have entered is more complex, both politically and technically, and seems likely to be less constrained by treaty, and therefore less transparent and less predictable, than any time in the past half-century.

It remains possible that New START can be extended and continue to serve as one basis for bilateral stability between the United States and Russia. In this future, there would remain many dangers, and the United States, Russia, and China would still need to engage in extensive dialogue to mitigate and manage them. Absent New START, the challenges would prove much greater. This volume has attempted, first, to help us understand what this coming world may look like and, second, to present recommendations that may provide a modest beginning to avoiding the worst outcomes in these possible futures.

First-generation nuclear weapons split the nuclei of either high-enriched uranium or plutonium to produce a million times more energy per kilogram than is the case for chemical high explosives. These are called fission weapons. Even greater amounts of energy per kilogram, by perhaps another factor of one hundred, is produced in fusion weapons. These weapons (also called hydrogen or thermonuclear weapons) use a fission weapon trigger (or “primary”) to create the pressures and temperatures needed to fuse hydrogen nuclei together (in the “secondary”) to produce helium, releasing even greater amounts of energy and typically driving additional fission as well. See, for example, Kosta Tsipis, Arsenal: Understanding Weapons in the Nuclear Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).

Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “United States Nuclear Forces, 2020,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 76 (1) (2020): 46–60.

See Tsipis, Arsenal , chap. 7.

See ibid., chap. 5; and Center for Strategic and International Studies Missile Defense Project, “SS-19 ‘Stiletto,‘” Missile Threat, August 10, 2016, https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/ss-19/ (last modified June 15, 2018); compare to Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Russian Nuclear Forces, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 75 (2) (2019): 73–84.

Alex Wellerstein, NUKEMAP, https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/. Nuclear weapons effects based on E. Royce Fletcher, Ray W. Albright, Robert F. D. Perret, et al., Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer (Including Slide-Rule Design and Curve Fits for Weapons Effects) , CEX-62.2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Civil Effects Test Operations, 1963); and Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Energy, 1977).

Such as was created at Hiroshima, and also by conventional bombing of cities such as Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo. See Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006).

The actual numbers are somewhat higher, since the counting rules under New START treat each strategic bomber as delivering only one warhead. See The Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START Treaty), Article III, https://2009–2017.state.gov/t/avc/newstart/c44126.htm .

Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 75 (4) (2019); Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “French Nuclear Forces, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 75 (1) (2019): 51–55; and Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “The British Nuclear Stockpile, 1953–2013,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69 (4) (2013): 69–75.

The essays in this volume have focused (albeit not exclusively) on nuclear deterrence among the United States, Russia, and China. Not every nuclear power has adopted a posture of assured retaliation. See Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014).

Barry R. Posen, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

See, for example, Joseph Rotblat, Jack Steinberger, and Bhalchandra Udgaonkar, A Nuclear-Weapon-Free World: Desirable? Feasible? (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1993); George Perkovich and James M. Acton, eds., Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009); and George P. Shultz, Sidney D. Drell, and James E. Goodby, eds., Deterrence: Its Past and Future (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2011).

Antony Beevor, The Second World War (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2012).

John Lewis Gaddis concludes: “It seems inescapable that what has really made the difference in inducing this unaccustomed caution has been the workings of the nuclear deterrent.” See John Lewis Gaddis, “The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System,” International Security 10 (4) (1986): 99–142, and references therein. Ward Wilson is skeptical of this conclusion; see Ward Wilson, “The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence,” Nonproliferation Review 15 (3) (2008): 421–439. See also Robert Rauchhaus, “Evaluating the Nuclear Peace Hypothesis: A Quantitative Approach,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53 (2) (2009): 258–277.

Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).

Dietrich Schroeer, Science, Technology, and the Nuclear Arms Race (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), chap. 10.

Confidence in the unwillingness of nuclear powers to go to full-scale war might, however, encourage these same powers to risk lower levels of conflict or violence: the “stability-instability paradox.” See Glenn Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” in Balance of Power , ed. Paul Seabury (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965); and Rauchhaus, “Evaluating the Nuclear Peace Hypothesis.”

Anthony Liberman, “The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb,” International Security 26 (2) (2001): 45–86.

Sadia Tasleem, Pakistan's Nuclear Use Doctrine (Washington, D.C: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/06/30/pakistan-s-nuclear-use-doctrine-pub-63913 .

Scott D. Sagan, “The Korean Missile Crisis: Why Deterrence Is Still the Best Option,” Foreign Affairs 96 (6) (2017): 72–82; and Patrick McEachern, “More than Regime Survival,” North Korea Review 14 (1) (2018): 115–118.

See Matthew Kroenig, “Nuclear Superiority and the Balance of Resolve: Explaining Nuclear Crisis Outcomes,” International Organization 67 (1) (2013): 141–171. For a contrary argument, compare with Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Major General Yang Huon, former deputy commander of China's strategic rocket forces, has written that “China's strategic nuclear weapons were developed because of the belief that hegemonic power will continue to use nuclear threats and nuclear blackmail.” Yang Huon, “China's Strategic Nuclear Weapons,” https://fas.org/nuke/guide/china/doctrine/huan.htm .

