Geoscientists Can Help Reduce the Threat of Nuclear Weapons

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By Alan Robock and  Stewart C. Prager, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: While we all recognize that global warming threatens humanity, the effects of nuclear war pose an even graver threat to the global population. ...Currently, there are more than 9,000 nuclear warheads in the active military stockpiles of nine nations, with more than 90% of those in Russia and the United States. Nearly 2,000 warheads are on alert status, ready to launch within minutes of an order. ...The nuclear arms control regime has been weakened in recent years with the termination of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between Russia and the United States, ... and the withdrawal of the United States from the Iran nuclear deal. ...a nuclear conflict would cause rapid changes in Earth’s climate. Smoke from firestorms ignited by attacks on cities and industrial areas would rise into the stratosphere and persist for years [e.g., Yu et al., 2019]. ...it would lead to stratospheric ozone depletion that would enhance the amount of ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth’s surface [Bardeen et al., 2021]. ...The original suggestions of “nuclear winter” following a nuclear war by Turco et al.[1983] and Aleksandrov and Stenchikov [1983], ...have been supported strongly by recent work using modern high-resolution general circulation models to simulate and predict its effects [Robock et al., 2007a; Coupe et al., 2019]. ...the multiyear lifetime of smoke in the stratosphere means the effects on climate would last a decade, with the largest impacts continuing for more than 5 years. Such a conflict would decrease crop production to an extent that it could seriously threaten world food security and even trigger global famine [Jägermeyr et al., 2020; L. Xia et al., Global famine after nuclear war, submitted to Nature Food, 2021]. ...to reduce the likelihood of using nuclear weapons, ...we can adopt a no-first-use policy, ...eliminate the launch-on-warning option, ...and we can eliminate presidential sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. ...We believe that the ultimate solution to the problem of nuclear weapons is to ban them globally. In 2017, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons led the effort to have the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons signed at the United Nations.…

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