A hypothetical nuclear war in South Asia could trigger worldwide famine and “probably cause the end modern industrial civilization as we know it,” the lead author of a new report tells Global Security Newswire.
Published by the watchdog group Physicians for Social Responsibility, the report, titled “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk,” updates prior studies on the potential impacts that a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan could have on the global climate, and consequently on food supplies.
The prior research, published in 2012, predicted that corn and soybean production in the United States would decline 10 percent on average for 10 years. It also projected a decline in Chinese middle-season rice production — on average by 21 percent during the first four years and on average 10 percent in the following six.
At the time, Physicians for Social Responsibility said these effects could “put more than one billion people at risk of starvation.” The new forecast released on Tuesday indicates the number of people at risk of starvation would actually be double that figure, the group says.
The fresh analysis includes a study completed this fall showing there could be even larger drops in Chinese winter wheat production. These crops could decline by 50 percent during the first year and by more than 30 percent over 10 years.
Increasing prices would exacerbate the shortage of available food, according to the report, which goes on to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons “as quickly as possible.”
“Significant, sustained agricultural shortfalls over an extended period would almost certainly lead to panic and hoarding on an international scale as food exporting nations suspended exports in order to assure adequate food supplies for their own populations,” the report says. “This turmoil in the agricultural markets would further reduce accessible food.”
Ira Helfand, a medical doctor from Northampton, Mass., who served as the lead author of the report, told GSN the data shows that the equivalent of 100 Hiroshima-size bombs could “probably cause the end modern industrial civilization as we know it.”
A conflict of this size would represent the use of about half the nuclear arsenals that India and Pakistan possess, or a “tiny portion” of the U.S. and Russian stockpiles, according to Helfand.
“This is an unbelievably huge shock to the international system,” Helfand said. “We saw what happened to the world’s economy when the housing bubble collapsed in the United States — [here] we’re talking about a shock to the international economic-social system orders of magnitude larger than that. I think it’s quite hard to imagine how this much-more-fragile-than-we’d-like-to-think system can survive that.”
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