See, for example, Lyle J. Goldstein, Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). See also William Perry, “The Risk of ‘Blundering’ into Nuclear War: Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Arms Control Today , December 2017, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2017–12/features/risk-‘blundering‘-into-nuclear-war-lessons-cuban-missile-crisis ; and Graham Allison, “The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: Lessons for U.S. Foreign Policy Today,” Foreign Affairs 91 (4) (2012): 11–16, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/cuba/2012–07–01/cuban-missile-crisis-50 .

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “Deterrence and the New Nuclear States,” project chairs Scott D. Sagan and Vipin Narang, https://www.amacad.org/project/deterrence-and-new-nuclear-states .

Schroeer, Science, Technology, and the Nuclear Arms Race ; and David Hafemeister, Physics of Societal Issues: Calculations on National Security, Environment, and Energy (New York: Springer, 2007), chap. 3.

Glenn H. Snyder, “Deterrence and Defense,” in The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics , 3rd ed., ed. Robert J. Art and Kenneth N. Waltz (New York: University Press of America, 1983), 25–43.

Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1965).

Thomas C. Schelling and Morton H. Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961); and “Arms Control,” Dædalus 89 (4) (Fall 1960)

Jon Brook Wolfsthal, “Why Arms Control?” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

Thomas C. Schelling, “What Went Wrong with Arms Control?” Foreign Affairs 64 (2) (1985): 219–233.

James Cameron, “What History Can Teach,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

See, for example, Dexter Masters and Katherine Way, eds., One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946).

Article VI of the NPT reads, in its entirety, “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” See “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT),” https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/text .

Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).

Harald Müller and Carmen Wunderlich, “Nuclear Disarmament without the Nuclear-Weapon States: The Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

Steven E. Miller, “A Nuclear World Transformed: The Rise of Multilateral Disorder,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

As quoted in ibid.

Brad Roberts, “On Adapting Nuclear Deterrence to Reduce Nuclear Risk,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

Anya Loukianova Fink and Olga Oliker, “Russia's Nuclear Weapons in a Multipolar World: Guarantors of Sovereignty, Great Power Status & More,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

Li Bin, “The Revival of Nuclear Competition in an Altered Geopolitical Context: A Chinese Perspective,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

James M. Acton, “Cyber Warfare & Inadvertent Escalation,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

Christopher F. Chyba, “New Technologies & Strategic Stability,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

Linton F. Brooks, “The End of Arms Control?” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

James Timbie, “A Way Forward,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

Nina Tannenwald, “Life beyond Arms Control: Moving toward a Global Regime of Nuclear Restraint & Responsibility,” Dædalus 149 (2) (Spring 2020).

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” Constitution of the United States of America, Article VI, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#toc-article-vi- .

The U.S. Department of Defense has defined resilience as “The ability of an architecture to support the functions necessary for mission success with higher probability, shorter periods of reduced capability, and across a wider range of scenarios, conditions, and threats, in spite of hostile action or adverse conditions.” A recent study suggests that the resilience of potentially targeted systems can be improved in many ways, including disaggregation, distribution, diversification, protection, proliferation, and deception. See Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense & Global Security, Space Domain Mission Assurance: A Resilience Taxonomy (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense & Global Security, 2015), https://fas.org/man/eprint/resilience.pdf .

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The Environmental Impact of Nuclear War

Even a limited nuclear war would throw enough soot into the atmosphere to block sunlight and lower global temperatures by more than one degree Celsius.

North Korea is getting closer to mastering ballistic missile technology, and the U.S., a longstanding nuclear power, is displeased. Bellicose threats from both sides have revived memories of Cold War fears. Obviously nothing good would happen to anyone directly in the path of a nuclear blast. But what about everyone else?

With all-out nuclear apocalypse unlikely, some researchers (climatologist Alan Robock, Brian Toon, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and four colleagues) turned their attention to the possibility of a smaller-scale nuclear war. Specifically, they examined potential outcomes of a limited war between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan . Their model assumes that urban areas would be targeted and around 100 weapons deployed.

The outlook? Poor. According to their research, independently verified climate models suggest that fires from even a limited war would throw enough soot into the atmosphere to block sunlight and lower global temperatures by more than one degree Celsius (for comparison, the Last Glacial Maximum was only 5 degrees cooler). The temperature drop would not be evenly distributed, with larger drops in continental interiors. These are the most agriculturally rich areas, so disruptions there have the potential to lead to widespread food insecurity (what the researchers call “nuclear famine”). The temperature change would likely reduce and disrupt global precipitation as well. To make matters worse, soot in the upper atmosphere has the potential to globally deplete the planet’s protective ozone layer, further affecting plant growth and human health. All this in addition to the millions killed in the actual war, of course.

Even those far removed from the blast zone could suffer. A global production decline would likely have dire consequences for net food importers, even wealthy industrial nations. Poor nations would fare even worse. The models predict that even powerful China might face widespread famine from a limited, regional war. It is less clear whether the effects would be as severe farther away, for example, in North America.

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Even as the immediate effects die down, studies indicate that ill effects could linger for years. In the 1980s, researchers Herbert D. Grover and Mark A. Harwell examined what the lasting  impacts on ecosystems might be . Data from nuclear test sites has shown that radiation may linger in soil, plants, and in food chains. Children in the Marshall Islands experienced thyroid problems long after nuclear tests. Marine food chains are particularly vulnerable both to radiation and the disruptive effects of atmospheric soot.

