Over 2 billion would die in an India-Pakistan nuclear conflict. 5 billion in a US-Russia one, study finds
- The researchers mostly considered a hypothetical nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan as they believed such a conflict was the most likely
- Tens of millions of immediate fatalities in the war zone would be followed by hundreds of millions of starvation deaths around the globe, they found
A nuclear conflict involving less than 3 per cent of the world’s stockpiles could kill one-third of the world’s population within two years, according to a new international study led by scientists at Rutgers University. A larger nuclear conflict between Russia and the US could kill three-fourths of the world’s population in the same time frame, according to the research published on Monday in Nature Food.
“It’s really a cautionary tale that any use of nuclear weapons could be a catastrophe for the world,” said climate scientist and study author Alan Robock, a distinguished professor in Rutgers’ Department of Environmental Sciences.
03:12
‘A nuclear war cannot be won': UN talks non-proliferation as North Korean test looms
The findings come at a time when – 30 years after the end of the Cold War – the threat of a nuclear holocaust may be greater now than it ever was.
Although Robock and others have previously projected that nuclear war would result in tremendous disruption to the climate and food supplies, the recent study marks the first time that researchers have calculated the potential extent of the famine that would result and how many people would die.
The detonation of even a small fraction of the world’s nuclear weapons would spark massive firestorms that would rapidly inject sun-blocking soot into the atmosphere, touching off a sudden cooling of the climate, the researchers theorised.