Opinion: How fear of nuclear winter has helped save the world, so far

Abstract

Abstract. The direct effects of nuclear war would be horrific, with blasts, fires, and radiation killing and injuring many people. But in 1983, United States and Soviet Union scientists showed that a nuclear war could also produce a nuclear winter, with catastrophic consequences for global food supplies for people far removed from the conflict. Smoke from fires ignited by nuclear weapons exploded on cities and industrial targets would block out sunlight, causing dark, cold, and dry surface conditions, producing a nuclear winter, with surface temperatures below freezing even in summer for years. Nuclear winter theory helped to end the nuclear arms race in the 1980s and helped to produce the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017, for which the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Because awareness of nuclear winter is now widespread, nuclear nations have so far not used nuclear weapons. But the mere existence of nuclear weapons means that they can be used, by unstable leaders, accidently from technical malfunctions, such as in computers and sensors, due to human error, or by terrorists. Because they cannot be used without the danger of escalation (resulting in a global humanitarian catastrophe), because of recent threats to use them by Russia, and because nuclear deterrence doctrines of all nuclear-armed states are based on the capability and readiness to use nuclear weapons, it is even more urgent for scientists to study these issues, to broadly communicate their results, and to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons.