There are now more than 15,000 nuclear warheads on Earth - enough to blow everything up to hell. More than enough, even. But how many nuclear explosions will it take to destroy the enemy? How many nuclear warheads can an aggressor country drop on an adversary before the consequences of a nuclear winter return to it? New research has been done to find answers to these very questions, but you won't like the results.
A paper published last week in Safety magazine suggests that no country should have more than 100 nuclear warheads. This is the maximum number, according to Joshua Pearce, a professor at Michigan Technological University, and David Denkenberger, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee. Anything above this number will come back to haunt the aggressor country in the form of environmental, socioeconomic and agricultural destruction, and will also seriously curtail local life - even if the enemy does not respond with its own nuclear strike. At the same time, scientists believe that hundreds of warheads are still enough for nuclear deterrence, reducing the risk of war (and collisions), and, as a result, preventing a catastrophic nuclear winter.
Cleaning up the nuclear arsenal and reducing the number of nuclear stockpiles to 100 warheads is a great proposal. Sotochka will look great on the negotiating table. But upon closer examination, this figure is still quite arbitrary. Modern nuclear weapons, even when used in limited quantities, can destroy entire cities and cause catastrophic environmental consequences. A nuclear war, be it 100 or 1000 nuclear strikes, will be a terrible event, the consequences of which will shake the entire planet. Ideally, the safest, most rational and humane number of nuclear weapons would be zero.
Should nuclear stockpiles be cut?
The United States currently has 6,550 nuclear warheads; Russia has 7010. Add reserves in the UK, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, China and North Korea and the number of total reserves approaches 15,000. But if the proposal of Pierce and Denckenberger materializes, this number drops to less than 900. It will be less by 94%. Fewer nuclear weapons mean less chance of collision, scientists argue, and less money needed to maintain all of these warheads. They themselves also believe that "none of these seven countries rationally maintain stockpiles of more than 100 weapons, given the enormous potential impact that it can have on their own citizens."
The whole essence of the new work is to define "a pragmatic nuclear limit, under which the direct physical negative consequences of nuclear weapons would be contrary to national interests." In other words, to understand when your own nuclear strike will bite your ass, even if the enemy does not respond.
“Studies that have looked at nuclear war scenarios in the past have focused primarily on a full-scale Russian war against the United States and asked questions like 'Will humanity survive?' Says Pearce. “Research into small regional wars has focused on environmental impacts. This is the first best-case scenario study of a unilateral attack and its consequences, especially for the food chain, for the aggressor.
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Under “best-case scenario,” Pierce describes a highly hypothetical (and completely unrealistic) situation in which, in addition to the fact that the aggressor nation does not face a retaliatory launch, it is not tormented by terrorist attacks, massive civil unrest, minimal nuclear fallout and a myriad of other things. which can manifest themselves against the background of a sudden nuclear attack. The authors tried to determine the maximum number of nuclear strikes that can be dropped on an enemy before a nuclear winter sets in and leads to the collapse of trade, industry and agriculture.
Everyone knows that nuclear winter is scary. Here's what the authors write:
“Nuclear winter is a potentially serious long-term global climate cooling effect that could emerge after large-scale firestorms caused by the detonation of a number of nuclear warheads. A nuclear war will burn out vast forest areas, arable land, fossil fuels, cities and industrial centers. These fires create a thick layer of smoke in the Earth's atmosphere, dramatically reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface and causing "nuclear twilight."
In addition to abnormally low temperatures, the heavily damaged ozone layer will no longer block harmful UV rays. Global food production will decline dramatically. Food chains and industry will cease to function fully, and in some cases disappear.
To determine when nuclear explosions will begin to pose a problem for an aggressor country, scientists calculated the consequences of 7,000, 1,000 and 100 nuclear warheads dropped on a single country. Each warhead was randomly assigned a yield of 15 kilotons. The authors calculated how much material would burn in each city and how much smoke would be released into the atmosphere. Climate models were used to predict the impact on agriculture and the global food supply chain.
In one hypothetical scenario, if the US dropped 100 nuclear warheads on China's most populous cities, the initial explosions would kill an estimated 30 million people. "Regional nuclear war" will provoke a nuclear fall, cause a drop in temperatures by 1 degree and a 10-20% decrease in world food production. Famine will kill many people in China, but most American citizens will remain unharmed. If the United States drops 1,000 to 7,000 warheads on China, the story will be completely different: 140,000 million people in China and 5 million in the United States will die.
“It is shocking to us how devastating the use of even a modest share of our nuclear arsenal will be to the stability of the United States,” Pearce says. “We thought America had so much land and so much wealth that any nuclear bombing scenario would leave us untouched. We were wrong. The number of dead Americans who will die after our own bombing is staggering - it is much higher than the number of dead from terrorist attacks today."
Pearce believes that the analysis, due to optimistic and conservative estimates, generally underestimates the number of US deaths in these scenarios. In reality, it will be much higher.
“For example, we assumed that anyone who starved to death would be immediately cut off from food. But it's hard to believe that the American elite would sacrifice their children for the common good of the nation. I think a lot of people will die of internal anxiety caused by a lack of calories."
Aside from radical and unrealistic assumptions, this study also suffers from another serious limitation related to the size and power of modern nuclear weapons. This study assumes the use of 15 kiloton bombs, which actually makes little sense. This is the power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Modern bombs are much larger and stronger. Most modern bombs are 25 times more powerful than those used in World War II, ranging from 100 to 500 kilotons. The largest bomb in the world is 5 megatons, and the largest in the United States is 1.4 megatons. The difference is enormous.
Scientists came to the same conclusion a year ago in a study published in Environment Magazine. Adam Liska and colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have shown that "limited strikes," such as those proposed by Pierce and Denckenberger, can still cause both local and global climate impacts. In addition, they found that the United States, Russia and China have weapons that could trigger a nuclear fall after five bombs have already been deployed. Therefore, "100 strikes" as a magic number lose their meaning in the context of modern weapons.
“The most sensitive parameter in this calculation is the size of the bombs, which ranges from 25 to 5,000 kilotons,” says Liska. "Today only the biggest bombs are counted."
Despite this, it is fair to say that reducing nuclear stockpiles will still be a smart move.
“It is irrational to invest billions in maintaining surplus weapons that would destabilize our own country if used,” Pierce says. “This logic works for everyone. Other countries are worse off because they are poorer, like Russia, or do not have enough land of their own, like Israel."
North Korea may abandon nuclear weapons, but it is not known whether other nations will follow. Probably no. Perhaps we will partially get rid of this dangerous cargo, but complete disposal of it is impossible or even undesirable. The authors of the study came to this conclusion.
Ilya Khel
