Regional Nuclear War and the Environment [View All]

[bananas]

Source: Time

Q&A
Regional Nuclear War and the Environment
By Eben Harrell Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009

In the 1980s, climate scientists in Russia and the U.S. theorized that all-out nuclear war between the superpowers would result in a "nuclear winter," as smoke from the atomic explosions blackened the sky and sent summer temperatures plummeting below freezing — killing crops and eventually starving all those who survived the initial explosions. Now that the risks of an all-out U.S.-Russian exchange have diminished, scientists are looking at the climactic effects of regional nuclear war — and the predictions are still sobering.

Alan Robock, a Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University who participated in the original nuclear winter research, recently completed a study on the results of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. He spoke with TIME from his office in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

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Q: Some scientists, most notably Freeman Dyson of The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, have stirred controversy by arguing that nuclear weapons are a more urgent environmental threat than global warming. Do you agree?

A: Yes. If India and Pakistan engaged in nuclear war, they would use about 0.3% of the global nuclear stockpile. And still the effects on the climate would be dramatic. Our calculations on nuclear winter from the early 1980s have been confirmed by modern climate models. And fundamentally the situation hasn't changed — even with reduced stockpiles there still exists enough weapons to cause nuclear winter. That's something that maybe people don't realize.

I think we have to solve the problem of the existence of all these weapons before we have the luxury of worrying about global warming.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1873164,00.html

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This is a short but informative interview.