Nuclear War versus Consequences of Global Warming

Cli­mate Change Trauma ver­sus Nuclear War Trama

I have spent my life­time face to face with some of the most bru­tal and inhu­mane acts ever com­mit­ted, but noth­ing has been as trau­ma­tiz­ing for me as try­ing to get action to tackle the cli­mate cri­sis … I believe that I and many other peo­ple around the world are suf­fer­ing from “Cli­mate Trauma.” It’s my own term. I am not a men­tal health pro­fes­sional, but I can iden­tify plain as day the symp­toms I rec­og­nize in myself and in my col­leagues trau­ma­tized by our work to tackle cli­mate change. (Gillian Cald­well, Com­ing out of the closet: My cli­mate trauma).

Any­one still hold­ing onto the idea that there is no global warm­ing ought to hang it up. All data sets—satellite, sur­face, and balloon—have been point­ing to ris­ing global tem­per­a­tures. How­ever, I can’t help but won­der if the “fear” is way WAY out of pro­por­tion to the real dan­gers of global warm­ing. The con­se­quences of global warm­ing are real, it deserves close study and scrutiny, and a cer­tain amount of worry and anx­i­ety (while coun­ter­pro­duc­tive) is nor­mal — but trauma?!

Is Global Warm­ing “the end of the world unless we stop it cold now”? Let’s say the worst pro­jec­tions Global Warm­ing mod­els are cor­rect (and a recent global warm­ing study found that CO2 emis­sions from fossil-fuel burn­ing and indus­trial processes have been accel­er­at­ing at a global scale, with their growth rate increas­ing from 1.1% y?1 for 1990–1999 to >3% y?1 for 2000–2004 — but blame China). Is it cause for label­ing Global Warm­ing the most sig­nif­i­cant threat human kind as ever faced? Would it really be the end of the known world? How does the chal­lenge and con­se­quence of global warm­ing stack up against past and cur­rent threats?

The other obvi­ous threat that should come to mind is Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War (acci­den­tal or oth­er­wise). You would think that global warm­ing would, in most people’s mind, pale in com­par­i­son to the con­se­quences of nuclear war, but – you would be wrong:

Check out Global Warm­ing Impact Like ‘Nuclear War’ by Jeremy Lovell:

So which is more likely to cause the end of the world,  global warm­ing or acci­den­tal nuclear war. I think the answer is obvi­ous: acci­den­tal nuclear war is the sin­gle biggest every­day real threat we face. Read on and you can come to your own conclusions:

ABC a cou­ple of years pro­duced a doc­u­men­tary called “Last Days on Earth,” about the var­i­ous ways human kind, as a whole, could bite the big one. Most were fairly far fetched, e.g., (Will super-intelligent machines some­day make their own deci­sions and destroy us?). A few though were much more plau­si­ble events: a mas­sive aster­oid hit, nuclear war, and – global warming.

Con­se­quences of Global Warm­ing | End of the World

Watch the episode on the Con­se­quences of Global Warm­ing first:

See part two on the Con­se­quences of Global Warming:

Sum­mary:

• The episode starts out by say­ing there’s no debate that the cli­mate, over­all, has been get­ting warmer. A sim­ple obser­va­tion that’s been repli­cated over and over again.
• It then moves on to talk about how “spe­cial inter­est” has sown doubt about the global warm­ing and why.
• They then talk about the well-known cor­re­la­tion between CO2 and warm­ing (and it’s more than just a cor­re­la­tion – there’s good evi­dence that C02 causes warming).
• They talk about the very hot sum­mers we have had lately, and how tough it has been on the polar bars and penguins.
• At this point, we hear pre­dic­tions of up to half the ani­mals and plants going extinct if noth­ing is done.
• Then we hear that if Greenland’s ice sheet melts, that’s 20 feet of sea level rise (over the next 200 years, maybe sooner). If Antarc­tica melts, that’s another 20 feet.
• Near the end, it’s starts to get apoc­a­lyp­tic, i.e., “global warm­ing will wipe out civ­i­liza­tion as a we know it.” This comes mostly from pre­dic­tions of 20 to 40 foot sea raise. This will lead to the 4 horse­men of the apoc­a­lypse, killing billions.
• Then it moves onto what we can do to stop the com­ing apoc­a­lypse, and most of this has to do with C02 reduction.

