What do the experts worry about? How many people would all-out nuclear war kill? Recommended References. Institute for Science and International Security : Analyzes and communicates to the public on the science and policy behind nuclear nonproliferation and related international security issues, with emphasis on tracking nuclear weapons programs worldwide.
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies C-PET : A wide network of knowledgeable professionals who identify, clarify, and prioritize the big questions raised in a future perspective to cultivate a context within which solutions can be developed. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation : National non-partisan, non-profit dedicated to enhancing peace and security through expert policy analysis and thought-provoking research.
Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy : Develops and supports multilateral disarmament and security agreements Abolition : An international global network of organizations and individuals working for a global treaty to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Cambridge Center for Existential Risk : Multidisciplinary research center within the University of Cambridge to study and mitigate existential risks Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament : Advocacy group that seeks nuclear disarmament in Britain and the establishment of an international treaty banning all nuclear weapons Federation of American Scientists : Think tank focused on providing analysis and policy recommendations on national and international security issues related to applied science and technology Future of Humanity Institute : Oxford-based research organization analyzing big-picture questions for human civilization in an attempt to help shape the future of humanity Global Catastrophic Risk Institute : Think tank leading research, education, and professional networking on the full breadth of major global catastrophic risks Global Zero : International movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Powered by a visionary group of international leaders and experts who support our bold, step-by-step plan to eliminate all nuclear weapons by , the relentless creativity, energy and optimism of young people and half a million citizens worldwide, Global Zero is challenging the 20th century idea of basing national security on the threat of mass destruction.
Human Survival Project : Seeks to protect humanity from nuclear holocaust and its societal and environmental aftermath; a joint initiative of the University of Sydney Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the and People for Nuclear Disarmament The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons ICAN : Coalition of non-governmental organizations in one hundred countries promoting adherence to and implementation of the United Nations nuclear weapon ban treaty.
James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies : Middlebury College-based organization focused on reducing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and training future nonproliferation experts Leverage Research : A team of researchers, inventors, educators, and activists focused on improving the world.
Their research includes reducing catastrophic risk from totalitarianism and artificial general intelligence Lifeboat Foundation : A non-profit organization encouraging scientific advancement while reducing existential risk and other possibly harmful outcomes from emerging technologies, including nanotechnology, robotics, AI, and genetic engineering Mayors for Peace : Close cooperation among the cities that strives to raise international public awareness regarding the need to abolish nuclear weapons.
It contributes to the realization of genuine and lasting world peace by working to eliminate starvation and poverty, assist refugees fleeing local conflict, support human rights, protect the environment, and solve the other problems that threaten peaceful coexistence within the human family. National Security Archive : Library of declassified U. Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament PNND : Non-partisan forum for parliamentarians nationally and internationally to share resources and information, develop cooperative strategies and engage in nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament issues, initiatives and arenas.
People for Nuclear Disarmament : A citizens?? PSR advocates on the issues you care about by addressing the dangers that threaten communities, such as nuclear weapons. Ploughshares Fund : Supports analysis and advocacy towards improving global security and peace via reductions in nuclear arsenals Program on Science and Global Security : Research group based at Princeton University studying nuclear weapons, biosecurity, and related issues Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs : Bring together scientists, academics, and public policy specialists to discuss the latest scientific insight to help reduce threats facing global society arising from science and technology, such as nuclear weapons and other WMDs Reaching Critical Will : A Women??
Department of Energy charged with managing and securing U. World Institute for Nuclear Security : Helps secure nuclear and radioactive materials from theft, unauthorized access, and sabotage.
Finally, in regard to the technocratic focus of the Future of Life Institute… One of the most detrimental effects of nuclear weapons has been the development of the nuclear state. Respectfully, Steve Kasner Portland, Oregon.
This website uses both functional and non-functional cookies. For the placement and reading of non-functional cookies, we require your prior consent.
You can change the use of cookies later and adjust your preferences. This grim vision of a possible future comes from the latest studies about how nuclear war could alter world climate. But much smaller nuclear conflicts, which are more likely to occur, could also have devastating effects around the world.
This week, researchers report that an India—Pakistan nuclear war could lead to crops failing in dozens of countries — devastating food supplies for more than one billion people 1. Other research reveals that a nuclear winter would dramatically alter the chemistry of the oceans, and probably decimate coral reefs and other marine ecosystems 2. These results spring from the most comprehensive effort yet to understand how a nuclear conflict would affect the entire Earth system, from the oceans to the atmosphere, to creatures on land and in the sea.
