Germany: A nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan that uses less than one per cent of the world's nuclear arsenal would have severe consequences and long-lasting impact on the global food security that will be unmatched in modern history, a research article said.
India and Pakistan are contributing to a de facto Asian arms race and the political instability in South Asia increasingly imposes a global threat.
Territorial disputes over the Kashmir region between India and Pakistan provide an increasingly high level of instability and escalators retaliation could result in the use of nuclear weapons. This study highlights the indirect food system consequences of a possible, limited nuclear war based on a previously published India-Pakistan scenario, assuming 5 Tg of soot injection derived from a direct relationship between population density and target-specific fuel load.
According to a recent study, a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. The research focuses on how sudden cooling and perturbations of precipitation and solar radiation could disrupt food production for about a decade.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Even a limited nuclear war could have dangerous effects far beyond the region that is fatally hit. It would result in global cooling that substantially reduces agricultural production in the world's main breadbasket regions, from the US to Europe, Russia and China.
The particular effect on food security worldwide including trade responses has now for the first time been revealed by an international team of scientists in a study based on advanced computer simulations. The sudden temperature reduction would lead to a food system shock unprecedented in documented history. It would not undo long-term climate change from fossil fuels use, though - after about a decade of cooling, global warming would surge again.
"Now we have the technological capabilities to do a sophisticated revision of earlier Cold War back-of-the-envelope calculations, but in a modern political context," Jagermeyr said. "My background is in climate change impact on global food systems. While we usually study global warming, the question of how sudden cooling would affect crop production and food systems is unresolved and therefore scientifically extremely interesting," said the main author at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of Chicago; lead author of the study.
"We find severe losses in agricultural production, but importantly we also evaluate trade repercussions affecting local food availability. It turns out that major breadbasket regions would cut exports leaving countries worldwide short of supplies. A regional crisis would become global because we all depend on the same climate system," Jonas added.
"Because of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history," it added.
Soot from fires ignited by the bombs would partially block sunlight. Fires ignited by the bombs would send large amounts of soot high up into the atmosphere where winds would rapidly distribute it around the globe.
These particles would partially block sunlight from reaching the earth's surface causing sudden cooling and changing weather patterns. For the injection of 5 million tons of smoke, climate models calculated global mean temperature drops of about 1.8 Celsius degrees (3.2 Fahrenheit degrees) and precipitation declines of 8 per cent for at least five years - pushing Earth into a state substantially colder and drier. To put this into context, so far greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have warmed our planet by roughly 1 degree Celsius. Before this study, however, there has been very little understanding of how global agricultural systems would respond to cooling.
In the first year after the war, domestic reserves and global trade could largely buffer the food production loss, the researchers now show. By year four, grain stocks would virtually be depleted and the international trade systems would come to a halt. Continuing production losses, therefore, propagate from the breadbasket regions in the Northern Hemisphere to the often poorer populations of the Global South. Maize and wheat availability would shrink by at least 20 per cent in more than 70 countries with about 1.3 billion people.
Evaluating impacts of such a war on the global food system, the study said harmonised state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice and soybean falls by about 13 per cent, 11 per cent, 3 per cent and 17 per cent over five years.
Total single-year losses of 12 per cent quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions.
"This is a surprisingly sharp response given the much larger conflict scenarios imaginable when it comes to nuclear war. More people could die outside the target areas due to famine," said Jagermeyr.
"As horrible as the direct effects of nuclear weapons would be, more people could die outside the target areas due to famine, simply because of indirect climatic effects. Nuclear proliferation continues and there is a de facto nuclear arms race in South Asia. Investigating the global impacts of a nuclear war is, therefore - unfortunately - not at all a Cold War issue," said co-author Alan Robock at Rutgers University. "
The authors exclude India and Pakistan from their analyses, to avoid arbitrary assumptions when mixing up the direct and indirect effects of war. Under the assumption that food production in the two countries would drop essentially to zero, indirect global food shortages would be even worse. While the two countries' nuclear arsenals continue to grow both in number and weapon size, this study used the lower end of potential soot emission estimates.
"We ran an ensemble of six leading AgMIP global crop models for this study, and they all agree to a great deal on the signal. This shows how robust the simulations are," said co-author Cynthia Rosenzweig at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. She's a veteran pioneer of breakthrough agricultural model intercomparisons (AgMIP) which today are one important part of the larger Impacts Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) coordinated by the Potsdam Institute.
"Comparing different computer simulation models reduces uncertainties. Today, we can say with confidence that such a regional nuclear war would have adverse consequences for global food security for about a decade, unmatched in modern history."
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(With inputs from ANI)