What’s inter­est­ing at this point is very lit­tle (in fact, no) evi­dence for this apoc­a­lyp­tic end of the world. All nat­ural ice on the planet would have to melt, human kind would have to be help­less to adapt over the course of one or two cen­turies to rais­ing sea levels.

I’ll just leave it at this: beyond the fact of C02 warm­ing the planet, the uncer­tainly about the exact con­se­quences of global warm­ing starts going way up, and one of the most dire con­se­quences of global warm­ing have been called into ques­tion, and there­fore debate over how bad is global warm­ing, how much worse will it get, how long will it take, and what we should do is in full sway.

Global warm­ing is clearly a prob­lem, and a poten­tially seri­ous one, but if we can’t stop it cold (and it seems unlikely that we can’t), is it the worst prob­lem we cur­rently face?

Con­se­quences of Nuclear War | End of the World

Now watch Last Days, Nuclear War:

First they make the point that while the cold war is over, the threat is not.

Sec­ond, C02, even the mass qual­i­ties we’re pro­duc­ing today, has always been here, there’s just more of it in the air. Split­ting the atom, on the other hand, was an unprece­dented leap for­ward in human kind’s under­stand­ing, power, and abil­ity to destroy. Before Trin­ity, the power peo­ple wit­ness in the New Mex­ico desert only existed in the heart of a star. Now we now can lit­er­ally repli­cate a piece of the sun and dupli­cate it on earth.

By the 1960’s the world arse­nal of nuclear weapons num­bered close to 40,000. And they were not “sim­ple” atomic weapons, like those used on Japan, but ther­monu­clear weapons, each 100s to a 1000 times more pow­er­ful, and there were over 40,000 such weapons on the planet. This prompted Kennedy to say in 1961:

Today, every inhab­i­tant of this planet must con­tem­plate the day when this planet may no longer be hab­it­able. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damo­cles, hang­ing by the slen­der­est of threads, capa­ble of being cut at any moment by acci­dent or mis­cal­cu­la­tion or by mad­ness. The weapons of war must be abol­ished before they abol­ish us.

He was not exag­ger­at­ing or kidding.

While most of the fears today are about Iran and North Korea, Ken­nette Benedit, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Bul­letin of Atomic Sci­en­tists says “these are the not the coun­tries, the sys­tems, the weapons that are the real threat.” The real “end of the world” threat comes from the fact that nei­ther the U.S. or Rus­sia have stood down. Their mas­sive strate­gic nuclear world-wide forces are still oper­a­tional, on alert, and in their cold war state of readiness.

Although the Cold War is said to have ended in 1991, the US and Rus­sia each still oper­ate under the assump­tion that the other could autho­rize a nuclear attack against them. The fail­ure to end their Cold War nuclear con­fronta­tion causes both nations to main­tain a total of about 2,600 strate­gic nuclear war­heads on high-alert sta­tus, which can be launched in only a few min­utes, and whose pri­mary mis­sions remain the destruc­tion of the oppos­ing side’s nuclear forces, indus­trial infra­struc­ture, and political/military lead­er­ship.” (SGR Newslet­ter: High-alert nuclear weapons: the for­got­ten dan­ger).

The most likely way a war could start would be acci­den­tal. If there was an acci­den­tal launch by Rus­sia, it would be almost imme­di­ately detected, and the “drill” for Obama would be to make a deci­sion w/in 15 min­utes. That’s how long he would have before a det­o­na­tion on U.S. soil. The stan­dard exer­cises call for a pro­por­tional retal­ia­tory strike. At that point, it could eas­ily escalate.