Scientists want to understand these matters because the nuclear menace is growing. From North Korea to Iran, nations are building up their nuclear capabilities. And some, including the United States, are withdrawing from arms-control efforts. Knowing the possible environmental consequences of a nuclear conflict can help policymakers to assess the threat, says Seth Baum, executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute in New York City, who has studied the risks of triggering a nuclear winter.
Nuclear-winter studies arose during the cold war, as the United States and the Soviet Union stockpiled tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in preparation for all-out assaults. Researchers including the US planetary scientist and communicator Carl Sagan described how smoke from incinerated cities would block sunlight and plunge much of the planet into a deep freeze lasting for months, even in summer 4.
Later studies tempered the forecasts somewhat, finding slightly less-dramatic cooling 5. But with many thousands of warheads still in existence, and with more nations becoming nuclear powers, some researchers have argued that nuclear war — and a nuclear winter — remain a threat.
They have shifted to studying the consequences of nuclear wars that would be smaller than an all-out US—Soviet annihilation. Both countries have around nuclear warheads, and both are heavily invested in the disputed Kashmir border region, where a suicide bomber last year killed dozens of Indian troops. Both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in , highlighting growing geopolitical tensions.
By the mids, Toon was exploring a scenario in which the countries set off Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, killing around 21 million people. He also connected with Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who studies how volcanic eruptions cool the climate in much the same way that a nuclear winter would. Using an advanced NASA climate model, the scientists calculated how soot rising from the incinerated cities would circle the planet.
All around the dark, cold globe, agricultural crops would dwindle. But after a burst of publications on the topic, Robock, Toon and their colleagues struggled to find funding to continue their research. The goal was to analyse every step of nuclear winter — from the initial firestorm and the spread of its smoke, to agricultural and economic impacts. The group looked at several scenarios.
Toon, Robock and their colleagues have used observations from major wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, in to estimate how high smoke from burning cities would rise into the atmosphere 7. During the wildfires, sunlight heated the smoke and caused it to soar higher, and persist in the atmosphere longer, than scientists might otherwise expect. The same phenomenon might happen after a nuclear war, Robock says.
Raymond Jeanloz, a geophysicist and nuclear-weapons policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, says that incorporating such estimates is a crucial step to understanding what would happen during a nuclear winter.
Comparisons with giant wildfires could also help in resolving a controversy about the scale of the potential impacts. The Los Alamos group used its own models to simulate the climate impact of India and Pakistan setting off Hiroshima-sized bombs.
The scientists found that much less smoke would get into the upper atmosphere than Toon and Robock reported. With less soot to darken the skies, the Los Alamos team calculated a much milder change to the climate — and no nuclear winter. At a parade in Islamabad, Pakistan, a truck carries a Shaheen II long-range missile that can be armed with a nuclear warhead.
The difference between the groups boils down to how they simulate the amount of fuel a firestorm consumes and how that fuel is converted into smoke.
I think we have a better feel about how much soot can potentially get produced. Robock and his colleagues have fired back in tit-for-tat journal responses 9. Among other things, they say the Los Alamos team simulated burning of greener spaces rather than a densely populated city. Every inch of ground was covered with wounded people begging for water.
There seemed to be no doctors, no nurses, no medical help of any kind. Thurlow tore off strips of her clothing, dipped them in a nearby stream, and spent the day squeezing drops of water from them into the mouths of the sick and dying. At night, she sat on the hillside and watched Hiroshima burn. Thurlow was reunited with her parents. Soldiers threw her body and that of her son into a ditch, poured gasoline on them, and set them on fire.
Thurlow stood and watched, in a state of shock, without shedding a tear. Her favorite aunt and uncle, who lived in the suburbs outside Hiroshima and appeared completely unharmed, died from radiation poisoning a few weeks after the blast.
After the bombing, Thurlow attended universities in Hiroshima and Lynchburg, Virginia. She married a historian and settled in Canada. She began her anti-nuclear activism in , and became a leading advocate for survivors of the atomic bombings, known as the hibakusha. A few years ago, I spent time with her in Stockholm, meeting with academics and legislators to discuss the nuclear threat.
