'Regional' Nuclear War Would Cause Worldwide Destruction
By Alexis Madrigal April 07, 2008 | 4:07:27 PMCategories: Military
Think you might escape the aftereffects of a limited nuclear war that
happens on the other side of the globe from you? Think again.
Imagine that the long-simmering conflict between India and Pakistan
broke out into a war in which each side deployed 50 nuclear weapons
against the other country's megacities. Karachi, Bombay, and dozens of
other South Asian cities catch fire like Hiro****ma and Nagasaki did at
the end of World War II.
Beyond the local human tragedy of such a situation, a new study
looking at the atmospheric chemistry of regional nuclear war finds
that the hot smoke from burning cities would tear holes in the ozone
layer of the Earth. The increased UV radiation resulting from the
ozone loss could more than double DNA damage, and increase cancer
rates across North America and Eurasia.
"Our research sup****ts that there would be worldwide destruction,"
said Michael Mills, co-author of the study and a research scientist at
the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It demonstrates that a small-
scale regional conflict is capable of triggering larger ozone losses
globally than the ones that were previously predicted for a full-scale
nuclear war."
Combined with the climatic impact of a regional nuclear war -- which
could reduce crop yields and starve hundreds of millions -- Mills'
modeling shows that the entire globe would feel the repercussions of a
hundred nuclear detonations, a small fraction of just the U.S.
stockpile. After decades of Cold War research into the impacts that a
full-blown war between the Soviet Union and the United States would
have had on the globe, recent work has focused on regional nuclear
wars, which are seen as more likely than all-out nuclear Armageddon.
Incor****ating the latest atmospheric modeling, the scientists are
finding that even a small nuclear conflict would wreak havoc on the
global environment (.pdf) -- cooling it twice as much as it's heated
over the last century -- and on the structure of the atmosphere
itself.
Mills' work, which appears online today in the Proceedings of the
National Academies of Science, used a model from National Center for
Atmospheric Research to look at the impact of throwing 5 million
metric tons of black carbon, or soot, into the atmosphere. He found
that when a cluster of cities are burning together, they end up
creating their own weather, pumping soot 20,000 feet into the
atmosphere. Once there, sunlight would heat the smoke, and drive it up
260,000 feet above the earth's surface.
Along the way, the hot soot would cause a variety of atmospheric
changes with a net result of huge reductions in ozone, which in the
stratosphere serves as sunblock for the earth. In the middle
latitudes, the researchers found the ozone layer would be reduced by
25 to 45 percent, with the polar regions losing 50 to 70 percent of
their ozone coverage. This thinning is known as a "hole" in the ozone
layer, and would be many times the size of the famed hole over
Antarctica.
According to research cited by the paper, the increase in ultraviolet
light falling to earth at the 45-degree latitude -- a little south of
****tland, Oregon -- would cause damage to DNA to increase 213 percent.
"It would have a dramatic effect on skin cancer and cataracts and be
very damaging to crops and ecosystems," Mills said.
The reduced levels of ozone would persist for five years, with
substantial reductions in ozone continuing for another five years
after that.
Even if the cause of the war were local, its impacts would be felt
across the globe.
"Pretty much everywhere [would be] affected," Mills concluded.
Photo: A nuclear bomb is detonated in a test blast at Mururoa atoll,
French Polynesia, in 1971./Associated Press
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