Nuclear war is not "unthinkable."
Today's guest post author. Ira Helfand, MD, thinks about it and is trying to do something to stop it.
A nuclear war will be very, very bad for the people who survive the first wave of explosions.
In this anniversary week of the atomic blasts that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I asked Microsoft's Co-Pilot artificial intelligence program if residents of Medford would survive a nuclear war. It assured me that Medford is unlikely to be a direct target but that residents should shelter in a basement or interior room for 48 hours, during which the radiation fallout would lose 99 percent of its danger. The implication is that we would emerge to resume normal life.
No.
What Co-Pilot did not say was that this begins a long, cold period of famine and social chaos. I mentioned Co-Pilot's response to a college classmate, Ira Helfand, MD, and he agreed to write a guest post to correct the record.
Ira Helfand is past president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, and a member of the board of International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize."
Guest Post by Ira Helfand, MD
As we observe the Hiroshima/Nagasaki anniversary this week, Peter asked me to comment on Co-Pilot’s response to a question he posed asking how people in Medford, Oregon would do in the event of nuclear war. Co-Pilot had a pretty upbeat assessment. It told him that Medford would not be a target, and people would be OK if they just sheltered in their basements for a couple of days.
Unfortunately, the response appears to fall rather clearly into the category of AI hallucinations.
It is true that Medford would probably not be a target. But most of the major cities across the country would be. Estimates are that more than 100 million people would die that afternoon from the explosions, fires, and radiation.
Those who survived—including the good people of Medford-- would find themselves in a landscape we cannot imagine. Most of the critical infrastructure we all depend on would be destroyed or profoundly disrupted. There would be no electric grid, no cellphones, no internet, no food distribution system, no public health system, no system for producing or distributing gasoline or heating oil or natural gas. In the months following the initial attack the vast majority of the US population would die from starvation, from radiation, from epidemic disease and from exposure to the elements.
And the destruction would not be confined to the U.S. and the other countries that actually fought the war. A large-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would loft enormous amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, as much as 150 million tons. The soot would block out the sun dropping temperatures across the planet an average of 18 degrees F. In the interior regions of Eurasia and North America, the temperature would fall 45 to 50 degrees F. and not recover for the better part of a decade.
Earth has not seen temperatures that cold since the last ice age. Under these conditions, most of the ecosystems that evolved since the ice age would collapse, food production would collapse and the vast majority of the human race would starve to death. A study published in the journal Nature/Food in August 2022 showed that in the first two years after the war six billion people, three quarters of the human race, would starve to death.
That same study showed that the famine caused by even a limited nuclear war, as almost occurred between India and Pakistan last year, could kill up to two billion people worldwide, including 130 million here in the United States.
So do we really need to worry about this? Is nuclear war even possible?
Unfortunately, the answer is a very definite yes to both questions. In the last 15 months, five of the nine countries with nuclear weapons have been engaged in active warfare. Russia threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine; the U.S. made slightly veiled threats to use them in Iran; and India and Pakistan fought a mini-war, during which airfields that housed nuclear weapons were bombed.
I was at the Global Nobel Assembly on AI and Nuclear War at the Vatican last month. One of the participants, a Nobel Laureate in physics, had an interesting way of assessing the risk. Suppose, he said, that there is a two percent chance per year of nuclear war, then statistically, there is a 50 percent chance –literally the toss of a coin--of nuclear war in 34 years. We can’t know the exact chance of nuclear war in a given year, but events of the last year suggest it is almost certainly much higher than two percent.
The bottom line? Right now we are marching blindly towards a nuclear catastrophe that will kill billions of people and destroy human civilization.
BUT—it doesn’t have to happen. Nuclear weapons are not a force of nature over which we have no control. They are little machines that we have built with our own hands. We have already dismantled some 60,000 since the 1980’s; we know exactly how to dismantle the 12,000 that remain and could do it in 3-4 years.
What is missing is the political will, a movement like the 1980’s Freeze Movement. Back from the Brink, (www.PreventNuclearWar.org) is a new campaign that intends to create such a movement. It has grown rapidly to a network of 25 chapters across the country, secured the endorsement of 70 cities and towns, and six state legislatures (including Oregon), and more than 500 NGO’s including most of the national faith communities and major environmental groups, labor unions, and a new student group Students for Nuclear Disarmament (www.students4disarmament.org). In Congress, H. Res 317 in the House has 60 co-sponsors, and S. Res. 323 in the Senate has ten, including both Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden of Oregon.
Looking for something to do? How about helping to save the world?
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