A study published this Monday (15) in the scientific journal Nature Food shows that a possible nuclear war between the United States and Russia would provoke a global famine that could kill more than 5 billion people on the planet.
Climate experts at Rutgers University in the US analyzed how smoke released into the atmosphere from the fires of a nuclear conflict would affect global agricultural production.
Researcher Lili Xia and her group examined six possible scenarios: Five of them relate to nuclear wars between India and Pakistan; while the sixth is a major conflict between Russia and the United States.
The scientists made calculations “based on the size of each country’s nuclear arsenal,” the educational institution said in a statement.
By feeding estimates into a climate model, the experts calculated the impacts that growing corn, rice, wheat and soybeans would have, as well as the changes that rangelands and fisheries would experience.
In the least damaging scenario of a war between India and Pakistan, average global calorie production would fall by 7% in the five years following the conflict. “In the worst case, however, this production would drop by about 90 percent over a period of three to four years.
The crop decline would be particularly severe in mid and highlatitude regions such as the United States and Russia, the top food exporters, affecting importing countries in Africa and the Middle East.
More than 75% of the planet would face starvation in a worstcase scenario, according to the work led by Xia, which speculates on the possibility that agricultural production now devoted to animals could, in the first instance, serve to support the human population to nourish.
The researcher announced that she hopes to further analyze the effects of nuclear war on the food chain in future work.
“The ozone layer would be destroyed by the heat in the stratosphere and more ultraviolet radiation would be generated at the surface. We need to understand the impact of this scenario on food production,” said the scientist.