So what would happen in a nuclear conflict between the U.S. and North Korea? A lot would depend on the details, but the worst effects would be felt on the Korean Peninsula and in surrounding areas. This area would likely be hit by more weapons then the U.S. mainland, and the models suggest that regional impacts are highest. No model has taken global climate change into account; some cooling may be offset by rising temperatures. On the bright side, ecosystems can recover. But they may not be useable by humans for a very long time.

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83 Nuclear Weapon Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best nuclear weapon topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy nuclear weapon essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on nuclear weapon, ❓ research questions about nuclear weapons.

• Was the US Justified in Dropping the Atomic Bomb? In addition to unleashing catastrophic damage upon the people of Japan, the dropping of the bombs was the beginning of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the U.S.
• Means of Destruction & Atomic Bomb Use Politics This information relates to the slide concerning atomic energy, which also advocates for the participation of the Manhattan Project’s researchers and policy-makers in the decision to atomic bombing during World War II.
• Truman’s Decision the Dropping an Atomic Bomb The operations planned for late 1945 and early 1946 were to be on mainland Japan, and the military fatalities on both sides, as well as civilian deaths, would have very certainly outweighed the losses caused […]
• Can a Nuclear Reactor Explode Like an Atomic Bomb? The fact is that a nuclear reactor is not designed in the same way as an atomic bomb, as such, despite the abundance of material that could cause a nuclear explosion, the means by which […]
• Ethics and Sustainability. Iran’s Nuclear Weapon The opponents of Iran’s nuclear program explain that the country’s nuclear power is a threat for the peace in the world especially with regards to the fact that Iran is a Muslim country, and its […]
• The Decision to Drop the Atom Bomb President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a decision of unprecedented complexity and gravity and, without a doubt, the most difficult decision of his life.
• E. B. Sledge’s Views on Dropping the A-Bomb There is a pointed effort to present to the reader the reality of war in all its starkness and raw horror. However, in the case of a war veteran like E.B.
• The Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima The effects of the bombing were devastating; the explosion had a blast equivalent to approximately 13 kilotons of TNT. Sasaki says that hospitals were teaming with the wounded people, those who managed to survive the […]
• Middle East: Begin Doctrine and Nuclear Weapon Free Zone This happens to be the case despite the fact that many countries and different members of the UN have always been opposed to the validity and applicability of this foreign doctrine or policy.
• Atomic Bomb as a Necessary Evil to End WWII Maddox argued that by releasing the deadly power of the A-bomb on Japanese soil, the Japanese people, and their leaders could visualize the utter senselessness of the war.
• Why the US Decided to Drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan? One of the most notable stains on America’s reputation, as the ‘beacon of democracy,’ has to do with the fact that the US is the only country in the world that had used the Atomic […]
• The Marshallese and Nuclear Weapon Testing The other effects that the Marshallese people suffered as a result of nuclear weapon testing had to do with the high levels of radiations that were released.
• Was the American Use of the Atomic Bomb Against Japan in 1945 the Final Act of WW2 or the Signal That the Cold War Was About to Begin Therefore, to evaluate the reasons that guided the American government in their successful attempt at mass genocide of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one must consider not only the political implications behind the actions […]
• Leo Szilard’s Petition on the Atomic Bomb The group of scientists who created the weapon of mass destruction tried to prevent the usage of atomic bombs with the help of providing the petition to the President.
• Atomic Audit: Nuclear Posture Review Michael notes that the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction, such as nuclear bombs, tends to qualify the infiltration of security threats in the United States and across the world.
• Why the US used the atomic bomb against Japan? There are two main reasons that prompted the United States to use the atomic bomb against Japan; the refusal to surrender by Japan and the need for the US to assert itself.
• The Use of Atomic Bomb in Japan: Causes and Consequences The reason why the United States was compelled to employ the use of a more lethal weapon in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan has been at the heart of many scholarly writings.
• The Tradition of Non Use of Nuclear Weapon It is worth noting that since 1945 the concept of non use of nuclear weapons have occupied the minds of scholars, the general public and have remain the most and single important issues in the […]
• Was it Necessary for the US to Drop the Atomic Bomb? When it comes to discussing whether it was necessary to drop atomic bombs on Japan’s cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, it is important to take into account the specifics of geopolitical […]
• Iran and Nuclear Weapon However, whether world leaders take action or not, Iran is about to get the nukes, and the first target will be Israel followed by American and the rest of the world.
• An Analysis of the United States’ Nuclear Weapon and the Natural Resources Used to Maintain it
• The Rise Of The Nuclear Weapon Into A Political Weapon
• Iran: Nuclear Weapon and United States
• Military And Nuclear Weapon Development During The Cold War
• Nuclear Weapons And Responsibility Of A Nuclear Weapon
• The Trinity Project: Testing The Effects of a Nuclear Weapon
• An Analysis of the First Nuclear Weapon Built in 1945
• The Problem With Nuclear Weapons Essay – Nuclear weapon
• The Soviet Union Tested A Nuclear Weapon
• An Argument in Favor of Nuclear Weapon Abolition
• An Analysis of the Major Problem in Nuclear Weapon in World Today
• WWII and the Lack of Nuclear Weapon Security
• The Controversy Of Indivisible Weapons Composition – Cold War, Nuclear weapon
• The Never Ending Genocide : A Nuclear Weapon, Stirring Debate
• Nuclear Weapon Should Be Destroyed from All Countries
• Atomic Dragon: Chinese Nuclear Weapon Development and the Risk of Nuclear War
• The Nuclear Weapon Of Mass Destruction
• Nuclear Weapon Programmes of India and Pakistan: A Comparative Assessment
• Use of Hydroelectric Dams and the Indian Nuclear Weapon Problem
• Detente: Nuclear Weapon And Cuban Missile Crisis
• The Danger Of Indivisible Weapons – Nuclear weapon, Cool War
• Terrorism: Nuclear Weapon and Pretty High Likelihood
• The United States and Nuclear Weapon
• Nuclear Weapon And Foreign Policy
• The Environmental and Health Issues of Nuclear Weapon in Ex-Soviet Bloc’s Environmental Crisis
• Science: Nuclear Weapon and Supersonic Air Crafts
• Justified Or Unjustified: America Builds The First Nuclear Weapon
• The Controversial Issue of the Justification for the Use of Nuclear Weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to End World War II
• Using Of Nuclear Weapon In Cold War Period
• Nuclear Weapon Funding In US Defense Budget
• Nuclear Weapon: Issues, Threat and Consequence Management
• An Analysis of Advantages and Disadvantage of Nuclear Weapon
• The Repercussion Of The North Korea’s Nuclear Weapon Threat On Globe
• A History of the SALT I and SALT II in Nuclear Weapon Treaties
• Free Hiroshima And Nagasaki: The Development And Usage Of The Nuclear Weapon
• The World ‘s First Nuclear Weapon
• The Effects Of Nuclear Weapon Development On Iran
• What Nuclear Weapons and How It Works?
• Can Nuclear Weapons Destroy the World?
• What Happens if a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off?
• Why Do Countries Have Nuclear Weapons?
• What Food Would Survive a Nuclear War?
• Why North Korea Should Stop It Nuclear Weapons Program?
• How Far Underground Do You Need to Be to Survive a Nuclear War?
• Why Nuclear Weapons Should Be Banned?
• Why Is There Such Focus on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, as Opposed to Other Kinds of Weapons?
• How Long Would It Take for Earth to Be Livable After a Nuclear War?
• What Are the Problems With Nuclear Weapons?
• How Have the Threats Posed by Nuclear Weapons Evolved Over Time?
• How Would the World Be Different if Nuclear Weapons Were Small Enough and Easy Enough to Make to Be Sold on the Black Market?
• How Big Is the Probability of Nuclear Weapons During Terrorism?
• Why Are Nuclear Weapons Important?
• Why Have Some Countries Chosen to Pursue Nuclear Weapons While Others Have Not?
• How Far Do You Need to Be From a Nuclear Explosion?
• Do Nuclear Weapons Keep Peace?
• Can a Nuclear Weapon Be Stopped?
• Do Nuclear Weapons Expire?
• What Do Nuclear Weapons Do to Humans?
• What Does the Case of South Africa Tell Us About What Motivates Countries to Develop or Relinquish Nuclear Weapons?
• Should One Person Have the Authority to Launch Nuclear Weapons?
• Does the World Need Nuclear Weapons at All, Even as a Deterrent?
• Will Most Countries Have Nuclear Weapons One Day?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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The Threat of Global Nuclear War