In her early eighties, she was sharp, passionate, tireless, and free of bitterness. Each person was loved by someone. Let us insure that their deaths were not in vain. The movement to abolish nuclear weapons began soon after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On September 25, , addressing the U. General Assembly, President Kennedy gave perhaps the most eloquent speech on behalf of abolition.
That week, Kennedy also secretly met with military advisers at the White House to discuss the pros and cons of launching a nuclear surprise attack on the Soviet Union.
American and Soviet troops were confronting each other in Berlin, and a war between the superpowers seemed possible. Kennedy wanted to hear the benefits of striking first. The casualties that would result from the Single Integrated Operational Plan seemed excessive to him: an estimated two hundred and twenty million deaths in the Soviet Union and China not including fatalities caused by fire. A Kennedy aide, Carl Kaysen, had come up with a surprise-attack plan, focussing solely on air bases and missile sites.
If the United States launched a surprise attack on the Soviets, the likely American death toll was somewhere between five million and thirteen million. But, if the Soviets attacked the United States first, perhaps a hundred million Americans would die. The height of anti-nuclear sentiment in the United States occurred during the Reagan Administration, amid renewed tensions with the Soviet Union.
The Nuclear Freeze Movement and worldwide anti-nuclear protests helped to transform Ronald Reagan from an ardent Cold Warrior into a nuclear abolitionist. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fear of nuclear war receded, and arms-control agreements between the United States and Russia cut the number of nuclear weapons by about eighty per cent.
Republican Presidents had proved especially effective at reducing the nuclear threat. And President George W.
Bush cut it in half again. In , the abolition movement was revived by an unlikely group of people: the leadership of the American national-security establishment. A new anti-nuclear group, Global Zero, was formed in by an international assortment of military, diplomatic, and political leaders.
He said that the United States had a moral responsibility, as the only country that has used nuclear weapons, to lead the international effort to abolish them. Nine years later, nuclear weapons have regained their sinister allure. North Korea has repeatedly threatened to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, producing elaborate videos that show the destruction of the White House and the U. During a speech by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, in March, computer animations projected on a large screen behind him showed Russian nuclear warheads descending over the state of Florida, perhaps aimed at Mar-a-Lago.
The current arms race between the United States and Russia betrays the same assumptions as the last one: that new weapons will be better, and that technological innovations can overcome the nuclear threat. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , unfortunately, agrees with him, and in January moved the hand of its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight.
The Cold War arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union has been replaced by a multipolar nuclear competition, with far more volatile dynamics. India must worry about China and Pakistan. China must deter the United States, India, and Russia. North Korea feels threatened by the United States, while some politicians in Japan and South Korea advocate developing their own nuclear weapons to counter those of North Korea. Nuclear terrorism poses a global threat.
And everyone, it seems, hates the United States. Moreover, the aftermath of a nuclear war may be even more dire than anything anticipated during the Cold War. The latest studies suggest that a relatively small nuclear exchange would have long-term effects across the globe.
A war between India and Pakistan, involving a hundred atomic bombs like the kind dropped on Hiroshima, could send five million tons of dust into the atmosphere, shrink the ozone layer by as much as fifty per cent, drop worldwide temperatures to their lowest point in a thousand years, create worldwide famines, and cause more than a billion casualties.
An all-out war between the United States and Russia would have atmospheric effects that are vastly worse. Nor does the prospect of Armageddon loom as an effective deterrent. An eagerness to embrace death undermines the logic of nuclear deterrence, while a determination to kill may perversely uphold it.
It seeks to reframe public attitudes toward nuclear weapons and gain ratification of an international treaty banning them. ICAN contends that the same rationale used to outlaw chemical weapons, biological weapons, land mines, and cluster munitions—their cruel, indiscriminate harm to civilians—should be applied to the deadliest weapons of all.
According to the World Health Organization, no nation has the medical facilities or emergency-response capability to deal with the detonation of a single nuclear weapon in a city, let alone hundreds. After a nuclear blast, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, survivors would have to fend for themselves.
ICAN wants to stigmatize nuclear weapons, portraying them as inherently immoral and in violation of international law, not symbols of power or guarantors of national security. The treaty will attain legal force after being signed and ratified by fifty. It forbids the testing, development, production, acquisition, manufacture, and possession of nuclear weapons. A month later, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to ICAN —an impressive achievement for an organization with only three full-time employees and a part-time office temp.
They argue that it is poorly conceived, unverifiable, unenforceable, unrealistic, and an invitation to nuclear blackmail.
0コメント