Abolishing Atomic Arms Can Avert War That Kills Billions, Experts Say

As Russia threatens nuclear strikes on Ukraine and its Western backers, potentially foreshadowing a doomsday war, leading American arms scholars say it’s becoming urgent to rapidly abolish nuclear weapons worldwide to protect the globe’s eight billion citizens. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Corbis via Getty Images

As Russia’s Commander-in-Chief threatens nuclear strikes on Ukraine and its Western backers, potentially foreshadowing a doomsday war, leading arms scholars in the U.S. say it’s becoming urgent to rapidly abolish nuclear weapons worldwide to protect the globe’s eight billion citizens.

Scientists creating increasingly sophisticated computer models to simulate an intercontinental nuclear war, in incredible real-time detail, are now predicting that a full-scale ICBM battle between the Russia and the United States could kill billions of people, more than half the world’s populace.

Sharon Weiner, one of the top American scholars on nuclear conflicts and their projected casualty tolls, told me in an interview that a cascade of nuclear clashes that her team at Princeton University simulated, based on the equally armed superpowers’ real-world nuclear arsenals and battle plans and likely order of bombings – of military citadels and then cosmopolitan cities – would kill or injure more than 90 million people in just the first few hours.

But that would be just the beginning of a chain reaction of catastrophes that would circle the Earth and shoot into the heavens, she says.

Nuclear firestorms would wipe out anyone across the vast periphery of a ground zero, but would also blast colossal mushroom clouds of soot into the stratosphere, blocking out most sunlight for years and triggering a “nuclear winter” that wipes out crops across the Northern Hemisphere.

As cities criss-crossing America and Russia are set ablaze, Weiner says, their rising ashes would add to this weapons-triggered ice age, which might stretch out for more than a decade.

The destruction of the ozone layer would allow hazardous ultraviolet radiation to rain down on the planet, adding to the series of climate cataclysms that would threaten civilization and most life on Earth.

A pre-eminent expert on nuclear weapons and strategic battle plans stretching from Moscow to Washington, Weiner is a professor at American University in Washington and a visiting scholar at Princeton University.

In a remarkable series of books and articles on potential atomic warfare of the future she’s authored, Wiener also sketches out strategies to head off that future, including universal adoption of the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and a worldwide, lightning-paced disarmament program.

Professor Weiner, who has been awarded a Nuclear Challenge Grant by the prestigious MacArthur Foundation, told me since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, strategic weapons scholars around the world have been issuing new predictions on the risk of nuclear war in times ahead.

With an amazing prescience, Weiner and her group of nuclear proliferation experts at Princeton University started their simulated nuclear clash, called Plan A, with Russia’s provocative launch of a single tactical warhead against NATO forces in Europe.

In an uncanny case of life imitating virtual reality, Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the U.S. would later personally threaten SpaceX founder Elon Musk that any use of his Starlink satellite technology by Ukraine’s defenders to attack the invading Russian Black Sea fleet would trigger the Kremlin’s use of a tactical nuclear warhead to wipe out this resistance.

An all-out “nuclear war can be caused intentionally but also inadvertently,” Weiner says.

In her group’s simulated atomic blitzkrieg, the Kremlin’s first launch of a single tactical bomb rapidly escalates into an exchange of intermediate-range missiles that decimate Europe and parts of Russia, and then an exploding barrage of intercontinental warheads that spark annihilation from Siberia to California.

Few Americans have any idea of the immense scope of the death and destruction that would speed across North America, Europe, Russia and surrounding sections of the globe, Weiner says, partly because “the U.S. government only estimates immediate impact on military objectives when it assesses the consequences of nuclear use.”

That means American government models of a nuclear war include only “prompt casualties on military objectives,” or those quickly caused by explosions, blast waves and overwhelming radiation poisoning, rather than the many many more people who would die as nuclear-winter-triggered famines spread out across the northern continents and as lakes, rivers, fisheries and oceans are chilled and deprived of sunlight.

A nuclear missile war ignited by the Kremlin could crush civilizations and trigger starvation across more than half the planet in the months and years following the outbreak of this thermonuclear World War III.

Weiner says she backs predictions issued by a ring of American and German bioscientists, in a pivotal paper titled “Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection” that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of their peers.

In their terrifying report, these researchers spell out the doomsday denouement of most of the planet’s peoples following a nuclear conflagration.

The scientists used leading-edge virtual replicas of the Earth’s climate system, crops, fisheries, oceans and biosphere to model a series of nuclear war scenarios, from a regional clash of hundreds of warheads up to a super-war involving the combined launch of 4,400 100-kiloton nuclear warheads, just half of the stockpiles held by Russia and the U.S.

Underscoring the importance of a global drive to prevent nuclear war, by ridding the planet of every single fission and fusion bomb, this transnational coalition of scientists said the nuclear super-war would kill apocalyptically.

Professor Owen Brian Toon, a senior researcher in the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a co-author of the study, told me in an interview that the intercontinental battle of 4000-plus warheads that his group simulated could ultimately cause the death of “80% of the world population,” or about 6.4 billion people, as war-sparked famines race across the planet.

In this absolutely worst-case scenario, “a U.S.-NATO-Russia-China world war,” he says, the nuclear blasts that pummel and crater the Earth could also inject about 150 million tons of soot into the stratosphere, creating a new Dark Age as civilization collapses.

The group’s predictions are nightmarish and agonizing to even contemplate.

“95% of the populations of the U.S., Canada, Russia, China and much of Europe are dead by the end of the second year, mainly due to starvation,” Professor Toon says.

For survivors scattered around the world scrambling for sanctuary, Toon and his group say Australia might emerge as a comparative safe-haven, with only minor disruptions to its cultivation of wheat and other crops.

“New Zealand would also experience smaller impacts than other countries,” they state in the study. “But if this scenario should actually take place, Australia and New Zealand would probably see an influx of refugees from Asia and other countries experiencing food insecurity.”

“Of course the world should build down the weapons,” Toon told me, and only the complete abolition of atomic arms can rule out this world-shattering scenario from ever appearing.

As things stand now, he warns, the “proliferation of nuclear nations is incredibly dangerous.”

Professor Sharon Weiner agrees.

As long as any atomic warheads remain hidden away in subterranean silos across the continents, or deployed on bomber jets, or inside stealth submarines that glide through the seas, Weiner says, “The risk of nuclear war is not zero.”

“The consequences of nuclear use are devastating.”

So the only logical strategy to protect the future of humanity and its civilizations, she says, is to rid the world of super-weapons that could destroy the globe.

Part of Weiner’s Plan A group at Princeton has closely collaborated with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the global coalition that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its spearheading role in pushing for the promulgation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

In a torrent of articles, Weiner has pushed for global nuclear disarmament.

In one piece, she lauded the New Jersey General Assembly for passing a resolution urging the federal government to join the nuclear ban treaty, and to “actively pursue a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.”

“The United States could begin to pursue a less dangerous future and help the effort to free the world from nuclear weapons,” Weiner said.

“The nuclear age has been marked by many crises, close calls, nuclear threats, and faulty warning and command-and-control systems.”

As of now, she warned, “The U.S. and Russian hair-trigger launch posture in combination with fear, misperception, accident or false warning could trigger a nuclear war.”