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What is behind Russia’s nuclear escalation threat?

Brinkmanship in the war in Ukraine might be nearing its natural limits; this could pave the way for diplomacy.

Last week, tensions between Russia and the West appeared to escalate to a dangerous new level when President Vladimir Putin ordered military drills involving tactical nuclear weapons near the Ukrainian border. The Kremlin made clear that the drills were in response to statements by Western leaders about the deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine and the use of Western weapons to strike targets inside Russia.

On May 2, during a surprise visit to Kyiv, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron pledged to keep helping Ukraine “for as long as it takes” and suggested that Ukrainians were free to use British weapons in order to strike Russian territory. This could pertain to the Franco-British Storm Shadow missiles as well as drones the United Kingdom had pledged to supply to Ukraine in their thousands.

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While Western countries have been supplying Ukraine with weapons, they have explicitly made clear that they cannot be used for attacks on Russian soil. For this reason, until now, Ukraine has been using its home-made drones and missiles against civilian and military targets inside Russia.

French President Emmanuel Macron, for his part, has repeatedly suggested that NATO could potentially end up deploying troops to Ukraine. He reiterated it this month in an interview with the Economist published on May 2. The French president refused to provide more details, insisting that the European Union should maintain “strategic ambiguity” and leave the Russians guessing about its real intentions.

But the Kremlin has chosen not to play the guessing game. The announcement of military drills involving tactical nuclear weapons in its Southern Military District which borders Ukraine sends a clear message to the West.

And to make the point clearer, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the British and French ambassadors and released details of the rebukes they received.