The Sci­en­tists for Global Respon­si­bil­ity Newslet­ter continues:

Dur­ing the Cold War, the US-Soviet nuclear stand­off was a polit­i­cal issue famil­iar to most Amer­i­cans. How­ever, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a low­er­ing of ten­sions between the US and Rus­sia (which obvi­ously inher­ited Soviet weaponry) led to a rather remark­able Amer­i­can com­pla­cency about the dan­ger posed by the con­tin­ued exis­tence of US and Russ­ian nuclear arsenals.

In 1994, this false sense of secu­rity was fos­tered by a largely sym­bolic agree­ment between the US and Rus­sia to remove the launch coor­di­nates from, or ‘de-target’, their nuclear mis­siles. Because it takes only about 10 sec­onds to re-install tar­get coor­di­nates dur­ing the launch process, the agree­ment cre­ated no mean­ing­ful change in the abil­ity to launch strate­gic nuclear forces in a rapid fashion.

On Jan­u­ary 24, 1995, Pres­i­dent Clin­ton told Con­gress that “not a sin­gle Russ­ian mis­sile is pointed at the chil­dren of Amer­ica”. Only hours later, a Nor­we­gian weather rocket (Black Brant XII) was mis­tak­enly iden­ti­fied by the Russ­ian early warn­ing sys­tem to be a hos­tile incom­ing bal­lis­tic missile.

The warn­ing appar­ently was passed up the entire Russ­ian chain of com­mand and report­edly resulted in the open­ing of the ‘nuclear brief­cases’ car­ried by the Russ­ian Pres­i­dent, Defense Min­is­ter and the Chief of the Gen­eral Staff. These brief­cases are designed to facil­i­tate the rapid trans­mis­sion of the ‘per­mis­sion order’ to launch Russ­ian nuclear forces. Accord­ing to numer­ous pub­lished accounts, the false warn­ing caused the Pres­i­dent to open his brief­case for the first time. The but­tons in the suit­case prob­a­bly gave him a range of nuclear strike options against all strate­gic tar­gets, includ­ing the US and West­ern Europe.

The elec­tronic dis­play on the nuclear brief­case indi­cated a pos­si­ble US or NATO nuclear mis­sile launched from Nor­way or the Nor­we­gian Sea. The Pres­i­dent tracked the mis­sile on the screen for three to seven min­utes before it became clear that the mis­sile was not headed towards Rus­sia. Russ­ian nuclear forces were then ordered to return to watch duty. Under Launch-on-Warning pro­to­col, he was within a few min­utes of a launch decision.

Had this inci­dent occurred dur­ing a period of increased ten­sions between the US and Rus­sia, one won­ders if the out­come would have been the same. Regard­less, the 1995 Russ­ian false warn­ing of a US/NATO nuclear attack clearly illus­trates the poten­tial dan­ger of an acci­den­tal nuclear war made pos­si­ble by the exis­tence of hun­dreds of high-alert ICBMs.

The exist­ing U.S. & Rus­sia nuclear arse­nal on alert is enough to oblit­er­ate both the U.S. and Rus­sia and end civ­i­liza­tion in the world as we know it. And it wouldn’t take 100, 200 years — it would take about 12 hours.

End Civ­i­liza­tion? How?

Tech­ni­cally, the total yield of these weapon is equal to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs. That one bomb killed 100,000 peo­ple, instantly. 80,000 times 100,000 peo­ple = 8 bil­lion peo­ple. There’s only 6 bil­lion peo­ple on the planet.

Sec­ond – talk about cli­mate change! – an exchange of only 20 mis­siles would change the cli­mate in ways that would go way beyond the worst pro­jec­tions of global warm­ing. Just 20 mis­siles, about a 100 mega­ton exchange, would be enough to set up a Nuclear Win­ter because of the det­o­na­tions and the result­ing firestorms in the cities they hit.