The one addressed to France merely denounced Macron’s statements as “provocative” and “destructive”. The statement addressed to the UK was much harsher. It said that by allowing Ukraine to use weapons against targets in Russia, the UK becomes a side in the conflict. The ambassador was warned that should Ukraine proceed with strikes using British weapons, Russia could strike British targets “in Ukraine and beyond”.

This was the first direct threat of an attack against NATO targets outside Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-out invasion in 2022. But it was not the first time Russia threatened the UK in the context of this conflict.

Back in the summer of 2021, the Russian navy fired warning shots when the British warship HMS Defender entered what Russia considers its territorial waters off the Crimean coast. It also threatened to bomb any British vessel that would attempt it again. That episode served as an important prelude to the Russian invasion.

Several factors must have contributed to the current escalatory episode. In the British case, domestic considerations did play a role. The unpopular Conservative government is nearly guaranteed to be routed in the upcoming national elections, which makes foreign affairs one of the last straws it could hold on to.

Being “tough on Russia” has been its trademark since the time when Prime Minister Boris Johnson emerged as the staunchest supporter of Ukraine and opponent of any deals with Russia while trying to salvage his post amid a COVID party scandal at home. Cameron’s visit came on the day of the UK’s local elections; his posturing in Kyiv, however, did not help his party avoid a crushing defeat.

But, of course, there is more to it than domestic politics. Western leaders generally tend to coordinate the statements and actions regarding this conflict. European leaders, especially the British, also tend to adopt the role of a “bad cop” in dealing with Russia so that the Biden administration appears more restrained and reasonable.

There is also the situation on the battlefield, which clearly worries Western capitals. Over the past few months, the Russian army has steadily advanced and more recently has extended the front line by a few dozen kilometres, attacking Ukraine from the north in the Kharkiv region.

The ongoing search for a magical solution that would turn the tables in Ukraine’s favour has so far been fruitless. The crucial US aid package, finally approved by Congress in April, will at best stall the Russian offensive at some point later this year. But the Russian army will likely seize more territory before it happens.

What Ukraine could realistically achieve is to try to make the Russian advance costlier by delivering more painful and more long-distance strikes, using Western missiles. The bridge connecting Russia’s mainland to the occupied Crimea is often named among the most prized targets.

The Ukrainians would also be very keen to target more infrastructure inside Russia proper if only to retaliate for Russia’s incessant strikes that have devastated Ukraine’s energy sector.

Western powers are willing to leave these options on the table in order to restrain Russia and make it think twice before launching large-scale operations with devastating consequences for Ukrainian defences.

Russia, on the other hand, wants to look undeterred and dead set on achieving its goals in Ukraine, no matter the cost. The Russian calculation has always been that at the end of the day, Ukraine will always be far less important for the West than for Moscow.

Against the backdrop of what might turn out to be the most decisive phase of this war, the sides are trying to set the rules of the game and draw their red lines which – they hope – the adversary will, at the very least, hesitate to cross.

But with nuclear weapons being demonstratively rolled out, it is becoming clear that the game of brinkmanship is nearing its natural limit. With most – if not all – trump cards on the table, the contours of a new equilibrium are becoming clearer which makes peace talks more likely.

As Putin made another bellicose speech during the Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9, the recently reprimanded French ambassador was in attendance, breaking the boycott imposed by all the other major Western powers. Behind the curtain of harsh rhetoric and threats, diplomatic efforts to put an end to the war continue.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

16 Pros and Cons of Nuclear Weapons

How does one keep a society safe at a national level?

In the past, city-states would build walls to protect the population. As technologies advanced, nations rushed to develop deadlier weapons than their enemies so that the threat of loss was greater than the reward of taking territory.

Those technologies have now developed into nuclear weapons. The destructive power of a nuclear weapon is just one threat to consider. The radioactive fallout from such a weapon can cause long-term consequences for a population that was close to the explosion. Radiated soil, weapon debris, and radioactive particles falling from the sky are all threats that must be taken seriously, which means a nation with nuclear weapons provides a great threat to a potential invader.

If enough nuclear weapons are launched and allowed to detonate, however, then life as we know it on our planet will cease to exist. Any survivors would be forced to endure unthinkable conditions.

Here are the essential pros and cons of nuclear weapons to consider.

The Pros of Nuclear Weapons

1. It is a deterrent for starting a major conflict. Only a handful of nations are armed with nuclear weapons. The US and Russia have the most weapons, but France, China, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan all have more than 100 weapons. The presence of these weapons and their immense destructive capabilities is a major deterrent for starting a major conflict, like the two world wars that are fought in the first half of the 20th century. Even when both nations have nuclear weapons, their mutually assured destruction is enough to cause diplomacy to rule the day.

2. It reinforces national borders. Our society is becoming ever-more global. Because of the internet, communications improvements, and other technological advances, we can talk with anyone, anywhere, with a simple data connection. New transportation technologies are in development that can provide long-distance transportation at speeds which were unthinkable just a generation ago. By reinforcing national borders, a global society of cooperation can be built through negotiation and diplomacy instead of warfare.

3. It changes the power and status of a nation. Countries with nuclear weapons are treated different on the global stage than countries without those weapons. North Korea may only have a dozen or so nuclear weapons at best estimate, but their demands are taken with an extra level of seriousness and scrutiny because they have developed rudimentary nuclear weapon technology. Because there is a desire to avoid such a devastating conflict, most nations with nuclear weapons can generally get what they want on-demand.

4. They can be fired without a direct threat to personnel. The nuclear weapons dropped in Japan were carried by bombers, staffed with a flight crew. Rockets can be fired remotely from stations and intercontinental ballistic technologies can let someone manage the weapon from thousands of miles away. Nuclear weapons do not require a battlefield presence in the same way a conventional weapon may require.

5. Nuclear weapons can be positioned in a variety of locations. Submarines and naval craft can be outfitted with nuclear weapons so that they can be fired from any ocean-based location on the planet. Storage silos, buried underground, can fire ICBM-outfitted nuclear weapons. They can be fired from remote trucks, put into aircraft missiles, or still be dropped by bombers like they were in the 1940s. The versatility of positioning that a nuclear weapon offers is quite profound.

6. They provide the foundations for other technologies. The technologies that have helped to create nuclear weapons have fostered other technologies that have benefited society in many ways. Nuclear power provides a relatively clean source of energy that is used to power hundreds of thousands of homes around the world. Nuclear reactors have been used to build naval vessels. Many types of nuclear-powered propulsion have been proposed for future spacecraft.

7. It is a highly reliable technology. As a power source, nuclear energy can run uninterrupted for more than a year without disruption, even during difficult weather conditions. The refinement of a nuclear weapon is similar to this advantage. Once installed, the delivery platform reliability of the weapon is strong. Even if the warheads are not modernized, the surety of the weapon and its readiness make it a consistent threat that cannot be ignored.

The Cons of Nuclear Weapons

1. They have added development and maintenance costs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the United States spends an estimated $34.8 billion per year to maintain, operate, and upgrade its nuclear weapons arsenal. Estimates from Nuclear Threat Initiative suggest the figures may be a little lower, but still costing the US up to $25 billion per year. To put that in perspective, an investment into food products at that level would provide up to 75 billion meals for those living in poverty.

2. Detonation has a major ethical impact. Only two cities have ever been directly affected by nuclear weapons in history. Both were in Japan: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just two bombs caused the death of over 129,000 people, with many of them being civilians. Acute effects from the bombs may have contributed to the deaths of over 250,000 additional people in the following decades. Even if military complexes are struck with a nuclear weapon, there will be civilian casualties.

3. There are environmental concerns which must be considered with a detonation. Since 1945, the testing of nuclear weapons has caused more than 2,100 detonations that have happened around the globe. Some have occurred underwater, while others have occurred underground. Every detonation creates radiation that, if someone were exposed to it, could create grave consequences. The threat of multiple simultaneous nuclear detonations could create a prolonged winter that would ravage the planet and potentially cause all life to cease.

4. It provides a major terror threat. The size of a nuclear weapon is relatively small. With terrorism on the rise around the world, the threat of a “dirty bomb” cannot be ignored. A terrorist group with a nuclear weapon could cause immense and immediate damage that could change the path of an entire society. The Patriot Act of 2001 was in response to airplanes being flown into buildings. Imagine would the aftermath of a nuclear explosion could be.

5. Waste from the development of nuclear weapons must be stored somewhere. The challenges of storing nuclear waste are evident at the Hanford Site in Washington State. It was the location of the world’s first plutonium production reactor. Up to 9 nuclear reactors and 5 plutonium processors were operating at once, creating 60,000 weapons for the US nuclear arsenal. Now the radioactive waste is stored in 177 storage tanks. Breaches and leaks are still a very real threat, despite the lack of production that occurs there today.

6. It is a non-renewable resource. Nuclear fuels are plutonium and uranium, which are radioactive metals. This means it is a resource that is non-renewable. Even if the all the nuclear energy from weapons was transitioned into usable energy that wouldn’t produce carbon dioxide, any accident could create a threat to human health that could potentially last for thousands of years. In many ways, nuclear technologies are much like fossil fuels, but with a different threat to the environment.

7. A nuclear weapon can fail because of a degraded delivery system. Even if the nuclear weapon is viable, the delivery system for the weapon may not be viable. Many nuclear weapons are being maintained with delivery systems that have not been modernized. In the US, the current stock of ICBM nuclear weapons is expected to remain in service until 2032. Submarine-based nuclear weapons are expected to remain in service until 2042. Unless delivery systems are upgraded and maintained in the same way as their weapon counterparts, they may not be an effective deterrent.

8. They require a skilled workforce to operate. Although nuclear weapons can be operated from a distance, a skilled workforce is required to make them a useful tool. Scientists, engineers, and operators are critical to the viability of any nuclear weapon. Without a skilled workforce in support, the safety and security of the nuclear weapons becomes doubtful and that doubt can be enough to make the weapons less of a deterrent.

9. Testing must require a detonation at some point. Computer simulations can show the effects of a nuclear weapon and what an expected fallout happens to be. To determine if the technology is viable, however, an actual detonation must take place. Since July 1945, the United States has fired over 1,100 nuclear weapon as part of the testing process. No tests have been conducted, however, since September 1992.

The pros and cons of nuclear weapons show that they can serve as a deterrent and support “positive” technologies. There is just one question that continues to remain unanswered: what will happen if someone finally calls the bluff and attacks a nation with nuclear capabilities? It is the potential answer to that questions which should cause everyone to pause and consider the continued need for these weapons.