Most peo­ple have no idea that the det­o­na­tion of a sin­gle aver­age strate­gic nuclear weapon will ignite a gigan­tic firestorm over a total area of 105 to 170 square kilo­me­ters. The bomb­ing over Dres­den ignited a firestorm over an area of about 35 square kilo­me­ters. (SGR Newslet­ter: High-alert nuclear weapons: the for­got­ten dan­ger).

Let’s repeat that: A sin­gle aver­age strate­gic nuclear weapon would ignite a nuclear firestorm over an area 4 to 5 times LARGER than Dres­den. One strate­gic nuclear weapon. One.

To see what unleash­ing all these weapons would do, see the After effects of Nuclear War:

In addi­tion to sev­eral hun­dred mil­lion imme­di­ately killed, sur­face temps would fall to sub-freezing lev­els a few days after.

And it wouldn’t take an acci­den­tal exchange of 20 or so mis­siles between the U.S. and Rus­sia (assum­ing it would stop there), even a regional nuclear war between India and Pak­istan would be enough to dras­ti­cally change the cli­mate — not in 100 to 200 years, but in about a day.

A team of sci­en­tists at Rut­gers, The State Uni­ver­sity of New Jer­sey; the Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado at Boul­der (CU-Boulder); and UCLA con­ducted the rig­or­ous sci­en­tific stud­ies on the effects of a “small” regional nuclear war, and concluded:

We exam­ined the cli­matic effects of the smoke pro­duced in a regional con­flict in the sub­trop­ics between two oppos­ing nations, each using 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons to attack the other’s most pop­u­lated urban areas,” Robock said. The researchers car­ried out their sim­u­la­tions using a mod­ern cli­mate model cou­pled with esti­mates of smoke emis­sions pro­vided by Toon and his col­leagues, which amounted to as much as five mil­lion met­ric tons of “soot” particles.

“A cool­ing of sev­eral degrees would occur over large areas of North Amer­ica and Eura­sia, includ­ing most of the grain-growing regions,” Robock said. “As in the case with ear­lier nuclear win­ter cal­cu­la­tions, large cli­matic effects would occur in regions far removed from the tar­get areas or the coun­tries involved in the conflict.”

“With the exchange of 100 15-kiloton weapons as posed in this sce­nario, the esti­mated quan­ti­ties of smoke gen­er­ated could lead to global cli­mate anom­alies exceed­ing any changes expe­ri­enced in recorded his­tory,” Robock said. “And that’s just 0.03 per­cent of the total explo­sive power of the cur­rent world nuclear arse­nal.” (Regional Nuclear War Could Dev­as­tate Global Cli­mate).

So, is global warm­ing warm­ing a prob­lem that deserves the atten­tion of sci­en­tists and pub­lic pol­icy analy­sis? Yes.

Can global warm­ing warm­ing real­is­ti­cally end the world over the course of 1, 2 or 3 cen­turies? Unlikely, even if we can’t pre­vent the worst of it.

Is global warm­ing the biggest threat to human kind today? The answer is a laugh­able resound­ing NO! The end of the world is only a but­ton push away. Me? I’ll take a 20 to 40 foot sea rise over 100–200 years then a 3000–5000 mega­ton exchange over the course of 12 hours.

Post­script

If any­one wants to argue that global nuclear war wouldn’t be the end of the world, you put your­self in the shoes of those hawks who used to argue that nuclear war was both winnable and survivable.

In 1984, a ter­ri­fy­ing film called Threads was released as a dra­matic answer to these “hawks.”

Also, there’s ter­rific doc­u­men­tary, “1983, The Brink of Apoc­a­lypse” about the year the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. came the clos­est they ever had to an acci­den­tal ther­monu­clear war:

It’s very good, and at times, riv­et­ing. And the 80’s music they use as a sound­track is inspired.

Finally, use this nuclear weapons yield chart and this inter­ac­tive tool to destroy NYC with dif­fer­ent size nuclear weapons.  Fun for the whole Family!

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Tagged as: Climate Change, Global Warming, Nuclear War