Single 'nuclear warning shot' could kill or injure 91 million people in Russia, US and NATO countries

A chilling simulation has revealed that a single ' nuclear warning shot ' could result in over 90 million casualties across Russia, the US, and other NATO countries. The simulation, known as 'Plan A', was developed by researchers at Princeton University's Science and Global Security lab in New Jersey . It was published in September 2019 amidst escalating tensions between Russia, the US, and NATO allies, illustrating a potential conflict scenario between these powers.

The study aimed to show how the deployment of low-yield or "tactical" nuclear weapons could rapidly escalate into a full-blown nuclear war. The project's website states: "This project is motivated by the need to highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences of current US and Russian nuclear war plans."

It further warns: "The risk of nuclear war has increased dramatically in the past two years as the United States and Russia have abandoned long-standing nuclear arms control treaties, started to develop new kinds of nuclear weapons, and expanded the circumstances in which they might use nuclear weapons," reports the Mirror US .

• 'Only two countries' immune to nuclear war that could see '5bn die in 72 hours'
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If you cannot see the map below, click here.

The chilling four-minute audio-visual simulation "is based on independent assessments of current US and Russian force postures, nuclear war plans, and nuclear weapons targets", according to the website. It kicks off with a scenario where conventional warfare has escalated into nuclear conflict after Russia fires a nuclear "warning shot" from a base near Kaliningrad in an attempt to halt NATO's advance.

NATO retaliates with a single tactical nuclear air strike. This act breaches the nuclear threshold, leading to an all-out tactical nuclear war in Europe. In this grim forecast, Russia deploys 300 nuclear warheads through aircraft and short-range missiles targeting NATO bases and troops on the move. In response, NATO launches approximately 180 tactical nuclear weapons at Russia using aircraft.

The simulation predicts a staggering 2.6 million casualties within just three hours. According to the simulation, Russia's tactical nukes would devastate much of Europe, prompting NATO to initiate a strategic nuclear onslaught of 600 warheads. This counterattack would involve warheads launched from US land-based missiles and submarines.

In response to the long-range capabilities of strategic nuclear weapons, Russia reportedly launches missiles from silos, mobile launchers and submarines. It's estimated that this 45-minute period of combat would result in approximately 3.4 million casualties.

The final phase, ominously referred to as 'The Countervalue Plan', is predicted to be the most catastrophic, according to the simulation. Both Russia and NATO target each other's 30 most populated cities and economic centers, to cripple the other side's recovery. Depending on the size of the city, between 5-10 warheads are used.

This phase alone is estimated to result in around 85.3 million casualties. The total casualty count from the entire battle, which lasts less than five hours, would be 34.1 million deaths and 57.4 million injuries, or a combined 91.3 million casualties overall. However, the simulation warns that the radioactive fallout from the nuclear disaster would result in even more deaths and injuries.

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The danger of nuclear escalation: What would be the impact of dropping atom bombs on Germany?

Johannes stern @jsternwsws 10 may 2024.

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“Never before has the danger of a third world war been as great as it is today. Nuclear war is being normalised,” runs the  European election TV spot  of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP), which was broadcast on public television for the first time on Tuesday. 

Since the broadcast of the election spot, there have been increasing signs that NATO’s war against Russia is entering a new stage that could actually lead to the use of nuclear weapons. Earlier this week, the  World Socialist Web Site  published a Perspective  on how leading NATO representatives—including British Foreign Secretary David Cameron and French President Emmanuel Macron—are threatening direct missile attacks on Russia and the deployment of ground troops in Ukraine. 

Russia is reacting to the increasingly direct NATO war preparations with the threat of counterattacks. Moscow has also announced military exercises in which the use of tactical nuclear weapons is to be simulated. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the planned exercises a reaction to an “unprecedented level of escalation of tensions initiated by the French President and the British Foreign Secretary,” including “the intention to send armed contingents to Ukraine, i.e., to actually place NATO soldiers in front of Russian troops.” 

With the NATO-armed troops in Ukraine having their backs to the wall, and the leading nuclear powers within NATO not ruling out the use of nuclear weapons in the event of war, Moscow even has to reckon with a possible pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russian targets. Despite the acute danger of a nuclear escalation, the imperialist powers continue to intensify their war offensive.

German imperialism, which already waged a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union during the Second World War, causing almost 30 million deaths, is playing a particularly aggressive role. On May 8, the German government used the anniversary of the country’s liberation from fascism by the Red Army to launch aggressive war threats against Russia. 

At a press conference with Finnish President Alexander Stubb in Berlin, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democrats, SPD) welcomed the accession of the country, which borders directly on Russia, to NATO and declared, “All for one, one for all. What was true for the Musketeers also applies to the NATO states.” They were “committed to each other,” would “protect and support each other” and would “defend every square centimetre of the Alliance’s territory.” To this end, they wanted to “further strengthen the eastern flank of NATO in particular.” 

Scholz’s affirmation of NATO’s “duty to assist” has potentially catastrophic consequences. Article 5 of the NATO treaty states that “an armed attack against one or more” parties “shall be considered as an attack against them all” and the military alliance “shall render assistance, including the use of armed force.” In other words, if the war in Ukraine spreads to a NATO country, Scholz commits Germany, with the entire alliance, to go to war against the nuclear power Russia. 

In fact, the ruling class is preparing to do just that. At the  end of January , Defence Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD), who is currently travelling to the US and Canada, declared that Germany must prepare for a direct war with Russia. He cited “the next three to five years” as a period that must be “used intensively” to “arm ourselves” and make Germany “fit for war” again.

Since then, preparations for war are being driven forward even more aggressively. The Osnabrück Decree  created the structural conditions for a “war-ready” army. At the same time, massive rearmament spending and the comprehensive militarisation of society is being accelerated. Pupils are taught “ war lessons ” in schools, the recent decision to introduce a “Veterans’ Day” to commemorate the infamous hero-worship of the Nazis and the planned reintroduction of  compulsory military service  are just a few examples. 

At the press conference with Stubb, Scholz boasted that he had increased defence spending to over 2 percent of gross domestic product. In addition, the coalition government had “decided to permanently station a brigade in Lithuania” and “other extensive forces are on high alert.” Germany was “the hub in the heart of Europe so that allied forces can be deployed to the operational locations.” 

The “Steadfast Defender” exercise is currently reaching its climax. With a total of around 90,000 soldiers—including over 12,000 from Germany—and hundreds of tanks and aircraft, these are the largest NATO manoeuvres since the end of the Cold War. The exercise has the character of a veritable mobilisation for war against Russia. The official Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) website quotes Dirk Hamann, the colonel jointly responsible for the exercise, as saying they were rehearsing for “an emergency” and sending “a signal to the Russian side.” Earlier this week, Scholz himself visited German soldiers in the Baltic and attended part of the military exercise on a tank.  

Speaking at this year’s  International May Day rally , David North, chairman of the international editorial board of the  World Socialist Web Site , said it was “high time” for NATO leaders to

tell the people that their pursuit of ‘victory in Ukraine’ means risking nuclear war and describe in necessary detail what will happen to their countries and the world if the confrontation with Russia goes nuclear.

Scholz and the ruling class know exactly what consequences nuclear escalation would have for Germany in particular. As the much-vaunted “hub” of the NATO deployment against Russia, it would be one of the first targets and could be comprehensively destroyed in a nuclear war in the shortest possible time—with tens of millions of deaths.  

A  Greenpeace study  titled “Effects of a nuclear bomb on Germany,” published in 2019, provides an impression of the extent of the destruction. The report discusses the impact of a nuclear bomb on three potential targets—the government district in Berlin, Germany’s financial centre in Frankfurt and Büchel Air Base, where the US nuclear weapons stationed in Germany are stored.  

The first scenario describes the detonation of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb on the lawn in front of the Reichstag (parliament) building. The study states: “Everything within a radius of 260 metres (0.22 km²) of the fireball is vaporised ... The parliament is located in this area.” The radius of the area with “severe explosion damage” would be 590 metres. In this area, “concrete buildings would be severely damaged or destroyed” and “the number of fatalities” would be close to “100 percent.”

It goes on to say: “Up to a distance of 1.41 kilometres from the explosion site and over a total area of 6.22 km²... people outdoors would receive a radiation dose of at least 5 Sv [sievert] due to immediate radiation. This radiation dose is fatal for most people, especially due to the additional injuries caused by the pressure and heat waves. People would die within a month.” 

It would be particularly catastrophic since Charité, a large hospital, is located in this area and therefore medical staff would no longer available. But Humboldt University, the Tiergarten and the government district are also “within this radius. If the average population were taken as a basis, more than 25,000 people would be affected.” In total, the resulting pressure and heat waves alone would cause 26,760 deaths and 73,550 injuries. In addition, there would be around 120,000 deaths from radiation fallout and over 50,000 subsequent deaths from cancer. 

Even more catastrophic are the effects described in the study’s second scenario, the dropping of a larger 550-kiloton nuclear bomb on Frankfurt am Main. Here, around 500,000 deaths would be expected as a direct result of the attack and around 165,000 subsequent fatalities from cancer. For the third scenario, the detonation of a 170-kiloton nuclear weapon in Büchel, the study calculates 130,000 immediate deaths and 80,000 subsequent deaths from cancer. 

When leading politicians and the media provocatively declare that we should not be deterred by the Russian nuclear arsenal and such scenarios, it has an element of madness. But the madness of war, which goes hand in hand with massive attacks on the social and democratic rights of the working class, has an objective basis. “Biden, Sunak, Macron and Scholz are not insane people,” North said, “But they are the leaders of a capitalist system riven by crises for which they cannot find progressive, socially reasonable, let alone humane solutions.”

The working class must oppose the imperialist logic of mass extermination, which is already culminating in a new genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, with a revolutionary socialist programme. The SGP’s  election appeal  for the European elections states:

The only legitimate conclusion that can be drawn from Nazi Germany’s war of extermination and the Holocaust, the worst crimes in human history, is this: The working class must never again permit war and fascism, and must eliminate once and for all the root of this horror, capitalism.

• The return of fascism and war in Germany and the fight for socialism 10 May 2024
• The return of German militarism and the lessons of World War II 1 May 2023
• German defence minister signs decree for war against Russia 3 May 2024